The Academy (45 page)

After dinner, they did the dishes together—what few there were—then relaxed, vegging out on the couch in front of the television until the late news came on. Frank checked his e-mail one last time while she took her vitamins and turned out the lights, and they met up again in the bedroom.

Linda took off her blouse and bra, then pulled off her skirt and looked down at herself, grimacing. “I have to wash these panties. They’re filthy. They need to give us at least three more pair.”

Frank grinned. “You want me to lick ’em clean?”

“I’ve been wearing them for two days already!”

“That’s how I like ’em.”

“You’re sick.” She paused, smiling. “Okay, you’re not. You’re actually sexy. In a dirty, nasty kind of way. And I probably would let you lick them if they didn’t have our charter school pledge printed there. Panty worship’s fine. Charter worship . . . that I will not tolerate.”

“Take them off, then, and let’s get down to business.”

She kissed his nose. “I really do want to shower first. It’s been a long day and I feel unclean. Working at Tyler will do that to you.” She kissed his mouth. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be right here.”

He was asleep by the time she got out of the shower, and she smiled as she watched him. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open and he was snoring.

Pulling down the covers, she crouched between his legs and took him into her mouth. He awoke, stretching and smiling, running his hands through her hair. When he was hard enough, she climbed on top of him and guided it in, riding him slowly and gently.

They came together.

And fell asleep in each other’s arms.

*

Greg went to bed early, but Diane stayed up late to correct papers.

It was going to be a long night. She still had creative-writing assignments from last week to grade, as well as today’s essay test, and if she hoped to have any kind of weekend, she needed to finish them all by Friday. It was her plan to grade all the stories tonight and all the tests tomorrow night. She prided herself on her quick turnaround, and despite everything that had been on her mind lately—
the Penalty Space

—she had no excuse for falling so far behind. She vowed to stay up all night if need be and get this job done.

Following her usual ritual, she shut off the television, made herself a pot of tea and turned off all the lights in the front of the house save the one over the dining room table where she worked.

The first story was by Kelly Hong, her best student. Diane smiled. If she were a less-conscientious teacher, she could just slap an A on that assignment without reading it and move on to the next one. Kelly had never turned in anything less than A work, and Diane knew that the girl’s obsessive perfectionism would not allow her to slack off this time. But she refused to cheat. It wouldn’t be fair to Kelly or the other students. Besides, she genuinely wanted to read the girl’s story. Taking a sip of tea, she opened the blue folder’s cover.

“Ms. Brooke Must Die!”
read the large-font title.

Diane frowned. That was odd. And very uncharacteristic of Kelly. She read the title again. It felt weird seeing her own name used in such a context.

She read on:

I don’t know when I decided that my English teacher, Ms. Brooke, had to die, but decide it I did, and nothing had ever felt more right. I finished my test and looked toward the front of the classroom, where the teacher sat at her desk, looking over the homework we’d turned in that morning. What I wanted more than anything was to slit her throat, to feel the blade of my knife sink into her flesh and sever the artery that pumped the blood into her twisted brain. . . .

Diane kept reading. Despite the distasteful subject matter, the story was well-done, and there was no real reason for her to give the assignment anything other than an A, although next to the grade, she wrote, “Disturbing.”

Diane picked up the next creative-writing assignment and looked at the title: “Assfuck Redemption.”

Assfuck?

A heavy weight seemed to settle in her stomach as she turned the page. Halfway down the paper, she spied her own name, and her gaze went immediately to that paragraph.

Ms. Brooke adjusted herself, pushing her buttocks out farther and higher in order to take him more deeply, her fingers fluttering between her legs as she manipulated herself from underneath. Her asshole was tight and soft and warm, and he grunted with animalistic pleasure as he drove it in hard. His orgasm was coming, and she cried out, too, as her furious fingers brought her to climax. With a feeling of great release, he thrust manfully, spurting deep into her willing ass as her sphincter muscle tightened around the base of his massive erection, squeezing out every last drop of his hot thick sperm.

Diane grimaced in revulsion. She refused to read any more. There was no way she could give this sickening fantasy anything resembling a decent grade. Frowning, she thought about Kelly’s story and picked up another paper, opening it at random. She read a few lines, did the same with another. And another. And another. They were all filled with graphic sex and appalling violence. As she sifted through the pile, glancing at sentences here, paragraphs there, she saw that they each had her as a main character. It was embarrassing and frightening and disgusting all at the same time. What made it even more disturbing was that each of the stories seemed to be fairly accomplished. Even her worst students, the ones who could barely string together a coherent sentence, had written pieces that were impressively detailed and relatively well executed.

Dispirited, she let the folder in her hands fall onto the table.

She couldn’t do this. Not tonight. She was tired, was disheartened and couldn’t even think clearly enough to decide what needed to be done. She certainly wasn’t going to correct the papers the way she ordinarily would. For now, she was going to go to bed, and tomorrow she would pretend to her class that she hadn’t read any of their work. Maybe by tomorrow evening some sort of solution would come to her.

