Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

incommunicado. That makes them nervous. You know. Also my spirit of cooperation leaves something to be desired—they had to cart me over here in an ambulance when I wouldn’t come willingly.” He peered into the carafe on the bedstand. “Want some? I read somewhere that drinking hospital water is a sure way to get strep throat.”

“Bill, why are you in this place?” He seemed perfectly normal to me. “All I know is Father said you’re angry at him because he thwarted some elaborate arrangements you’d made to run away from school. But this seems a bit drastic, doesn’t it?”

Bill chuckled and tossed a cube of ice into his mouth. “That’s not why I’m pissed off,” he said. “I’m mad because I’m here. They got me here under false pretenses. They promised me I’d only have to come here for one night. It’s been two weeks.”

“Two weeks!” I exclaimed.

“That’s not all,” said Bill.

“Wait a minute—who’s they? Father and Nan?”

“This big-shot psychiatrist, Dr. Kubie. Very highly thought of amongst those who think of these things. Kind of a family retainer.” Bill chuckled again. “When Father found out about my plot to skip out on Lawrenceville [Bill had left Eaglebrook that year to return to Lawrenceville], he made a surprise appearance there and said he’d like to drive me into New York and have me talk to this old family friend named Dr. Lawrence Kubie. Part of my escape plan was to go to New York anyway, so I figured it would save me the train fare, plus Father had the biggest chauffeur I’d ever seen and I had the feeling there wasn’t much refusing. I packed my stuff and came with him to New York to Dr. Kubie’s office. We had a strange series of meetings: both Father and I, then one of us, then the other one, then both, then one, and then the other. Finally Dr. Kubie said that in his judgment, to relieve Father and Nan of the worry that I might disappear that night—I’d made it pretty clear my plans were just momentarily suspended out of inconvenience—it would be best if I spent the night in a small private hospital. And I refused to, and ended up in an ambulance, and here I am and it’s been two weeks.”

“Unbelievable,” I said. I felt the same kind of isolation as when I hadn’t read a newspaper in a very long time.

“Father and Nan come here every day,” went on Bill. “I don’t speak to them. Nan brings me books, which I must say is a boon. But I won’t talk to either of them. Won’t say a word.”

“That’s a dumb way to get revenge,” I said. “If I were you, I’d be talking a mile a minute with every last breath in my body.”

“There’s nothing to say,” said Bill. “I’ve already said it. Listen, I’m not being paranoid—I’m here. This is actually happening to me. I mean, they’ve taken my clothes, my money, my wallet, all my goodies—very underhanded of them. The night I arrived, they gave me a whopping dose of Tuinol—”

“What’s that?”

“Half Seconal, half Amytal. Deadly. I was naïve enough to think I could power my way through, but it dropped me like a tree. Now they’ve got me on a steady diet of sleeping pills because my time thing is all turned around. There’s a nurse on guard twenty-four hours a day; I have no privacy.”

“Why the nurse, seriously?”

“In case I might try to break out—how do I know why? The place isn’t equipped for this stuff—Father came here once with his stomach thing.”

“Why are you in bed? Why are you just lying there?”

“Where else am I supposed to be? They won’t let me leave the room. Haven’t been out of it in two weeks.”

“But, Bill, why were you running away?”

Bill crunched on another piece of ice. It was a very hot day and I could feel rivulets of perspiration running down my sides.

“Well,” he said, “during spring vacation, I met this girl from Tulsa. Father took Bridget and me to Sarasota, Florida—he’s got buddies there who run the circus, Harry and Johnny North. Strange place to go for a vacation, Sarasota.”

He looked off into space.

“And?” Sometimes Bill’s digressions were so convoluted he told the beginning of a story at the end.

“Oh, well,” he said, sighing. “I fell madly in love with this girl. When I got back to Lawrenceville after Easter, I figured school was a waste of my time, better to get a job in some oil field driving a truck, so I bought a New York-to-Oklahoma airplane ticket with the cash I’ve been saving up for about a year. My best friend finked on me. The housemaster, a very nice fellow, called me in and asked me if it was true that I was leaving school. I said yes, it was. And he said he felt obligated to call my father and notify him. This was on a Friday night and I was planning to split on Saturday morning. I knew Father was premiering The Spirit of St. Louis in San Francisco that night, and that it would be totally impossible for the housemaster to get through to him. He had no idea Father was, first of all, in San Francisco and, second, in the middle of a theatre. Like a fool, I agreed to spend that night at the dean’s house—so as not to be a bad influence on the other kids—before making my exit in the morning. The next morning, I was having breakfast with the dean’s wife when Father walked in the door, which startled me enormously. The rest is history.”

My heart ached for him. Oklahoma oil fields would have been much better than this.

“I mean, I would have been happier,” Bill was saying, “they never asked me—going to a public school, living at home. This is my fourth consecutive year in boarding school. There’s something creepy about all these Eastern prep schools anyway. But I’ve always envied the kids