The Academy (24 page)

It was what he should have said but didn’t. Instead, he kept looking at the wall, unable to meet her gaze, unable to look upon her at all.

“How do you think I feel, having a son who did something like that, huh? Do you know how embarrassing that is?”

He should have turned those questions around on her, but he didn’t. He flexed his fingers harder, opening them wider, closing them tighter.

She moved closer, bent down, looked into his eyes. He had the feeling that she knew what he was thinking, or, more accurately, that she was thinking the same thing. She smiled but not in a nice way, and stood up straight.

“The razors are in the bathroom,” she said as she walked away. “Feel free to use one.”

*

Bill Manning stood in front of the classroom, grinning. He felt good about Tyler’s chances in the academic decathlon. He thought they might even have a shot at going to Washington, D.C. Before this year, the school had never even placed in the
district
competition, let alone state, let alone the nationals. But never before had he been given free rein to do whatever it took to whip his team into shape.

Whip
his team.

With a loud swish, he cut through the air with the black leather riding crop he held in his hand.

Nervously, some of the students looked up. Others glanced over surreptitiously, their heads still bent over their books and papers, their eyes on him. Most continued studying, too frightened, too
whipped,
to risk his wrath.

He swung the riding crop again, cutting the air, his smile growing wider.

Outside the window, the sun was going down, the light turning orange. Fall was here, and soon it would be getting dark before they finished these practice sessions.

There were a lot of things he could do in the dark.

Mr. Manning looked up at the clock. It was almost four thirty, almost time to end the study break and get back to the serious business of drilling. Usually, he gave them half-minute warnings and then loudly counted down the last ten seconds, but this time he waited in silence, keeping his eye on the clock. Five minutes . . .

Four minutes . . .

Two minutes . . .

... ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two . . .

One.

He whirled around, using the crop to point at AngelaYee. “Nucleotides contain two types of nitrogenous bases! What are they?” he demanded.

“Pentose and purines!” she shouted out.

“Wrong!” Angrily, he slammed the riding crop on her desk, barely missing her fingers. “Purines and pyrimidines!”

Angela started to cry.

“What’s the matter, wittle baby?” He leaned down, pushing his face mockingly in front of hers. “Are we cwying because we’re dumb?”

She sat up straighter, sniffled, made a concerted effort to stop crying. “I’m not dumb,” she assured him. She wiped away a stray tear. “I can handle this.”

“No, you can’t!” he yelled at her. “And you
are
dumb! You’re just about the most ignorant, worthless piece of shit it’s ever been my misfortune to coach!” He swung his riding crop again, and this time it hit her. She cried out as the tip slammed into her shoulder. “Maybe you’ll remember better next time.”

He walked slowly down the central aisle of the class. “In the vascular plant body, the primary tissues are . . .
what
?” He slammed his crop down on Kirk New-comb’s desk.

“Primary xylem and primary phloem!”

“Yes.”

The drill continued this way as he walked through the room, picking students at random, berating them and hitting them if they answered his questions incorrectly, bestowing halfhearted praise if they got them right. Finally, everyone had had a chance to answer at least one life science and one earth science question. He returned to the front of the classroom. It was going to be a long, hard slog, but with his help and hard work, they were going to make it. If not . . .

He swung the riding crop hard, listening with pleasure as it sliced the air.

He faced the decathlon team. “Now, let me make one thing perfectly clear. We are in this thing to win. We are not competing so we can come in second place or third place or get a little pat on the head and an honorable-mention certificate. Does everyone understand me?”

“Yes!” they answered in unison.

“Good! Now, I expect you to ace the district, take state and win the nationals! If you do
not
—!” He dropped his voice. “If you do not, if you falter anywhere along that path, you will be punished. Severely. Not only will you never enter another decathlon again; you will never be
able
to enter another decathlon again. I will beat you until your writing hands are crippled, your fingers so broken they can never hold a pen or tap a keyboard. I will strike your head so hard that you will be lucky to find yourself in an EH class. I will make sure that you will never again be in a position to embarrass either myself or the school. Do I make myself understood?”

“Yes!” they answered.

He smiled broadly. “Then that’s it for today. Now go home and study. I’ll see you here again tomorrow.”

*

Mrs. Temple blew her whistle. “One . . . two . . . three . . . go!”

Cheryl put her heart into it. She had helped design this routine, and while it was difficult, especially for some of the newer, younger cheerleaders, it would be worth it in the end. This was the kind of routine that won trophies, that inspired movies.

“—the Tyler Tigers sure are great!”
they concluded, doing the splits sequentially from left to right.

“Hmmmm,” the cheerleading coach said. “Let’s try it again from the top.”

Cheryl didn’t know about the others, but she tried even harder this time, jumping higher, yelling louder, moving with more definition. Still, Mrs. Temple wouldn’t give them a pass. “Let me see that first kick again,” she ordered.

“Something’s wrong,” the coach said when they’d finished. She stood there, thinking, as they watched her. “It’s that bulky material beneath your skirts,” she decided. “I think it’ll work better if there’s nothing there.”

The girls looked at one another, not sure they were hearing what they thought they were hearing.

“Take ’em off, girls!” she ordered. “I want to see bush!”