Diane stood, finished the last cold dregs of her tea, put her cup in the sink, then turned off the dining room light and felt her way through the darkness to the hallway. In the bedroom, Greg’s nightstand light was on and he was on his side, lying sacked out in the center of the mattress. He often fell asleep while reading—“The best sleeping pill’s a good book,” he liked to joke—and she walked over to the bed to take off his glasses. He wasn’t wearing them, though, and she saw almost instantly that they had fallen off and he had rolled over and broken them.

“Greg,” she said. She tried to push him over, but there was something strangely heavy about his body. It had no give, and there was no reaction to her prodding. She felt his cheek.

His skin was cold.

“Greg!” she screamed. Using all her strength, she moved him onto his back, ripped open his pajama shirt and straddled his chest. She felt for breath, listened for a heartbeat, felt nothing, heard nothing and tried to remember her CPR as she pinched his nose, blew into his mouth and then pressed rhythmically on his chest. “Don’t die,” she sobbed. “Don’t die.” But she knew in her heart that he was dead already.

Still, she wouldn’t give up, and she kept administering CPR, pumping and blowing, pumping and blowing, pumping and blowing. . . .

She gave up at some point, her arms hurting, her lungs raw. She was crying hysterically, but some part of her thought that it might still be possible for him to be saved, and she reached over his body to pick up the phone and dial 911. Maybe the paramedics had machines she wasn’t aware of, or knew techniques that she didn’t, and would be able to bring him back.

She looked down next to him on the bed and, by his squashed glasses, saw the bound volume he’d been reading. She was staring at the title even as the police dispatcher answered the phone and asked her to please describe the emergency.

It was the John Tyler High School Charter.

Twenty-three

Afraid to attend most of their classes and needing time to plan, Brad, Myla and Ed ditched school for the rest of the week. They alternated their time between the public library and Ed’s house, where they went only when they were absolutely positive that neither of his parents was there.

Their research had finally paid off. They’d found an obituary for John Joseph Hawkes in an old newspaper, stating that he had died here in Santa Mara of “unnatural causes.” They’d also located a monograph Hawkes had written on the importance of discipline in learning, where he argued that dividing students into teams of scouts, teaching them each different survival skills and pitting them against one another in physical contests resulted in the students’ becoming more self-sufficient and motivated.

“Scouts!” Ed said excitedly, pointing at the computer screen. “See?”

“I see,” Brad said.

They’d uncovered as well, in a collection of Franklin Pierce’s documents that had been made available to the public through a virtual library, a letter John Hawkes had written to President Pierce. In it, he had described his plans for establishing the Academy and its support community. The most interesting line, however, was an unclear sentence that stated, “Mrs. F. has Agreed to Become Librarian.”

Ed pushed himself away from the computer as though it were emitting toxic rays. “Mrs. F.?” he said.

“It can’t be,” Brad told him.

“It might be,” Myla disagreed.

“It is,” Ed said.

Unfortunately, none of the information they’d discovered helped them in any practical way, and the only worthwhile idea they’d come up with was starting a blog in order to get the word out about what was happening at Tyler High. Since Ed was the most computer literate of the three of them, he set up an interactive home page, with Brad and Myla doing most of the actual writing. The hope was that others would add to their postings with examples of their own, and to this end they’d sent out anonymous e-mails to everyone they could think of, informing them about the existence of the Web site.

They’d even sent e-mails to the school district offices, the police and every media outlet they could think of.

It couldn’t hurt.

But by Saturday, they were getting restless. With Brad driving his mom’s Honda, they drove by the school, making several passes along the front before gathering the courage to drive around the block that contained the campus. Unfortunately, they could see little beyond the tops of the buildings over the brown brick security wall.

“Hey,” Ed pointed out. “They were right. There’s no graffiti.”

“Everyone’s
afraid
to write on that wall,” Brad said.

“You know, we could get expelled.” Myla’s voice sounded nervous.

Ed snorted. “For skipping a few classes? That’s one of the privileges of being a senior.”

“There’s an official senior ditch day. It’s in May. And we didn’t just skip a few classes. We were absent from all of our classes for half a week.”

Brad drove around the school once again, looking at the gates to see if any were open. For all three days—Wednesday, Thursday and Friday—Brad had expected his parents to yell at him when he’d come home from Ed’s, having been informed by the school that he had not been attending any of his classes. But no one from the office called; no notices arrived in the mail; no e-mail was sent.

It was as if, he thought now, the school didn’t care that they were gone.

He slowed the car.

Or was
glad
that they were gone.

“Myla’s right,” he said. “We can’t stay away forever. I think we’ve already pushed this thing to the limit. Right now, we can forge notes from our parents, turn them in and probably get away with it. Any longer, and we’d probably need a doctor’s signature. Then we’d be screwed.”

Ed pointed at the wall. “You really want to go back in there?”

“No. But I don’t think the school wants us back either.” He pulled to the curb and parked, turning to face them. “Think about it. Our teachers have been marking us absent for three days and no one from the office has bothered to call our parents to find out why. Doesn’t that seem suspicious to you?”

“Not necessarily,” Ed said.

“I think it is. We’re a threat and they know it. That’s why they’re happy we’re not there. I think we’re on to something. I think we can make a difference.”

“We’ve done all we can on the outside,” Myla added. “The Web site’s up. We need to go back and spread the word in person. Besides, it’s test week.” She sounded almost embarrassed. “I can’t miss that.”