March 9, 1941

The boys arrive at Wellington and meet their roommates For story info that wont fit here, see this link :-) http://www.writerscafe.org/hopelessromantic/blogs/The-Story/4239/

Sunday, March 11, 1941

 

Hersch  -

            I’m sitting on a bus full of strangers in a country I first saw yesterday. I know that this is hardly the place to begin my story, but if I don’t calm down I’ll probably throw myself out the window, which I imagine would only make things worse, and at this point writing is the only way for me to calm myself down.

Rebecca gave me this journal back in London. She shouldn’t have spent the money, but I’m glad to have it now. I hope she’s all right alone, but she’s handling the sudden change of scene a lot better than me. For once, I feel like I needed her more than she needed me. I need someone to hold on to in this lonely place, somebody to get me through this, and without her I don’t know what I’ll do.

I’ll never tell anyone about what happened back home. It’s not that I don’t want anyone to know, but I just can’t talk about it. It will kill me. No one can know about Kristen.

I can see the gates of Wellington’s now, and, though it happens to be the sight I have been waiting to see for the past hour, I don’t relish it all.

            It’s not that I miss where I came from. There is nothing on earth that could make me go back. But though the past few weeks have been excruciating, they’ve gone incredibly fast. I don’t know if I can handle the world I’ve been tossed into. I need to make myself out to be a fairly normal student in about five minutes, and all this time alone with my thoughts isn’t exactly keeping me sane.

But Poland is far behind me, at least literally, and I know I have to leave the past behind too.

            The bus is stopped at the entrance. Apparently I’m the only one getting off here, so I guess they’re waiting for me. I don’t know what I’ll find behind the gates, but, like it or not, I’m going to find out.

…

Erich "

            I braced myself against the cool spring wind that blew against my back. The school had turned out to be much further away from my motel than I thought and I had begun to regret the decision to walk about two miles back. My suitcase cut cutting into my hand and my feet were aching. I could usually handle difficult circumstances with gritted teeth, but my mood was already getting steadily worse.

            I looked behind me, suddenly conscious that I was no longer the only one on the road. A bus was driving away, and the kid who had gotten off was following me up the walk.

            I tensed up. In the past few years, I had learned to sense my enemies from a distance, and the guy who was following me put me on the edge. I threw another glance over my shoulder and he caught my eye, looking down before I could. I immediately realized why his presence bothered me: he was a Jew.

            My temper flared. It was almost impossible to hold down the blind hatred I knew I was supposed to feel for him. I had been so angry ever since I left home and the urge to act on that resentment was almost overwhelming.

            But I was in England to prove that I wasn’t like that anymore. I couldn’t let my anger get to me, and if I let loose on some innocent Jewish kid, there was nothing to say I didn’t belong back in Germany.

            I ducked further behind the collar of my coat and walked faster up the path as I tried to put him from my mind. The cab that had already passed me came to a stop in the school courtyard a few meters ahead. The kid inside got out, lugged his bags out of the trunk and went over to greet the guy who was waiting for him. The boy from the car was easy to ignore, but there was something about the other one that caught my attention.

            He was dark and tall, though not as tall as me, with black curls. He was holding a strangely shaped carrying case like it was the only thing he had in the world. All that was easy enough to dismiss, but as I got closer to him, an odd feeling came over me. It’s almost impossible to describe, but for just a second I felt like he was the person who could almost fix me, someone who could make me better than I had been.

            But before the feeling could really take hold of me, I crushed it. For me, killing sentiment was always easier that dealing with it. So I sighed and trudged up into the courtyard to meet the boys I would be more or less trapped with for the next four months.

            The boy from the cab noticed me first and his eyes widened as he muttered something to the other one. I couldn’t help but feel superior. I had always retained the ability to intimidate people on sight and I found it very satisfying. It was a quality that kept people away from me, which was exactly the way I liked it.

            But my confidence shrunk when the second boy took a few steps down the road towards me, not afraid but curious. It startled me and, for some reason, I was suddenly scrambling to figure out what I could say to him. I stopped in front of the pair and looked them up and down, trying to decide where to begin. Unfortunately, what came out wasn’t helpful.

            “Du bist der Mitbewohner,” I said, automatically referring back to German. I could tell neither of them understood me and I had done nothing to make myself appear more menacing. To my own disgust, I felt my face go red. “You must be the roommates,” I muttered.

