The Academy (38 page)

Her mother was standing in front of the bench.

Diane gasped, slamming the door shut. She stood there for several seconds, catching her breath, then opened the door again.

Her mother was still there, and she was in her angry guilt-mongering lecture mode. Diane recognized the set of her mouth, the hard flatness of her eyes, the clenched right hand.

She slammed the door again. This was impossible. Her mother wasn’t dead, so this couldn’t be her ghost. And she lived in Massachusetts, so she couldn’t actually be here. Diane didn’t know what was going on, but she understood now Ms. Tremayne’s wariness.

Suddenly, the hallway was no longer silent. There were knocks and raps and tappings and thumps. Voices—some whispering, some screaming, some mumbling in a monotone—sounded from every direction, a cacophony of tongues so all-encompassing that it made her feel disoriented. The end of the passage was no longer visible but seemed misty and impressionistic, almost as though it was disintegrating before her eyes. Frightened, she turned to leave, and the door to the first cell—A—flew open, banging loudly against the wall. She ran past it, seeing
something
out of the corner of her eye, and shoved her shoulder against the entrance at the same time her hands tried to turn the doorknob.

It wouldn’t budge. It was locked.

No!

“Help!” she screamed, pounding on the door. “Let me out!”

Behind her, she could hear movement. Heavy footsteps, scuttling claws, increasingly loud voices getting nearer and nearer.

“Help!”

The door opened.

It was Linda. Diane practically tumbled outside and quickly slammed the door behind her.

“I couldn’t leave you here alone,” Linda said. “I had the feeling something might happen.”

Diane ran into her friend, hugging her gratefully, practically hyperventilating. “Did you see what was in there? Before I closed the door? Did you see anything behind me?”

Linda shook her head. “Just a dark hallway.”

“Jesus,” Diane breathed. “Jesus.”

“So what did you see? What
was
there?”

She shook her head. “I’ll tell you in a minute. Once we get out of here.” Holding Linda’s arm more tightly than was probably comfortable, she pushed her friend in front of her and hurried down the walkway to the end of the building. Passing the other nearby classrooms, she wondered if the students and teachers in them ever heard anything through the walls. She vowed to look up which teachers were in these rooms and talk to them.

They did not stop until they reached the quad, and Diane bent down, grabbing her knees and breathing deeply. Her heart was pounding as if she’d just run a race, and her hands were shaking.

“What was in there?” Linda asked.

Diane told her everything, from the beginning.

“So what was all that? What
is
in there?”

“I don’t know, but I’m never going back in.
No one
should.”

“Except Jody.”

Diane found herself laughing, laughing much more than the joke deserved, laughing until there were tears in her eyes. “Except Jody,” she agreed.

Linda smiled. “And maybe Bobbi.”

Twenty

The evening was cold, and the dark clouds that had been gathering throughout the day now obscured all trace of moon and stars. A crisp wind, not too strong but not too soft, fluttered the flags and banners that marked the perimeter of the carnival and sent crinkly autumn leaves swirling about the grounds. From one of the houses nearby came the smell of wood from a fireplace.

They could not have chosen a better night for the Harvest Festival.

The festival was being held on the field near the sports complex. Not the football field in the stadium, where games were played, but the field adjacent to the gym where the outside PE classes were held. Each of the on-campus clubs and organizations that wanted to participate and passed what Myla said was a strict and biased screening process could take part, and this year a record number had sponsored games and activities. An army of volunteer students, along with teachers and parents, had spent the better part of the week making decorations and planning the booths, and everything had been set up earlier today. It looked terrific.

There was to be a Sadie Hawkins dance in the gym afterward, a retro tradition that Tyler honored each year and that seemed to be perennially popular. Girls asked boys to the dance, rather than the other way round, and they also bought the tickets and corsages and arranged for pictures. Myla had asked Brad, of course, but no one had asked Ed, and although he professed not to care, Brad could tell that it hurt him. Still, Ed accompanied them to the festival, allowed in under Myla’s auspices. “Who knows?” he said. “I might get lucky and run into some dateless troll so desperate to go to the dance and be seen by her friends that she’ll give me a last-minute pity invite.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Brad warned.

Ed snorted. “Don’t worry, dude. They’re not.”

As Myla had promised, there
were
no dateless trolls at the festival. These were the beautiful people, the campus elite, the rich, attractive and predominantly white. Brad felt like a gate-crasher, unwelcome and unwanted among the prom queens, athletes and Tyler Scouts, but he refused to allow it to bother him, and he bought a bunch of tickets at the ticket booth, giving half to Myla, and they went around to various games, attempting to win prizes. Ed, too cheap or stubborn to participate, watched.

It was kind of fun, Brad had to admit, as he won a stuffed Shrek at the pep squad’s ringtoss game and a jack-o’-lantern Frisbee at the German Club’s beanbag throw. But as the evening wore on, he began to notice a growing crowd of people outside the chain-link barrier that had been erected around the field. There were only a few at first, but each time he looked past the lit booths to the gloom outside, he saw more and more peering in. They were students, many of them kids he knew, the ones not allowed to participate, only there was something about the darkness that made them seem odd, alien, unfamiliar, and for some reason he was reminded of dirty street urchins in an old Charles Dickens novel. There was a hunger in their faces, and a desperation, and though he couldn’t see what they were wearing, in his mind they were garbed in torn raggedy clothes. It was a strange reaction, one he didn’t understand, but it haunted him, and he kept looking back and forth between the wealthy, well-dressed Harvest Festival attendees playing carnival games and preparing for the dance, and the silently staring mob on the other side of the fence.

