I was lying on my stomach on my bed, resting my upper body on my elbows, reading intently from the general anatomy book propped up against the wall in front of me, occasionally highlighting important points with a yellow marker. I looked at my watch. Eleven am — time for my classmates to start showing up.
Soon I heard growing murmurs and louder conversations starting in the hallway, and saw white-clad students walking past my door, looking for their own rooms. I got up to stand in the doorway and watched the students arrive, most of them with bags, boxes, or suitcases of possessions, each boy comparing a slip of paper he was holding to the numbers above the doors.
One boy walking past caught my eye — the jackal from yesterday, Maverick, the one who'd seemed... I wasn't sure "snotty" was the best word for it, but it was a close fit. Seeing him walking, especially in the skimpy school uniform, made him even more attractive than just seeing his face. He had a good, strong chest, the sort of well-defined abs that I was working on but hadn't quite reached, glutes that filled out his shorts, and beautiful long legs — another thing about him that reminded me of Marshall. I felt a sudden rush of physical attraction to him, muted an instant later by memories of his performance yesterday. Today he had a sour expression on his face as he walked by, kind of a do-I-have-to-live-with-these-idiots look that further solidified my negative impression of him. I was relieved to see Maverick walk on past and go into a room two doors farther down the hall.
Moments later, I recognized the brown-haired boy who'd also asked one of the questions at the orientation. I smiled at him. "Jack, right? I saw you yesterday."
The boy smiled back. "Jack Eason. You're...?"
I held out my hand. "Wynn Cameron. Which room are you in?"
Jack looked at his slip of paper again. "Room 27."
I pointed down the hall. "It's close to the end, down that way. I hope nobody has to triple up. There's only thirty-one rooms."
Jack shook his head. "I heard seven boys decided not to come. It ended up being fifty-eight boys in the class."
I nodded. "I guess they know from experience how many will come back after orientation." I shrugged. "It seems weird, somebody not coming. After all that work to get in!"
Jack nodded agreement. "I think it was partly that bit about the Honor Code, and violations and all that. You'd think they'd all have read about that in the handbook, and they knew they were going to be slaves here. But I think seeing the place and meeting everybody made it all seem... I don't know, more real. I can see some boys not being ready for that big of a step. Getting cold feet at the last minute."
I looked down at Jack's feet and smiled. "Not cold, huh?"
He laughed. "Not a chance! I've wanted to be here since I was, I don't know, twelve. It was this or be a dancer. I guess I decided I liked..." He laughed. "...this kind of dancing."
A rabbit came up behind Jack, looking at the room number over my head. He grinned, happily, and said, "Hi, I'm Shaw. Are you Maverick?"
"No. Are you sure this is the right room?"
A puzzled look crossed Shaw's face, and he looked back down at the paper he held. "Oh, wait!" He laughed good-naturedly — his whole personality seemed bubbly. "Eighteen. I don't know why I was thinking fourteen."
I smiled and pointed. "A little farther down."
"Thanks!" Shaw grinned and shrugged. "See you later, I guess."
As the rabbit disappeared into the room two doors away, I shook my head, muttering, "Better him than me, I guess."
Jack raised his eyebrows. "What?"
"Oh..." I hoped Jack wasn't one of Maverick's old friends. "That jackal, Maverick. Did you see him yesterday? He's in that room. The one Shaw went in."
Jack made a face. "Yeah, I remember him. Maybe he'll lighten up later. Anyway, it's nice meeting you, Wynn. I'd better go down and see if I've got a roommate yet."
"Sure. Talk to you later."
Jack moved down the hall. Another boy — a mouse with really soft-looking light-gray fur — was approaching from the other direction, doing the room-number-compare like all the others. He stopped in front of me. He was good-looking — well, they all were, of course — a small, slender mouse with short brown headfur, lighter than mine. The boy looked nervously up at the room number over the door. "Are you..." He looked at his slip of paper again. "...Wynn?"
I smiled. "Wynn Cameron, yeah. I guess you must be my roommate." I backed away to let the boy come in.
The mouse relaxed and followed me. "I'm Sumner Fennel." He shook hands with me while looking around. He saw the two small beds, the meager shelf space, the television, the hanging platform folded up underneath it. In the far wall of the room, a window looked out on the Academy's courtyard, the great square area surrounded by the school's buildings. The boy stopped for a second to look into the tiny bathroom on the right, just large enough for a shower, sink, and toilet. "It's not real big, is it?"
"Wait till our other roommates show up — just kidding," I added hurriedly, seeing the look on Sumner's face.
Sumner suddenly saw the head on the shelf over my bed. "Oh, who's that?"
"That's Marshall. I get a lot of inspiration from him. He's an Academy graduate. I saw him do his show."
Sumner's eyes flew open wide. "Really? And you got his head??"
"He was hanged at my house. My dad bought him." I left Andrew out of the story.
"Oh, and he let you keep him because you were coming here?"
"Not... well, something like that, I guess."
"He's... I mean, wow, he's really wow!"
I loved hearing Marshall complimented. "Yeah. Everybody thinks that. Me too, of course."
Sumner continued looking around. "I guess you've got that side of the room."
"Is that okay? I've been here awhile."
Sumner nodded absently. "I don't care. Really." He looked at me more closely. "I'm not remembering you from orientation."
I shook my head. "When I said 'awhile,' I mean I've been here for a month."
Sumner's jaw dropped. "How did you manage that?"
I shrugged. "Long story. I just really couldn't stay at home. I haven't been in classes, though. I'll be starting from the same place you are."
