As with any great story, it all started with a girl.  Well, two girls really – I can’t help being handsome.  There was Jill and there was Leah and there was the rush of crisp air that comes with autumn in New York and there was the burst of new feelings that come with those endless and few teenage years.

I was seventeen and I was a senior and I knew everything there was to know and nothing at all.  I had two things on my mind, the first being the obvious thing seventeen year old boys busy their thoughts with and the other was not school. The other was mischief.

You see, Jill was a studious girl, as studious as she was attractive and she made heads turn so fast you could hear the brains of young boys squish and splat as they bounced around their skulls behind her like an audible wake on the sea of Park Avenue.  And as you do when you’re at that age where your flirtations have barely moved passed punching the object of your affection, yet you fancy yourself Casanova, I set about wooing her through annoyance.
My thought process was, I believe, as follows: at first she would be annoyed, but annoyance, like a magnet, needs something solid to latch onto, so she would focus her annoyance on me, and thus her attention on me and then, once I had her full attention she would see I was harmless, and not in fact the oaf she had at first believed and then she would warm to me and then we would talk and we would get to know each other and we would see we really weren’t that different and then my hand would fall harmlessly to my side and her hand would fall harmlessly to her side and they would brush one another and we would think, our pesky hands keeping bumping into one another, best they hold each other so as to avoid that and then our latched hands would bump our sides and we would say oh now we can’t have that happening so we would hold each other’s waists instead and then we would just hold each other and then we would kiss and then we would kiss more and then I wasn’t quite sure what you do with a girl after you’ve kiss her and you’ve kissed her some more, but I was sure I was going to like it.  But before all that there was the pesky little bit of mischief I had to perform before we could go about the serious business of falling in love.

Prank is such an ugly and feeble word and does not capture the beautiful complexity of what I had in store for that academic institution.  I will supply you with the elements - live animals, fireworks and graffiti – and I will let your imaginations do the rest to assemble the truly magnificent scene.  Ah, mischief, from the old French word meschever, which means, “to end badly,” and oh did things ever end badly. 

Let me at first say I did not burn the school down, though surely that is how today’s pupils refer to the legendary event.  Sure there was fire damage, but the roof probably needed rebuilding anyway, I just moved up their timetable.  Saying I burnt the school to the ground is at the very least an exaggeration, and may well be libel.  I’ll have my attorneys look into it.  And how was I supposed to know pigs ate paper.  Goats?  Sure, you know not to let them lose in a library, they’ll rip the books to shreds, but pigs – I couldn’t have been expected to know that. 

Well, as you might imagine and I should have guessed, wreaking havoc on Jill’s beloved place of learning did not drive her into my arms.  The principal did not take too kindly to it either.  And just like that I was shipped back home through that backwards and paradoxical form of punishment known as suspension.  Why anyone would think handing out free vacation would cause a student to reevaluate his behavior was beyond me.  Jill would have probably had the answer, but I never got to know her in any of the ways I had wanted to, so her and her answers remained a mystery to me.

Unfortunately, my mother made up for any institutional shortcomings of the school system.  Not for disciplinary reasons of course.  When the principal called to tell my mother of my actions I heard muffled, yet distinct guffaws coming from the other end of the line.  Nonetheless, she levied a punishment against me far worse than our poor educational system would ever dream of.  See, where I was set to enjoy a lovely week of shows and lunches with my mother, she was set to enjoy a week of shopping on the Champs Elysees.  She looked that choice in the eye and she boarded a plane to Charles de Gaulle and I boarded a train across the River Styx straight into my own personal hell.

To be fair, calling it my own personal hell isn’t entirely accurate.  Its hellishness was objective, a collective hell, felt by all of the miserable souls dumped there by their sweet old mothers.  The way she saw it, I was a young boy and I needed to be corrected, so why not send me for a week to a young boy’s correctional facility.  Sound enough reasoning I suppose, so long as you aren’t the one on the wrong side of the barbed wire fence. 
The yelling, the running, the scrubbing, the push-ups, the 5am wake-up calls and the cold showers – it was enough to scare you into never doing wrong again.  It was enough to scare you into never doing anything again except lying in the grass in central park, staring up at the passing clouds, feeling the breeze on your cheeks and being thankful you’re alive.  That and yet at the same time it makes you wish you were dead - Funny how you can feel them both at once. 

But then there was Leah.  I don’t know if the word taunt and the word tantalize both come from the story of Tantalus, but if they don’t they should, because the state’s decision to place the young girl’s correctional facility adjacent to the young boy’s correctional facility was both taunting and tantalizing.  Our yards were separated by a ten-foot tall fence, topped with that overly sharp and uninviting flourish and guarded by burly individuals who did not look very understanding.  The young girls in need of correcting were just there yet forever out of reach.  Leah was just there yet she may as well not have existed.  Communication across the fence was not looked kindly upon and was likely to be accompanied by more yelling and more running and more push-up and everything else that makes you want to at once die and appreciate life.
I’d noticed her the first day out.  The fence gives an illusion of invisibility that becomes quite embarrassing when you realize it is in fact an illusion.  You feel you can stare across with not repercussions, as if staring into a TV screen or across a one-way mirror.  Of course, inevitably, the object of your focus will notice, and that is when the blood rushes not just to your cheeks but to your forehead and to the back of your neck as well.