The Academy (11 page)

“Later.”

After class, they met up again by the lockers, stopped to chat with Stewart Bigley, who claimed to have news about the mascot costume but didn’t, and were late getting to math. To Brad’s surprise, Mr. Connor, standing in front of the class, didn’t lecture them for their tardiness but simply gave them a disapproving look as they sat down in their seats.

The teacher scanned the room. “Now, I know you all want to talk about Mr. Dolliver and what happened, but I’m here to tell you that in
this
class we are not going to waste time with idle speculation. This is an algebra class, and we will be studying algebra, the same way we do every day. Now I want you to do problems five through fifteen on page twenty-three. When everyone has finished, we will correct them together. You have ten minutes.”

Dolliver?
What
had happened? Brad glanced over at Ed, who shook his head and shrugged his shoulders to indicate his own bewilderment.

Connor kept the lid on and didn’t give anyone the chance to talk, and it wasn’t until after the bell rang and they were walking out the door that Brad was finally able to ask Joey Maswick what had happened.

“You didn’t hear? They found kiddie porn on his computer.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah. Little naked boys and stuff.”

“
Gay
kiddie porn?”

“That’s what I heard.”

Ed’s eyes widened. “Fuck howdy.”

Brad gave him a hard stare.

“I guess he’s suspended or whatever until they sort it all out, but I don’t think he’s coming back.”

“I don’t think so either,” Brad said.

Ed shook his head. “He doesn’t seem the type. Not that you can always tell, but . . .”

Brad had the same reaction, and as the three of them walked down the hallway, that seemed to be the consensus of everyone they encountered. In the quad, he looked over at Senior Corner. The mess had been cleaned up, but the small section of grass was still empty of students.

No seniors on Senior Corner.

He had never seen such a thing in the three years he’d been going to this school, and he found the sight troubling. The disquiet must have shown on his face, because when he met Myla outside biology, she immediatelyasked him what was wrong. “Nothing,” he said. But that wasn’t true, and she knew it, and they ended up getting into a fight.

He spent his lunch with Ed, watching crows and sparrows slam into the blacktop backboards as raucous students cheered them on.

*

Woodshop.

Last class of the day.

Ed walked past the drafting room and past metal shop, then slowed as he reached the long section of windowless wall before the woodshop door. Yesterday, he’d arrived early to class, and though the door had been open, the teacher was nowhere to be found. That had been scary. Woodshop was a magnet for some of the toughest and meanest kids in the school, students looking to graduate by doing as little academic work as possible, and quite a few of them hated his guts. Luckily, the three worst offenders were busy tormenting Wayne Dickey by the band saw and Mr. Ruiz arrived before they noticed Ed. But it had been a close call.

Today, he walked past the doorway as though he were on his way to auto shop and merely taking a casual peek as he passed by. But he saw Mr. Ruiz standing by his desk, saw no sign of bullies and quickly stepped inside.

Safe.

Todd Zivney and his buddies came in moments later, punching one another and laughing at a cruel prank they’d pulled on some kid in the halls. Zivney had been one of Ed’s chief torturers since eighth grade, the leader of his little gang of thugs, and Ed watched warily as he swaggered past Mr. Ruiz and sat on one of the worktables, awaiting the bell. Zivney scanned the room from his perch, and for a second, their eyes met. Ed looked quickly away, heart pounding.

“Mr. Zivney,” the teacher said loudly. “Please get off the table and sit down on your stool. I do not want to have to tell you this every day.”

The bully just looked at him, making no effort to comply.

“Mr. Zivney?”

The whole class was looking at him now, and Ed noticed for the first time that there was some sort of patch on the sleeve of his shirt. It looked official, almost like something a policeman or security guard would wear.
What was it?
Ed squinted, looking closer. The patch depicted a growling tiger, the school’s mascot, flanked by twin palm trees, with a silhouette of Tyler’s buildings in the background. He recognized the logo. It was the same one printed on the school’s letterhead.

He thought of that mascot costume stuffed with shit. It had been one weird fucking day, and it didn’t look like it was going to chill out at the end here either.

Zivney was staring silently at the teacher, refusing to budge.

“You’re going to the office,” Mr. Ruiz announced, taking out his referral pad.

Zivney hopped off the table. “No. I’m not.” There was something threatening in the way he said it, and in the way he started across the concrete floor toward Mr. Ruiz’s desk.

Ed’s stomach lurched, his heart pounding.

“I don’t have to listen to you. I’m a Tyler Scout now.” He pointed to the patch on his sleeve, pulled out a badge from his pocket. “I’ve been empowered by Principal Hawkes to enforce rules and regulations with students
and
teachers.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“Oh yeah? Principal Hawkes called me in for a meeting this morning and made me a deputy! It’s
my
job to make sure
you
do
your
job. And if you don’t . . .” The sentence trailed off ominously.

The teacher’s face was red and angry. He ripped a referral off the pad. “Please take this to the office, Mr. Zivney.”

The boy lifted his chin defiantly. “You gonna make me?”

Mr. Ruiz stood. “Yes, Mr. Zivney. I will.”

“Come on, old man. I’ll deck ya!” Zivney slipped the badge back in his pocket and put up his fists.

“Let’s take it outside,” the teacher said.

“No.”

