Alphas (5 page)

Charlie narrowed her brown eyes. She was about to get exiled from Alpha Island—what did she have to lose? “I don’t want to
go to the academy for Darwin.”
Only,
she added silently. “I want to go for me.” 
And him. For us!

Shira turned to face her. “It’s a moot point, lolly,” she stated with feigned disappointment. “The admissions committee has
strict rules about nepotism stating that anyone related to an employee cannot attend.”

“But you
are
the committee!”

“That’s enough, Charlotte!” Bee insisted. She turned to Shira, her scowl dissolving like Crystal Light in water. “Clooney
sends his apologies. Will there be anything else, or can I release the circle-hold on the planes and prepare the ground crew
for arrival? ”

Shira tapped her nails against the platform railing, and the sky cleared instantly. “Unless…”

The single word hung in the air. Bee’s eyes widened in anticipation. Charlie held her breath.

“Unless”—Shira turned toward her longtime assistant—“you resigned. Then Charlie wouldn’t be related to anyone.” She grinned.

“What?” Charlie locked eyes with her mother’s, a barrage of sentiments passing silently between them. Bee’s fluttering lids
seemed to ask if this was what she really wanted. If she would be okay without her. If this would make her happy.

Charlie felt like her brain and heart were going to explode. Her mom was in a one-sided game of truth or dare with Shira,
where Shira thought up outlandish dares for Bee, and Bee had signed confidentiality agreements that would prevent her from
ever telling the truth or daring to call her bluff.

Until now.

“Very well.” Bee stretched up to her full height of five foot two. “I quit.”

“Are you kidding? Mom, you can’t!” Charlie blurted. Ever since her dad died, Bee had worked birthdays, holidays, weekends—work
was as much a part of Charlie’s mother as afternoon tea. And as much as Charlie abhorred Shira, she wasn’t sure Bee could
cope without her.

“It’s okay.” Bee reached for her daughter’s hand. Her lips were set in her
this discussion is over
line. Pride twinkled behind her brown eyes. “It’s your time, Charlie. And I’ve been meaning to visit Mum and Dad in Manchester
for twelve years. Don’t you think I’m overdue?”

“Are you sure about this, Bee?” Shira asked.

Bee gave a nod.

“Very well.” Shira nodded back.

It was a done deal.

A look flickered across Shira’s face that Charlie had never seen before. The corners of her lips lifted. Her brows relaxed
behind her glasses. Was that respect or the release of gas?

Bee pulled her daughter close and whispered into her ear. “Everything I did was for you. You have a gift. It’s time you shared
it.”

“But Mom, I can’t—” Charlie whispered back, unable to fully process what had just happened. Within minutes, the entire course
of her mother’s life had changed. And for what? A boy?

“Do we have a deal?” Shira extended her arm.

Bee elbowed her daughter in the ribs. Charlie surrendered and offered her right hand.

“No.” Shira shooed it away. “The other one.”

“Huh?” Charlie slowly held out her left.

Shira stepped to the edge of her platform, leaned forward, and slipped a bracelet off Charlie’s arm. In a single motion she
popped open the cameo and removed the round picture of her son. Pleased, she handed it back.

How did you know about the photo? How did you know which bracelet it was in? How can you just take that from me?
Charlie wanted to shout. But she couldn’t. Her stomach was in her throat.

The sky buzzed. A fleet of gold-tinted PAPs circled overhead, waiting for clearance to land. Shira nodded at Bee. Bee signaled
the crew to bring the planes in. It was her final job for Brazille Enterprises.

“As long as you’re here, you will focus on your studies,” Shira stated, watching her protégés descend onto the runway and
roll to a stop. “Darwin is off-limits. When you break up with him, leave this conversation out of it. A true alpha makes sacrifices
for her goals. And he will be your first sacrifice.” She made a fist around the photo and squeezed. “Understood?”

Charlie gasped.
Break up with Darwin
? Charlie inhaled deeply, trying to steady herself with her breath. How could she lose her mom
and
Darwin, all in ten minutes? Then again, what was the alternative? Boarding school in New Jersey? A long-distance relationship
with the two most important people in her life? At least now she’d be able to
see
one of them. And maybe in time, if she got the grades, Shira would see that she was good enough for her son. And her mom
could get her job back and—

“Understood?” Shira pressed.

“Understood,” Charlie managed.

Shira’s lips curled back against her teeth. To the untrained eye, it might have looked like a smile. But Charlie knew better.
It was the look of a predator preparing to devour her prey.

“Welcome to Alpha Academy.”

Skye skipped down the plane’s stairwell, downgrading her smile from high beam to low so as not to blind anyone with her excitement.
Her mint, jersey-knit dance skirt ballooned up, and she shoved her hands in her skirt pockets to push it down around her long,
tan legs. Just as her ballet flats made contact with the gold carpet that cut across the Jetway, the door of the private plane
closed behind her.

A glass tower rose in the distance, and green caterpillar-shaped trees waved in the breeze. She arranged her white-blond wavelets
behind her and blinked. Where was the welcome committee? Where was her adoring public? Where was
anyone
? She wasn’t used to being alone. It was her unwritten policy to have people around her at all times. The silence made her
felt a little lost and a little grown-up all at once, like the first time she’d flown by herself to visit her grandma in Florida.

Fishing her aPod out of her purse, she kept her eyes glued on the horizon, searching for signs of life.

“Follow the gold carpet,” a honeyed Australian voice piped in.

There, on the rectangular screen of her aPod, was Shira’s face framed by her famous red waves. Heel-toeing along the carpet,
which sparkled like a thousand Swarovski crystals, Skye felt like Dorothy in Oz—only she never wanted to go home.

