The Academy (44 page)

“No, not at all.”

His father looked at him. “Well . . . I guess that’s good.” He checked the clock above the blackboard and stood. “I’m sorry to run like this, but I’m sure you have a class to prepare for, and I only came by to check on the status of my son here. . . .”

“Mr. Becker?”

“Yes?”

Ms. Montolvo leaned across the table. “I’ll lick your ass until you beg for mercy,” she whispered.

Brad didn’t know whether the teacher thought she was being quiet, or whether she didn’t care about being overheard, but he saw his father’s face redden. His dad glanced over at him, and Brad quickly looked away. He had never felt so embarrassed in his life. Inwardly, however, he was rejoicing. His old man would
have
to believe him now.

“I really have to go,” his father said stiffly.

Brad followed him out the door. “See?” he started to say.

But the moment his dad walked out of the classroom, it was as if he’d forgotten what had happened. He smiled at Brad. “Looks like everything’s fine. Glad to hear you’re doing well.”

“Uh, Dad . . . ?” he prodded.

His father looked at him blankly. “Yes?”

“Don’t you remember what she said in there?”
She offered to lick your ass,
he wanted to say, but he couldn’t bring that up.

Was he so pathetic that he’d let a little embarrassment keep him from opening his old man’s eyes to the truth?

No.

The campus was starting to get crowded, so he kept his voice low. “I think she wanted to have sex with you, Dad.”

His father chuckled. “That’s a good one, Brad.”

Brad felt himself starting to panic.
His old man had forgotten already!
Was the school getting to him? “She did,” he insisted. He took the plunge. “She said she’d lick your ass until you begged for mercy.”

His father’s face hardened. “That’s enough.”

“Look around you! There’s the wall I told you about! And my teacher’s crazy! There are ghosts here, Dad. And people are dying and disappearing. Everything I tried to tell you is true! You can see it for yourself!”

“I have to go. And you have to get to class.” His dad smiled, but the smile came too quickly, as though a switch had been flipped and it had been turned on by someone else. “I’ll see you this afternoon, buddy.”

And then he was gone, striding down the walkway toward the parking lot. Brad watched him go with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Your father’s a nice man.”

Brad jumped at the sound of Ms. Montolvo’s voice. She put a hand on his shoulder, spoke softly into his ear. “And I
would
lick his ass until he begged for mercy. I’d tongue his balls, too. And use his pubic hair for dental floss.”

Heart pounding, Brad hurried away from her as fast as he could without running and drawing attention to himself. Spanish was his first class, but now he was not even sure he was going to go. He didn’t see how he could sit there listening to Ms. Montolvo talk about conjugating verbs after what had just happened.

He couldn’t ditch, though. The teacher knew he was here today, and if he didn’t show up, she would e-mail his dad about it.

He didn’t want that to happen for
several
reasons.

He walked across the quad, going nowhere in particular, just needing to keep moving. Over in Senior Corner, there were no seniors. He saw on the small patch of grass what appeared to be a dog impaled on a stake embedded in the ground. Through the center of campus marched a squad of Tyler Scouts, swinging their arms in unison and heading toward the lawn at the front of the school, singing a military song.

This school was sinking fast. And they were going down with the ship, with no rescue in sight.

The bell rang, and while the thought of returning to Ms. Montolvo’s class put butterflies in his stomach, he was more afraid to not go than go. He waited until the last minute, however, making sure the room was filled with other students before he entered, and he sat down in his chair just as the final bell rang.

Ms. Montolvo spent the period ranting about the evils of rotoscoping.

Brad was glad Myla was in his biology class third period. Seeing her always gave him a lift, no matter what was going on. Yet something felt wrong from the second they walked in. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but the classroom seemed weird and uncomfortable to him, the air thick and heavy. He met Myla’s eyes. She felt it, too.

He wasn’t sure anyone else had noticed. The two nerds in the back row were discussing comic books; the slutty girls in the corner were whispering and giggling among themselves; the majority of the students were staring into space or doodling on their notebooks the way they always did.

Brad sat down slowly, feeling like an astronaut trying to maneuver around in one of those bulky space suits.

Mr. Manning, seated at his desk, was staring at the back wall of the room, smiling. The last bell rang and the students waited, but the teacher remained where he was. There were a few muffled giggles and some restless movement. Brad watched the teacher. There was no mirth in that smile, he thought. It was grim—angry, even—and it looked as though it could snap off at any second.

In the center of the class, Antonio Gonzalez made a snorting noise. “Hey, dude,” he said. “You gonna teach today or what?”

Several kids laughed.

The teacher stood. Still smiling, he walked down the aisle and, without warning, grabbed Antonio by the hair, yanking him out of his seat.

“Oww!” the boy screamed. “What the fuck—?”

Mr. Manning punched him hard in the stomach.

The entire class watched as Antonio doubled over, seeming almost to deflate as he did so. He was a big kid and Mr. Manning was not a tall man, but in seconds those dimensions seemed to have been reversed. “Faces forward,” the teacher ordered. His voice was loud—harsh and angry enough to brook no resistance. Brad shot a quick look at Myla before following the rest of the class and complying. He stared at the blackboard as from behind came sounds of hitting and slapping, followed by grunts of pain.

