The Academy (42 page)

“I didn’t think so.”

“We’ve got to keep looking.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not going to like this,” Brad said. “But if we don’t find anything online, maybe there are books in the school library that can tell us something.”

Ed shook his head. “No way in hell, dude. No fucking way.”

“That’s where you found that Special Collections set. And those other books with deformed people and stuff.”

Ed was already trying another search engine. “I won’t give up the quest.”

“I know. But think about that playground we saw. And this guy believed that people just became ghosts and hung around after they died? The answer’s here somewhere, and if we have to scour the school for clues, then that’s what we have to do.”

Ed ignored him.

“You hear me?”

Ed scrolled through a list of unrelated topics and sighed. “Loud and clear, bud. Loud and clear.”

*

The editor of the school newspaper was standing in front of one of the vending machines in the lunch area, getting a package of chocolate-chip cookies, when Myla saw him. It was break, and Brad and Ed were in the library. Ed had discovered some strange books in the secret Special Collections room yesterday afternoon, and they were in there now, searching the regular stacks, the ones not often used, looking for other books that might give them additional clues as to what was going on. She’d begged off because her period had come, and she’d needed to use the restroom. Now she was all alone, so she walked up to the editor and cleared her throat loudly. “Richard. Richard Park.”

He turned around, and she saw the look of panic on his face.

“What happened to Rachel?” she asked. “You never told me the truth about that.”

His voice was high and whiny.
Nervous,
she thought. “Yes, we did. She was killed by a drunk driver.”

“What about the article she was working on?”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

Myla looked him in the eye. “We both know that’s not the case. Rachel told me that both you and Booth approved it. And she wasn’t a liar. Or are you saying that she was?”

“No!” he protested.

“Then what’s the story?”

He opened his bag of cookies, trying to pretend there was nothing wrong, but she saw that his hands were shaking. “I have to go.”

She stood in front of him. “What are you planning to do about coverage of the Harvest Festival?”

“What do you mean?” He licked his lips.

“Were you there? Did you see what happened?”

He shook his head. “The student council banned us. You know that.”

“Did you
hear
about what happened?”

“I heard it was a huge success and the festival raised nearly twice as much money as last year. . . .”

She moved in closer. “Someone died. Someone was killed. He was burned in a bonfire and everyone wants to know who it was and how it happened.”

Richard backed up.

“I smell Pulitzer here. You break this story open, you’ll have your choice of any journalism school in the country. This is big. And you have the power to get it out to the public.”

She’d touched a nerve. She could see that the idea grabbed him, but the spark in his eyes died the instant it appeared, fear immediately trumping ambition.

“What happened to Rachel?” Myla pressed again. “You know. Why won’t you tell me? Is it Booth? Is he making you keep quiet? You know you don’t want to live with this for the rest of your life. Why don’t you just come clean?”

Richard’s eyes widened as he looked past her, and then two muscular scouts came from behind, pushed her aside and grabbed him by his arms, practically lifting him off the ground. Myla didn’t recognize either of them, and to her eyes they both appeared too old to be in high school.

“The principal wants to see you,” the one on the left said.

“I didn’t tell her anything!” Richard cried. “I swear!”

“You didn’t hear that,” the other scout said, pointing at her, and then they were gone, striding quickly back toward the quad, Richard held between them, his legs scrambling as he tried to keep up.

I didn’t tell her anything.

Myla wanted to go after them, but she knew that was imprudent. She wouldn’t be allowed wherever it was that they were headed. Besides, she was scared. The other kids using the vending machines and hanging out around the tables had not batted an eye when those two fascists had carried off the newspaper editor, and the fact that she went to a school where broad-daylight abductions were accepted as a matter of course frightened her almost as much as the act itself.

Richard had dropped his bag of cookies, and she picked it up, staring numbly at the blue foil package.

“Myla.”

She looked up to see Cheryl, Reba and Cindy walking toward her. The three girls were smiling, but in a smirky self-satisfied way that did not bode well. She braced herself. “What?”

It was Cheryl who spoke. “We had a student-council meeting last night—”

“No one told me,” Myla said.

“Yeah, well, it was
about
you. We took a vote and decided to excommunicate you from our ranks. As of last night, you are no longer a member of the council.”

“It was unanimous,” Cindy added spitefully.

She no longer wanted to be on student council, really, but it would still look good on her résumé, and the fact that her so-called friends had gone behind her back in such a malicious and underhanded way made her want to fight for her position.

“I was elected,” she said. “You cannot ‘excommunicate’ me.” She smiled tightly. “Besides, the student council is not a religion. It is an extracurricular school activity. I think the word you were looking for is ‘impeach, ’ not ‘excommunicate,’ although I believe there are processes and procedures you would have to go through in order to do such a thing. One of them would be to inform me of your intent so that I could be there to defend myself.”

All three were taken aback. Reba and Cindy looked toward Cheryl for guidance.

“I’m not a novice,” Myla said coldly. “I know what I’m doing. And if anyone has proven herself unfit for office, Cheryl, it’s you. I
will
be at the next council meeting. Try to remove me from office then.”

