Michael Molitch-Hou
The Full Story
Ch. 5: The Full Story
On her way to lunch the following day, Harvey tried to remember what happened that day, March 15, 2024, pre-PISCES. She was in the 9th grade at her old school, fourteen-years-old. At that point, Harvey had decided that she didn’t identify with the gender ascribed to her at birth and by her family around her. But she still didn’t quite know what that meant. That is to say, she definitely wasn’t male, but she didn’t feel exactly female either. Regardless of how she was inside, Harvey didn’t tell her folks.
It was a Sunday, so she was probably doing homework. It was late March, so she was probably doing it at the teak picnic table outside, enjoying the warm, 70-degree weather that early spring brought. Though the memory may not have been precisely photographic, Harvey allowed herself to be lost for a moment in the daydream:
A fresh breeze cascaded through empty branches, carrying with it the smell of laundry tumbling in the dryer in her parents’ basement. On its way to Harvey, the aroma mingled with lemon risotto being cooked in the kitchen. Daydream Harvey closed her eyes and took it all in, kicking her head back and feeling the late afternoon sun flicker against her sealed lids.
The sky above was nearly cloudless, aside from a few thin white wisps of water particles and other atmospheric vapor. Something about the sensation of the wind and the sun, combined with the smell and the sound of her environment coalesced into goosebumps up and down her arms.
The sound of neighbor kids playing in the yard a few houses down reverberated between the backs of houses. Something made a thud and one of them counted backward from ten as hushed voices lightly trotted in all directions.
“Spud!”
A startled grunt then shot from the direction of the risotto. “Oh, god,” Harvey’s dad muttered. “Jesus.”
Daydream Harvey opened her eyes and looked behind her in the direction of the kitchen, where her dad stood, glasses raised above his eyebrows and irises pointed down at his phone. When he looked up and out toward his only child, his eyes caught Harvey’s. A look of paternal fear traveled from deep within his pupils and into his spine.
“What is it, Dad?” she shouted.
“Uh…”
“Something bad?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. Let me talk to mom first.”
Anyway, for Harvey, it went something like that.
***
Harvey sat chowing down on a warm bread bowl of clam chowder, which puffed a slow, steady stream of steam into the brisk October air. The cold had her bundled into herself beneath her green sweatshirt and fluorescent knitted cap, soothed by the thick, white stew.
She started where she left off in the Salinger book, but it was hard not to think about the world Harvey had mentally absorbed herself in. Something that had struck Harvey was the fact that, to the public, James Leonard Twill was a rabid Marxist, handing out flyers with the ferocity of a pit bull trained to win a dogfight, but, in his private dealings, he surrounded himself with a consortium of militant anti-communists. This included cavorting with a right-wing roommate who was running the most militant school rivalry in academic history.
To learn more about which was closer to reality, Harvey decided she’d try to contact Twill’s former roommate. Not Donovan Lanning, but whoever he was paired with at Spoon Union.
Harvey learned that Spoon Union was a college-prep boarding school that described itself as being “founded on Christian values” and “offered structure and discipline for boys in 7th grade to 12th grade.” Students lived in “barracks,” instead of dorms, where they were grouped by “company” and led by “cadet officers,” older student leaders. The curriculum featured a “Single Course Plan,” in which cadets studied one subject with one teacher for a block of six weeks at a time before moving onto another subject and teacher.
It was also an all-boys’ school “to remove social distractions that come with a coeducational school.” Harvey wondered if there were any LGBTQ kids there and what sort of distractions they had.
Harvey swiped away the school’s Academics page and did a search for the admin email. She drafted a message:
Hi there,
I’m Harvey Spizzle, a student journalist from Moorehaven Academy. I’m writing a story about a former Spoon Union student who transferred here last year, James Leonard Twill. I was hoping to speak to his roommate about him for an article for our school paper. If that’s a possibility, that would be amazing!
Thanks so much!
