Boarding School by Clint Adams Read Free Book Online

spent a year at the Academy not know where the pool is? I wondered to myself.
    Frank then smiled at me. “There’s no pool at Ulster, Clint.”
    I couldn’t believe my ears. “Are you kidding?” I must have sounded as if I was blaming Frank for the bad news. “There’s a picture of three or four Academy kids swimming in an indoor pool right smack dab in the middle of the Academy catalog!”
    “Smack dab, huh? I didn’t know people really said things like that. If you ever said anything like ‘smack dab’ in Brooklyn, they’d beat you up.”
    This was awful news. I couldn’t figure out how in the world the Academy could advertise a swimming pool and then turn out to not have one. “Oh well,” I said a moment later when I realized that there was no point in getting upset over the issue. “At least we’ve got the lake we can swim in. That’ll probably be more fun anyway.”
    “No, you can’t do that either.” Frank now looked as if he was enjoying his new role as dream smasher.
    “Well why the hell not?” My voice now rose in pitch. Rapidly I was becoming exasperated with the whole subject.
    “Because the guy that owns the Academy doesn’t let us use the lake any mo…”
    “Wait a minute!” I interrupted Frank. “You said ‘owns’? There’s a guy who owns the Academy?” Now I was ready for Frank to clarify what he had just said to me.
    “Yeah,” Frank confirmed. “Some guy named Zanapolis or something like that.”
    “He owns it?” I still couldn’t get this idea to make sense to me. “As in he makes his living off of us?”
    “I guess,” Frank confirmed again.
    “What’s the big deal?” Matt asked me.
    “I don’t know, I just thought private schools were never operated for a profit and were run by boards.”
    “Well, we’ve got a board,” Frank volunteered.
    “We do?” Matt now seemed a little more interested in our discussion.
    “Yeah, Zanapolis and Stuart and I think maybe the dean of students are our board.”
    “Well, why don’t we talk to this Zana… whoever he is and ask him if we can go swimming in the lake?” Matt always seemed to believe that there was a simple answer to everything.
    “Because he’s never around,” Frank continued. “Sometimes he comes to the Academy in the morning when everyone’s in class to check on the bookkeeping in the bursar’s office, and stuff. But most of the time he just stays away. Anyway, he told Stuart and Stuart told us that he can’t afford to pay for a guy with the right training to watch us all the time when we’re in the lake. So the insurance company made him tell us to stop using the lake. Which is too bad really, because last year we got to go in it all the time. It was a lot of fun. In fact, we even had our own ski boat last year.”
    I was nearly sickened by my bad luck. I had missed all of that fun by one year. “That stinks,” I protested.
    “Yeah, really,” Frank concurred.
    “I can’t believe it.” And I couldn’t believe it. “So there’s no way that we can use the lake ever, is there?”
    “What if we go swimming anyway?” Matt asked.
    “Then you get detention or suspended,” Frank advised.
    In those days there were actually unpleasant consequences which went along with being placed on detention or suspension. So that, unfortunately, was that on the subject of swimming at Ulster Academy.
    * * *
    For the next couple of weeks I put my efforts into establishing a routine for myself. The classes I had been assigned were like classes in any school, except we always had fewer students in them. For example, my smallest class consisted of only five of us. This fact, of course, was considered to be one of the benefits provided by the Academy. A smaller student-teacher ratio was supposed to mean a greater degree of personal attention for each boy.
    The one universal feature which was true for practically all of the teachers at the Academy that year was that, with only one exception I can recall, every