The Academy (26 page)

Brad and Ed headed in the opposite direction, toward the exit. “Why do they always want to pray for me?” Ed wondered.

“They want God to turn you into the type of person they think you should be. They want him to make you just like them.”

Ed snorted. “Yeah. Like that’s going to happen.”

Outside, the campus was almost completely empty. In previous years, quite a few kids had remained after school, hanging out with their friends, making out with their boyfriends or girlfriends, biking, skateboarding. But Tyler cleared out fast these days, and whether it was a conscious decision or just instinctive, most students were spending as little time as possible on campus.

But not the scouts.

There they were, marching back and forth on the lawn in front of the school, and Brad and Ed walked in the opposite direction. Even without the official sanction of the school, those bullies and jocks were their natural enemies, people the two of them had always made an extra effort to avoid. And now that the principal had given them permission to physically enforce the school’s rules and regulations, they were downright dangerous.

“Assholes,” Ed said, looking over at them, but he said it quietly, not wanting any of them to hear, although they were so far away that it was doubtful they could hear him even if he shouted.

Laborers were working on the wall, music from competing Spanish stations blaring from the tinny speakers of cheap radios placed upon piles of bricks, and Brad and Ed had to walk around a fairly long section before finding an open space where they could get out to the sidewalk. Two of the workers close by were talking loudly, trying to be heard over the music, and though Brad’s Spanish was poor even after three years of classes, he made out the words “afraid,” “bad” and “ghost face.”

“Let’s go to McDonald’s,” Ed said. “My treat.”

Brad’s surprise was so great that he forgot about the workers. “Your treat?”

“I found five bucks in one of the study carrels,” Ed admitted.

“And you didn’t report it or put it in the Lost and Found?”

“Hey, finders keepers, losers weepers. You want some fries or don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Brad said.

“All right, then.”

They started walking toward the golden arches down the street, but before they reached the corner, Brad looked back at the workers he’d overheard. Both of them were still talking.

And it might have been his imagination, but he thought they both looked scared.

*

Despite the hard line she’d taken with the student council over . . . well, nearly everything, and the fact that she’d been so angry with Cheryl after the last council meeting that the two of them had ended up screaming at each other and had not spoken for five straight days, Myla still considered Cheryl her friend, and it was she who took the initiative in making up. She e-mailed an apology, left a voice mail message on the other girl’s cell phone and waited for Cheryl outside her first-period class in the morning. Though she hadn’t responded, Cheryl
had
gotten both her e-mail and her voice mail, and after a few awkward moments, the fight was over.

Reba and Cindy had stayed away from both of them during the feud, and while they were all ostensibly friends again, there was a tightness and tension to their exchanges, and they now avoided talking about a lot of subjects so they wouldn’t end up arguing. The time they spent together was a lot less than it had been, too, and while she knew part of it was natural, the result of diverging commitments and boyfriends and the usual social changes that occurred senior year, part of it wasn’t.

Part of it was something else.

She felt sad about the old gang breaking up, and she knew her friends did as well, but there didn’t seem to be anything any of them could do about it. Still, she made an effort to counter the drift and connect, and on Wednesday, she even went with Cheryl to cheerleader practice. Afterward, they were planning to go to the mall, window-shop and eat an early dinner at the food court, just like they used to do last year.

Myla sat on the bottom row of the stadium seats, watching the girls practice. The truth was, she’d wanted to be a cheerleader when she was in junior high. She wasn’t coordinated enough to ever make the squad—she wasn’t confident enough to even try out—but it had been sort of a secret dream of hers. Her tastes and priorities had shifted since then, and cheerleading no longer held much interest for her, but she didn’t have the disdain for it and for the girls that Brad did. Sitting here, watching them flex and stretch before starting their first routine, she even admired their skills and abilities.

And then they kicked up their legs.

Myla looked quickly away, shocked and flustered. She could feel the heat on her face as her skin reddened with embarrassment. Glancing up again, her eyes went to Mrs. Temple. She thought, or was
hoping,
that this was a prank pulled by the girls on the squad, some sort of rude but good-natured joke on the cheerleading coach. But a few of the girls seemed uncomfortable and embarrassed themselves, while Mrs. Temple was all business and not at all surprised by the sight.

“Okay!” the coach said. “That was pretty good! But we need to work on synchronization. Hayley, you came in half a beat behind at the beginning, and, Jasmine, you were a little too quick with your kick. We’re looking for precision here. On the first kick, especially, I want to see those skirts fly up at exactly the same time. This is the money shot, folks. All right, let’s try it from the top!”

The practice seemed to drag on forever, and it was nearly dark by the time it was over. Some of the girls followed Mrs. Temple into the locker room to shower and change, but Cheryl merely pulled a pair of underwear out of her bag, put it on and joined Myla in the stands. “What do you think?” she asked.

Myla didn’t know what to say.

“That first routine was mine. And the last one, too. I choreographed them both.”

“I could . . . see you,” Myla said finally. “At the games,
everyone
will be able to see you.”

Cheryl nodded happily. “Yeah.”

“What if your mom or dad watches that?”

“Oh, they don’t go to the games.”

“What about someone else’s parents? They could tell your mom and dad. Wouldn’t you get in trouble?”

She shrugged. “The school would get in trouble, not me. I’m just following orders.”

“But how can you do that?” Myla asked.

