The Academy (28 page)

Tony frowned, kept reading. Once he underwent the initiation ceremony and took the pledge, he would be awarded an official uniform and would become a duly sworn officer of the school.

“Initiation?” he said, looking up.

“It’s kind of rough,” Chuck admitted. “This is your chance to back out.”

Tony couldn’t tell if that was a statement or a warning. Still, this was a school-sponsored program put together by the principal. How rough could it be? “That’s okay,” he said.

Craig slapped a hand on his back. “Good.” He grinned. “Glad to have you aboard.”

“What do I—?” he began.

He was grabbed from behind, his arms pinned to his sides. A black hood was placed over his head and then tied loosely around his neck so that he could neither see straight ahead nor look down at the ground. His arms were let go. He could hear the normal sounds of lunchtime—students talking, laughing, eating—but they seemed to come from far away, and none of the scouts said a word at all. Someone grabbed his hand and pulled him forward. There were scouts on every side of him, and while that made for easier walking, since he knew he wouldn’t bump into anything, it made it more difficult to tell in which direction they were going. After the first two turns, he was completely lost.

It seemed like they’d walked far enough to be off campus and halfway down the next block by the time they finally stopped. At one point, it had felt as though they were going down a ramp or an incline, and when the hood was removed from his head, he saw that they were in some sort of tunnel. It was rounded at the top and along both sides ran pipes and insulated cables. He assumed it was a passageway used for maintenance. A series of bare bulbs was strung above them, the ones behind and slightly in front of them lit, the ones beyond that dark.

Just behind the last illuminated bulb, suffused in its yellowish glow, was a slab of raw meat hanging from a hook. On the dirty cement below it lay a pile of clothes. He knew it was just one of those typical hazing rituals—they were trying to fool him into thinking that was
human
meat—but the bloody slab was odd looking, and he thought the crumpled shirt below it looked like Phil Cho’s.

Phil had supposedly been transferred last week to another school.

Tony glanced around nervously. Chuck, Logan and Craig were nowhere to be seen, and the scouts surrounding him were all rather formidable and intimidating. They looked like football players, though he didn’t recognize any of them.

Without a word, strong arms pushed him forward. His impulse was to dig in his heels and fight against the tide, but he knew that if he did so, he would never become a scout, so he allowed himself to be led to the hanging slab of meat. This close, he could see that it was too skinny to be cow or pig and had the vague contours of a human torso.

“It’s lunchtime,” the scout to his left said. “Eat.”

A hand shoved his face into the meat. It felt cold and rubbery, and the smell was overpowering, a putrid stench that almost made him gag. But he didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of these guys, didn’t want to end up rejected by the scouts and back at the lunch tables eating alone like a loser. He tried breathing through his mouth so as not to smell the disgusting odor, but his senses were overpowered, and when the scouts started chanting as one, “Eat! Eat! Eat!” he opened wide and bit.

The taste was awful, sickening. The odd chewy consistency of the cold meat made him want to spit it out instantly, and it took every ounce of willpower he had not to throw up, but he managed to bite the small piece in his mouth in two and then swallow the individual halves.

The other boys had stopped chanting, and from the darkness behind the hanging meat, he heard whispering, what sounded like several voices talking at once. All the scouts were in back of him, and as far as he knew, there was no one in the tunnel ahead. But still he heard the whispers, and it sounded as though some of them were saying his name.

There was no longer pressure on the back of his head, and he turned around, feeling the wetness of blood on his face from where it had been pressed into the meat. The other scouts were backing up. They heard the whispering, too, and they were scared. Even in the dim light from the string of bare bulbs, he could see the fear in their eyes, and he started walking toward them. Not too fast—he didn’t want them to think he was a pussy—but quickly enough to put some space between himself and the hunk of meat hanging before that black emptiness. Something was behind him—he could feel it—and it was all he could do not to bolt.

Several of the scouts were turning now, no longer just backing up but actually walking away. A few were starting to stride briskly down the tunnel the way they had come. The whispering was closer, louder. He could hear it above the noise of shuffling feet and the voices of the scouts, and maybe it wasn’t behind them—maybe it was in front of them, or maybe it was all around.

Someone screamed. Tony didn’t know if the screamer had seen something or had simply panicked, but all of a sudden they were running wildly, like little children, every person for himself, no longer a cohesive unit but a random collection of frightened individuals desperately trying to escape. Tony was last, and he kept expecting to feel cold claws on his shoulder, kept waiting to be dragged back into the darkness and hung up on a meat hook. But he ran as fast as his legs could carry him, shoved his way past two scouts, passed Chuck and was safely in the middle of the pack when the tunnel began sloping upward and he saw the light of day at the end.

The scouts in front of him stopped yelling, gradually slowed from a sprint to a march and regained the orderliness instilled in them by all their recent training. They emerged, surprisingly, from a sloping sidewalk that ran between the Little Theater and the band classrooms. Tony had not noticed the narrow space between the two buildings before and, if asked, would have said that there
was
no space between the buildings or, if there was, that it was a strip of bare ground littered with garbage, like the area behind the cafeteria. But he looked back beyond the last of the scouts and saw that the inclined sidewalk led to an undergroundtunnel that headed under the faculty parking lot.

At the top, the other scouts were all smiling and gathered around him, slapping him on the back and offering congratulations.

“
That
doesn’t get any easier,” Logan said.

Tony looked at him incredulously. “You mean that’s happened before?”

