Equilibrium Academy by Benjamin Selesnick

Equilibrium Academy

      Neel stuck his hand beneath the dispenser. It hummed and a milky glop, slick like pond scum, fell into his palm. 
    His hair looked bright on top, almost translucent, but near the roots it darkened into a pale, swampy green. It looked like the perfect place for a caterpillar to spin its cocoon. It also looked terrible. His parents, both cardiologists, forbid the bleaching of his hair but they’d forbid many things before. A teenager’s arrogance is boundless, Neel’s guidance counselor told them.
    Shaking the goo in his cupped palm, tiny orbs that looked like minerals or perhaps crystals from a forgotten galaxy floated to the top, giving him the most minute reflection of himself that he'd ever seen. 
    They had found Neel draped beneath a layer of sprinkled tobacco and toilet paper on the floor of their bath room. They accosted him, told him that he debased himself on a daily basis, but the noises they made were muffled in Neel’s ears; his hangover deterred the concept of having a rational conversation.
    No one was in the waiting room. Neel sipped the liquid out of his hands. The back of his throat burned and his stomach rejected what he'd just swallowed. But he knew how to suppress his gag reflex. 
    Months later they found him passed out on the steps outside their home, saliva slipping out of his mouth and onto the brick walkway. Only two weeks earlier he’d overdosed on cough syrup, which his parents hadn’t believed was possible. In the hospital he vomited the majority of it back up. Soupy green garbage. Neel swam in it as his leg twitched on the gurney. They sent him to Equilibrium Academy when he was sixteen. They hired two men to wake him in the middle of the night and escort him to their van. Neel, his pale brown skin illuminated against his white comforter, woke to the sound of his doorknob twisting. He stood and grabbed a small switch blade he kept hidden under his mattress, but at the sight of the two men, gargantuan in size, he released the blade and it nicked his calf on its way to the floor.
     He shoved his hand underneath the dispenser once more, threw back another shot. 
    His parents didn’t acknowledge him in the foyer as the men wrestled him out the front door. Down the walkway in his pajamas, Neel cursed the two men and his unloving parents. His parents closed the door once they saw he’d made it safely into the van.
    Two more handfuls, he told himself. Two more and then one more to top it off. 
    An upper classman greeted Neel on the outskirts of Equilibrium Academy Academy on his first day. Skinny, dressed head to toe in cream-colored clothing, he escorted Neel to the areas of the campus he’d soon become familiar with: a one-room library with what was deemed appropriate reading material, a draconian brick building where his group therapy would be held, the wooden one-story, 3-bedroom lodge that would be his dormitory, and the windowless shack better know as the Education Hall. When Neel asked how long he had been at Equilibrium Academy, the boy sat on a rocking chair outside the dorm, kicked his feet onto the wooden guardrail, gestured with an open palm for Neel to sit next to him, and said, “10 months to the day.”
    And then one more to top it off. 
    Equilibrium Academy was nestled in the middle of a canyon in Northern Arizona. No other school for miles, hardly a rest stop either. Like being marooned on an island, the boy remarked.
    He fell into a deep squat with his arms thrust over his head. Through his fingertips, he could hear his pulse rattling through his body, and his head began to swim. 
    His parents wrote him a letter before he left. It lay face up on his cot in his room when he arrived. He tore it open, recognized their handwriting, and stuffed it in his bedside drawer.
    Slowly, over the course of fifteen minutes, the walls of the hallway shifted and looked like the contents of a witch's cauldron. His shoulders slumped down, relaxed. He put his body weight against the wall and slid to the floor. 
    Neel kept the letter in his bedside table. From September to November he chose not to read it; he was trying to develop a new life, so he didn’t want to be reminded of home. It was only when his cravings got bad, when he’d rubbed the pads of his fingers together so much that he worried his fingerprints might wear down to nothing, that he read it.
    It was a well-kept secret among the students that the hand sanitizer wasn't alcohol-free. The staff members simply assumed it was. It had to be. 
    The letter was written with a fountain pen and the ink leaked through the page. It said Neel. And then it said Never forget how much we love you. And then Neel put it down and left his room.
    Sitting on the floor, he again put his palm under the motion detector of the dispenser. He imagined himself looking like the old drunk slamming on the bar for another shot, the same downward-sloped face, averting eyes, rounded posture. A classroom door flew open and a class of twelve students poured out. 
    Out of his dorm and into the desert sun, Neel rushed into the Education Hall. He marched himself right up to the Purell dispenser and held himself there for a moment, locking eyes with the colorful calligraphy on the machine, before placing his hand beneath.
    Later, when asked by the dean of Equilibrium Academy, Neel told the man that he didn't know why he did it, but he knew that he wanted to go home.  

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Bio: Benjamin Selesnick is a student at Northeastern University, where he studies English, Creative Writing, and Theology. His work has appeared in Literary Orphans, Spectrum, and The Cantabrigian.