-Harvey
As she exited the cafeteria, she saw Hack Klein hidden in a shadowy corner of the covered patio, shoving a gyro into his mouth and trying not to be seen by sinking down low into his chair. Harvey decided to circumnavigate the building so that she could catch him without scaring him away.
Coming out of a door to his rear, Harvey tapped him lightly on the shoulder and stammered, “Hey, Hack.”
The older student jumped.
“What? Do I know you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We just chatted online yesterday.”
“Oh, you. You’re stalking me now?”
“No, Hack,” she paused to think for a minute. “It’s just that I know you’re a good guy and I don’t want you to get mixed up in something Donovan Lanning was doing if you didn’t do anything wrong.”
Hack said nothing and returned to his gyro, something Harvey took as a silent invitation to sit.
“Hack,” Harvey began quietly, “is this something Donovan Lanning was involved in?” She passed her phone across the table, presenting the photo she’d snapped of the newspaper article.
“You already know the answer, or you wouldn’t have this picture on your phone,” he replied. He read a little more and said, “Yeah, that’s Donovan’s deal. Is it okay if I read the whole story?”
He read through both stories with an intense concentration, finishing with a bewildered grimace.
“It doesn’t even mention the full raid!” he blurted out. “Or anything about the Evader transfers that got arrested!”
“So, why don’t you tell me the full story, Hack?”
Harvey didn’t expect Hack Klein to tell the whole story, but that’s exactly what he did. Klein, like so many of the students at Moorehaven, came from a wealthy family. His mother was a representative in the House and his father was a district attorney, hence Hack’s involvement in anything that resembled being a cop.
He’d known Donovan Lanning since they were kids—well, much younger kids. Since kindergarten.
Their second year at Moorehaven, they both joined Crisis Management, but started to grow apart in other respects. Donovan fell in with some more popular students, while Hack spent time with a quieter bunch of nerdier kids. Donovan wound up at various parties on the weekends, the nature of which Klein was ignorant. It got to the point where the two friends worked together but that was about it. They still trusted each other, even felt like brothers, but didn’t have the same bond they once did.
It was in this epoch, after both boys had been at Moorehaven for a year-and-a-half, that Hack began to witness the dealings that his friend became involved in. Perhaps the biggest detail left out of the news story was the fact that the Office of Discipline had not just raided a dorm, but also a shed at Lake Cochichewick, where the students had been arrested, two Evader transfers and three Moorehaven students. The group was planning to plant a bomb at Evader Academy.
Apparently, the Office of Discipline had been told of the shed by Josh Kilpatrick. The full extent of the raid had been concealed from the public to protect Lanning’s general activities.
Hack referred to Lanning’s operations as the “Lanning Network”, which included the two Evader students, the Moorehaven kids, and the adults that passed through the office. Hack described just some of the events that transpired, either first-hand accounts he himself witnessed or missions relayed between Lanning and those that passed through his office. One mission involved Donovan Lanning and a CMT volunteer traveling to the house of a Moorehaven economics teacher, Howard Hunt.
Hunt, coincidentally, was an avid hunter, but not of the traditional sort. Instead of a rifle and sight, he hunted his prey using explosives. With Lanning driving an unmarked conversion van, he and the CMT volunteer, an angular and tough third year, pulled up to the history instructor’s colonial mansion. White halogen headlights broadcast their presence along the hedge-lined and needlessly long driveway.
Smoking a cigarette, Hunt retrieved some volatile material from his lifeless cellar and gave it to the kids. Wearing his white, sleeveless undershirt and trademark horn-rimmed glasses while drinking a scotch, Hunt watched as the Moorehaven kids took off back down the driveway.
The material was held temporarily in a storage closet in Lanning’s office before they were transferred by laundry truck to a site outside Evader. By then, it seemed obvious that whatever was going on was related to the “bomb threat” associated with the Evader Fiasco.
