The Academy (43 page)

She kept up a running lecture as they carried her what felt like down the hall, through the living room and out the front door.

“We’re going outside? I didn’t hear the door close. Did you close it? Did you lock it? What if someone comes in while we’re gone and steals everything?”

If her goal was to embarrass him in front of his friends, it didn’t work. Her comments were met with stony silence. She was carried into what had to be a van and placed inside, the same hands holding her as the vehicle sped down the road, although at least the fingers had been removed from her inner thighs and butt.

It was amazing how acute her other senses seemed since the pillowcase had temporarily deprived her of her sight. She felt every small bump in the road, every acceleration and deceleration of the van, heard every breath of her otherwise silent captors, every creak and groan the vehicle made.

Then they stopped, then they were there, and her nightie flipping up once more, unfamiliar hands shoved once again into inappropriate places, she was carried somewhere through the cool open air before finally entering someplace warm and put down. The pillowcase was removed from her head.

And she was in the Tyler High School office.

It had to be after midnight, but it might as well have been midday. All the lights were on and all the desks appeared to be occupied. Secretaries were typing on computers; clerks were on the phone. She even saw a student assistant walk by carrying a stapler to one of the offices down a short hallway at the rear of the room.

The hallway.

She found herself staring at the short, seemingly unremarkable corridor. Something about it made her feel uneasy, and Kate realized that despite her tough stance earlier in the evening, she was afraid.

A door in the hallway opened, and Jody Hawkes emerged, walking toward her and smiling. Another woman, with a belligerent face and the mien of a lap-dog,accompanied her. As the two of them drew closer, Kate could read the woman’s name tag. BOBBI EVANS, it said, ADMINISTRATIVE COORDINATOR.

“You’ve come to pay your fine,” Bobbi said. It wasn’t a question but a statement.

“Yeah, I have my checkbook hidden here in my nightgown.” Kate turned away from the woman and faced the principal. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” It was hard to be dignified when she was nearly naked in someone else’s workplace, but anger saw her through. She looked behind her to find Tony and tell him that they were both going to get out of here and go home, but all four of the scouts had disappeared.

“You are here,” Jody said, “because you failed to volunteer, as required by the Tyler High School Charter and the contract which you yourself signed.”

“As a matter of fact, I did volunteer, but your art teacher is a pervert and your PTA is a bunch of psychotics. I was going to volunteer again in Tony’s math class later this week. But of course you didn’t even try to find that out.”

“Do you want to see what a
true
volunteer looks like? A
real
involved parent?” Motioning for her to follow, the principal led Kate to a door to the right of the hallway that sported a plaque reading CONFERENCE ROOM. The administrative coordinator followed close behind.

The principal opened the door. Inside, a long table had been pushed against the back wall, and a handful of women were kneeling on the carpet, facing forward. In front of them stood a woman with a shaved head, wearing a long simple peasant robe. She looked like a medieval penitent, only her robe was black with an orange belt—Tyler’s colors—and on the back of her head was a similarly two-toned tattoo of the Tyler tiger. She was leading the other women in a chant: “. . . I hereby renounce my religion, my friends and my family. With full heart and serene mind, I dedicate myself to the PTA and pledge my troth to John Tyler High School.”

Kate turned away.

“It shames you, doesn’t it?” the principal asked.

Kate turned on her. “No, it’s crazy. And it doesn’t make any sense. Renounce their families? Their kids are the reason they’re here! How could they renounce them?”

“Because they’ve gone
beyond
that.” There was a fanatic glint in the principal’s eyes that made Kate realize that the woman might very well be insane. “Their loyalty is no longer to
their
children but to
all
of our children, to the
school
. This is the type of mother who deserves to have her child in a charter school, and this is the type of charter school that deserves to have such a mother volunteering for it. This is the wave of the future. This is where
you
should be.”

“Drop dead,” Kate told her.

Bobbi stepped forward. “Then you must pay the fine.”

Kate leaned forward. “I’m not paying you a red fucking cent.”

The principal smiled. “Let’s go into my office.”

Kate smiled back. “Let’s not. You had your goons break into my house—”

“Tyler Scouts.”

“Your
goons
break into my house, kidnap me, then bring me here, where I consider myself to be imprisoned. You are looking at not just a civil but a criminal lawsuit, and when I’m through with you, you won’t even be able to get a job cleaning toilets at a Kwikee Mart.”

“Let’s go into my office.”

It wasn’t a request but an order, and astonishingly, the administrative coordinator
pushed
her from behind and forced her to follow the principal around the corner and into the short hall. Immediately upon passing through the entryway, she was overcome with a dread so palpable that she nearly froze in her tracks. Then the principal was opening the door to her office, Bobbi was pushing her from behind and they were walking inside.

One look at the room and Kate knew she was in deep trouble. This was like no office she had ever seen. The floor was hard dirt pocked by holes and piles of clumped excrement that could have been animal but appeared human. The walls were a mélange of dark colors—black, purple, brown—that looked as though they had originally been stripes and had melted into the mess she saw now. Taped over what had to be a window were irregularly cut pieces of white and yellow construction paper on which were drawn crude crayon renderings of male and female genitals. On the ceiling was painted one of those yellow happy faces, but the paint was old and faded, dull rather than bright, and instead of a curved-line smile, there was a black circle from which hung a cord and a single bare lightbulb. A frowning face was drawn on the bulb in marking pen.

