The Academy (15 page)

“Please?”

“All right. I don’t get it, but all right.”

They picked up their drinks from the window, then pulled onto West Street, driving past the Ralphs shopping center and into the residential area beyond.

“It’s Cheryl,” Myla said finally when they turned down Grayson. “She has this . . . thing for Mr. Nicholson.”

“Holy shit. And she’s there with him right now? At school? That’s what she told you?”

“No,” Myla admitted. “But she’s not answering; she’s not there. And on Saturday night her phone is
always
on. No matter what she’s doing.”

“And now you think they’re hooking up. At night. At school.” Brad shook his head. “That’s a pretty big stretch. Don’t you think if something like that
was
going on, they’d pick someplace safer?”

“It’s just a feeling I have.” She put a hand on his arm, and he realized that there was no reason they
couldn’t
stop by the school. It wasn’t
that
late.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s check it out.”

She gave him a quick kiss on the side of his cheek. “Thank you.”

“You know, speaking of creepy, Ed says the librarian has one of those glamour shots of herself on the desk in her office—and she’s wearing sexy lingerie!”

Myla grimaced in disgust. “Mrs. Fratelli?”

“The very one.”

“That’s wrong on so many levels.”

The buildings of the school were looming up on their right, and he pulled over to park in the twenty-minute drop-off zone. He cut the ignition, switched off the headlights. “All right. What’s the plan?”

Myla was looking between the classrooms toward the center of campus. She seemed nervous all of a sudden.

No, not nervous,
he thought.
Scared
.

He touched her shoulder. “We can leave if you want. We don’t have to—”

“No,” she said. “We’ll just do a quick check. To make sure.”

Again the nervousness.

Fear.

“Let’s go by the PE area. His office, maybe.”

They got out of the car, locked the doors. “What’s the plan if we find them?” he asked. “Are we supposed to turn them in? Tell them to knock it off? What?”

She obviously hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “We’ll figure that out when it comes up.
If
it comes up.”

Hand in hand, they started down the corridor next to the English classrooms, heading for the walkway that led to the sports complex. He’d been here at night before for various special events, but never when it was empty like this, and he had to admit that it did seem a little spooky. The only sounds were their footsteps echoing on the cement, and it seemed as though there should have been more lights on than there were.

“Do you have a flashlight?” he joked.

Myla’s only response was to grip his hand tighter.

He found himself thinking of Van Nguyen, who had disappeared from the school in broad daylight. He looked around, saw nothing but shadows and places for someone to hide. It would be so much easier to kidnap someone here at night.

Kidnap?
Was that what he really thought?

No. It was nothing that simple. He remembered the birds flying into the backboard on the blacktop. There was something about the school, about Tyler itself, that—

Something banged on the locker next to them.

Myla screamed, and both of them jumped. Grasping her hand so tightly that his fingers hurt, Brad pulled her off the walkway, away from the lockers, backing quickly onto the narrow strip of grass that ran between this building and the next. He glanced around in all directions, even up on the roof of the adjoining building, looking for someone who could have thrown a rock or shot at the lockers.

The noise came again, a loud sharp bang, as though a baseball bat had slammed against the metal, and this time they could
see
where the noise originated.

Something was inside one of the lockers.

The rectangular metal door was still vibrating.

The two of them continued to back away. Brad looked to his left. If they ran down the strip of grass, parallel to the walkway, they could make it back out to the street and escape.

“That’s where my locker is,” Myla managed to get out.

She was right, but he saw almost immediately that though it was
near
her locker, it wasn’t the same one.

Then he noticed something even worse: the locker didn’t belong to anyone. It had no lock on it.

The noise was louder this time, and the bottom left corner of the locker door stuck out. It had been struck so hard from the inside that the metal had bent.

“Let’s go!” Brad said, but before they could even start to run, the locker door flew open—

—and nothing was there.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting—a small hairy beast? an evil dwarf?—but it hadn’t been . . . anything. Not that his mind was any more at ease. The fear within him was powerful and instinctive, and a split second after that locker flew open, they were off and running. Bounding onto the sidewalk, they dashed to the Toyota and got in, locking the doors.

“Cheryl’s on her own,” he said, starting the car.

It had been a joke. Sort of. A quick quip under pressure. But as they sped down Grayson past the back half of the school, he saw what looked like two figures—a male and a female—passing under a light at the edge of the stadium. He didn’t say anything to Myla, though, and it was not until they turned onto Yorba Avenue and Tyler High was no longer in his rearview mirror that he finally stopped hearing the pounding of his panicked heart in his ears.

Ten

On Monday, Kyle Faber was gone.

He was not in class and not on her first-period attendance list. Linda could not say she was unhappy about that—he was probably her worst student, a problem both behaviorally and academically—but his sudden unexplained absence disturbed her. It was almost as though he’d been deleted, erased, with no indication that he had ever existed, like some disappeared dissident in a totalitarian state.