Heads were turning, and Brad couldn’t resist the temptation either. Slowly, surreptitiously, he shifted in his seat, looked back and saw Mr. Manning shove Antonio to the rear of the room. There was an alcove there with a sink and counter beneath a series of shelves containing chemicals and scientific paraphernalia. “You’ll stay there for five minutes!” the teacher ordered.

Only . . .

Only the alcove was dark. The lights in the room were on, and banks of windows faced the sun in the east, but somehow the alcove had become suffused with shadows so murky that Antonio seemed almost to disappear within them. Brad didn’t want to think about how that was possible, and he faced forward once again, reminded for some reason of that playground he and Ed had seen in the fog.

The teacher strode to the front of the class and, as if nothing had happened, began writing on the board. “Take notes!” he ordered, and there was a rustle of papers as everyone opened their notebooks, grabbed their pencils and began copying down what the instructor was writing. As always, Mr. Manning did not lecture but simply filled the blackboard with outlines and definitions that he expected his students to duplicate in their notes.

He filled the first half of the board, then the second. Erasing what he’d initially written, he picked up a new piece of chalk and began writing on the first half of the board again.

Finally, he put the chalk down, dusting off his hands. “You can come out now, Antonio,” Mr. Manning said pleasantly, addressing the rear of the room.

The boy emerged from the shadows, stumbling into a desk, his legs wobbly and uncertain, as though he were just learning to use them again after a long time off his feet. He seemed to have wet his pants—there was a large stain on the crotch of his jeans—and the expression on his face was one of complete befuddlement. He was drooling. Students scooted their desks aside, giving him room as he lurched up an aisle toward the front of the class.

He reached the teacher’s desk, leaned against it and moaned incoherently.

“Joey?” Mr. Manning said. “Patrick? Would you come here, please?”

Two boys stood, looking at their classmates with trepidation as they stepped up to the front of the room.

The teacher pulled Antonio away from his desk, taking one of his wrists and giving it to Joey, handing the other one to Patrick. “Take him to the special-ed room,” Mr. Manning said. “He’s aphasic.”

“Aphasic?” Patrick asked. “What does that mean?”

Mr. Manning grinned. “It means he’s a retard.”

Brad looked over at Myla, saw fear on her face that mirrored his own.

“The rest of you open your books and turn to chapter three. . . .”

*

Linda arrived home feeling good, bearing sandwiches from Pepino’s Italian Deli, although she realized that she should have called Frank ahead of time, because she found him in the kitchen taking a baking dish of Pasta Roni out of the microwave.

“Where were you?” he asked. “You were late, so I figured I’d better make dinner.”

“You call that dinner?”

“You knew I couldn’t cook when you married me. Where were you?”

“We had another meeting. After school.”

“And how are things coming?”

“Not bad,” she admitted, putting the sandwiches down on the counter. “I also heard from the employees’ association. The Ninth Circuit’s agreed to hear their case. We might have union representation once again.”

“Or it might be tied up in court for years.”

“Or that.”

He picked up a fork and tried a bite of his clumpy pasta. “So what happened at your meeting?”

“Everyone’s been following your suggestion: keeping notes, saving memos, writing down dates and times.”

“Good.”

“Several teachers have been doing further research, and it may interest you to know that this is not an isolated occurrence. Or at least part of it isn’t. Several charter schools have been beset by megalomaniac principals. We’ve been in contact with teachers there, and some of them have managed to have their principals removed. Others have had their charters revoked.”

“Bravo!”

Linda unwrapped one of the sandwiches. “It’s not all good news. Tyler has some problems to deal with that these other schools don’t.”

“Your ghosts,” Frank said.

“That’s a simple way of putting it, but, yes.”

He carried his baking dish to the breakfast table and sat down. Linda followed, bringing her sandwich. “But that seems to be charter related, too,” he said. “Right? Nothing strange or supernatural was happening before this semester.”

She gave his cheek a pinch. “I just love the way you matter-of-factly list the supernatural as one of several factors we need to consider.”

“I know, I know. You love my Spock-like brain.”

“It’s reassuring somehow.” She took a bite of her sandwich.

“So what’s your next step?”

“We have the first round of standardized tests next week.”

“Yeah?”

She put down her sandwich. “Yeah. The thing is, if our test scores go down from last year, on top of everything else we’ve gathered, I think we have a good shot at getting this charter revoked. I called Sacramento this afternoon, and that five-year trial period is not set in stone. If the benchmarks Jody promised to have us meet are not met, there’s a chance that we can get the charter nullified. Proof of malfeasance or misbehavior on the part of the administration or the charter committee would help as well. That’s what one of the other schools said, too.”

“I don’t understand.” Frank looked at her. “You’re going to ask your students to put their futures at stake and do poorly on their tests? Doesn’t that seem slightly unethical to you? Isn’t there some educators’ version of the Hippocratic oath that precludes that?”

“We haven’t worked everything out yet. But those achievement tests measure school performance, not individual performance. They’re blind. They wouldn’t affect the kids at all.”

“Still . . .”

She sighed. “It’s a dilemma. But it might be our only hope.”