She smiled. “By the way, how are things going with Mr. Nicholson? To be honest, he’s a little old and paunchy for my taste. But, hey, that’s just me.”

Turning her back on her three
ex
-friends, Myla started for the classroom buildings just as the bell rang. She felt proud of herself; she felt good. But then she saw the two scouts who had taken Richard away, the editor nowhere to be seen, and she slunk toward fourth period feeling like the weight of the world was on her shoulders.

Twenty-two

“I told you I wanted macaroni and cheese!”

Kate Robinson ducked out of the way to avoid being hit as Tony threw the plate of food across the kitchen. She was afraid of her son. A terrible thing to admit, but there it was. He’d been acting like a macho bully ever since he’d joined that scouting program at school, and over the past week or so he had turned
mean.
It wasn’t just his newly found seriousness or his obsessive need for order and discipline; it was the anger, hatred and cruelty she’d seen in him that made her so anxious, that caused her to lock the door to her bedroom at night.

“Can’t you do anything right?” he demanded.

“We were out of cheese,” she said patiently, “and I know you don’t like the kind out of a box, so I decided to save that for tomorrow and make spaghetti tonight.”

“Stupid bitch.”

“What did you say?” Anger flared within her, and she advanced on him. “Don’t you
ever
say that. Do you hear me?”

“I wish I lived with dad instead of you.” He looked at her with unconcealed hostility. “Stupid bitch.”

She crossed the rest of the kitchen in three quick steps—

And Tony slapped her across the face. Hard. There was satisfaction in his eyes as he did it, and though her own eyes welled with tears, she refused to let him see her cry. She sucked it up, forced back her emotions and calmly walked past him and out of the kitchen. More than anything else, she wanted to retreat into her bedroom, lock the door and hide. But she couldn’t show any more weakness than she’d already shown, so she went out into the living room and sat down on the couch.

Lying on the coffee table, mocking her, was Tony’s white envelope. He must have dropped it there after school. She wanted to ignore it, wanted simply to turn on the television and watch the news until Tony retired to his own room, but she could see it in her peripheral vision, bright against the darkness of the table, and after a moment’s resistance she succumbed.

She reached for the envelope, opened it. There were a good thirty or forty pages in there this week, and on top was a yellow photocopied sheet that had her name scrawled in marking pen in the upper left-hand corner. The rest of the page was a form letter, and she picked it up and read it:

Dear Unfit Mother,
Your complete and utter failure to participate in school activities on behalf of your child has left us no choice but to level a fine against you for noninvolvement. Please come to the office at your earliest convenience to pay the $359.62 you owe John Tyler High School for the abdication of your parental responsibility. Interest will accruedaily at a rate of 19.5% until this amount is paid in full. Visa and Master-Card accepted.

The preprinted signature read: “Jody Hawkes, Principal.”

Astonishment was her first reaction. Anger was her second. How dare the principal try to make her feel guilty?
Unfit mother?
She was going down to the school tomorrow and give that woman a piece of her mind. She refused to pay a single dime, and if that bitch didn’t back down, she was going to talk to Tony’s father and the two of them would fight this to the bitter end, even if it meant hiring a lawyer and using up every last dime they had.

She didn’t even bother looking at the other pages in the white envelope. She picked them up, dumped them in the recycling bag with the old newspapers, then pushed in the envelope itself for good measure, squishing it down.

From the kitchen, she heard the sounds of Tony rattling dishes, loudly closing cupboards and slamming the door of the refrigerator in an effort to show her how he was fixing his own dinner because she had not done so to his specifications.
Fine,
she thought.
Let him throw a tantrum.
She turned on the television to watch the news. Sometime later, he stormed past her into the hallway and slammed the door to his bedroom as hard as he could. She waited awhile, until she was sure he wasn’t coming out again, then went into the kitchen to see how bad the damage was.

It took her until nine o’clock to clean the place up.

She took a shower and went to bed, but her mind was active, and it was well after eleven when she finally fell asleep.

She was awakened in the middle of the night by Tony.

He was standing at the foot of her bed with three other Tyler Scouts dressed in those identical quasi-military uniforms. In the dim illumination of her night-light, they made her think of Hitler Youth. Tony was carrying what looked like a pillowcase, and before she could ask what he intended to do with it and what they were doing in her bedroom at this hour, he had pulled it over her head, and hands were all over her, grabbing, groping, lifting. A cool breeze swept between her legs as her nightie flipped up.

“Let me go!” she shouted.

One pair of hands gripped her right arm and shoulder, one pair her left. She hoped one of those pairs belonged to Tony because the other two were holding up the lower half of her body, and the scout on her lower left side had one hand on her calf, the other buried deep in the crack of her buttocks. The scout on her lower right held both hands together on her upper thigh, one of his thumbs pressed hard against her vagina.

Kate didn’t know which was greater, her fear or her humiliation, but she kept her wits about her, and while this seemed to be a kidnapping, the fact that one of the kidnappers was her son gave her a distinct advantage. “Wait until your father hears about this,” she told Tony, although she couldn’t see which one he was. “Your father is not just going to be angry—he’s going to be disappointed. This is not the way we raised you. This is not how you are supposed to behave. Do you hear me?”