The Academy (21 page)

A tree branch fell in his way.

This was getting ridiculous. There was no wind, no remotely logical reason for the branch to have fallen from the carefully maintained sycamore, and angrily, Carlos strode ahead of his friend. He attempted to pick up the branch, wanting to break it in half and heave the pieces as far as he could, but it was heavy, and the best he could do was to shunt it off to one side.

Behind him came a loud crash. Rakeem shouted, “Fuck!”

A metal trash barrel was rolling out of the darkness toward the other custodian, with another one hot on its heels.

The school was attacking him.

It was a stupid thought. A crazy thought. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true, and Carlos grabbed his friend’s arm and helped him hobble out of the way. If he could just get Rakeem off campus, the man would be safe.

The barrels rolled past them.

Then stopped.

And sped backward.

They both went down, knocked over like human bowling pins, and Carlos was surprised by the
force
of the rolling barrel. When it hit his legs, the impact was tremendous. It felt as though he’d been struck by a car, and he flew several feet in front of the trash receptacle, the bones in one leg audibly cracking, pain engulfing the entire lower half of his body. Then the barrel rolled over him, forcing his head onto the concrete, crushing his right arm. He was screaming in agony, but even with all that was going on, he realized that his was the
only
scream. Rakeem was not making any noise at all.

Dimly, he was aware of the fact that the barrels were still rolling. He heard the hollow echoing sound of metal on cement. Beneath the cacophony of his own screams, he also heard a strange low tone that at first he couldn’t recognize but that his rattled brain finally recognized as a note being blown on a tuba.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm . . .

When he shakily lifted his head, he saw Rakeem lying unmoving on the ground. Behind Rakeem, he saw Enrique’s motorized cart, speeding toward them from the sports complex, lights off. Was Enrique in it? He couldn’t tell.

And he would never know.

The last thing he saw was the tire that crushed his skull.

Thirteen

The campus looked beautiful in the morning. The custodians must have been there all night cleaning up the mess, and Linda vowed to thank Carlos and Rakeem when she saw them.

She walked slowly across the quad. Thinking about the custodians, it occurred to her that she hadn’t asked any of the classified employees how they felt since Tyler became a charter school, and she decided it was high time she took an informal poll among the nonteaching staff. They were probably just as angry and disappointed as she was. More so, perhaps, since they no longer had any supplemental help from the district and had more than doubled their workload. Theoretically, they, too, were supposed to have an equal voice in this great experiment in democracy, but the truth was that their opinions mattered even less to Jody than did the teachers’. And since there’d been no talk of those promised raises since the changeover, she was pretty sure the custodians and other classified employees were pretty dissatisfied with the way things were going.

Enrique, driving up the sidewalk in his motorized cart, saw her and gave her a fake smile. “Hello, Mrs. Webster.”

“Hi, Enrique,” she said. “When you see Carlos and Rakeem, could you tell them what a great job they did last night? The campus looks beautiful.”

The custodian’s smile grew. “Well, thank you, Mrs. Webster. But I’m the one who cleaned up last night. Carlos and Rakeem don’t work here anymore. They quit.”

The surprise must have shown in her face because Enrique chuckled. “No great loss. They weren’t hard workers. Now I can hire men who’ll do a
good
job.

“
And
who’ll respect the charter.”

If she’d been suspicious before—how likely was it that two full-time custodians with seniority would quit at the same time?—that last statement was the icing on the cake. If Carlos and Rakeem had quit, it was because they’d been forced to do so. More likely, they’d been fired because they refused to toe the party line, although Jody and Enrique had no doubt devised some made-up reason for their dismissal.

“Well, anyway, the school looks nice.” Linda walked past the head custodian. The truth was, the campus no longer did seem quite as nice to her, and the good mood she’d been in until now had been ruined. She looked straight ahead, not slowing her pace until she heard the cart take off behind her. Stopping, she looked up at the second-floor windows of the building before her. Even though it was daytime, she was still nervous about returning to her classroom. Diane and Frank, not to mention Ray and Steve, had almost convinced her that she hadn’t seen what she thought she saw, but the image of that immobile white-haired boy was still fresh in her mind, as was the fear she’d felt. She’d even had a nightmare last night about the encounter, and in it she had seen his face. She’d awakened at that point, drenched with sweat and on the verge of screaming, and she was thankful that all details of that terrible visage had disappeared with the dream.

