Academic Assassins (5 page)

Thar she goes…

Babyface climbed back into his seat, down but not quite out yet. “This place can't hold me,” he shouted to the driver, who could've cared less. “Nobody
can!”

Kesey suddenly came into full view. I pressed my head against the window to get a better view of the bland cinder block building coming up ahead.

It looked like a school.

Just a run-of-the-mill, shoebox-shaped, no-frills photocopy of any other school I'd ever seen. I could have been going back to Greenfield for all I knew.

So this was the Kesey Reclamation Center?

This was home?

“I know someone who was sent here,” the girl ahead of us broke her silence, chewing on her middle finger now. “Came in when she was twelve and didn't leave until her
seventeenth birthday. When they released her, she'd lost fifty pounds. Most of it in the eyes. Her soul got sucked right out through the sockets.
Ssssssslurp.
…”

Out of nowhere, she thrust her head against her window.

Bang.

“Get me out get…”

Bang.

“…me out get…

Bang.

“…me out.”

She wasn't shouting. She was simply talking to herself—or the window.

Bang.

“Get me out get…

Bang.

“…me out get me out…”

Bang.

A raspberry swelled out from across her forehead, growing darker each time she reeled her head back and slammed her skull against the window.

Babyface looked away, pretending like none of this was happening.
Was it?
The bus finally screeched to a halt. Our driver cut the engine off and turned around.

“Last stop,” he said. Through the wire mesh I could see his thin maggoty lips curve upwards. “Welcome to Kesey. Welcome home.”

Bang.

“Get me out get…”

Bang.

“…me out get me…”

Bang.

“…out get me
out….
”

T
he clock had already given me a headache.

I couldn't locate it. Wherever that ice-picking timepiece was hiding, its
ticktocking
chiseled away at my eardrums from within the waiting room.

Here I was, five minutes off the bus, and already I was separated from the rest of the herd and sent to the office.

Some things never change….

The brass plaque bolted to the office door said P
ROGRAM
D
IRECTOR
.

Well—
some
things change.

The days of visiting Assistant Principal Pritchard were long gone. No more after-school detention for me. Now I was being sent to the prison warden.

The door opened. A grandmotherly miasma wafted out from the office—the sickly sweet odor of mothballs and prune juice and petrified hard candies.

Out shuffled a petite lady wearing a button-down gray jacket and pencil skirt. Her gray hair was pinned back perfectly, with a metallic glint under the lights.

Her eyes settled on me, radiating a warmth I hadn't felt in a while.

“You must be Mr. Pendleton,” she said. She looked at me as if we were family.

So this must be the warden's secretary, I thought.

“I am Louise Merridew.” She extended her hand out for me to shake. “Program director. It is such a pleasure to finally meet you.”

I took her hand as if I were about to escort my great aunt across the street.

“We will have to work on that handshake.” Her fingers tightened around mine. The looseness of her senior citizen skin gave way to an iron fist.

“Always keep a firm grip, Mr. Pendleton.”

I could feel the phalanges in my hand crumble under her clutch.

“Look your fellow right in the eye.”

Merridew pumped her arm three times through the air.

“And thrust, Mr. Pendleton.
Thrust!
”

She released me. I yanked my mangled hand back, palm throbbing.

“Please,” she said. “Come in.”

My eyes immediately locked onto the engraved brass-faced antique grandfather clock pounding away in the far corner. It was suspended from the wall in a varnished walnut case, its swinging arm
slicing back and forth through the air.

“Have a seat.”

Merridew politely cleared her throat. Once she realized she had my full attention, she smiled.

“Three months, Mr. Pendleton.” She gazed appraisingly at me from behind her desk. “You were left to your own devices out in the harsh woods for eighty-seven days.”

But who's counting, right?

“I imagine that provided some time for a bit of…
introspection
.”

Averting her gaze, I found my own reflection in the polished surface of her desk staring back up at me.

What're you looking at?

“I am curious,” she continued. “Were you able to find your inner-you?”

He hasn't sent me a postcard yet, I thought.

I scanned the office. The entire room looked as if it had been hand-carved. The book cases, the paneling along the walls. Even the mantle along the fireplace was fashioned from some chunk of
cherrywood, whittled with ornate floral patterns.

I spotted a plaque hanging on the mantle. Scorched into the wood in ornately blackened script, it read:

Parens Patriae

Merridew followed my eyes. “One of our residents made that for me. It is Latin. Do you know Latin?”

I solemnly shook my head—
No dead languages for me, sorry
.

Merridew smiled and nodded. “It means—
The state as parent
.”

So she was supposed to be my mother now?

I'll stick with my family-free diet right now, thanks.

