EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

I Was Gone For Three Days

November 2, 2026—Buffalo, New York (Amelia's House)

Sometimes I photograph something because it is beautiful. Sometimes I photograph it because it is disappearing. Occasionally I do not know which one until years later. I do not know what happened to the vast majority of the pictures I took during childhood.

When I was sent away to boarding school, I was permitted to have very few personal possessions. I had a cheap college-ruled composition book, some blue ballpoint pens, and a Canon AE-1.

The school operated with what I can only describe as a prison mentality. Students were required to earn privileges, establish rank within the student body, and submit to a disciplinary system that treated personal freedom as something the administration could grant or revoke whenever it pleased. At night, we were confined to our rooms. Our belongings were subject to random searches, and mine were searched with remarkable frequency.

There was nothing particularly discreet about these searches. I would return to my room after lunch to discover my clothes scattered across the floor, my mattress stripped, and everything I owned thrown into a pile on top of it.

I kept my exposed rolls of film hidden inside a pair of dirty socks in the corner of one of my dresser drawers. I would wait until breaks from school to have the film developed. I don't remember what happened to most of those photographs. Likely lost to time.

Today, while spending time with Amelia in Buffalo, I told her that her house reminded me of practically every other house I remembered seeing in the area during my boarding school years.

One of those memories involves my friend Keith, who lived in Tonawanda.

When I first tried to run away from boarding school, Keith's mother took me in. I stayed away from school for three days before his father happened to be heading that way anyway and was kind enough to drive me back.

I was gone for three days. We listened to a live AM broadcast of the Buffalo Bills game.

The worst part of the school's disciplinary system was something called line-up. Whenever someone in the dormitory was accused of breaking a rule, everyone was ordered out of their rooms late at night in their pajamas and required to sit on the hallway floor. We sat with our backs against the walls, alternating sides as we went down the hallway. We were instructed to keep our backs against the wall, shut up, listen to the teacher, and speak only when addressed.

At the end of the hallway, the accused student was required to stand before everyone, confess to whatever they had been accused of doing, and announce their punishment. Anyone who failed to follow the instructions risked receiving the same punishment. Some of the punishments extended not only to the student but to everyone equally in cases where the offender was not able to be immediately determined.

During my junior year, another student bullied me for most of the school year. Eventually, I'd had enough and informed him that if he didn't stop, I was going to knock him out. He didn't stop. So I hit him with a surprise punch to the jaw and laid him out on the floor.

That was the one and only disciplinary infraction on my record during the entire four years I attended the school. The administration responded by confining me to my dormitory for two weeks under a disciplinary program called PINS, which stood for Persons In Need Of Supervision.

I was still required to attend classes, but I had to obtain a teacher's signature everywhere I went, maintain documentation of my whereabouts, and submit the paperwork at the end of each week.

I often feared for my safety at that school. Toward the end, I began to fear for my life. I was almost one of the children who didn't survive those years, and I have never forgotten that some of the children I knew were not as fortunate as I was. And so, whenever an opportunity arose to get off campus, I took it.

An old trail ran through the back side of the property and wound up into the hills on the opposite side of the main road.

Twice a week, I would run that trail, crossing the railroad tracks and eventually making my way to a television broadcast tower at the summit. It was a familiar route, and I knew where it led.

There was also a rumor about an abandoned house somewhere along the trail, although nobody seemed to know precisely where it was located. Naturally, I decided to find it.

Eventually, I did, and being the curious person I have always been, I went inside to investigate. Unfortunately, I discovered that the house was not nearly as abandoned as I had been led to believe. One of the senior boys from my school was inside having sex with a girl his age who attended the local school.

During my junior and senior years, the school made the rather spectacular mistake of allowing me to have evening study time in my dorm room. Once dinner was over, nobody ordinarily checked on me again until the following morning.

This was an extraordinary oversight. I took full advantage of it. On Saturday evenings, I would make my way to the Walden Galleria Mall by whatever means necessary. I generally arrived around five in the afternoon and stayed until nine or ten at night, returning to campus just in time to sneak inside before the doors were locked.

On a handful of occasions, I also made it to McKinley Mall during the week. Most of my unsanctioned weekday excursions took place on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. While the administration believed I was diligently studying in my dormitory, I was somewhere else entirely, enjoying the simple pleasure of being away from a place where I had been forced to spend so much of my childhood.

When I finally left the school, I decided that the assistant headmaster deserved to know. I wrote him a letter detailing the fact that I'd been leaving campus without permission, including the days of the week when I had done so, citing the supervisory oversights that he deserved to be aware of. I handed it to him while I was literally walking out.

He called after me.

"Hey, wait!"

Then he grabbed me by the back of my shirt and informed me that if I was going to write something and hand it to him, I was going to stand there while he read it.

Fair enough. So I stood there.

I also decided that this would be an excellent opportunity to acknowledge my involvement in one of the more ridiculous incidents of my boarding school years. At some point, someone in my dormitory had deposited an absolutely enormous bowel movement in the dormitory toilet. It was evidently impressive enough that someone decided the occasion warranted photographic documentation.

Someone handed me the school's Polaroid yearbook camera. I was rushed into the bathroom where someone was threatening to flush it.

"Emily, do your thing. Quick!”

So I did. I photographed the enormous bowel movement, and the resulting Polaroid circulated around the school for the remainder of the academic year, providing the boys with what I can only describe as an astonishing amount of entertainment.

The bowel movement was then given a ridiculous fictional name, which was written along the bottom of the polaroid.

I included my confession in the letter. The assistant headmaster read everything I'd written, including the rather extensive accounting of my unauthorized departures and my involvement in the infamous Polaroid photograph.

"Oh, for fuck's sake!"

That was his reaction. He knew he was screwed. I was free. He was now powerless. For four years, the administration had dictated where I could go, what I could possess, and how I was expected to behave.

Now I was leaving, and there was nothing he could do to change what had already happened.

I have thought about that moment occasionally over the years. There was something immensely satisfying about handing him a written account of the school's failures at the very moment that same authority over me was coming to an end.

Life is strange sometimes.

Today, Amelia told me that she's been feeling lonely and isolated here in Buffalo, and that she misses me. She's decided that she's going to spend most of the year at the farm in Vermont. We can stay at Mom's house or at her place in Buffalo whenever we want, and neither of us needs to make any permanent decision about where we must spend our time.

I told Amelia that I will never let go of the farm or Mom's house during my lifetime. Both places mean everything to me, although for different reasons.

Mom's house is one of the few remaining places that connects me directly to the life I shared with her. So much of what I remember from childhood has disappeared, and I have spent years watching familiar places change or cease to exist altogether. By leaving me and Amelia her house, she kept pieces of my childhood that I never expected to see again.

The farm in Vermont is equally important to me. That's where Amelia and I began our lives together, and where everyone eventually came to visit. Over the years, it became the place where I wanted to return home after my many adventures.

It’s where I've built a life that I genuinely love, surrounded by people who matter to me.