There was another mysteriously missing student in her third-period class—another troublemaker—and when she stopped by the department office between third and fourth periods to check on the status of tenth-grade textbooks that had still not arrived, she learned that Diane and Steve Warren also had students who no longer seemed to be enrolled in school.

“Do you think—?” she began.

“I
know,
” Diane said. “Jody said they were going to do this.”

“But so fast?”

Steve smiled wryly. “I guess charter schools
are
more efficient.”

Still, the absences gnawed at her, and at lunch she gathered up her courage and went into the office, looking for answers. Bobbi frowned at her as she walked in, but Linda ignored the disapproving stare and walked over to the cubicle of Elena Moore, the attendance clerk. She’d never had that much contact with Elena, but every time they’d encountered each other, they’d always chatted easily and gotten along. So it was a surprise to see the attendance clerk look up at her and scowl angrily. “What do
you
want?”

Linda was taken aback, but she tried hard not to act as flustered as she felt. Bobbi, she knew, was watching. Jody could very well be watching, too. “I, uh . . .” She forced herself to smile. “I’m just trying to find out about a couple of my students who’ve been taken off the attendance roll—”

“The rolls have been purged,” Elena said shortly.

Much to the clerk’s annoyance, Linda sat down in a chair next to her desk. “What exactly does that mean?”

“What do you mean, ‘What does that mean?’ ”

“ ‘The rolls have been purged’? What about the students? Did they move? Have they transferred to other schools? Where exactly are they?”

“That’s none of your business,” Elena told her. The voice was still antagonistic, but she kept sneaking furtive glances at Bobbi, and Linda understood that the attendance clerk was afraid.

Maybe that was why she was hewing so closely to the party line.

Perhaps if she could get Elena away from here, talk to her one-on-one . . .

She looked into the clerk’s eyes. No. The fear was there, but behind it was the will of a true believer. This was not the Elena she had known.

This was not the
office
she had known.

Now that she was here, Linda shifted uncomfortably in her chair, trying to figure out what had changed. Obviously, the people had undergone a cultlike transformation. But that was not all. There was something wrong with the building as well. She felt uneasy being in it and was still not sure why. She glanced around. There was a new carpet, an ugly one, although that hardly would have affected her perception to such a degree. The plants were gone, the pothos and ficus that had been in pots and hanging baskets, and the windows were tinted so darkly that no one could see in
or
out. The recessed bars of fluorescent light in the ceiling glowed not the typically antiseptic white but a more sickly greenish yellow. None of these things individually would have been so disturbing, but taken together, everything was off just enough that the entire scene was skewed, which was probably the reason why she felt so ill at ease.

No, it wasn’t.

No. It wasn’t.

Something else was at work here, something that could not be seen but could only be felt. It was not the physical placement of objects within the room that made it so unsettling but the living essence of the office itself. As crazy as that sounded.

Still, she kept the false smile on her face. “So you can’t tell me what happened to my students?”

“No, I cannot. That would be a breach of confidentiality. But don’t worry,” Elena said shortly. “They’ll be replaced.”

“What do you mean, they’ll be replaced?”

“Our funding still depends on enrollment even though we’re a charter school. We can’t afford to let the count go down.”

“But—”

“Principal Hawkes has arranged to bring in some high achievers to help tilt the balance.” Elena’s smile was cold and hard. “Your test scores will go through the roof.”

This was not what Linda wanted to hear.

The attendance clerk turned away, sorting through a stack of forms on her desk, and Linda understood that she was being dismissed. It was just as well. She was starting to perspire. The office seemed far too warm. It also seemed hard to breathe, and though she had never before been claustrophobic, it felt as if the walls were closing in on her and the room were shrinking. She stood, heading out of the office the way she’d come, and it was all she could do not to run out in a mad dash for freedom.

Outside, the open air felt wonderful, and she bent down, put her hands on her knees and breathed deeply, like a runner who had just finished a race. She glanced back at the office and though she could see nothing through the dark tinted glass, Linda had the feeling that she was being watched. She hurried into the crowd of milling students and did not relax until she was in the teachers’ lounge and the office was hidden from her behind closed doors.

The next day, two more of her students were gone, both of whom could most charitably be described as academic underachievers. Another boy, Luke Vernon, came to fourth period late, turned in his textbooks and angrily told Linda that he had been expelled.

“For what?” she asked, incredulous. Luke wasn’t one of her best students, but he was squarely in the bell portion of the curve and he certainly wasn’t a behavioral problem.

“Made-up reasons,” he said. “Coach Nicholson said that I refused to follow directions and was being insubordinate because I walked on the six-minute jog/ walk, and he wanted me to run. It’s part of the president’sphysical-fitness test, and it doesn’t even count toward our grade. And it’s called the jog/
walk
. You can do either.”

It came to her then: he wasn’t good in PE.

Jody was weeding out not just those students who didn’t perform well academically but those who did not do well in
any
class.

Don’t worry. They’ll be replaced.