“I take a personal interest in all my wards, Mr. Pendleton. Each is special to me in his or her own very unique way. But I must admit, I have been looking forward to your visit for quite
some time now. It is not every day that we have the
privilege
of welcoming such a
distinguished
guest as yourself to our humble facility.”

Distinguished?
That was a first. I turned my head to see if there was anyone else in the room, just in case she wasn't referring to me.

“It is silly of me…” Merridew demurely bowed her head and blushed like a bashful china doll. Her lips lifted into a smile, sending a series of fissures through her porcelain
complexion. “But I could not help myself. I simply had to personally welcome you to Kesey. I have followed your case with great interest for quite some time now. I secretly hoped the judge
would send you here….”

Merridew leaned forward over her desk, as if she were about to fill me in on a little secret.

“As fate would have it, I am acquaintances with Judge Abraham Goldfarb. When I learned he was presiding over your trial, I personally reached out to him and…well. Here you
are.”

Lucky, lucky me.

“I would like to discuss the provisions of your new home, if I may.”

Home
. Just hearing her say the word made my stomach lurch.

I'd lost my home. I'd turned my back on my home.

I didn't deserve a home.

“You will not find a program quite like Kesey anywhere else in the state. The country, for that matter. Of course there are other treatment facilities, but what sets our serious offender
program aside from the rest is something quite special.”

She paused, figuring I'd bite.

“Love.”

I kept quiet. Merridew stood from her leather chair and walked around to the front of her desk. “I believe it is time you were given the love and attention you have been missing for all
these years.”

She perched herself on the desktop in front of me and crossed her legs.

“I want to apologize.”

Apologize
?

“We have failed you,” she said. “The system has failed you. Adults have failed you. Even your parents have failed you. Please…accept my sincerest of
apologies.”

Merridew leaned over and rested a hand on my knee.

“When all your options had dried up and you hit a dead end, you finally found your way to me. To Kesey. Right where you belong.”

Her fingers squeezed my knee so hard, I thought she'd pop my patella.

“I give you my word, Spencer—you will not slip through society's cracks.”

She said my name. My first name. I hadn't expected to hear her say it.

Spencer
.

It sounded so foreign, coming out from her mouth. Was that even my name anymore? I'd gotten so used to
Pendleton-this, Pendleton-that
—I couldn't even recognize the sound
of my own name.

“You are my problem now,” she said. “All mine.”

Then she hugged me.

A
cute kitten clung to the end of a rope, sticking its adorable tongue out at me as it held on for dear life—
Hang in there!

The poster was taped to the opposite side of the control room window. It felt like I had been staring at it for hours as Babyface, Nailbiter, and I waited for the orderly sitting behind the
Plexiglas partition to buzz us through a set of steel double doors.

There was an electric hum. The lock released.

Our cue to move.

I glanced at the kitten one last time before entering the admission ward.

Hang in there, little fella….

I noticed the black, bullet-shaped surveillance camera mounted to the ceiling.

So much for privacy.

We were brought into a room with no windows.

We were told to stand in a line.

We were told not to talk.

That won't be hard.

Don't even think about breathing 'til we tell you to, I expected one of the men in starched white to say. We got ways of sucking the oxygen right outta your lungs.

Babyface had been uncharacteristically quiet all through “processing.” His spirit seemed to sag the second we passed through the double doors. Not that I blamed him. Something was
definitely off about this place. There was an oppressive weight to the air inside. My own chest had deflated a bit. You really had to struggle to even breathe in here.

I turned to Nailbiter to see how she was holding up. She had wrapped her arms around her chest, hugging herself tightly. The bruise from the bus's window had blossomed across her forehead,
like a smashed raspberry.

“Don't let them inject you with anything,” she whispered to me. “They implant you with a tracking device. A little microchip under your skin. Then they'll always be
able to find you, no matter where you go. They'll hunt you down.”

A steel door opened behind us. Nailbiter instantly dropped her eyes to the floor without another word, feasting on her index finger.

I heard a rattle of keys. A gruff, buzz-cutted man wearing a white uniform stood before us. His nose looked as if it had been broken so many times, it was now permanently crooked. The upper half
of his left ear was missing. There were several indentations along the crescent contours of the lobe—like teeth marks.

Had somebody bitten his ear off?

He had a black leather belt clinched around his waist. Quick inventory: two key chains, a walkie-talkie, a pen, and a pad. And if I wasn't mistaken, I think I saw a remote control.

This guy must be in charge of changing the channels.

A cloth name tag was sewn across his uniform's chest pocket.

G
RAYSON
.

“Have a seat,” he ordered, wheeling over a television set that looked like it had been manufactured in nineteen eight-two. Its faux wooden cabinet was laced in graffiti.

Only someone had scratched through the “w” in “waste,” turning it into a “t,” so it now read—