Ed found it hard to breathe. This was not good. Mr. Ruiz was the only thing standing between himself and certain annihilation. Without the teacher’s protection, he was dead meat. He looked over at Wayne, saw a panic on the other boy’s face that mirrored his own. Most of the kids in class looked frightened, but Zivney’s buddies were laughing excitedly and elbowing each other.

Suddenly, the boy lunged. His right fist flew forward . . . and missed. Mr. Ruiz neatly sidestepped the attack and punched Zivney in the stomach. Not hard. Just enough to let the student know that he
could
hurt him if he wanted to.

That should have been the end of it.

But it wasn’t.

Zivney stumbled, nearly hitting his head on the corner of the teacher’s metal desk. He was grimacing, breathing hard and sucking in air loud enough for everyone to hear. Instead of going after the teacher with his fists again, he scrambled around to the side of the room and grabbed a length of two-by-four from the discard pile. Mr. Ruiz picked up another, longer two-by-four from the floor next to his desk. Warily, the two circled each other in the open space close to the door. Ed thought of a poster he’d seen in a horror-movie book for a film called
Fight with Sledgehammers.
It was from the early nineteen hundreds and had to be really primitive, but the images his mind conjured from that title had always stayed with him. Now his woodshop teacher and a student were about to whale on each other with boards, and he had the same sick queasy feeling in his stomach that he’d gotten when he’d first thought about that movie.

Screaming crazily, his face red and filled with rage, Zivney swung at the teacher, putting so much strength behind it that the board made a swishing sound as it cut through the air. Mr. Ruiz wielded his own board like a sword and parried. The force of Zivney’s swing caused his two-by-four to bounce back at him at an odd angle. He was struck on the side of the head by his own board and fell flat on the cement, landing with a hard thud, the two-by-four dropping onto his back.

Ed thought for a moment—

hoped

—that he was dead, but Zivney moaned, struggled to his feet and stared about dazedly, as though unsure of where he was.

The teacher looked at Rick and Mitchell, Zivney’s friends, who were no longer laughing. “Take him to the nurse’s office,” Mr. Ruiz ordered. He picked up the referral from his desk. “And give this to the principal.” He was nearly out of breath, and Ed was afraid for a moment that Mitchell and Rick would double-team him and kick his ass—he saw the hatred on their faces—but the students did as they were told, and as soon as they left, the rest of the class gratefully settled into their usual woodworking routines.

Ed had been planning to make speaker boxes for the back of his car this semester—not that he
had
a car yet . . . or speakers, for that matter—and he proceeded to sand a piece of maple that yesterday he’d crosscut to length. But his mind was not on the project, and several moments later, after Zivney’s friends had returned from the office and Rick had accidentally on purpose bumped into him, causing the handheld sander to veer off the board and onto the table, he stopped. He liked woodworking—and he was good at it—but he couldn’t put up with this for an entire semester. Mitchell and Rick were starting to work on their own projects, and Ed went up to Mr. Ruiz and asked the teacher if he could have a hall pass to go to the office.

“What’s the matter?” the instructor asked. “Don’t you feel well?”

He didn’t want to say the real reason, but he didn’t really have a choice, so he lowered his voice. “I think I’m going to transfer to another class.”

He’d expected the teacher to try to talk him out of it. But Mr. Ruiz seemed to instinctively understand Ed’s plight. The instructor nodded, gave him a reassuring smile. “We’re going to miss you,” he said, writing out a hall pass.

“It’s not—,” Ed began.

“I know,” the teacher said.

Ed walked across campus feeling as if a great weight had been lifted off him. He passed Cheryl in the hallway between the science and social studies buildings. The student body president did not acknowledge him, but he grinned at her and said, “Hey, Cher! How’s it going?”

“Drop dead,” she muttered as she walked past.

“I retract my invitation to the homecoming dance, then. You’re out.”

“In your dreams, loser.”

He laughed.

There were fewer students in the quad than there should have been. Quite a few seniors didn’t have a seventh period, and in previous years a lot of them had hung around Senior Corner, waiting for their friends to get out of school and hassling any underclassmen who happened to pass by. Today, however, the quad was deserted save for himself and a girl he didn’t know who was heading from the Little Theater toward the restrooms.

Maybe the administration had made a new rule that students couldn’t loiter on campus after their classes ended. It would be a stupid rule—but he could definitely see it happening.

A lot of things were different this semester.

Almost none of them good.

Ed reached the office and pulled open the tinted door, walking inside. Instantly, the buoyant lightness he had felt after leaving woodshop vanished. He stood there for a moment, acclimatizing. There was something creepy about the office. He’d noticed that the other day. The lights seemed too low, for one thing, and there were shadows in the corners that shouldn’t have been there in the daytime. But there was something else as well, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, and he walked forward slowly, almost cautiously. He handed his hall pass to the secretary at the front desk. “I’m here to see my counselor.” He found when he spoke that his voice was quiet, subdued.

“Who is your counselor?”

“I don’t know. I’m a senior, so I guess it’s Mr. Hill.”

“Mr. Hill is no longer at the school,” the secretary informed him, and the way she said it made his arms break out in gooseflesh. “Your new counselor is Ms. Tremayne.” The secretary pointed down a short hallway. “Room B.”

A TA walked by silently, carrying a stack of interoffice envelopes, looking blank and dull, almost tranquilized.

Zombified.

That was even more accurate, and he shivered as he saw another TA pass by, a vacant expression on her face.