Cheryl looked dreamy. “I just tell myself that Mr. Nicholson will be watching,” she said.

On Friday, Myla and Brad went out. There was a football game at school, which was where she’d told her parents they were going, but neither she nor Brad was a football fan. And Tyler High was the
last
place she wanted to be at night.

She thought of Cheryl, pantyless, kicking her feet high in order to give the crowd a show, and shivered.

“You cold?” Brad asked.

She shook her head no and snuggled against him. They’d gone to the beach for their date, which was a little weird for her. Despite being raised in Southern California, a mere twenty miles or so from the ocean, she was not much of a beachgoer. When she
did
go, it was always with her family, and being here now with Brad made her feel grown-up somehow, although there was also an irrational twinge of guilt, as though she were doing something she shouldn’t.

They sat on a bench above Corona del Mar, listening to the crashing of the waves below. There was moonlight on the water and the salty smell of the sea in the air. An exotic-sounding bird sang in one of the bushes near the edge of the bluff.

“I don’t want to go to the Harvest Festival,” she admitted.

He shifted on the bench to look at her. “You have to. It’s sponsored by the ASB, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “I know. But I’m afraid.”

“Why? There’ll be plenty of people there.”

It was hard to put into words. And when they were here at the beach, so far away from school, her reservations seemed, if not exactly trivial, at least unconvincing. “I just have this horrible feeling that something’s going to go terribly wrong.”

Brad held her. She wondered if he was thinking about that locker.

She was.

Myla took a deep breath. “And I don’t like the fact that they’re trying to keep people out, that they want to make it just for themselves and their friends, like one of those restricted country clubs.” Anger pushed away the apprehension. “The festival used to be for everyone—now it’s only for the privileged few. That really pisses me off.”

“Then don’t go.”

“No, you’re right. I have to go. We’re sponsoring it. I’m even listed as one of the organizers on the flyers and posters.”

“Well, I’m not going,” he said. “There’s no way I’m paying those outrageous fees just so I can play some stupid games and win some crappy prizes.”

“I can get you in,” Myla said. “Ed, too.”

“It’s the principle of the thing.”

“But that’s just what they want, don’t you see? That’s what I’ve been fighting so hard against. They want to have an exclusive party where no one else can come.”

“I thought you said you were scared.”

“I
am
scared,” she said. “But that’s why I have to go. And that’s why you and Ed need to go, too. If something happens, we need to be there. We need to witness it.”

He nodded slowly, and she knew he knew what she meant.

They were silent for a few moments.

“Are you afraid, too?” Myla asked softly. She hadn’t meant to embarrass him; she was just wondering, and she thought they were close enough that he would be honest and tell her the truth, especially after what they’d been through together. But when he didn’t answer right away, she quickly assumed he was a more macho, less enlightened guy than she’d originally believed, and she was about to do the usual high school girl thing and apologize to salve his ego.

He surprised her, though. “I don’t like to go to that school at night,” he admitted.

“I don’t think anyone does,” she said. She snuggled closer to him, happy that he felt safe enough to tell her that, and soon afterward, they left the bench and returned to the car.

In the darkness of the backseat, they started kissing. She was nervous at first, because there were people occasionally walking by on the sidewalk next to them—other couples, mostly—but after a while the windows were so steamed up with condensation that no one could have seen in even if anybody had wanted to.

And this time, when he tried to slip his hand beneath her panties, she let him.

Sixteen

Kate Robinson had come to dread the white envelopes.

Tony went into his bedroom to work on the ridiculous amount of homework that was assigned to him each night, while Kate sorted through the envelope’s contents. Various ads for chain stores and restaurants. An army recruitment flyer. A Jogathon sign-up form, with a suggested pledge total of two hundred dollars or more. A request that each family with a child attending Tyler High sell a minimum of three hundred dollars’ worth of magazine subscriptions to friends, neighbors and coworkers in order to help fund the school’s music program. A plea for parents to volunteer for a campus-beautification committee.

She dropped the pile of papers and the white envelope on the coffee table. Never, in the twelve years Tony had been going to school, had she encountered anything like this. On a weekly basis, Tyler High made appeals for her time and money. And it never stopped. The school was like a big vacuum, sucking parents dry, demanding ever more from them. She thought about her own high school days. Her parents had never contributed a dime to her school, nor had they been asked to. And volunteering? Aside from the occasionalroom mother, no parents volunteered. No one had
needed
to volunteer.

And that had been true at Tony’s schools, too.

Until this year.

Until Tyler became a charter school.

Kate looked at the pile of papers on the table, then got up and went into the kitchen to start dinner. Her impulse was to throw all those papers away, but some she was supposed to sign and send back, to acknowledge that she’d received and read them, and she didn’t want Tony to get flak because she wasn’t following the rules. She’d sort through them later and do what she needed to do.

They ate homemade hamburgers for dinner—turkey burgers, actually; she was trying to make slightly healthier food these days—and halfway through the meal, she noticed that Tony wasn’t talking. She was chattering enough for both of them, telling him about her horrible new coworker at the title company, which was why she hadn’t noticed his silence at first. But there came a lull in her soliloquy, and when Kate looked over at her son, she saw the same sullen expression she’d seen so often on his father’s face. She was not about to let him turn into his father, and rather than let things slide, she decided to address the situation head-on. “What’s the matter?” she asked.