            I must have succeeded in scaring the first guy, because he just stared at me. But the other, the one I was already more worried about, extended his hand. “Gabe Moretti,” he introduced himself.

            I couldn’t even pretend to smile back. Again, he had confused me. Something about him made me angry. It was like he was one of the enemies I was supposed to be able to recognize, but he left me completely baffled as to why I felt that way. So, at least for that moment, all I knew was that I hated the boy whose hand I was shaking.

…

Gabe-

            I stood in the center of the school square, clutching my luggage and watching as the shadows of the oak tree crept across the courtyard. Apparently I was the only one who was stupid enough to have misread my acceptance letter and had showed up the day before orientation. I had spent the night in a guest room in the main building above the dining hall, and I was beginning to realize that I wasn’t going to get an orientation so much as I was going to be tossed into the ocean of Wellington’s without a life-preserver. Now I had nothing but to wait for the other boys, the ones who would be, according to the prefect who had shown me the grounds, my new roommates.

            The prospect was a little scary. For reasons that I tried to forget, I knew that sharing a room with three other guys would be a tough task. As much as I tried to downplay it in my mind, I couldn’t help the knot that had formed in my stomach or the fact that my pulse was out of control.

            It was cold for a spring morning and I shivered as I watched a cab pull up in front of me. A tall, lean guy with a mop of sandy brown hair tripped out the door and pulled his luggage heatedly out of the trunk like it had done something to offend him. There was no one to greet him, so I assumed that was my job.

            “Hey,” I said, trying to appear friendly, “James Banhart?” I asked, recalling the first name that had been mentioned to me.

            He nodded, seeming a little more sociable than I had initially taken him for. “Jim,” he corrected me, “Gabriel?”

            I smiled “Yeah, Gabe, actually. Gabe Moretti.”

            He didn’t exactly smile, but he wasn’t totally unpleasant, “American, huh?” I asked, for lack of anything better to talk about.

            “Yeah,” he nodded, and we proceeded into a short but awkward silence. We both turned when someone, a built, white-blonde guy, came up the path to the courtyard.

            “Holy s**t,” muttered Jim, gesturing to the huge guy on the road. “Is he the other one we’re waiting for?”

            I squinted down the road at the newcomer, “I don’t know.” Unable to contain my curiosity, I took a few steps down the road towards him. The guy was intimidating to say the least, looking to be a few inches taller than me and more than a little stronger. His eyes were a cold, icy blue and he hunched his shoulders like he was trying to protect himself from something right behind him. Jim and I took an automatic step back as he got closer.

            He stopped in front of us and looked us up and down like he was trying to decide which one to kill. Then he said something in German which neither of us understood. The big guy’s face reddened as he must have realized that he hadn’t spoken in English. “You must be the roommates,” he muttered, obviously uncomfortable.

            I nodded, not really sure what I could say to him. “Gabe Moretti,” I introduced myself feebly.

            His mouth tightened like something I had said had made him even angrier. “Erich Amery,” he said through a locked jaw. He hid his accent nearly perfectly when he spoke English, but he gave himself away again with the harsh pronunciation of his first name.

It was then that I first had that feeling that I would experience many times over the course of our association, a bewildered feeling of fear and awe. It was the first time I ever suspected there was more to Erich Amery that met the eye.

…

Jim "

 “Oh, come on!” I groaned, throwing a punch at the seat in front of me. My cab had gotten stuck behind a bus ten minutes outside of London and the a*****e driver had thoroughly refused to pass it. We had just come to a screeching halt for the hundredth time that afternoon. “What the hell, man? How much f*****g longer do I have to put up with this?” I cursed. I didn’t mean to overreact, but being frustrated and sleep-deprived, I was hardly in a forgiving mood.

The cab driver let me go on like that for a minute before saying, “I don’t mean to interrupt, sir, but this happens to be your stop.” I looked up at him, still pretty damn aggravated, “Unless you don’t intend to visit Wellington’s Boys’ Academy,” he said with the condescending air that every Brit I had met so far had used.

I whipped my head to the right and saw that WELLINGTON’S was printed in bold, spiraling letters on the iron gates that we had so suddenly parked in front of.

I turned back to the driver, feeling like a complete idiot. “Yes, actually I do,” I grumbled, knowing I looked like an a*s.

“Shall I drive you in then?”

