The Academy (46 page)

“Those tests mean nothing,” Ed said. “They don’t count toward your grade. They don’t mean shit.” He ran an exasperated hand through his hair. “And have you forgotten already? Tell me again what Antonio was like after he came out of the corner. You want that to be you?”

“We need to be careful,” Brad stressed. “But we need to go back.”

Ed sat back in the seat, arms folded. “No way, dude. No fuckin’ way.”

“Way,” Brad said.

Myla smiled. “Way.”

Ed sighed. “Shit.”

After nearly a week’s absence, Tyler, in their minds, had grown into a fearsome boogeyman, a place of monolithic evil on the order of Mordor, so it was somewhat surprising when they returned Monday morning to see kids carrying books and wearing backpacks, chatting in the halls, doing all the normal things high school students did.

But the wall was still there, hemming in the campus, and they had only to scratch the surface to find evidence that all was not right with the world. Scouts were now posted at both ends of every hallway as well as at various points around school: in the quad, in front of the office and the library, by the lunch area, on the walkway to the sports complex. Senior Corner was filled with some unidentifiable type of rotting meat, and the cowed students walking to class were so silent that the buzzing from flies on the meat sounded like the noise of a lawn mower.

“I told you,” Ed whispered. “I told you.”

A full can of Red Bull sailed through the air from the direction of the Little Theater and struck Ed in the back.

“Ow!” he cried, turning.

Todd Zivney, standing in front of the theater entrance, grinned. “Hey, wimpy! Where’s Popeye?”

Ed ignored him and tried to slink away, but Brad held his ground. The scouts were placed so deliberately around the campus that he suspected they had assigned posts they were not allowed to leave. “Popeye can’t be here!” Brad called. “He’s fucking your mom! Or at least he’s one of the thirty men standing in line for it!”

Zivney shouted a torrent of obscenities, but just as Brad suspected, he didn’t move from his spot.

Ed smiled.

“Are you laughing at me? That’ll be your last laugh, you little faggot!” Zivney threw another can.

Ed easily sidestepped it and turned away, facing Brad. “I’m feeling a little better now,” he admitted. “I’ll probably get my ass kicked at break and lunch and possibly PE, but that will almost have been worth it.”

“There are good teachers here and good students,” Myla said. “We need to find them and stay with them. There’s safety in numbers.”

The three of them went into the office, gave their fake notes to the attendance clerk and were met with a surprising lack of suspicion—despite the fact that they had come in together and had been absent the exact same amount of time. They emerged moments later, free and unscathed.

“If I’d known it was this easy,” Ed said when they came out, “I’d’ve been doing this more often.”

Brad and Ed walked Myla to PE—“Be careful,” Brad warned her; “I will,” she promised—and then Brad dropped Ed off at his chemistry class.

He waited until the final bell rang before he went into Ms. Montolvo’s room, and for the rest of the morning—

Everything was fine.

It was almost as if this were a normal school, with normal teachers and normal students. Even Mr. Manning behaved like a regular person.

It was his favorite teacher, Mrs. Webster, who brought him back to reality. One of the kids asked about the achievement tests on Wednesday and whether they were going to be on their usual seven-period schedule or an all-day testing schedule, the way they were when they took the SATs and the PSATs. The teacher didn’t answer right away, and when she did, her voice was uncharacteristically serious. “It’s a modified all-day schedule,” she said, speaking slowly. “You will remain in your first-period classes until lunch and, after that, go to your regular afternoon classes.” She paused. “But you are not actually required to take the examination. The school is required to administer the exam and turn in the results, but there is no law stating that you must take it.”

What was going on here? Brad wondered. Was she telling them not to take the test?

He looked at Myla and their eyes locked. She was thinking the same thing he was.

Mrs. Webster spoke carefully. “As I’m sure you are all aware, ever since Tyler High became a charter school, there has been a renewed emphasis on standards and accountability. In fact, one of the requirements the state put on us is that we meet a series of stated educational goals. If we do not, our charter could be revoked.”

She was.

The teacher looked around the room, and what Brad saw when her eyes met his was that she hated the charter.

And feared it.

The discussion ended there, and they moved on to talk about George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-four,
which was not much of a stretch and which he was now beginning to think had been a deliberate choice on her part. He was encouraged not just by her suggestion but by the fact that, apparently, they now had an ally on the staff. There were probably others as well, and he tried to go over in his mind the instructors he knew, placing them in categories of friend or foe.

After class, instead of walking out with the others, he and Myla stayed behind in the room, waiting until everyone else had gone.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Mrs. Webster asked pleasantly.

What if he was wrong?

“Is it true that there’s no legal requirement for us to take the achievement test?” he asked cautiously.

She nodded slowly. “There is not,” she said, equally cautious.

“So if I stayed home that day or I just left the test blank and didn’t fill in any of the bubbles, it wouldn’t affect my grade?”

“No,” she said, and he thought he heard a note of gratitude in her voice. “It might affect the standing of the school, but it would not reflect on you. No one would even know it
was
you. The test is administered anonymously.”

Another teacher, Mr. Cheng, poked his head in the doorway. “Almost through here?” he asked.

Mrs. Webster waved. “I’ll be right out.” She turned back to Brad and Myla. “Do you have any more questions?”