“Every fuckin’ time.”

“Now just the blood oath and you get your uniform,” Craig told him.

“
Blood
oath?”

Chuck put a shaky hand on his shoulder. “You’re one of us.”

Tony smiled weakly. “Gabba, gabba hey.”

Seventeen

Minimum day.

Those words, previously so magical to both students and teachers, now caused Linda’s stomach to knot with tension. Once a month, Tyler had a district-mandated minimum day, ostensibly to allow instructors time to perform nonteaching duties. Jody and the charter committee had elected to continue the practice, and as always, each period was shortened so that the school day ended at noon. The students went home. But whereas before teachers were given free time to catch up on grading, writing tests and preparing assignments, or even, if they so chose, allowed to go home themselves, Jody had made it clear that from here on in, the afternoon of each minimum day would be taken up with a mandatory meeting of the entire staff.

Though Linda had been calling every day to check in, there was still no news from the union. No news was bad news, she assumed, and her gut told her that Jody was going to win this one. Whatever happened, she probably could not count on the association for help.

After the students were gone, Linda met Steve and Diane in the English department office. They had fifteen minutes for lunch before the meeting started, and Steve hurried off to grab some junk food from the cafeteria. Diane was still on a diet and skipping lunch, while Linda had left a thermos filled with soup and a sack containing carrots and grapes on top of the file cabinet. She found a plastic spoon in the upper right desk drawer and started eating.

“What is it?” Diane asked. “Even through all that soup slurping, I can tell you’re dying to tell me something. Spit it out.”

Linda wiped her mouth with a napkin. “People are changing. This school is affecting people and making them different, not themselves.”

“I’m listening.”

“You know yourself about Jody’s disciples, and you know my opinion about some of the other things going on here.”

“Yes, I do. I even agree with some of them.”

“Well, something else seems to be happening. People are changing. And I don’t mean just their loyalties or ideas or whatever. Their
personalities
are undergoing some radical transformations.”

“Like who?” Diane asked. “Give me an example.”

“Trudy Temple, for one. I saw her threatening a girl with a tennis racket yesterday after school. Her arm was cocked back, and it looked like she was going to beat the kid. It wasn’t even some smart-ass punk, which might at least be understandable. It was Kim Nimura, who’s about four feet high and who I don’t think I’ve ever heard say a single word—she’s so shy. I went over there to see what was going on, to make sure Kim was okay, and Trudy shot me this look that practically curled my hair. You know that saying ‘If looks could kill’? Well, if they could, I’d be dead. And this was Trudy. Trudy! You know she’d never do anything like that. That’s not her.

“Paul Mays, too. He’s gone over to the dark side. I saw him laughing and talking with Jody and Bobbi this morning.”

“And you’re blaming this on . . .”

“The school,” Linda said. “The charter.”

“Which has some sort of magical power to influence people.”

“You’re being sarcastic, and that’s probably putting it too simply, but . . . yes.”

“Then why aren’t we affected?”

“I don’t know,” Linda admitted. “Maybe it’s like voodoo. You know how voodoo only works if you believe in it? Maybe this is the same kind of thing.”

“There’s no bigger believer than you, my friend, and you’re fine. Well, maybe not
fine
. . .”

“Come on.”

“And my textbook allowance was slashed. That’s an objective truth. It happened no matter what I believe.”

“Things like that, yeah. Practical things. Concrete, material things. But I think you have to believe in the power of the charter in order for it to have any effect on you personally.”

Diane closed her eyes. “I
do
believe in fairies! I
do
believe in fairies!”

“Knock it off.”

“Well . . .”

“People here
are
different, a lot of them. No matter what you might think. And maybe the explanation isn’t supernatural.” She fixed her friend with a level stare. “Despite the
ghost
that I saw. But you have to admit that this charter is cutting the campus in two—supporters and opponents—and that divide is just getting deeper every day.”

“That I agree with.”

Steve walked in, chewing the last bit of something, a can of Coke in hand. “Made it with time to spare!” he announced. He grinned. “What do you think Jody’d do to us if we were late? Hang us by our thumbs from the flagpole?”

Linda motioned toward him with a sweep of her arm. “I rest my case.”

“Huh?” Steve looked confused.

“I never had any argument about Jody. I agree with you there.”

Steve glanced from Linda to Diane. “What are you two talking about?”

“Linda thinks there’s something in the water here at Tyler—”

“In the
charter
.”

“—and it’s changing people and making them into someone they’re not.”

“Oh, it’s true,” Steve agreed. “I was talking to Paul yesterday, and remember how he was all militant and angry and anticharter? Well, now he’s a gung ho supporter of the administration. He’s like one of those brainwashed cultists. Even though I think they’re still going to phase out his EH program.”

Linda shot Diane a look. “See?”

“Okay, maybe there’s something to it,” Diane agreed. She looked at the clock. “But you’d better finish your lunch and we’d better get going. Or Jody
will
have us hanging by our thumbs.”

This time there were seat assignments. The principal wasn’t taking any chances by allowing her opponents to sit together, so in a variation of the ever-popular boy-girl-boy-girl arrangement, the placement of staff members followed a supporter-opponent pattern. Bobbi was in charge of actually seating people, and smirking, she led Linda to a seat as far away from Diane and Steve as possible. Craning her neck and looking around, Linda saw that most of her friends and closest allies were scattered to distant sections of the room.