Nothing terrible happened during my first twenty-four hours at boarding school. But nearly every moment was terrifying.
Now, I’m not talking about Faces of Death moments. So get that out of your head. I'm talking about what I like to call tiny terrors. On their own, no one would consider any of them a holy-shit-crazy moment. It was the combination of them taking place again and again and again.
To a fourteen-year-old who had just been ripped out of his home and dropped off at boarding school, they were terrifying.
The tiny terrors started fairly quickly.
The first one hit the moment my dad left, and I was alone in my dorm room in an unfamiliar place. Not only was this a new school for me, but I knew no one—and I was living there. It didn’t help that the hall outside my room was deathly quiet. Where were the other sacrifices?
The terrors continued with the first dorm meeting that night.
I met the others living in the dorm. The sophomores. The juniors. The seniors. Were those guys even students? Some had mustaches. I swear one had a beard. Freaking grown men.
How was I, a 125-pound, soaking-wet scrub, supposed to stand up against that? I later learned that the best way to stand up to them was called avoidance. Adaptation was necessary for survival.
The upperclassmen all knew one another. Only the freshmen were fresh blood. Well, most of us. Some had been boarding students in seventh and eighth grade, so they already had friends. They were the privileged, like the older kids.
The group of small-fry freshmen who were completely on their own got smaller and smaller. And the terrors were circling.
Communal showers were the next tiny terror.
One open space with showerheads sticking out of a tiled wall. No place to hide. Showering was mandatory. I learned to move if someone wanted my shower. My soap and shampoo became communal if an upperclassman deemed them so. But I adapted. I made friends with the other fresh blood. We bonded. Strength in numbers, right?
You wouldn’t think eating could be a tiny terror. It was.
The first boarder dinner brought hundreds of boys and girls of all ages pouring into the cafeteria. I thought lunchtime was the only time I had to deal with the seating hierarchy of a cafeteria. Now I could add breakfast and dinner. Wonderful.
This was nothing like Harry Potter, where everyone sat down and got along. But I got the hang of it. I had other fresh blood to cling to. We walked in joined at the hip and walked out the same way.
Lights-out? More like boogeyman time.
Do you know how many strange noises come out at night in a dorm older than the Crypt Keeper, at a school filled with superstition and Hawaiian lore?
Sheeeeeettt.
Padded footsteps in the hallway. Whispers outside my window. I swear it was a knock on my door that woke me at three in the morning.
Tiny terrors.
When you’re fourteen, living away from the protective shell of home, an ordinary room can hold a tsunami of fear. And you still have to sleep in it.
But eventually, I did sleep. When my alarm clock woke me the next morning, I opened my eyes and thought, One day down, a bajillion more to go. Then I psyched myself up for my second communal shower.
I would eventually learn that the tiny terrors never stopped. Being a sophomore, junior, or senior didn’t change things. Boarding school had a way of creating new terrors the minute you got used to the old ones.
Decades later, when I began writing my psychological thriller, This Room Has Eyes, I didn’t have to imagine what it felt like to be fourteen, alone in a strange dorm room, listening to footsteps outside my door.
I only had to remember.