The carpet led her through a thicket of Joshua trees, and when she emerged on the other side of the green pine curtain, she
found herself staring at a pink sand beach and what appeared to be miles of blue water.

“Ohmuhgud,” she gasped, noticing the high-def rainbow up ahead.

WHOOOOOOO!

A translucent train that looked like a massive string of see-through pearls slithered along the sand and stopped in front
of her. Skye tried to scope out the other girls, but all she saw was the back of their blowouts as they climbed inside their
personal train cars.

Was a student body more alpha than OCD’s even possible? And if it was, what did it look like? September
Vogue
? She was gagging to know. Or was the bitter taste of chocolate in the back of her throat the jet’s mini cupcakes going AWOL
after the private plane ride?

Once inside, Skye settled into an egg-shaped Lucite chair. An identical one faced her; only it was empty. For a moment Skye
tried to imagine who she would want joining her on this dreamlike adventure, if she could pick one person to fill the seat.
She ran through her long list of friends, boyfriends, and dance friends. But no one from the past seemed good enough for the
future. Not even her perfect mother. Not when the future looked like
this
! Why wear last year’s dance shoes in next year’s recital?

A small silver wheel next to the chair turned like a mini Ferris wheel, rotating an assortment of mini snacks—tiny bags of
veggie chips, bite-size brownies, and those mini candy bars that kids get at Halloween—the kind Skye had never outgrown and
loved year round. Miniatures made her feel like she was larger than life, like the world was in the palm of her hand.

She grabbed a tray of mini beakers filled with colored water—blue, purple, pink, and yellow—and took a sip. They looked like
drinkable glow sticks and tasted like candy. Then she turned her attention to the @-shaped map that suddenly appeared before
her.

A blinking gold arrow next to the words 
Skye Hamilton is here
was flash-traveling from the opening of the circle toward the
a
inside. Skye fought the urge to press her glossed lips to the train’s window to get a better view of the miragelike oasis
that rose out of the dusty desert. Clear water and palm trees were whisking by. She was moving!

“Welcome to Alpha Academy, Skye.” Shira Brazille, dressed in a single-shouldered black Grecian dress and dark round sunglasses,
suddenly appeared in the other chair.

Skye gasped, and then giggled nervously.

“Oh, hi, Ms. Brazille.” She choked back the bitter taste of chocolate once again. “It’s a total honor to meet you!” Right
hand out like a true professional, Skye leaned forward to shake Shira’s hand, but her fingertips went straight through the
Australian mogul and she fell to the floor.

“You cannot interface with this hologram,” a stern British accent warned.

Skye straightened back up, concealing her blushing cheeks behind a wall of blond hair.

Shira cackled. “Nothing is ever what it seems, is it?” She kept laughing, like this was some practical joke they’d been pulling
on each other for years.

Skye faced the window, urging her cheeks to transition from fuchsia back to rosy glow.

“My campus is inspired by the Acropolis,” Shira’s hologram explained as they zipped past palm leaves that turned to cherry
blossoms like someone had hit “replace all.” Seconds later the heavy pink blooms turned to flowering cacti.

“What is this place?” Skye marveled. She had been to the actual Acropolis and seen the ruins with her parents, but there was
nothing Greek looking about the super-futuristic architecture springing up around her like pages in a pop-up book. Instead
of marble structures crumbling, glass towers soared. The scenery reminded her of dancing—fluid and ever-evolving.

“Behold the Pavilion,” Shira bellowed as they passed an oblong structure with white steel wings stretching out from its center,
like a phoenix rising.

“It has bris soleil—sunshades that open and close depending on the amount of sunlight.”

As if on cue, the building’s wings began to flap, creating breezy shade.

“Ohmuhgud.” Skye blinked her eyelids sharply, trying to snap a mental picture for her friends and family back home. No matter
how many international dance tours her mother had been on, she had definitely never seen anything like this.

“The Pavilion is the central gathering place. Inside are the health food court, shops, lounges, the spa, and a salon. You
won’t need money to buy anything. Just good grades, which have a monetary value and will be immediately deposited in your
personal account—you access it through your aPod. You can eat for a week off an A. But an F will leave you skinnier than salmonella.
It’s just like life, m’dear. You fail, you starve.”

Skye giggled on the off chance that Shira was joking.

“You’ll notice that all the structures here are curved.” Hologram Shira pointed out the Zen Center (a giant building shaped
like a cross-legged Buddha), the harp-shaped Music Hall, and the ark-shaped zoo full of endangered animals. “There are no
angles at Alphas—in the architecture, anyway.” Shira threw her head back and laughed. She didn’t have a single filling in
her entire mouth.

The train looped into the ultramodern Tokyo Times Square-esque area, located to the north of the Pavilion.
WELCOME SKYE!
scrolled across each electronic billboard. Then the digital letters morphed into different images of her dancing. Skye’s
performance at Juilliard last summer, showcases at Body Alive, home movies of her and her mother performing a pas de deux.
A cell phone video of her and the DSL Daters freestyling. Were the girls in the other bubbles seeing this, or did they have
their own greatest-hits reels?

Shira’s hologram gestured out the window to a vertical farm, with each floor housing a different crop, from super fruits like
açaí berries to staples like green beans or those adorable little grape tomatoes. “Alphas is one hundred percent green. Solar
panels power the island, and every building is smart and energy efficient.”

“Just like you,” Skye joked. But the hologram didn’t get it. Instead, it stared straight at her with a
let me know when you’re done doing amateur stand-up so I can continue
glare. “Sorry.” Skye bit her bottom lip.

As the bubble train rounded another corner, rows of empty snow globe–shaped domes emerged. The train pulled closer, and Skye
realized that there were no defining house numbers or street names to identify the residences, just the glittery autographs
of the alpha females the houses were named for radiating off the glass.