I muttered something that he must have interpreted as a ‘yes.’ Though I wasn’t looking forward to spending more time in the cab, I had just seen a pretty shady looking kid around my age step out of the bus and walk towards the gates. I decided I would rather not take the walk to the school with him, so I let the cab driver follow the boy up the path.

We drove up the road leading to the school, past the strange looking kid and another person on foot, a big blond guy who looked like he could probably rip my head off, and I thought about how far I was from home.

London was a far cry from my perpetually boring life in Wisconsin. I had applied to Wellington’s on a whim, thinking traveling to war-ravaged Europe would be just the adventure I was looking for. No one was more surprised than me when I got an actual acceptance letter.

I was a little too eager to get out of the cab and stepped out the door, tripping on my own feet, before the car could stop moving. I tried to blow it off, but not before the guy watching me from the courtyard saw. I trudged to the trunk and grabbed my luggage as he, to my annoyance, came over to me.

The kid was about my age. He looked Spanish or Italian or something, but had more of a British accent. He introduced himself as Gabe Moretti and stood in awkward silence until we were joined by the next guy, the hulking, scary-looking blond I had seen earlier. I let Gabe talk to him; if his appearance wasn’t enough to ward me off, his German introduction was plenty. I didn’t dare say it, I couldn’t help but feel like I was dealing with the kind of scary, blood-thirsty German we read about back in America.

From what we had all read in our letters, we knew we had one more roommate, and luckily we didn’t have long to wait. The shady looking guy who had gotten off the bus in front of me came up the path a minute later.

“Hey,” he said, not addressing any one of us in particular, “sorry I’m late. Herschel Abrahamson,” he introduced himself, keeping his eyes down as he held out a hand. He wasn’t bad looking but seemed a little rough to be entering an exclusive prep school. His hair was overgrown, his clothes were rumpled and it looked like it had been a while since he had shaved. It was his name that tipped me off, though. The rest of us gave him an odd look, obviously wondering how a Jewish boy who was obviously not exactly British had gotten there. “Hersch,” he tried again, pushing his crooked, rectangular glasses up his nose, when none of us answered, “Hersch Abrahamson.”

We all nodded and looked in different directions. It was one f****r of an uncomfortable situation. Already, none of us liked any of the others. I was worried by Hersch, who seemed to have so much going on in his head that he couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to anything else; confused by Gabe, who had a quality that made me uneasy and I felt like I should have recognized; and more than a little scared of Erich, who didn’t seem to like anyone or anything. We were saved by our uncomfortable moment by the annoying-looking prefect who came to greet us.

“Everyone here?” he asked, “Abrahamson, Amery, Banhart, and Moretti?” He looked at us like we were the biggest group of misfits he had ever seen, which, in retrospect, we probably were. When none of us responded, he must have assumed we were all in the right place. “All right,” he clapped his hands together with a falsely-excited air that failed to make any of us more comfortable, “welcome to Wellington’s!”

The four of us followed him across the grounds. The school was apparently made of one main building, which the prefect pointed out as holding the dining hall, library, and classes, with four separate dorms to the side and a scattering of even smaller, unspecified buildings behind them. The tension mounted as we realized that we were not being led towards any of the dorms, but around the back of the main building.

“Unfortunately for you,” the prefect was saying, “there were no dorm rooms left by the time we got your confirmations. But the headmaster had something set up.” I was already finding this guy to be the most annoying I had dealt with yet, and I tried to be optimistic by focusing on the fact that at least we wouldn’t have to room with him.

We followed him around the side of the building to a door that looked, to all of our horror, like it led to the basement. He led us down the stairs, through the door and into a dimly lit concrete hall. There was a flight of stairs at the end of the corridor and a single door on the right-hand side of the hall. The handle was broken, which we should have seen as a sign of the environment where we would be spending the next four months. I don’t know what I expected to see on the other side of that door, but I know that disappointment was one of the first unanimous feelings the four of us shared.

Our dorm had clearly once been a boiler room, a conclusion I drew based on the fact that the boiler was still there, a huge, ugly thing that took up a good fourth of the room. The floor was concrete and covered by a thin rug that clashed with the color of the red brick walls. There were two sets of bunk beds that sat opposite each other against the opposite wall, a writing desk in the corner and an old wooden tub that apparently no one had bothered to move.

The prefect made no attempt to explain anything more, but was apparently so dismayed by our new home that he wanted to get the hell out. “Breakfast is tomorrow at seven, classes at eight. Your uniforms are on the beds, schedules are on the desk and don’t be late,” he ordered as he made his way out the door.

