The Academy (37 page)

Diane understood. The counselor was unhappy with this new arrangement, wanted to get the word out about it and was doing it through her. “Just one more question: how long are students put in detention—I mean the Penalty Space?”

“It varies. From a half hour or an hour to . . . five days.”

“Five days!”

Ms. Tremayne nodded but said nothing.

“And where is this room?”

The counselor paled. “You don’t want to go there.”

“Come on. Where is the Penalty Space? I just want to get a look at it.”

“You won’t be allowed in.”

“I just want to see the outside.” Diane had never encountered such resistance to such a simple request, and it unnerved her a little. More than a little. And she wondered what it was about the room that inspired such steadfast stonewalling.

“It’s room one sixty-six,” Ms. Tremayne finally admitted. “But it’s . . . hard to find.”

“How could it be hard to find?”

“It just is.”

“It’s right after one sixty-five, right?”

“Theoretically.”

Talking to the counselor was getting her nowhere, and while Diane appreciated her help and obvious sympathy, she could not stomach all this fearful tiptoeing around any subject that had to do with disciplinary procedures. “That’s okay. I’ll find it.” She stood, thanked the woman and opened the door to leave.

“Be careful,” the counselor warned, her voice barely above a whisper. “And don’t go
in
the Penalty Space. You can look at it from outside, but don’t go in.”

Diane nodded.
The Penalty Space can’t be worse than this hallway,
she thought as she made her way quickly down the short corridor away from the counselor’s door. Indeed, Linda was right—there
was
something about the office that seemed ominous, and it wasn’t just the automaton TAs or the openly hostile secretaries. It was something in the building itself, and for the first time she thought that maybe she
shouldn’t
go to the Penalty Space. At least not alone.

Still, it couldn’t hurt just to look at it from afar, and she walked out into the quad and over to the science building. Room 166 was on the opposite side, down the narrow corridor that separated the science and arts buildings, and she headed up the walkway that led there. The room was at the building’s far extremity, where the corridor dead-ended at the wall, and even looking at the spot from this far away, she felt nervous. That portion of the hallway seemed to be shrouded in shadow, and though it was broad daylight and the sun was shining overhead, it might as well have been night. This was the middle of the school day, and all the surrounding classrooms were filled with students, yet she felt as though she were all alone. There was no noise coming from any of the closed doors in the science building nor any sign of movement from within the closed tinted windows in the adjacent arts building. It was as if the school were empty, and thinking about Ms. Tremayne’s warnings—

You don’t want to go there

—she decided that maybe this was not the time to check it out.

She turned around, went back to her classroom.

When Nathan Whitman returned the next day, he was not himself. He was kind, patient, thoughtful, a model student. That should have made her happy—it certainly made a lot of his other instructors happy, if teachers’-lounge scuttlebutt was to be believed—but Nathan was no longer Nathan. He was a different boy in the same body. That alone was cause for consternation. But when Lisa Piccolo and Joel Grazer both admitted that two of their students had also been sent to the Penalty Space and had emerged brainwashed and different, Diane knew that this was not just a fluke. Something
happened
in there, something that worked consistently and that somehow turned problem kids into perfect little angels.

As convenient as it might be for teachers, she could no longer allow any child to be subjected to whatever sort of indoctrination or extreme behavior modification occurred in the Penalty Space.

So for the past week she’d avoided writing referrals for any student, no matter how badly they misbehaved. They
were
children, after all, and even the transgressions of the worst of them did not make them deserving of this treatment. She felt weighted down with guilt for what had happened to Nathan, and she even made a phone call to the boy’s parents to discuss it with them, but they were thrilled with the change in their son and rather than condemning the school for transforming him into someone he was not, they had nothing but praise for it.

Lisa and Joel—as well as Steve and Ray—agreed with Ms. Tremayne that she should stay as far away from the Penalty Space as possible, but Linda understood both the horror she felt and the curiosity, and she suggested that they check out the room together.

“I mean, come on,” Linda said. “Windowless prison cells where kids are kept for
days
? With an ever-presenttorturer—I’m sorry, ‘punishment facilitator’? Can this even be legal?”

“We keep saying that, but we never follow up on it. No one does. No one does anything about what’s happening here.”

“It’s time for us to change that.”

“How?”

“First of all,” Linda said, “you’re a department head.”

“Big whoop.”

“That means,” she continued evenly, “that you have a certain amount of clout or respectability or
believability.
Particularly to the outside world. Now, we’ve all been taking notes, right? Keeping detailed track of everything that happens?”

Diane smiled. “That husband of yours is something.”

“He comes in handy sometimes. And he’s right about this. We have to fight fire with fire. We have to beat Jody at her own game. She no doubt had facts and figures to show the district and the state that Tyler was a good candidate to become a charter school. And you see how obsessed she is with keeping test scores up. If she doesn’t meet projections, our charter’s yanked.”

“Praise be.”

“
We
need to show those same people the extent she’s going to reach those goals. It’s been, what, two weeks since our meeting? I think it’s high time we have another get-together, pool what we’ve gathered so far and see what we have. Opinions, facts, all of it.” She took a deep breath. “And it sounds like this Penalty Box—”

“Penalty Space.”

“Okay, Penalty Space can be a real feather in our caps.
This
is the kind of thing that’s going to hang her.
This
is what’s going to help us get back to normal.”