Harvey’s stomach had begun to settle by the end of Hack’s tale and she realized that she was beginning to feel comfortable around him. However, another feeling crept up through her nervous system. Something about the revelations she was experiencing. Something akin to exhilaration.
That all of this activity was happening within the school’s Safety-Intelligence nexus—where the Office of Discipline sat in front of Campus Safety and across from the Crisis Management Team—and nothing was done about it seemed absurd to Harvey.
She tried to imagine herself as a school security officer observing these scenes play out just yards from her post:
There was Donovan Lanning, amateur drag racer and foppish anti-communist. A vulgar madcap with a self-made rug of red mohair on his head and penciled-on eyebrows, crude attempts to cover up the complete baldness caused by his alopecia. Lanning was constantly coming and going from the CMT office, aside from the time he spent at the Lake Cochichewick shed, maybe wearing combat boots, camo and an askew green beret.
And then there was James Leonard Twill, scrawny but tough—increasingly disliked by typically conservative, popular students and administration staff on campus as he went into Lanning’s office and returned with inflammatory Marxist pamphlets to hand out in front of his dorm.
All the while, anti-Castaneda Evader transfers wearing camo were also regularly coming and going to and from Lanning’s office in between trips to the shed at Lake Cochichewick.
The folks at the Office of Discipline and CMT must have eventually gotten bored just watching this activity nonstop for the duration of the semester. And the fact that the newspaper only reported part of the story, hiding the most dangerous and damaging information from the public, made it clear that this was a protected operation.
***
After class, Harvey pulled out her phone as she exited the refuge of the PD Scott building and into the moist miasma of rain and sulfate. She checked her email. To her surprise, she found a response from Spoon Union. The secretary who replied said that he was unable to provide that information, but did give the name of Twill’s advisor, who he believed “would be a more suitable source for a news story.”
Finding Dean Lovejoy’s extension on the Spoon Union website, Harvey prepared to give it a ring. Journalists were always chasing around sources, she’d learned from her mom, so she’d have to get over her anxiety of using the phone and call. She told herself that, once she dialed the first several numbers, she’d already have been halfway toward entering the whole thing, which would mean she’d have nearly completed the task and, at that point, there’d be no reason not to just follow through and talk to Lovejoy on the phone. Chest tightening, Harvey implemented the plan: she dialed the number and listened to it ring.
“Lovejoy,” the man said, almost posing a question.
There was a knot in Harvey’s throat as she murmured an explanation as to who she was and why she was calling. She then asked about Twill’s political leanings.
“We… didn’t really talk much about those sorts of things, but Cadet Twill did fill me in on big projects when I asked, and none had any—what’d you call them? Marxist undertones? And none of his extracurriculars had anything to do with communism—I mean—not that I’m aware of. It’d be tough to be a communist here anyway. This is a very patriotic school and you’d be liable to get your butt kicked if you talked about communism around here.”
Lovejoy was much easier to talk to than Harvey had anticipated. Much friendlier than how she imagined some military school to be. And surprisingly open.
“What about his shooting ability?” Harvey asked.
Lovejoy laughed. “I shouldn’t be sharing this, but I already told the Boston Globe, so I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up. Cadet Twill was an absolutely awful marksman. He almost didn’t meet his marksmanship criteria for moving onto the next grade. Thank god they don’t care about that sort of thing at Moorehaven because he got a lot of ‘Maggie’s drawers’—you know, a lot of misses. Didn’t seem to care like the other kids, though.”
“He didn’t like going to the range?”
“He was mostly a thinker, a reader. He read quite a bit.”
That was odd, given the fact that Twill was supposedly seen at the Moorehaven shooting range, according to the Wilson Report.
Before she ended the call, Harvey found out what “squad” Twill had been a member of. Lovejoy again conceded because he’d told the Globe and claimed to want to help a young reporter. Twill was a member of the Intelligence Squad in Charlie Company.
