The Upper Floor

Heading upstairs was like moving into another world. Whereas the downstairs was a place of quietness, other then our Rec Room, the upstairs was full of loud voice, laughter, the occasional shout from a staff member to pipe down.

The first door that you came to, was another office. This consisted of one desk, two chairs and two large metal cabinets that housed files and medication. It also housed the alarm system for the entire building.

Right across from this was another room. When I first came, it was actually a bedroom that contained 4 boys. After a while, they decided that 4 angry teenage boys all together in one room was just too much so they converted it into a punishment room of sorts. I’ll go more into that later.

In addition to this, there were three more doors on that side of the wall that housed the boys.

There was a single door on the other side, about halfway down the hallway that led to the girl’s dorm. That meant that it was a massive wooden door that opened up and you had to actually go inside in order to access our rooms.

When you stepped through this door, you were facing one of the bedrooms; on your right was bathroom that had 4 stalls and 4 showers; on your left was a short hallway that led to two more rooms.

I would eventually end up living in all of these rooms at some point, but, I started out in the middle room.

Now, each of the rooms were different, by quite a bit. Size and setup played a big part in this difference. However, there were some things that were standard.

The windows were one of those standard things. Every single room upstairs, with the exception of the office had windows that faced outside. The biggest room had 4 and the smallest room had 3. The windows, in whole, were huge. Eventually I will get to posting pictures, when I find them, but, for now I will try to describe it.

There were two portions to the windows. Top portion was huge plate glass that was about 6 feet in height, the bottom part was maybe a foot and a half, but, then again, that is just a rough number and I really suck at measurements. The lower portion of the windows could open. You just had to have a crank, which, we didn’t because they had all been removed. You know the ones I’m talking about, you turn them and the window slowly creaks open.

From the outside, all the windows looked like upside down crosses. That always struck me as sick humor since the building used to be a church. None of the windows had any kind of coverings on them.
Also inside each of the rooms, each student had a “locker”. They were made of wood and painted white. There were no doors on them, open completely. As you looked at them, there were 4 shelves on the left and the right had a closet bar with a longer shelf just above that.

We each had a single bed and for the life of me I can’t remember what color the bedspreads were, but they were all the same.

The best thing that I can recall about the rooms was the window sills. Each window had them and we always put our stuff that didn’t fit in our lockers there, neatly of course.

That was one of the many rules that we had. Which, I will go into in my post for tomarrow.