“That will be all,” the principal told Bobbi. “Leave us alone.”

The administrative coordinator left—reluctantly, Kate thought—and closed the door behind her.

“Sit,” the principal said.

There was no place
to
sit. The office was completely devoid of furniture save for a couple of twisted pieces of metal that could conceivably have been chairs at some point in their existence, and a broken wooden table on which were stacked various whips and knives and weapons.

Kate remained standing.

“I said
sit
!” Jody Hawkes picked up a bamboo cane and made slashing motions in the air with it.

Kate made no effort to move.

Suddenly, the principal was no longer alone. There was a man behind her, a tall, full-bearded man in an old-fashioned topcoat. Kate had no idea where he’d come from. He could have been there all along—his dark clothes blended in with the muddy colors of the walls—but she was pretty certain that he had simply appeared. She was not even sure the principal was aware of him. For a brief second, she thought he might be there to punish or harm the other woman, but it became instantly clear from the fact that he was shadowing her, mimicking her every movement, that he was on her side, that in some terrible way he was part of this room.

The principal cut a swath through the air with her cane. “You will not leave this office—”

Until you pay the fine,
Kate expected her to conclude. But there
was
no conclusion to the sentence. That was it.

You will not leave this office.

She’d had enough. Kate turned to open the door.

The cane struck her across the shoulders. The impact was excruciating, and Kate felt a warm wash of blood trickle down the cold skin of her back. She cried out reflexively, automatically, an instant response to the infliction of pain, but she did not falter, did not stop and continued reaching for the knob.

Another cane smacked hard against her hand. Bones broke this time, there was once again blood and she saw out of the corner of her eye the bearded man wielding a cane of his own, one of dark wood with a silver head that looked like something Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would use.

Before she could even scream, both figures were attacking, blows raining down upon her from all sides as they circled in, canes flailing. She dropped to the floor, her chin landing in excrement, and she was vomiting even as the two canes beat the life out of her.

It was the principal who struck the final blow.

“You’re not a real parent,” she said, raising her arms high.

And then there was only blackness.

*

Brad told his parents that Ms. Montolvo, his Spanish teacher, wanted to talk to them. She wasn’t his worst instructor—that would be Mr. Connor or maybe Mr. Myers—but she’d definitely been acting very peculiar lately. She was the teacher who had changed the most since the beginning of the semester, and her behavior was strange enough that an encounter with her might enable his parents to see how bad things were getting.

And while she was freaky, she was not yet dangerous.

Unlike Mr. Connor or Mr. Myers.

It was a risk, a gamble, but he’d called both Myla and Ed last night when he’d first thought of it, and they’d both agreed it was a good plan. All three of them had attempted to tell their parents about what was happening at Tyler High, but to no avail. After all, what ordinary person would believe an honest account of the horrors they’d experienced? His parents and Ed’s had been so irritated by their constant barrage of stories that it was almost a boy-who-cried-wolf situation, and their failed efforts to contact the police had only further put them in the doghouse. It was doubtful that their parents would believe
anything
they had to say on the subject. So he’d come up with the idea of telling his mom and dad that he was having trouble in Spanish and that his teacher wanted to have a conference.

His dad had e-mailed Mrs. Montolvo and set up an appointment for a meeting in the morning before school.

His mom had to work at the last minute—another nurse called in sick—but his dad had the morning off, so the two of them drove to school early and Brad purposely took his father through the gate in the wall that led to the lunch area. He was hoping for a glimpse of that ghostly playground or even some dead birds by the backboards, but nothing unusual was visible at all, and he directed his dad through the corridor that led to the foreign-language classrooms.

Ms. Montolvo’s door was open, the light on inside, as the two of them approached. Brad wiped his hands on his pants, nervous all of a sudden, unsure why he had thought such an idiotic idea might work. His dad knocked on the doorframe. “Anybody home?” he asked jovially.

Ms. Montolvo stood. “Mr. Becker, I assume. Come in, come in. You, too, Brad.”

This was not going well. She looked normal today, and was acting like a regular teacher. Yesterday, she had been wearing what looked like clown makeup, which appeared especially odd against the two tones of her uniform, and when Tami Yoshida had mistakenly used the masculine rather than feminine form of a word in a sentence, she had inexplicably and nonsensically started railing against what she believed were the evils of computer animation.

“So,” she said, offering them both a seat at the table near the window, “what did you want to see me about?”

Brad’s heart lurched in his chest.

His dad frowned. “I thought you wanted to see me.”

Laughing lightly, she touched his hand, lowering her eyes coquettishly. “Oh, I do.”

Thank God. The craziness was starting.

“So how
is
Brad doing?” his father asked.

“Oh, he’s a fine student. We just had our first test last week, and he did very well. He also raises his hand and participates in class.”

Brad felt like he was in first grade.

His dad frowned again. “So there’s no real problem?”