The Academy (49 page)

“Remember,” she said before they left, “we
all
have to go home and burn our copies of the charter.”

They split up, said their good-byes.

“What do you think’s going to happen?” Diane asked as they made their way out to the car.

“I guess we’ll find that out tomorrow,” Linda said.

Twenty-five

Brad called Myla before he went to bed. He called her every night. In fact their phone calls were becoming so epic that his mom had taken to putting a kitchen timer outside the door of his room and when it rang after an hour, he was supposed to hang up. But tonight they spoke longer, nearly two hours, and while there was bravado in their talk, it masked a lot of anxiety. Ed had installed a counter on their Web page, and their blog had registered over five hundred hits since Monday evening, which was pretty good but not spectacular, since the population of the school was somewhere around twelve hundred. There were a few anonymous postings, but not many, and while Brad put on a brave face, his fear was that their plan was dead in the water and the only thing that would come of it was their own expulsion.

Or worse.

He dreamed that night of the ghostly playground, and in it were his family and all his friends, dead because he had endangered their lives with his ill-conceived schemes.

As they had been doing all week, Brad, Myla and Ed walked to school together the next morning. They had no idea what was going to happen today, but the moment they turned the corner onto Grayson, they knew that something big was afoot. Not only were there two yellow buses lined up and waiting to get into the parking lot, but the sidewalk and street ahead were overflowing with people.

“What’s going on?” Myla said.

“I have no idea.” Holding her hand, Brad walked a little faster.

Ed, already several yards ahead, was the first to spot the television cameras. “Look!” he said.

Someone had alerted the media. Ed crowed that it was their blog, and he could very well have been right, but it had mushroomed from there. Walking through the crowd, listening in as a reporter not from one of the UHF Orange County stations but from one of the big Los Angeles stations, a woman they all recognized, interviewed both Eric Van Gelder and his dad about their opinions on the fairness or unfairness of achievement tests, Brad realized that today’s action was being framed as a protest against standardized testing. A reporter for another local news station solicited a quote from Brad’s suddenly loquacious friend Brian Brown, who came down squarely on the side of the school administration in his insistence on the efficacy of such tests.

Still, the fact that such attention was being drawn to their school could only be good, and Brad’s hopes for success were raised considerably.

The outside of the school looked like a three-ring circus. A crowd of parents, pundits and curious onlookers was milling about the sidewalk and parking lot, not allowed past the wall, and Tyler Scouts were roughly escorting students through the throng and onto school grounds, pushing aside anyone who stood in their way. The scouts, both male and female, were sporting weapons and looked prepared for battle as they wielded blackjacks and clutched batons.

“I’m not going in that gate,” Ed said, watching the scouts manhandle a girl and shove her through the entrance.

“We’ll go around,” Brad suggested.

They stepped into the street, walked between the buses and trekked down the block to a different gate where a bunch of other students were avoiding the crowds and going in.

On the campus, it was chaos. The second they passed through the gate, the sounds of cars and human voices from the street and sidewalk outside disappeared, replaced by weird noises whose origins could not be determined: a curious rumbling that sounded like an earthquake in midtremor; short, sharp cries that were loud and shrill enough to cause earaches; an odd mewling that could have come from cats or infants or something in between. Groups of students were huddled together for protection in front of the locked doors of their classrooms, waiting for teachers to open them, while male and female scouts were throwing spears at one another by Senior Corner.

The three of them remained close to the gate should they need to beat a hasty retreat.

Coach Nicholson, brandishing a whip, ran through the quad, chasing a pair of female students wearing only black underwear with orange letters that read I SHOW FEALTY TO JOHN TYLER HIGH.

“Is that what your underwear looks like?” Ed asked.

Myla blushed.

“Mine just says ‘John Tyler Charter High School.’ ” He grinned. “Want to see it?”

Brad hit him.

He stood there, watching all the frantic movement with a sense of detachment. There was a desperation to it all, he thought, as though the school knew it was going down and was pulling out all the stops, utilizing everything it had in an effort to go out with a big bang.

If just one of those reporters or cameramen got a view of what was going on in here right now, it would be all over.

“This can’t last,” Myla said, as though reading his thoughts. “It’s too much. They’re going to get caught.”

Then the first bell rang.

And it all stopped.

As though someone had flipped a switch, the mayhem halted midstream and everyone began walking to their lockers and classrooms in an orderly fashion. The strange sounds disappeared, replaced by silence, and even the scouts picked up their weapons, straightened their uniforms and headed off to their first-period classes.

“Wow,” Ed said.

“We’d better get going, too,” Myla declared.

Brad nodded, gave her hand a squeeze. “This is it,” he said. “Wish us luck.”

“Not so fast!”

All three of them halted at the sound of the voice. Brad knew who it was without looking, but he turned around anyway to see Todd Zivney standing behind them and holding a knife. Behind
him
was the principal’s secretary, Mrs. Evans, wearing a fiendish smile on her face. “Principal Hawkes knows what you’ve done!” she said gleefully. “Principal Hawkes knows everything!”

“You three,” Zivney announced with satisfaction, “are going to the Penalty Space.”

