The Academy (19 page)

“Death!”
he screamed, pointing at the word on the board. “That’s what you all deserve!”

Zorida Marin, in the last row, burst into tears.

“There will be no crying in this classroom!” he shouted at her, and her sobs ceased instantly.

“Now,” he said, his voice calmer, “we will spend the rest of the period discussing what the charter demands of
us
and what
we
can give the charter.”

Forty minutes later, the students emerged from the class silently, seconds before the bell rang. Mr. Connor had let them out early, but none of them dared speak, and they merely looked at one another as they exited into the hall. Then the bell did ring, and students were pouring out of the adjoining rooms, laughing, talking, yelling.

“I don’t even know what to say to that,” Ed admitted.

“There’s nothing
to
say,” Brad told him.

Ed nodded, and the two of them separated, heading into the crowd and off to their next classes.

Twelve

Back-to-School Night sneaked up on her this year. In fact, it seemed to sneak up on everyone. Linda had no idea how that had happened. For one thing, the event was later than usual—four weeks after school had started rather than the usual two—and for another, Jody had been pestering them about it in e-mails and voice mails and memos left in their mailboxes. That should have meant that they’d be
more
prepared than they were ordinarily. But all day Thursday, teachers were skipping lunch and showing videos during class as they tried desperately to get their rooms ready for the evening.

Carpooling with Diane, Linda felt woefully unprepared herself. It shouldn’t have mattered, since, ordinarily, very few parents attended Tyler’s Back-to-School Night. It was well-known among teachers that nearly all parents showed up for Back-to-School Night at the elementary level, there was a big attendance drop-off in junior high, and by the time their kids reached high school, hardly anyone showed.

But as Diane pulled into the parking lot and the two of them looked in vain for an open space, it was clear that that was not going to be the situation this year. Start time was still forty-five minutes away, yet they were forced to drive around to the opposite side of the school and park on the street.

“I guess I should have worked a little harder on my bulletin boards,” Diane said drily.

Linda shook her head. “This is amazing.”

Every light in the high school seemed to be on, and both around the perimeter of the school and down the corridors that led to the center of campus, they could see men and women milling about, pointing at rooms and familiarizing themselves with the layout of the buildings. They got out of the car and walked through the crowd of parents to the office, where Jody had informed the staff they were all required to sign in. There was a skeleton staff on duty—Bobbi and Janet—but she and Diane ignored them both, signing in silently and not speaking until they were once again outside.

Linda surveyed the quad. “I wonder where Jody is.” “She’s out there somewhere,” Diane intoned in a hushed dramatic voice. “Somewhere in the dark, dark night.”

Linda laughed.

“Let’s go. I really do have some last-minute decorating to do.” They began walking. “Meet in the department office after it’s over?”

“Sure.”

Although their classrooms were in the same building, Linda’s was upstairs and Diane’s down, so they parted at the stairway. “It’s going to be a busy night,” Diane predicted.

“That’ll be a nice change of pace,” Linda said, starting up the steps.

But while the campus was teeming outside, the stairwell was empty and so was the hallway on the second floor.

Save for a lone figure standing at the far end.

Jody Hawkes.

She stood exactly where she had before, and while the doors of several other classrooms were open, teachers inside, none of them came out, and it was as though the two of them were alone in the corridor. Jody smiled at her, an inexplicably wide and off-putting grin. Then, just like last time, she turned and walked down the opposite stairway.

Feeling ill at ease—which was doubtless Jody’s intention—Linda unlocked and opened her classroom door. Flipping on the lights, she saw that everything was in place, where she’d left it. But there was a terrible odor in the room. The place smelled like a cat box, and she walked slowly around the periphery, sniffing, trying to determine where the stench was coming from. Finally, she narrowed it down to the book corner, where she kept the volumes of her class library, and after a little more investigation, she came upon a copy of
Leaves of Grass
lying flat across the tops of several other books. Dried excrement extruded from between the book’s pages.

She wasn’t sure if the shit was cat or dog or human. She didn’t care. Grimacing, she picked up the book by a corner and carried it out into the hall. There was no trash can up here, so she hurried downstairs and outside, tossing it into a barrel next to a tree in front of the building.

Linda returned to her room. The evening was cold, but she opened all the windows that were operable in order to air out the place. She was pretty sure she had some deodorizer somewhere in her desk, and she dug through the drawers until she found the aerosol can. Spraying it all over the room, especially in the book corner, she thought about what had happened, wondering who could have done it.

Jody?

Was that why the principal had been smiling?

No. Even as creepy as she seemed to be these days, Jody would not have defecated in a book. Although just imagining the logistics of such a thing made Linda smile herself, and she laughed out loud at the thought of the principal squatting over the open pages of
Leaves of Grass.

Her first period’s parents started arriving soon after, and though the smell was not entirely gone, no one mentioned it. As always, Back-to-School Night was structured like an ordinary school day, with parents attending their children’s classes in the same order as the students did, albeit for only ten minutes each. By the time the first bell rang, every seat in her room was filled, and for the most part it remained that way for the rest of the evening.