Brad looked at Myla, who shook her head. “No,” he said. “Thank you.”

“
Now
there’s something we can do,” Myla said enthusiastically as they hurried down the stairs. “We have to get this out. We have to blog it.”

Ed, when they told him, was not quite convinced.

“Well, that’s fine for Mrs. Webster’s first period,” he said. “But if I tried that excuse in my class, I’d be in the principal’s office so fast my head would spin.” He motioned toward Brad. “You really think Ms. Montolvo would let you squirm out of taking the test because it wasn’t a legal requirement? I think not, bud.”

“You’re right,” Brad said. “But what if we try something else? What if we flunk the test intentionally? What if we do our best to get every answer wrong and we can convince other students to do it as well? It wouldn’t take many. A handful of good students screwing up would seriously throw off the curve. And if what Mrs. Webster said is right, the fact that Tyler’s overall score went down instead of up would mean that the charter could be in jeopardy.”

“I hate to burst your bubble here, but remember that guy who burned up in the bonfire? Remember our haunted playground? Remember what I saw in the library? Not everything is the fault of the charter. This is just an evil fucking place.”

“But they’re connected,” Myla insisted. “The only question is, is this a charter school because it’s evil, or is it evil because it’s a charter school?”

“Chicken or egg,” Brad said. “Six of one, half a dozen of the other. All we know for sure is that this is a combustible mixture, like fire and gasoline. Haunted, charter . . . what we have here is a perfect storm, and the combination of the two has gotten us where we are today. Break apart that pairing and I think we’re safe.”

“I hope you’re right,” Ed said.

Brad glanced across the quad to where a unit of scouts was marching through the corridor that led to the lunch area. “I hope so, too.”

*

He hadn’t liked the idea at first, but the more he thought about flunking the achievement test, the more Ed thought it was a good plan. As crazy as it sounded, it might actually work. It also appealed to his more rebellious sensibilities. But before they posted it online, before they dragged other kids into this, they needed to bounce it off someone besides Mrs. Webster.

He thought of his counselor, Ms. Tremayne. He’d been to see her only that one time, when he’d transferred out of woodshop, but she’d seemed like one of the good guys.

You have any problems, you come to me. That’s what I’m here for.

Since he was planning to transfer out of the library anyway—there was no way he was going back into that building, not with things the way they were—he went to the office at the beginning of seventh period, thinking he could talk to the counselor, drop his TA gig and then hit her up about the test idea.

There were still scouts guarding the entrance to the building. Not Zivney or his buddies but two boys Ed had seen around and who he thought were in the marching band. Without Brad and Myla at his side, he wasn’t sure at first how he was going to get past the sentries, but neither made any effort to stop him and he simply walked inside.

A witch of a secretary asked him angrily what he wanted, and Ed replied in a calm voice that he needed to see his counselor, Ms. Tremayne.

“What for?” the secretary demanded.

He was slightly intimidated by the woman’s aggressiveness, but he held his ground. “That’s between me and her. Can you tell her I’m here?”

The secretary opened the counter gate. “See her yourself.”

Ed walked quickly through the office. It hadn’t changed, exactly, but it was
more
of what it had been, and the place felt not just uncomfortable now but slightly dangerous. The elements in place were all what they should have been—desks, clerks, computers, copiers, phones—but they were not in the right combination or something, like chemical ingredients that were benign on their own but if mixed turned toxic.

He kept his eyes focused straight ahead, pretending he didn’t see the TA with a bandage across her face, the secretary intently coloring a piece of paper completely black. He walked into that horrible short hallway and opened his counselor’s door without knocking, stepping in and closing the door behind him. He was breathing hard as though he’d been running, and there was the pressure of a headache at the front of his skull.

Ms. Tremayne looked up from her computer screen, surprised. “Hello,” she said.

He took a deep breath, sat down. “Sorry to barge in here like this,” he said. “My name’s Ed Haynes. A few weeks ago, I transferred from my woodshop class to library TA.”

“Yes. I remember.”

“I need to transfer out.”

She swiveled her chair toward him. “I see. Is there any reason—”

The headache was pressing against his forehead. “I just need to get out of there,” he said.

“Do your parents—”

“Listen.” He leaned forward, putting his arms on her desk, squinting against the pain. “Do you have an aspirin or something? All of a sudden, I have this huge headache.”

“The nurse’s office is right next door.” She stood. “Do you want me to get her?”

Ed shook his head, and for some reason the shaking motion made the pain lessen a little. “Maybe I’ll transfer out tomorrow,” he said. “That’s not really the important thing right now. The real reason I’m here is because I need to ask you a question. It’s about our charter and . . . and everything that’s going on here right now.”

Ms. Tremayne looked at him. “All right,” she said after a long pause. She was nervous, he could tell, and wary about what he might ask. But the counselor hadn’t been co-opted, she hadn’t been beaten down and he knew that she was still one of the good guys.

“We were thinking,” he said, “and I know you can’t condone this or anything, but we were thinking that if, for some reason, Tyler’s students did really bad on this achievement test Wednesday, wouldn’t that kind of screw things up for the school? I mean, the whole reason we became a charter school is that it was supposed to be better for us and raise our test scores, right? So if our scores didn’t go up, if they went down instead, people would have to take another look at the whole charter thing, right?”