Sumner's attention was caught by the apparatus on the wall above his bed, matching the one over mine. "What's that?"
"Oh! That's the neck trainer. You must have read about that. You haven't seen one before, though. Let me show you how it works."
I climbed onto my bed, squatting down with my back to the wall at the head of the bed, and began unwinding the apparatus. "I've got some friends in the Second Year, and they showed me how to do this. I wasn't allowed to do any hanging, but this is safer. But you're still never allowed to do it alone."
I opened the wide, thick collar and wrapped it around my neck. In front, at its top, it bulged outward to make a shelf for my chin to rest in. In back, it pressed firmly against the back of my skull. "It doesn't squeeze your neck at all, and you can easily breathe with it on. It's made to hold up your head without the squeezing." With the support collar in place, I put my arms back against the wall, wrapped my hands around two handles next to either hip to support myself, and carefully straightened out my legs along the surface of the bed. Finally I eased myself down and let go of the handles. The weight of my upper body was now supported by the collar, distributing the force as tension in my neck muscles, my butt hovering a few inches off the surface of the bed — that is, I was hanging by my neck, without choking.
Sumner's eyes widened. "How long can you do it for?"
I grimaced and reached back for the handles, pushing myself back up. "Sorry, I can't really talk when I'm hanging in the thing. Anyway, I've got to where I can stand it for about ten minutes, maybe twelve. You know, we're supposed to start out doing it a half hour total every day — in short pieces, like five minutes or whatever, just so it adds up to a half hour. You're supposed to break it up less as your neck gets stronger, like two fifteen-minute intervals, say. After a couple of months it'll go up to sixty minutes a day. It's not that big of a deal — you can read or watch TV while you're doing it, so it doesn't take you away from other stuff you could be doing. You need to be able to do the whole sixty minute stretch at one time by the end of the year." I pulled my legs back, and removed the collar. "You want to try yours? I'll help you put it on."
Sumner looked doubtful. "I don't really have to do it until tomorrow, do I?"
"Have to? Don't you want to??" I wanted to ask "What else are we here for?" but didn't want to rush the mouse. I understood how overwhelming it was to be starting a whole new life.
"Later, maybe." Sumner put down his bag of possessions and sat on the other bed, looking uncomfortable.
I folded up the neck trainer and put it in its niche, and sat on my bed facing Sumner, smiling at him and trying to put him at ease. I had felt like the little brother during my time here. This was my first chance to feel like a veteran. "Tell me some things about yourself. Have you tried hanging before? I still haven't yet." I gestured up at the neck trainer. "This thing doesn't count."
Sumner smiled. "Oh, yeah. I used to do it at home. All by myself — really stupid, I know." He grinned sheepishly. "Then I volunteered for the role of Jansen when our school drama club put on the play 'The Wrong Man.' You know, he's the one who gets arrested for murder and hanged before they find out somebody else did it. The hanging scene was really cool. I was really hanged, and kicked for about half a minute before they pulled a curtain in front of me to end the scene, and then afterwards I'm stretched out on a table, dead, when they get the call to stop the hanging — too late, of course."
"Wow, you've even done a show! That must have really been fun. Of course, by the time you graduate, you can do it lots longer than that. Marshall did it for thirty-one minutes."
Sumner goggled at me. "Thirty-one! Are you kidding me?"
I grinned, always proud of Marshall's accomplishment. "See, when they say you can do twenty or twenty-five, always tell yourself, 'I can go longer.'"
I saw that Sumner was looking down at his bed, obviously a little dismayed at its small size, as he had been with the room earlier. "We could get a bigger one for both of us later, if that'd be better."
Sumner colored a little. "I guess this is a good time to tell you, I..." he hesitated. "You're going to be my roommate, so I guess I'd better tell you. I don't really like sex with males much. I like females a lot better."
I was astonished. Even in the outside world, sex between males was common, since there were so few females. But here... "Uhhh, I wasn't really talking about sex, just trying to see what would make you more comfortable, but..." I waved my arm around to indicate our surroundings. "Sumner, there's nobody but males here!"
Sumner nodded. "I know. I guess I am a little weird in some ways. Hanging is... well, it's the only thing that's ever made me feel really sexy. I mean excited-sexy. I just..." He shivered, obviously imagining himself dangling from the noose. "As far as sex, I can get by between parties. There'll be femmes at the parties."
"Well, true. But you know most of the guests at the parties are male. Whoever rents you at one of the parties, you have to try to satisfy them. You don't have to succeed, but you have to try. We get graded on that. What are you going to do?"
Sumner shrugged. "When I have to do it, I'll do it. And I really think I'll do a good job of it. I'd just rather not do it when I don't have to."
I wondered if Sumner was accustomed to doing anything he didn't have to. That didn't seem like quite the right attitude for a slave. I was about to suggest that doing well at anything required practice, but realized that would sound as if I was trying to serve my own purposes. I didn't feel a strong need to get Sumner in bed. I was very happy with Larry and Leo, and knew I'd soon get close to the boys in my own class as well. Jack seemed really nice, for example. I let the subject go. "Did you eat anything yet? It's close to lunchtime, if you want to go grab something."
Sumner smiled. "That sounds good. Oh — do I need that meal card thing?"
I nodded. "You can't get food without it."
"And I just have to show that and I can eat anything?"
"Right. Obviously you don't want to overdo it. Weight is really important in hanging, and if you start getting above your ideal weight, they take the card away and replace it with ration tickets for healthy foods, in limited portions."
Sumner stood up, smiling again. "I guess you must know where the cafeteria is. You can show me."
"Sure."