Mount Holly is one of those specialty schools dotted around the Virginia and North Carolina countryside for young men with special needs-and for parents living at some distance from Virginia and North Carolina who are tired of dealing with those special needs.
Our own version of the special-needs school is a post-high school, two-year prep school for athletes who have been offered college scholarships but whose grades are not yet up to par for entry into the Carolina coast universities the school feeds into. That is what we put in our recruitment brochures. What it is beyond that, why we have no trouble keeping our enrollment up and our steep tuition being paid-what parents know by whispered word of mouth-is that it also is a "holding" school for those who have gotten themselves in trouble. A good many of them who have gotten themselves in the same sort of trouble that had brought me to Mount Holly when I left high school and no college was yet ready to enroll me. To be bald, we are where parents park their sons who can't keep their peters in their pants or their belts buckled when other men are around.
What I never can quite fathom, though, is why parents send us their wayward gay sons to "straighten" them out when an objective look at our record-if indeed we ever let anyone close to looking at our records-would clearly reveal that we do just the opposite. But then, I suppose we get the young men when their parents have truly given up on curing or curbing them and just want to get them out of town. |
