26 Outside is as dark as inside, and swaying in the swing can’t calm me right now, not when I turn my head around. The music in my ears deprives me of the steps around me, but there’s no one around me. Every time I see something move out of the corner of my eye there’s nothing when I take a better look at it, the walls, the trees, the houses, the couches, the flowers. Everything and nothing surrounding me. The constant sway can’t stop me from looking at the smiling flowers. White flowers bunching around each other, separating in the middle and forming, what looks like, a pair of eyes. The rest of the flowers curl below the circles above, a smiling face made of flowers. The flowers are smiling and it looks like a ghost is behind it, observing me. It feels like a timer and the clock’s ticking. What am I scared of if there is nothing around me? I’m not scared of dying, I know it’s something that’ll eventually come, I’m not scared of anyone around me, I’m not scared of the dark, or flowers, or shadows, or noises. I’m not scared. I'm not scared, I'm not, but the flowers keep smiling and the shadows keep watching every movement I make. Everytime I look around, something moves, nothing moves. And now being outside seems like a worse idea than upstairs in my room. There’s a pit in my stomach and it’s deeper than the wide, opened door. I had closed it, I closed it when I left. Both beds are empty when I turn to look at them and there’s talking beside me. It lags like a machine and it has my sister’s voice behind the glitch. I don’t want to turn around, I don’t want to see what’s inside. I’m trembling, my whole body is shaking, and my eyes move towards the nonexistent sound. I can’t wake up from this nightmare. Not when I turn around and see my sister’s beaten body with an unnatural smile on its face. The eyes melting down and the smile widening across its face. It’s a glitch, I don’t know what it is, but the body in front of me is glitching. The voice never stops and it says my name. I think I’m scared.
Boarding School’s Impact on Brain Development By Louisa Strong ’26
According to numerous scientific studies, boarding for middle schoolers (especially those aged ten and eleven) could run the risk of being very detrimental towards the boarder's mental health longterm. Higher rates of social and study-related anxiety were noticed in boarding students rather than day students, as well as learning anxiety (Ma et al). Do these studies play out in real life here at Hebron? One faculty member on campus suggested that good experiences of boarding could outweigh the negative studies, and maybe the more positive results of boarding were not what the researchers were looking for. So, five middle school boarding students were interviewed to find out more about the impact of boarding on their everyday life as well as their mental health (not all of the students interviewed wanted their names used in this article).