Diane thought for a moment. “What scares me is how scared Ms. Tremayne was. I don’t know her that well—”

“Neither do I.”

“—but she seems like one of the good guys, despite her position. She
really
didn’t want me anywhere near that room, and I don’t think it’s because she was trying to hide something. She seemed genuinely afraid for me. And, let’s be honest, what that place does is brainwash students. They come out different than when they go in. This is where Stepford students are made. And what I’m worried about is that if one of us goes in there, we’ll come out . . . one of them.”

“Which is why we’re
both
going in.”

“Oh no, we’re not,” Diane said firmly. “No, we’re not. One of us needs to stay outside. This is one of those situations where you tell someone that you’re going hiking so that if you don’t return on time they can send a search party after you. I mean, who knows if we can even get in, right? But if we can, and we decide to go through with this and check it out, one of us needs to remain free. Because if we both get brainwashed . . . there goes the ball game.”

“Okay,” Linda said. “I see your point.”

“And I’m the one going in.”

“Wait a minute. I don’t think you—”

“I’m the one who sent Nathan Whitman to detention. It’s my fault he is the way he is. It’s my responsibility to go in there, see what’s happening and find out if there’s some way I can set things right.”

Linda nodded. “Okay,” she agreed. “So what’s the plan?”

“Tomorrow before school.”

Linda smiled ruefully. “We’re talking about this like you’re going into some lion’s den. It’s a converted classroom in a suburban high school.”

Diane smiled back. “Yeah.” But neither of them believed that, and the next morning she found herself at the head of that hallway again, standing next to Linda and staring down at the shadowed area in front of room 166. It could have been her imagination, but the shadows seemed to be
swirling,
like mist, and she didn’t mention it to Linda because she did not want her suspicions confirmed and did not want to chicken out. She looked at her watch. “It’s seven fifteen,” she told her friend. “If I’m not back by seven thirty, do something.”

“It might not be open,” Linda pointed out. “It’s early. None of the other teachers are here yet. . . .”

“Kids are locked in there for
days,
” Diane reminded her. “Someone can let me in.”

“I’ll wait here until you
are
in,” Linda said. “I’ll let them see me. They might not screw with you if
they
know that
I
know you’re there. After that, I’ll go back to the department office and wait.”

“I’m kind of scared,” Diane admitted. “This is a lot of buildup.”

“I’ll go if you want.”

Diane shook her head. “No.” She started down the corridor, toward those swirling shadows, and with each step she took, the outside world seemed to retreat. There were classroom doors to her left, classroom windows to her right, but they seemed far away somehow and not really there. When she looked back toward Linda,
she
seemed to be the one in shadow, and when Linda said something to her, Diane could not hear what it was.

And then she was in front of the Penalty Space.

Room 166.

Taking a deep breath, she knocked on the door. She waited, knocked again. When there was still no answer, she tried the knob. To her surprise, it turned—it was unlocked—and gathering her courage, she pulled open the door and walked inside.

She was in a narrow hallway that stretched before her much farther than it should have, much more than the length of a classroom. The walls were dark but didn’t look like wood or plaster or concrete, and when she touched her finger to the wall on her right, it felt cold, like metal. The door closed behind her, and on impulse, she tried the knob.

It turned.

She’d expected it to be locked, expected to find herself trapped in here, and just knowing that she could get out and escape if she had to gave her a boost of confidence.

Diane walked forward. There was no light in the hallway, but she could somehow see, and a few feet down the passage, she stopped in front of a door on the left. A white “A” had been crudely painted at eye level, and when she looked down, there was only a knob, no dead bolt, no padlock. She stood for a moment and listened, then pressed her ear to the door.

Nothing.

Silence.

Tentatively, she knocked. “Hello?”

There was no response and she tried again. When still she heard no sound, she reached for the knob and turned it. The door opened. Within was a narrow space barely bigger than a closet. On the short wall opposite her was a flat bench of the type found in discount-store fitting rooms. The tiny cell was otherwise devoid of furnishings or adornment. There was no toilet, she noticed, but perhaps the Penalty Space was less prisonlike than she’d originally thought and there was a bathroom farther down the hall.

Less
prisonlike?

This little cubicle was
worse
than most of the prison cells she’d seen. There was barely enough room in there for one person, and she wondered where the “punishment facilitator” sat or stood whenever he . . . did what he did.

Diane closed the door, looked down the hallway. “Hello!” she called out.

There was no answer: no voices, not even any knocks or thumps on the wall. The place appeared to be abandoned. Maybe that was good. Maybe she wasn’t the only one who had stopped writing referrals and sending students to the office. Or maybe she’d just gotten lucky. There must have been some reason why Ms. Tremayne had not wanted her to come here—

Don’t go in the Penalty Space

—and perhaps it was fortunate that she’d arrived at a time between incarcerations. Touching the cold wall, she tried to imagine what it was about this converted classroom that worried the counselor so. There were, of course, the shadows outside that seemed to permanently shroud the entrance. And there was the fact that the hallway seemed much longer than was physically possible. But despite all that, Diane felt braver and more confident than she had before coming in here, and she pressed forward, knocking on the next door, inexplicably marked “Q.” When there was no response, she opened it.