“What is the—?” Ed started to ask, and was promptly cuffed on the side of the head with the butt of the knife handle. “Fuck!” he yelled.

Zivney hit him again. “Say another word, and I’ll slit your goddamn throat.”

“Put them in there for a year,” Mrs. Evans said. “That should teach them a lesson.”

A year?
Brad looked at Myla. That had to be a joke. If they weren’t home this
evening,
their parents would be all over this, not only calling the police, but making sure that no stone was left unturned in the effort to find them.

“Move!” Zivney ordered, punching Ed in the back.

They followed the scout’s directions through the center of the school to the far side of the science building, where they went down the narrow corridor that separated the science and art rooms. “You’re almost there,” Zivney said, and Brad could hear the cruel delight in his voice.

But they never made it to the Penalty Space. Shadows engulfed them halfway down the hall, swirling formless tendrils of darkness that had no weight or heft but that obscured the world around them and made them feel as though they were being sucked into an endless black hole. Zivney ran away screaming, leaving them to fend off the onslaught alone, and Brad reached for Myla’s hand but found only air, the end of his arm seeming to disappear in the twisting inkiness.

“Myla?” he tried to call. “Ed?”

But his voice made no sound.

And he found himself in another place.

*

Linda was supposed to be proctoring the test, but she had not passed out any booklets or Scantron forms and had told her students they were free to go home if they wished.

They wished.

The spectacle outside the walls had given the kids the confidence to be defiant, and the madness within the walls had left them feeling frightened, so when she informed her first-period class that they could leave with no repercussions, nearly all of them bailed. Hector Alvarado, who was not her best student but was definitely the most conscientious, offered to remain and take the exam, thinking that was what she wanted, but she told him kindly that he could go, and he took off, too.

Now she sat there staring at the unused tests, waiting. When the time came for the exam to be over, she would take the pile of unused Scantron forms and turn them into the office. She had thirty kids in her first-period class. That was thirty kids who would get zeros on the exam.

She wondered how many other teachers were doing the same thing. Diane, for sure. And Ray. And Steve.

There was an odd noise in the hallway outside the classroom. Her spine tingling, Linda stood up, walking over to the doorway to investigate. She poked her head around the corner of the doorjamb.

Jody was standing at the far end of the hall.

Her heart froze. This time, the principal was not smiling. She looked furious, and rage had distorted her features to such an extent that she no longer looked like herself.
No,
Linda thought.
Not just rage.
For the entire underlying bone structure of the principal’s face had changed, making her into a monster, and with an uneasy combination of elation and terror, Linda realized that it was because so many of them had burned their copies of the charter.

It hadn’t done enough, though. It hadn’t stopped her. And Linda understood that, for that, they would need to find and burn the original.

Why hadn’t she thought of that before?

Where was the original kept? In Sacramento? Here on campus?

Jody moved. But instead of turning and going down the stairs the way she had previously done, the principal strode forward. Glaring, eyes focused like a laser on Linda, she advanced quickly. Her mouth was open in a wide toothless O and the sound that emerged from it was the howling of wind. She’d become something no longer human, and instead of remaining to face the woman, Linda turned tail and ran.

She took the steps two at a time. She had no idea where she was going, only that she had to get away, and when she reached the bottom of the stairs, she hesitated for a moment, unsure whether to hide in the department office and lock herself in or dash outside. Like a squirrel in the roadway, she moved first to the left, then to the right, before finally deciding that her chances were better out in the open.

Hearing a noise from the stairwell above, she pushed open the door and ran.

Outside, it was a different world.

There was fog, though there had been no fog previously, and swirling through the white mist were dark shadows that reminded her of those shrouding the entrance to the Penalty Space. There were no people about, neither students nor teachers, and the campus seemed to exist in a strange realm of eerie silence.

Only she was not sure that it even
was
the campus. There were no indications that there was a classroom building off to her left, or that there was a tree and a garbage can directly in front of her, or that any of the school’s familiar landmarks even existed. Turning around, she could see neither the door she had just walked through nor any outline of the building. The mere fact that Jody might still be coming for her, however, spurred Linda into moving forward. For while the fog itself was spooky, it was not half so spooky as the thought of the hideously mutated principal striding through it with the roaring of wind issuing from her open toothless mouth.

Linda strode ahead, encountering nothing, no trees, no walls, no bushes, only what seemed to be a flat empty space. She knew that she should be in the quad, but she clearly wasn’t, and she decided after the first few seconds that she was lost.

Suddenly a building loomed out of the mist.

The library.

It was the only thing visible, and in the haze of white, its square bulk looked like nothing so much as a box in which something had been trapped. Linda frowned. That was a strange reaction, but this semester she had learned to trust her instincts. Some of her strangest reactions had been the ones most on the money.

She approached the library warily. She was almost upon it now, less than a few feet away, but the details of the building had not grown clearer or more distinct. Indeed, the structure retained a curiously blurred vagueness, as though it were an idea that had only just been conceived and had not been entirely thought through. She could see a fuzzy rectangle of light, however, at the spot where there appeared to be an open door. She walked up to it, intending only to peek in and see what was there. But before she knew what she was doing, she stepped inside—