The Academy - Introductions (22 page)

He chuckled. “Try it.”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to hurt you, Silas.”

His body tensed behind me. I stopped wriggling. We stood
together like that for what seemed like an eon in the moment. Slowly he let go
of me. I turned to face him. His large brown eyes fixed on mine. His fingers
flexed and he reached out toward my face for a moment but stopped short. His
arms dropped to his side. He smiled down at me.

“You’re not like other girls, Sang.”

I frowned softly. How could he say that about me? Did I do
something wrong? “I am a girl, though. I know my family is a little weird but
I’m normal enough.” I was lying through my teeth. I didn’t feel normal at all.
I just desperately wanted to be like everyone else. I didn’t want parents who
were agoraphobic. I was doing my best to be as average as everyone else so I
could be accepted. Was I failing?

“You’re far from normal,” he said quietly.

My eyes went wide. “You think I’m strange?”

“Yeah,” he said, blinking at me. “I mean, different.”

I scoffed.

“It’s not a bad thing.”

I shrugged, stuffing my hands into my pocket again. I
didn’t know what to say to him. He just called me weird. Weird like my family.
Weird was what unwanted people were. Weird stopped me from having friends for
such a long time.

His brows creased and he blew out a perplexed breath of
air. “I have to get going.”

“Okay.” I was still a little hurt but I was sorry to see
him go.

He fished his keys out of his pocket and opened his car door.
“I’ll see you tomorrow at registration,” he said. He got in, started his car
and drove off.

I walked home alone.

That night, the house was fairly quiet. My parents were in
bed. Marie’s light was off. No one had noticed I was gone all day. I was grateful
for it.

I took out what I was going to wear for registration the
next day, a light blue skirt and a nicer white blouse that buttoned up in the
front and had a soft collar. It was thanks to Gabriel’s suggestions and the
pictures I sent to him of what was in my closet. He had an opinion about every
piece I owned. I had a list, thanks to Kota, of the classes I wanted to take.
When there was nothing else to do, I was sprawled out on the floor. It was
after eleven at night and I still wasn’t sleepy. I crawled to the corner of my
room near the window, looking through the apps on the phone just to see what
was available for free. I didn’t want to download anything that would lead to
more expenses for the guys.

The phone vibrated in my hand.

Nathan
: “
Are you
awake?”

Sang
: “Yes.”

Nathan
: “
Are you in
your room?”

The question got me to sit up.

Sang
: “
Yup.”

Nathan
: “
Your
window is the second one from the left?
”

Where was this going? And how did he know?

Sang
: “
If you’re
facing the house from the street, yes. Above the porch.”

I waited for an answer. When nothing came back after a
while I sent another text.

Sang
: “
Why did you
want to know?”

Silence again.

Sang
: “
Nathan?”

I was just about to give up on him when I heard a gentle tap
at my window. It startled me so badly that I jumped sideways, dropping my
phone, my head twisting toward the window.

With my light on, I couldn’t see if anyone was there. I got
up off the floor, approaching it slowly, my hand still on my heart, until I was
close enough to where I was blocking the light from the window. At first all I
saw was the silhouette. Nathan was kneeling on the roof, looking inside.

I hurried to unlock the window and lifted it. He helped
open it from the other side.

I stuck my head out. “What are you doing up here?” I
whispered. “How did you get up here?”

“I’m glad to see you, too.” He grinned at me, his blue eyes
lighting up. “I brought you something.”

“It couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”

He passed me something soft. I took it from him. He sat on
the flat part of the roof while I unraveled it. It was the dark t-shirt with
foreign writing on it I had borrowed to wear the day I went swimming.

“I thought you wanted it,” he said.

I smiled, touched that he risked breaking his neck to bring
it to me. “I didn’t win the races. Any of them,” I said.

“Consider it a consolation prize. As many times as I won,
you’ll be sitting next to me in every class all the way through med school.”

I held a couple of fingers to my lips to help suppress my
giggling. “Until I beat you at another race.”

“That’s not gonna happen, peanut.”

The shirt smelled clean. I smoothed my palm over the
foreign lettering. “What’s this shirt say, anyway?”

“It says girls are stupid. Throw rocks at them.”

I reached out to punch at what I thought was his arm but he
dodged a little and I hit his chest.

“Hey,” he said, feigning being hurt when I only barely
brushed his chest. “I’m sitting out on a roof, you know.”

The house creaked and we both froze. I held my breath,
listening. When nothing else happened, I looked at him. His eyes focus on my
face.

“I’ll go,” he whispered. “I just wanted to say hi. I hadn’t
seen you all day.”

“Where were you?”

“I had training.”

“Jujitsu?”

His smile was gentle on his face, a contrast to the
harshness of his masculine jawline. “Yeah. Jujitsu.”

The way he answered me, it felt like it wasn’t the whole
truth. “All day long?”

“I’m tired,” he said. “You should get some sleep. We’ve got
registration tomorrow.”

It was late and I didn’t want to press him. I bit back my
questions. Who was I to privy into his life when I just met him? “I guess I’ll
see you then.”

