In the Pit

When my sister got to high school, she told me stories about The Pit.

The Pit was meant to be—or maybe even was, for a time—a swimming pool. But there was no pool in the high school anymore, only a depression in the center of the school. This literal pit was where seniors hung out and, more to the point, where nerdy freshmen got thrown to get beat up by upperclassmen.

I didn’t see the pit until I was in high school myself, the year after my sister had graduated. She’d never gotten beaten up the pit—at least not physically—but so far as I could understand the world, things like that didn’t happen to girls. There was a code, that boys wouldn’t hit girls because girls were weaker and couldn’t defend themselves, never mind that there were plenty of girls stronger and better equipped to defend themselves than skinny boys like me.

That my sister had survived the pit four years was little solace to me, the dorky kid brother.

When I saw the pit, I was immediately underwhelmed. Be it the outsized mythology, intentional exaggeration, or a simple matter of me hearing it wrong or letting my imagination get away from me, the space was downright tiny—just three steps down into a carpeted square barely larger than the proper staircase over it that offered access between the first and second floors. Ten by ten feet, maybe fifteen, twenty at the absolute max. I couldn’t believe it had ever been intended as a pool. My fear of the pit quickly diffused, giving way more to confusion over the numbering system of the building with rooms in the 400s at the bottom, the 500s where landmarks like the main office and The Pit existed, and 600s up top that seemed to imply many more subterranean floors, maybe a Hellmouth beneath the school’s ground floor surface. The prospect of getting lost and never found felt more realistic than getting beaten bloody in the Pit.

There was a fight in the library. A boy I can’t remember reportedly thrown on top of a table by a boy I didn’t know well, but I’m now Facebook friends with, mounted and punched at least two or three times before some combination of hall monitors, teachers, and other students pulled him off. The library was near the Pit, but nonetheless a separate space, and though I forget the particulars, it had something to do with a girl or the boy beaten talking shit—the kind of faux pas I could avoid as opposed to the more randomized violence I’d feared. That first year of high school did see me assigned a gym class that was half freshmen, half seniors, but the worst I ever got if it was taking a shotgun blast of rubber ball to my stomach from the starting quarterback in a game of dodgeball.

Years passed.

I passed the pit on a daily basis. A social space. A space where I was led to believe certain troublemakers went to disappear, hiding not so much in a deep, dark, foreboding space as a place a little out of sight from adult supervision, particularly with a congregation of teenage bodies milling nearby, lingering to chit-chat as I would come to, or else in transit.

Dances happened there, too. Excluding junior and senior prom, each dance saw the stairs roped off, the pit and the open space and hallways surrounding it the scene for slow dances and the sort of awkward bouncing at the knees I’d partake in when enough of my friends were dancing and I didn’t feel compelled to stand to the side rather than looking uncool for dancing.

One of the traditional privileges seniors enjoyed was the ability to sign themselves out of study hall to do their homework in the Pit. Though hall monitors circulated and quieted down the chatter during these free periods, it was always more a matter of formality than serious rule. Even as someone who did tend to work on homework when I’d signed out, I still talked as much as I studied.

Another tradition: seniors, at the end of their final years, carving their initials into the wood beneath the stairs. Another behavior that was officially disallowed, and I hung out with rule-abiding-enough kids that they didn’t want to chance doing so. They also may well have recognized the silliness of the gesture, and that most of initials from years if not decades past were mostly erased with other initials carved over them and surely administrators’ efforts to paint over the mess every few years. There’s a particular futility to making a mark like that in a space left behind. Carving initials you hope will always be there in a space you won’t ever come back to check.

I carved my initials.

I used my house keys, and between the blunt tool, my lack of handiness, and the weakness of my hands, I didn’t leave much of an intelligible mark. I can’t remember exactly where I carved it, and I’m quite certain it’s gone now. But for the moment it seemed to matter that I’d been in The Pit and that I’d walked out alive.