***
Based on Lovejoy’s candidness and the material Moorehaven had made available to the public, Harvey began to wonder what information the school didn’t want public. The same way one can judge the existence of the wind by the leaves through which it blows, Harvey hoped she might be able to see what Twill was up to by what records she couldn’t access.
In the Wilson Committee’s collection, Harvey checked the index for what files were included and what were deemed too sensitive for public release. They included the following:
● CD 321 Chronology of Twill in Venezuela (Secret)
● CD 528 re. Allegation Twill interviewed by CMT in New Orleans
● CD 631 re. CMT dissemination of information on Twill
● CD 674 Info given to the Office of Discipline but not yet to the Administration (Secret)
● CD 692 Reproduction of CMT official dossier on Twill
● CD 698 Reports of travel and activities of Twill & Marna
● CD 871 Photos of Twill in Venezuela (Secret)
● CD 931 Twill’s access to information about surveillance drone (Secret)
● CD 1216 Memo from Aaron Douglas entitled “James Leonard Twill ” (Secret)
● CD 1222 Statements by Jorge Villarroel re: assassination (Secret)
● CD 1273 Memo from Aaron Douglas re: apparent inconsistencies in info provided by CMT (Secret)
This list of redacted documents made it even more clear to Harvey that something wasn’t on the level. She decided to track Twill’s movements after Spoon Union using the publicly available records from the Committee.
Twill had requested an early discharge from military school on the grounds that his mother, Marna, was scheduled to have a hysterectomy to remove a malignant collection of polyps. Twill headed to New Orleans, where he spent two weeks with his mother as she had the procedure and recovered, before going to socialist Venezuela. Interestingly, Twill traveled from New Orleans to Caracas by boat, rather than commercial jet. His tickets were purchased ahead of time at the North Atlantic Oil Company, formerly run by Mudd Yoder.
According to Committee testimony, many Venezuelan secondary school students initially received Twill with caution. Some students reportedly made contact immediately to get a feel for his “vibe”, while others observed him from a distance. To still others, his arrival heralded exciting relief from the boredom of adolescent socialist academia, given his American military school background.
Twill was said to have offered anything and everything they wanted to know, tales of hazing, information about what military kids were learning, what sorts of weapons they were using, and whatever else was considered “intelligence” of a sort. They responded in kind by inviting him to parties, to the park across the street where everyone smoked pot, and on their camping trips.
Then, after three months, he transferred to Moorehaven. Neither school seemed to find the move odd. Moorehaven even paid his moving expenses. The Ziggurat of Admissions didn’t have a problem with his transcript either, despite the number of credits that wouldn’t have easily translated from one type of curriculum to the other. Normally when a transfer from one school system to another occurs, Admissions requires students to take summer courses or pass tests to make up for any gap in credits, another procedure Moorehaven didn’t follow in Twill’s case.
His only requirement was that he pay a visit to the Children’s Crusade, a privately funded organization that was linked to boarding schools in the U.S., and the Crisis Management Team.
Twill was given a modest dorm at Rumble Hall. He immediately took a volunteer position at the school’s auto body shop until one evening when he was visited by a foreign student named Jorge Villarroel, of the Moorehaven Petroleum Club.
The next day, Twill moved out and across the campus to Pease Hall. He then quit his volunteer gig at the auto body shop and began his volunteer work with the Custodial Department, where he was responsible for drawing maps of the school’s irrigation, sprinkler and security systems, among other things. It goes without saying that this was a job with a high level of sensitivity for such a new student.
Meanwhile, Twill was welcomed with open arms by Venezuelan expats in the New England community, most of which were on the far right of the political spectrum. A good number of them were Venezuelan blue bloods or members of the landed aristocracy who were forced to give up their land when Hugo Chavez became president. They clamored for a time in which the Chavistas would be driven from power and they could be restored to what they believed to be their rightful place in society. The rest of the community were ordinary émigrés who fled their homeland, but who also hated socialism with just as much passion as the rest of their enclave.