He nodded and then moved away from the window. He crawled
on his hands and feet to the edge. He swung his legs down first and held the
roof with his hands. He dropped down out of my view. With my heart in my throat
and holding my breath, I waited by the window until I spotted him dashing
across the front lawn and out into the street.

Nathan the ninja.

D
R.
G
REEN

I dreamed of my old school with people I didn’t know who
had turned into zombies. They chased me. The doors were locked. I was trapped.

T
he phone
woke me that morning. I had forgotten to put it back into the attic. I was in
bed with it, and it had slipped to between my stomach and the sheets. I felt it
vibrating and it tickled me out of sleep. In my dream, it was a zombie biting.

Silas
: “
I’m sorry
if I made you mad.”

It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about.

Sang
: “
I’m not
mad.”

Now that I had slept, what I felt before with him seemed
stupid. It was wrong of me to get angry with him when from what I remembered of
the conversation, he was trying to be nice.

Sang
: “
Forgive me
for being a meanie?”

Silas
: “
You’re not
mean, Sang.”

I smiled, my heart flutter and flipped around in my chest.

Sang
: “
You’re too
nice to me.”

Silas
: “
Ditto.”

I took my time in the bathroom later. I showered, shaved my
body, dried off, used a blow dryer on my hair and dug out a barrette to pull back
locks of hair from my eyes without using the clip. It was Gabriel’s suggestion.
I wasn’t sure why there was such an emphasis on what to wear. It was just
registration.

I put on my blue skirt and modest white blouse, and my
sandals. I had a notebook and a pencil with me, Kota’s list was tucked into the
notebook along with the paper that I had filled out for registration. We were
supposed to bring it to be approved and entered into a computer.

There was a tall mirror hanging on the inside of my bedroom
closet. I checked myself out in my reflection. Dirty blond hair. Green eyes.
Light skin. Decent clothes. Average across the board.

Marie opened my bedroom door, letting it swing until the
knob hit the wall. “Hey,” she said. “Let’s go.” She was wearing jeans and a
t-shirt with sneakers. She had heavy makeup on her face, her eyes looked darker
with the eyeliner around it. She picked up makeup leftovers from her friends at
her old school. She only wore it on rare occasions to save what she could. “You
look like you’re new to school,” she said.

“I am new.”

“Yeah, but you look it. And that notebook makes you look
like a nerd.”

I shrugged. I didn’t want to say something about what I
thought of her makeup. Sometime in the past few years we had grown distant. We
saw each other. We worked alongside each other. We had argued a lot, too.
Mostly our arguments focused on who would do which chores. Eventually it became
a general need to simply exist without getting involved in what the other one
was doing. The feeling around her was that of what I imagined a co-worker would
feel. Friendly sometimes but we were just as happy not talking to each other.
Why hadn’t we bonded like I read of other siblings doing in books? It struck me
as odd but I could only guess we were simply different from each other.
Something happened between us. I couldn’t explain and we were now so far apart
from each other it felt impossible to become what I imagined real sisters were
like.

“Get going,” she said and she walked out to rush down the
stairs.

My dad was waiting for us out in the car. I rarely saw my
father unless there was a school event or on Sundays. Any other day he worked
and made it in time for dinner and I usually skipped dinner. He was tall, lanky
and most of the time he was cheery around the family. He had curly dark hair,
high cheek bones. When he was around my mother, his posture sagged more and he
looked tired.

“Hurry up,” he called to us. He waved his big hand at us.
“You’re going to end up in all the leftover classes.”

Marie got in the front passenger side of the small,
five-year-old sedan. I climbed into the back. I locked my seat belt in even if
my dad and sister didn’t. We rode in silence in the car.

The lot at the school was already full. I wasn’t sure we
would find a parking space but there were people pulling into part of the lawn.
My dad found a spot near the back.

“Remember where we’re parked,” he said. “If we have to
split up, just come back here.”

I fell behind them as we headed toward the side door of the
school. It looked about the same size as my old school. Gabriel had been right
about it being ugly. The building was two stories, brown, drab, no windows
except for a handful along the second floor. The grounds were flat, with only a
handful of trees along the border of the grounds. Square hedges grew along the
outside walls between sets of doors. The hedges looked like they needed to be
watered three months ago. There was a football practice area off to the left, a
baseball diamond and some tennis courts beyond it. Each were well worn with
holes in the mesh guards and the benches looked warped. Beyond that I could see
the trailers Kota had talked about. The number amazed me. I counted at least
thirty and they extended out from the school. I wondered how anyone managed to
get from one of those trailers to classes inside on time.

“I don’t want a class in a trailer,” Marie said. For the
moment, I agreed with her on that point.

The entryway was crowded. The off-white tiles inside the
doors were cracked and uneven. Students coming and going made it difficult to
navigate and many of them stopped to talk to each other without concern of who
they might be blocking. Most of the parents looked tired and were leaning up
against the walls and out of the way.

It took five minutes just to get through the side door. I
scanned the crowd for one of the guys. I wondered if they expected me to come
in through another door.

From what Kota described of how dangerous the school was, I
tried to make myself small and uninteresting. None of the other students seemed
particularly interested in us. Most were concerned with either getting in line
or finding old school friends to talk to. I couldn’t imagine a fight breaking
out when so many teachers and parents were standing right there.