They were practicing in the stadium, on the field, in front of the stands, and Cheryl looked around to make sure there were no other kids watching, especially not those dweeby little pervs from the tennis team. Although, now that she thought about it, what did it really matter? These stands would be
filled
Friday night, and everyone in them would be able to see when she kicked high and jumped.

The thought gave her a little thrill of excitement.

No one had started to take off her underpants. To her right, Yolanda Martinez stood there like a block of wood, her legs unconsciously pressed together. The girls beyond looked at one another, nervous and embarrassed. Lindsey giggled. To her left, Carrie was hesitating. “I will if you will,” she told Cheryl.

“Girls!” the coach shouted. “Now!”

Cheryl unfastened the underwear from the skirt and pulled down her panties underneath. The air felt cool between her legs all of a sudden, and as Carrie took off her own underwear, she did a high kick, flashing the stands.

Moments later, they were all bare under their short skirts.

“Try it again, girls!” Mrs. Temple ordered.

They did, and even the shyest of them admitted afterward that the flow was a lot smoother, the kicks and drops not nearly so jerky and mechanical.

“Excellent job!” the coach told them. “Now go home and make sure you get a good night’s sleep. We have a lot of hard work to do before the game, and I want you rested and rarin’ to go. Oh, and Yolanda?”

The girl stopped, turned.

“Trim that thing, will you? It looks like a goddamn rain forest down there.”

Fifteen

He had no friends in his last-period Government class, so Brad spent the minutes before the teacher arrived reading
The Magus,
this week’s assignment in English. He loved English. Mrs. Webster was a great teacher, and somehow reading the books she wanted them to read, discussing them, hearing her opinions on them, made him feel smart and intellectual, as though he were already in college rather than still in high school. It was a personal feeling, private, a feeling he hadn’t shared with anyone, not even Myla, who was in the class with him, and somehow keeping it to himself made it seem all the more special.

But English was the only course he really enjoyed this semester.

And Government?

This was definitely one he could do without.

Mr. Myers walked in, and Brad closed his book. He’d gotten stuck in the front row, so even though he hated the class, he had to at least pretend to pay attention or else the teacher would be all over his ass.

Mr. Myers went over to his desk and dropped off a folder he’d been carrying. “We’re going to the library today,” he announced as the bell rang. Chatter among the students subsided, stopped. “I’ll be passing out a list of topics. Pick one and do a report on it. Five pages, three sources. Books and periodicals only, no Web sites. I want footnotes and a bibliography.”

Sheets were dropped off at the head of each row and passed back. Brad looked over the list. As he’d suspected, the ideas were all boring, but he quickly raised his hand and nailed down “Why the First Amendment Is Important,” probably the least objectionable topic. Everyone else followed suit, and in a few moments the entire class was ready to go to the library and start working on their papers.

Suddenly, the door of the classroom opened, and in walked two uniformed scouts. Moving in lockstep, they approached Annabelle Ivers, who sat in the back row looking down at the battered bestickered notebook she always carried with her. As usual, Annabelle was wearing her goth regalia—black boots, black dress, black lace, silver skull jewelry—and above her almost Kabuki-white makeup, her dyed black hair had been teased into a Tim Burtonesque rat’s nest. She did not bother to look up as the two boys stopped and stood on either side of her desk.

“We got a report about you,” the first scout said.

Brad did not recognize either of them, but they both had the square-jawed clean-cut appearance of dedicated jocks.

“You’re breaking the dress code,” the second one told her.

Annabelle still didn’t look up. “There
is
no dress code,” she informed them.

“There is now.” As one, the two boys grabbed her arms, lifting her up and out of her seat.

“Hey!” she cried.

The first scout snickered. “Where’d you get those clothes, your mom’s closet?”

“Yeah, what do you think this is, 1988?”

She tried to fight but couldn’t, and they pulled her out of the room as though they were comedic cops in a movie, holding her arms as her feet dragged behind her on the floor. Brad and the rest of the students looked quickly toward the teacher, shocked that he would allow this to happen in his own classroom, but he was smiling pleasantly as though nothing out of the ordinary were going on. “Bring your books,” he said. “We won’t be coming back to class. You’ll be leaving directly from the library.”

“Those two guys just came in and dragged Annabelle out of the room,” Gary Chen said.

Mr. Myers nodded. “Yes. Now let’s get ready to go.”

“What about her books?” someone else asked.

“Don’t worry,” the teacher said. “She’ll be back.”

“But you said we’re not coming back,” Gary pointed out. “We’re leaving directly from the library.”

“Every minute you waste talking about Annabelle is a minute that you could be using to work on your report. Now come on, let’s go.”

Didn’t one of the constitutional amendments have something to do with unreasonable search and seizure? Brad thought. He should have chosen to write about that one.

Following the teacher, they went down the stairs, out of the building, across the quad to the library. Too cool to walk in a single-file line, they moved in sprawling formless groups that were spread out but traveling in the same general direction. Brad walked alone, near Gary, who was also by himself, and a new transfer student whose name no one knew. He looked up at the square forbidding block that was the library building and couldn’t help smiling to himself as he thought of Ed working in there.