some things you might not know:
At HLA, Max was constantly insisting to me and a number of other people that his mom's death was caused deliberately by his father. not murder per se, but as an indirect result of his dad's actions. i'm not revealing the details.
Max also smoked quite a bit of weed with me at HLA. i smuggled it in a variety of ways - in special deoderant, my shoes, through staff, and freinds that would dead-drop the stuff on the property in the middle of the night for me to pick up the next day while on restrictions or doing activities. we'd smoke it under the desks using the ol' fabric softener in a toilet paper tube method, in the bathroom at lower left or we'd just sneak away either at lower left or by the lake into the woods. it was really easy, after 05' there was a total lack of staff supervision and it just got better for us when the lawsuit hit. other kids snuck in all sorts of stuff, but i must admire max for staying away from it: coke smuggled in vaginas and anuses, meth and LSD sprayed onto pages of books, ecstacy smuggled inside stuffed animals and shoes, some kid even brought tar heroin once, flattened down to look like the rubber underlining of his shoe sole. that kid ate most of it but was able to steal a syringe from a diabetic and a lighter from me near the end of his stash. staff are just oblivious.
on another point, there are plenty of kids who stayed there much longer than two years. everytime a peergroup is graduating the counselors try to convince all the parents to keep the kid postgrad untill they graduate high school. every kid's parents are talked to, in the hopes of retaining at least one or two from every peer group. why? because keeping postgrads around costs less as they require less supervision and less therapy; they are "positives" to the rest of the gen pop, yet the school collects just as money for keeping them. counselors as a result get bonuses for every kid they retain postgrad. i know kids that were stuck for a 27 month program and then stayed postgrad anyway. (27 months - it was originally 21 months but then HLA cancelled december graduation and forced those kids to graduate six months later). i know a kid that has spent nearly forty months at HLA. steven gioa.
I'm not sure if they still do postgrad, but it's very likely max reuben spent all that time at HLA. he got there, from what i remember, in 8th grade. facing the prospect of an HLA grad entering 11th grade in a regular school (THE sex and drugs year according to HLA) he could have been there that long easily.
