No Land's Man Read Online Free Page B

he had been caught masturbating in the bathroom and, to humiliate him, he was stripped naked and forced to parade around the dormitory with his erection on full display while the other boys laughed and jeered and pummeled him with pillows and books. Sitting on a ledge till morning was perfectly fine compared to that.
    As the night deepened around me, I took in my surroundings. Snow blanketed the ground below and the dark gothic stone buildings of the school, built during Queen Victoria’s reign, were silhouetted perfectly against the navy blue sky like the cover of a cheap horror novel. The moon was a perfectly tilted crescent playing a casual game of peekaboo as she floated in and out of view behind the clouds.
    I was glad to see the moon again. She had been a constant source of comfort for me over the last six months since my father had hugged me in the school parking lot and said, “Don’t worry, soon you will make lots of great friends, beta,” and my mother had tearfully kissed me, reminding me to say my nightly prayers. A few nights after that during prep, my homesickness merged with claustrophobia as I stared at the pale concrete walls of my classroom. I felt my chest tighten as tears began to rise up into my throat. Terrified they would seep out of my eyes and be seen by the other boys, I stared up at the moon and tried to breathe. As I stared I was reassured by the thought that if I could see the moon, so could my mother, and perhaps the moon could relay messages back and forth. The panic attack subsided.
    However, the moon seemed silent tonight, offering no advice. Ever-present as I stood on the ledge, like a mother teaching her child independence, she floated in the cold night sky, just watching. I stared at her in return, closely examining her pockmarked face to keep myself from falling into fear and anxiety or worse still, sleep.
    The window was locked from the inside. I pushed on it, a little too hard perhaps, and almost lost my balance. My foot slipped as I clutched onto the window handle with all my might. I knew someone would have to let me back in eventually. I just didn’t know how long that would be.
    All of this had happened because Rob’s parents had sent him food, which he had decided to share with me, since our beds were next to each other.
    There were two things that would keep us up after lights-out, risking the wrath of the prefects: food and naked lady pictures. I’m not sure this ever changes in a man’s life, but it’s particularly enticing when you are thirteen. If someone’s mother had sent him food, we would risk our very lives when the prefects weren’t looking by running from bed to bed passing baked goods and pastries back and forth like skilled drug runners. If someone’s older brother had sent him a back issue of
Penthouse
or
Hustler
, however, there was no group sharing. We would wait all night for the images of breasts and pubic hair to be passed to us after each boy had spent an adequate amount of time with it. Since everything in school was dictated by the law of the jungle, those like me at the bottom of the food chain always went without. As it was with the cereal milk, it also was with the naked lady pictures, and I spent many nights fantasizing about both.
    Rob and I were whispering about whether the chocolate or the lemon cake was better when Rob saw the creeping shadow of a prefect in the doorway behind me. In an instant, Rob vanished, as he and the cake tins were swallowed under white sheets, leaving me in mid-discussion with my torso leaning out of bed and my hands and mouth covered in cake crumbs.
    Smithy shone his flashlight in my face.
    “Get out of bed,” he ordered.
    No sooner did I stand up than I felt a fast fist to my abdomen that made me double over with pain.
    “I’ve told you about talking after lights out, Mandi-wala,” he said, pulling me up by my pajama collar. He walked over to the window and opened it. “You want to talk? Talk out