Myla was talking to one of her friends over by the dunk tank, and he and Ed had cornered Brian Brown and were grilling him about why he had been avoiding them and wouldn’t answer questions about Rachel’s death. (“What the fuck are you talking about?” he yelled. “It was a drunk driver! No one on the newspaper had anything to do with it!”) Then the lights that had been strung over a series of poles around the field flickered on and off several times. A power chord and a drumroll sounded from within the gym as the band inside indicated that it was nearly time for the dance to start.

Students started walking toward the open entrance of the gymnasium, and Brad glanced over at Myla. Brian took the opportunity to escape into the crowd, and Brad turned toward Ed. “What’s your plan?”

His friend shrugged. “Hang out, hug the wall.”

“You could go home if you want.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“No,” Brad assured him. “But this
is
a dance. I just thought it might be less awkward for you.”

“Doesn’t bother me. Awkwardness and I are old friends. I’ll just watch all the shiny happy people and plot my twisted revenge.”

“All right. But after the festival, you go home alone. Myla and I need some private time, if you know what I mean.”

“We drove separate cars. Of course I’m going home by myself.”

“I just meant don’t expect to meet up with us somewhere after we leave. We want to be by ourselves.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll head home to twang my tater and you can park somewhere and bend her over the backseat.”

Brad turned away. “Asshole.”

“Sorry,” Ed apologized. “Habit.”

Myla came over, her friends’ dates having found them. She offered her arm. “Ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

The carnival area was emptying out as students filed into the gymnasium. Arm in arm, Ed at their side, Brad and Myla trekked across the trampled grass to the gym. They walked inside. The interior of the gym had not been decorated so much as sponsored. There were banners depicting fall leaves and pumpkins, streamers in yellow, orange and brown, and balloons in bunches arranged strategically around the perimeter of the dance floor. All of them sported logos for various chain stores and eateries. The symbol for a well-known bank adorned the curtain behind the stage where the band was playing, and above the drink table were ads for the companies that had supplied the drinks.

“Welcome to the Microsoft Harvest Festival Dance in the Tyler High Starbucks Gym,” Ed said wryly. “Over in the Pepsi-Cola Corner you can sign up for the Apple iPod song request. . . .”

“Amazing,” Brad said, looking around. He turned to Myla. “Did you know about this?”

“I knew about it, but I didn’t think it was going to be this blatant. Or tacky.”

“A night to remember,” Ed said, “courtesy of our student council and Taco Bell.”

“It’s not that bad,” Myla said defensively.

“It’s pretty bad,” Brad admitted.

“Let’s just dance,” she told him.

Brad was not much of a dancer. In fact, he didn’t dance at all. But he held Myla on a couple of the early slow songs, swayed back and forth and faked it. When the tempo picked up, he went to get them both drinks. He grinned at Ed, standing alone by the drink table and nursing a cup of punch. “Having fun?”

“Tons.”

“You can still go home.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Ed shook his head. “I’ll never cave in to public pressure.”

“Masochist.” With a salute of his cup, Brad returned to the edge of the dance floor, where Myla was talking to Reba and Cindy and their dates. The last thing he wanted to do right now was socialize with those two snots, but he put on his best fake smile and handed Myla her drink. “How goes it, all?”

Either Myla sensed his true feelings or she was looking for a way out herself, because she took a sip of her drink, put a hand on his arm and said, “I want to get our picture taken.”

“Okay,” he said. He nodded a quick good-bye to the rest of the group, and the two of them headed toward the rear of the gym where a photographer had set up shop behind a curtained partition. As they got closer, Brad took a look at the long line of waiting couples and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to wait for twenty minutes just to have some guy overcharge us for some badly posed picture with a corny backdrop.”

Myla’s grip on his hand tightened. “Oh yes, you are. For one thing, this is our first dance. It’s important to me, and I want a memento. Secondly, it’s Sadie Hawkins. I’m paying. So get your butt in line and shut up.”

Laughing, he allowed himself to be dragged over to the photo queue.

The couple in line in front of them, a boy from his PE class and a girl he’d seen around campus but did not know, were talking about how maybe they shouldn’t have come here tonight.

“I kind of wish we’d gone to a movie instead,” the girl was saying. “This whole elitist thing rubs me the wrong way.”

“You, too?” Myla jumped in. “That’s what I was fighting against. I was on the Harvest Festival committee,” she explained.

Another couple—Ray Sandy and Anita Begole, who were both in his and Myla’s English class—had gotten into line behind them.

“We saw a whole bunch of kids outside the fence,” Anita said. “I don’t know if they were trying to get in or what, but there was definitely a
Tale of Two Cities
vibe to it.”

“I’m sorry,” Brad said to the girl in front of them. “I don’t know your name.” He pointed to the boy from his PE class. “Dane, right?”

“Yeah. This is my girlfriend, Laurie. You’re . . . Brad?”

He nodded. Introductions were made all around, and the six of them started comparing notes not just about tonight but about the entire semester so far. They were all concerned, all unhappy with the state of things, and the criticisms Brad heard made him feel much better. He’d felt like a spy behind enemy lines tonight, and in his mind all the people on the other side of the fence had become the exploited and all the people on this side the exploiters. It gave him hope to know that everyone here tonight was not of one mind, that he and his friends were not fighting against a monolithic enemy.