There was something unnerving about that. For the first time since she’d started teaching at Tyler, Linda had a chance to speak with the parents of nearly every one of her students. That was great, of course. And all of them seemed interested in how their children were doing so far. But there was a tension underlying their presence. They were being coerced into doing this, and beneath the legitimate concern for their kids’ welfare was a barely restrained animosity, the coiled resentment of totalitarianism that people naturally felt toward institutions that dictated and enforced arbitrary rules and requirements.

She was supposed to take attendance and turn into the office the names of any families that did not show, but Linda had no intention of doing that. Only a few parents did not attend, and those who couldn’t make it probably had very good reasons. Even if they didn’t, she wasn’t about to inform on her students’ mothers and fathers. For all she knew, Jody was planning to expel the sons and daughters of any parent who didn’t come tonight.

And she refused to be a party to that.

In her last class, her sixth-period class, one of the dads kept fooling with his iPhone—or trying to. Finally he gave up. “Excuse me,” he said. “Is there some reason I can’t get a signal in here?” He looked suspiciously around as if the walls were lined with lead.

“That’s true of the whole school,” Linda told him. “We don’t know why yet, but it’s being looked into.”

“What if my son needs to get ahold of me?” a mother asked. “What if it’s an emergency?”

“That’s a good question,” Linda told her. “You should bring that up with the principal.”

The class emptied out quickly after the final bell—it was eight thirty, after all, and a weeknight besides—and Linda closed her door, intending to tidy up a bit before meeting Diane down in the department office. She turned back toward her desk.

And saw a student sitting in the front row of the classroom.

Her heart practically leaped into her chest, and she let out a short, startled cry. The room had been empty only seconds ago. She was sure of it. She had escorted the last father out the door.

There had been no kids in her class all night.

Yet there one sat now, a boy, in the front row, facing forward, staring at the chalkboard.

He had not moved a muscle when she’d let out her involuntary cry, had not been surprised by her short scream, had not turned to look and see what was happening. Even now, he remained completely silent and still, and she saw with something like horror that while she hadn’t noticed it at first, his clothes were dusty and of a style that had been old when her grandparents were young. His hair was not blond, as she’d originally thought, but white.

A spider hung from a thread on his collar and scuttled down his back.

And still the student remained silent, unmoving.

Staring at the blackboard.

Linda ran. She opened the door and bolted down the hall, not bothering to turn off the lights, not locking the door behind her. The sound of her frantic footsteps alerted Steve and Ray, who both hurried out of their classrooms to see what the commotion was all about.

She’d fled on instinct, running away without a plan or thought in her head other than the necessity of escaping, but as soon as she saw the two teachers, she stopped. “There’s someone in my classroom!” she said breathlessly. “An intruder!”

Intruder?

That was an odd word. But it was better than “ghost,” which was what she was really thinking, and it got Steve and Ray moving. They sprinted back to her classroom and walked inside. “Hello!” she heard Ray call. “Anyone here?”

She knew then that the student was gone—if he had ever been there at all—and though her gut was telling her to flee to safety and get out of the building, she gathered her courage and walked back to her classroom, peeking in. Steve saw her and shrugged his shoulders. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone here.”

“He was sitting in that seat there.” She pointed.

“An
intruder
was
sitting
in a seat,” Ray said skeptically.

She couldn’t explain what she’d seen: the unmoving boy, the old clothes, the white hair, the spider. There was no way they’d believe any of that—and there was no way she could convey the feeling of terror the utterly still student had engendered within her. So she told them about the despoiled book and how she’d tossed it outside. “I think he was the one who did it,” she said. “The guy I saw.”

“The intruder.”

“I don’t know why I called him that. I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to make you come in here—I wasn’t trying to fool you. . . .” And she started to cry. She couldn’t help herself. All her fear and frustration came out in entirely uncharacteristic tears, and she wiped them angrily from her face.

Steve and Ray stood there awkwardly.

“I’m sorry,” Ray said. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s all right,” she told him.

“We could look some more,” Steve offered. “Maybe he’s hiding.”

She waved him away. “Let’s just get out of here,” she said.

Embarrassed, the two men shuffled past her into the hall. She shut off the lights and closed the door, locking it.

“I believe you,” Ray said. “I’m sorry if it seemed like I didn’t.”

“Yeah,” Steve added.

Linda shook her head. She knew they were lying, but she didn’t want to discuss it with them. She knew what she’d seen—
a ghost

—and all she wanted to do right now was go downstairs, find Diane and get out of here. She used a finger to push away the last of her tears and forced herself to smile. “It’s okay,” she told them. “It’s been a long day. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

But before going into the department office to meet with Diane, she walked outside the building to look up at the windows of her room. She saw movement in the darkness, a hazy white bobbing in the black gloom, and she turned quickly away, walking past the trash barrel where she’d thrown
Leaves of Grass,
and back into the building, where her friend was waiting.

*

The school was crowded. The lights were all on.

And Myla was scared.