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Military Daze Part 3

Hey, Abe,

Everything’s been going pretty well here. Sorry for scaring you. Lots of exercise, classwork, and fulfilling disciplinary requirements have taken up so much of my time. Please, forgive me for my inconsideration. A close friend shouldn’t have to suffer like that. Your letters have been a great help to me, when dealing with my homesickness, but I still miss hanging out with you and the guys. That’s why I entered your name into this contest at school. See, it gives the winner a chance at a full scholarship. Room, board, the whole thing. The school rakes in enough money from all the other attendees that they can afford to let a few people attend free each year. Anyways, I put your name in, because, well, I miss you, man, and turns out it got chosen. I was totally floored. Please, tell me you’ll come. It’ll be like old times. Military life isn’t so bad, really, once you get used to it. And if you do well here, you get a big boost for college applications. It’s a big step for our futures, ya know? Even if you don’t want to come, I really do want to keep in contact with you. But please, make sure to respond as soon as you can. The school should’ve sent you an email, too, with all the details. If you wait too long, then you’ll lose the opportunity, and I won’t get to see you for at least another half a year. Please, Abe, say you’ll come, at least for one semester. I miss you. Sincerely, Private Kendall Rogers P.S. Sorry if there are any formatting errors in the letter. I’m still learning how to employ proper grammar. My  You blink in utter shock. Some parts of the letter sounded like Kendall, well enough, but others were just so ... formal. Just what were they doing to your friend over there? You furrow your brows in suspicion. Would you even recognize him anymore, at this rate? Or could someone have been ghost writing, pretending to be him? You shake your head. No, that’s not right. That would be nothing more than a conspiracy theory. Something else was going on. You narrow your eyes as you pore over the letter again. Eventually, the rest on the post script. Kendall always hated class of any kind, especially English, so why would he make a specific note to formatting errors? Fortunately for you, his hate of English was your love. It took you forever to even get the guy to concede to listening to recorded books, but you eventually got him at least a little into the spirit. Not enough to put effort into his writing, mind, but enough to make it so he didn’t hate books anymore. As you scanned over the document, you could see no errors in capitalization or punctuation, so it had to be something else in the letter. As you look over each of the paragraphs, you notice the varying lengths, comparing the short first two to the much longer third, fourth, and fifth. ... Length. You tap your chin as you recall the principle hammered into you from your youth. A proper paragraph should be at least three sentences in length, and even then, it’s preferable to keep it closer to five. So, why would he keep everything so short in the beginning? You take a closer look at the paragraphs. The sentences all seemed innocuous enough. Again, there were no errors involved. The letter was set to a formal header, with all the paragraphs lined up to the far left margin and no indentation. It was actually kind of funny. When you lined up the first three paragraphs, including the greeting, the letters formed HEL. You then looked down at the third paragraph. P. H-E-L-P. HELP. Help. Could it be? “An acrostic?” you pondered. It was a simple matter to link the other two letters from the last paragraphs. Help Me. “Shit,” you swore. Your heart rate picked up again. Your breathing became shallow. You wanted to get up and report this to someone, anyone, but you knew better than that. If this academy was doing something to your friend, you’d need real proof of wrongdoing, before you could convince anyone of the fact. This was the kind of thing that would get you laughed out of the station faster than you could present it. After you get yourself under control, you start your reply. Subject: RE: Congratulations! Dear Kendall, I got your message. Still, before I choose to accept, though, I need to ask a few things. 1. Is it all right for me to bring my equipment with me? You know how much I enjoy my film and photography.... You composed your reply very carefully to ensure it would fit the standards and evade possibility of detection. That being said, if there really was something off at this school, it was likely they would be able to see through your coded messages. Acrostics were a fairly simple coding system, after all. You would need to go prepared, if you went at all. Once you sent your reply with your list of “follow-up questions,” you turned to your next order of business. You quickly made your way to your spam folder and authorized the message from the academy. If you were going to do this, you would need all the information you could find on the place. Even then, ... you weren’t sure you would be ready.