The four of us looked at each other without saying anything. We claimed our beds without a word, meaning Erich picked the left top bunk and no one was about to argue with him. I ended up on the opposite top, sharing the set with Herschel.

The uniforms were lousy, tan pants, white button up, and a blue sweater-vest. Great, just perfect. I was going to look like a heel and be trapped with three jerks all term. No one made any attempt to communicate, though we were trapped within five feet of each other. I groaned and flopped back on my bed, looking up at the ceiling and trying to block out my roommates.

“Verdammt!” the German word came from the other top bunk.

“Cazzo!” Italian, from a little ways away.

“Cholera!” Polish, from the bed underneath me.

I didn’t speak any of those languages, but the general meaning was pretty clear and echoed them in the only way I knew how.

“F**k.”

Reviews

[WayOath]

(I’ll probably throw myself out the window, which I imagine would only make things worse...)

This was awesome, made me laugh.

(I immediately realized why his presence bothered me: he was a Jew.)

Was it Kyle from Southpark? lol

(“Du bist der Mitbewohner,”)


I picked up that he was german a long time ago, but now I really like him. There is just something about german jew hating guys. lol, I think is because of Rammstein. :)

Ha ha, classic ending, F**k. That truly was funny, everyone else was speaking some fancy dancy language and then a f**k in the middle of it all. lol. BUt I really did like this and enjoyed it immensly befcause every guy had a view point and it was great and awesome for the reader how you incorportated them all into every guys view. I laughed at your awesome sarcasm. That was a factor that made in very enjoyable for the reader as well. You sure can write for a 15 year old. THis was really impressing (not to stereotype you but all the 15 yea olds her are dumb and s****y.) But any how, this was remarkable and you have an awesome skill for writing.

XWayOathX

[Arianna]

this whole chapter made me laugh.
they seem like the most unlikely group of people.
add that to the fact that their dorm is in the boiler room!!! and you've got an interesting story that i am 100% up for reading. :)
onto the next chapter. but before i go. gotta say the last part was my favrote.
all the different swear words made me laugh.

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[Coyote Poetry]

A amazing opening chapter. I like the description of location and the people. I like the history you gave in the chapter of each character. You have my attention. I will read on. A excellent chapter.
Coyote

[Jake Donald Stephens]

First of all, I need to say that you're an amazing writer and this story kicks all kinds of buttocks. From the start of this chapter I was right there with the guys, the writing was so detailed and insightful as it described their thoughts and feelings.
A WWII era German rooming with a Jew? Awkwaaard.
One small error: "I was going to look like a heel and be trapped with four jerks all term" (toward the end), I think he means three jerks.

In summation, I LOVE what you're doing with this story. Outstanding work, which I would recommend to anyone.

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[Voice]

This is a really good read so far. I really feel like I am back in that time period watching this all take place. I will be back to read more soon! Great write!!

Voice

[hannah]

my favorite character is gabe :) there's just something about him that i like. i think you're doing a pretty good job at talking like a boy, your mental files have been filling up thanks to me twin ;) hannah likey, keep going!

[SilentDreamer]

Very interesting start to a book, though kind of a long chapter( although it could just be my short attention span) :) Very good chapter, it kept me interested and the characters personalities are amazingly defined. Great job.

[LostinKristina]

Just the ending of this chapter made my day.
no lie.
"F**k"

This was really good, i didn't see any mistakes really.
maybe some here and there, but nothing to point out.
keep it up.

[Bexfinch]

I'm confuzzled right now cuz i haven't read much and annoyed cuz my hair is standing up the top of my head . But ill read as much as i can before my mum comes k and I'll update the review if i don't finish
K luckily she did not come it was really good cuz of the surprise well i guess at the end and One of the dudes Gabe Morretti i think has the same name almost as the dude at my school except his last name is Morales I can't wait to read more FINALLY an NEW story hahhahaha
Ciao and hope to see more
Oceana Vivian

[trish420]

Yay a new story! I like it so far... it is a little confusing reading all the different persepectives and going back to the beginning with each one... maybe give a wee bit more explanation of who everyone is first? I kept having to re-read to understand who I was that time. Though of course if it isn't the opener then we'll already know :-) I like the tone a lot though and the subject matter seems very promising, and yes, you sound like a boy :-)