We used to go there and play in the white room.
We had no idea why it was the only room in the whole building that was painted that blinding, holy looking white, when literally nothing else in the entire building had any sort of vibrancy or life to it. Maybe it should’ve been suspicious, really, but we were ten. We didn’t care about the paint color of a room, we cared about saying “fuck” under our breath and feeling rebellious, about leering over at Stacy, the middle school chick that developed early and made us boys feel short of breath (for no reason, we would always wail) and weak in the knees.
So we brought our playing cards, our shitty bicycles with mismatched tires and missing spokes, our Red Man chewing tobacco that Derrick “stole” from his dad (although we all suspected his dad just didn’t give a damn) and camped out in that room once or twice a month for the majority of three summers, until James moved away and Derrick, Tommy and myself grew bored with being cooped up in that room when there were misdemeanors to perform and girls to try and woo.
Nothing peculiar ever happened in there.
It was only a few days ago, when I walked by the building on one of my many “nature walks” away from the house and more importantly, my wife, that I wondered about that white room again for the first time in twenty two years. It was like a white dot in a sea of darkness, in my thoughts, and no matter what I did to try to rid myself of that speck, it remained, like an ornery eye floater with an intense purpose to annoy, annoy, annoy.
So that’s how I found myself artfully hoisting myself over a “CAUTION: NO ENTRY” fence, retracing the dirt path up to the rear door of the Fourth Wing, and creaking the already ajar door open, retracing my childhood steps to the white room.
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time. George Bernard Shaw
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