“You want me to go in with you?”

She turned at the sound of the voice. It was Ray.

“Come on,” he said. “I’m going up, too. We’ll check out your room.”

It was nice of him, and the fact that he didn’t try to make her feel silly gave her confidence. She accompanied him up the stairs, and together the two of them gave her room a cursory search. There was nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary, and feeling more relieved than she was willing to admit, Linda thanked him for his help.

“That’s what friends are for,” he told her.

She smiled. “I’ve heard that.” She began going over her lesson plans for today and was just starting to write her first period’s assignment on the board when Ray returned.

He looked disgusted and upset. “Linda?” He said no more, merely beckoned her with his finger, and she followed him to his room, a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

Someone had left a pile of feces on top of his desk.

Linda gagged, moved back outside the doorway.

“Well, at least we know you’re not crazy,” he said, trying to make a joke of it.

She looked at him. “You thought I was crazy?”

“Of course not. Bad joke.” He looked back at his desk and grimaced. “I need to call the janitor, get this out of here.”

“Take your kids to the library until they get it cleaned,” Linda suggested.

“Are you kidding? The Fascist won’t let us in without at least two days’ notice.”

“Just show up.”

“She’ll bite my head off!”

“Let me get this straight,” Linda said. “You’re not afraid of ghosts, but you’re afraid of our librarian.”

“That’s about the size of it, yeah.” He frowned. “Ghosts? Is that what you thought you saw?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Ray glanced toward his desk. “No ghost did that. Disgruntled student would be my guess.” He walked over to the phone on the wall. “I’d better report this.”

Linda headed back to her room. “Good luck,” she said.

Just in case, she gave her own room a more thorough search, but she could detect nothing peculiar, nothing that had been moved or taken, and with a sense of relief, she continued writing the assignment on the board.

In the middle of second period, a TA from the office arrived. The entire class looked up from their books at the intrusion, and the girl walked self-consciously around the first row of desks to hand Linda a sealed envelope. “Back to work,” Linda told the class. Groaning, they returned to their books while the TA left.

She opened the envelope. Inside was a memo from the principal, dated today:

Dear Ms. Webster,
I request that you come to my office immediately after your last class this afternoon. There are several important issues I would like to discuss with you.
Thank you for your cooperation.

It was signed by the principal, and a “CC” in the corner alerted her to the fact that Bobbi had been copied on this as well.

Linda read it again. She didn’t like the formal tone of the memo, nor the fact that the request had been made in writing, and during break she went down to the department office and called Lyle Johns, president of the employees’ association, and told him that she wanted a representative from the union to accompany her to the meeting.

At lunch, she discussed the memo with anyone who would listen, trying to get as many opinions as she could. Nearly everyone expressed puzzlement save Joseph Carr. The band teacher sat on a couch in the lounge with an enigmatic smile on his face and refused to participate in the conversation.

“Hey,” Ray finally asked him. “When’s your next steering-committee meeting?”

“It’s the
charter
committee, not the
steering
committee, and I’m afraid that information is privileged.”

The other teachers looked at one another with raised eyebrows.

“Excuse me,” Alonso said. “We’re all supposed to be the captains of this ship. We all have a stake in how this thing turns out, and we all have a vote. You can’t keep secrets from us.”

Carr did not respond. That mysterious smile remained on his lips, and he turned his attention toward Linda. “We have discussed
your
case,” he told her, “but I can’t say anything about it.”

“My
case
?” she said. “What is my
case
?”

Chuckling, Carr pointed to his watch. “Oh, look at the time.” Standing up from the couch, he headed toward the door. Nobody said a word until he was gone.

“Bring a union rep with you,” Alonso advised, and there were nodding heads all around.

“Don’t worry,” Linda told them. “I’m going to.”

Boyd Merritt, the rep, met her in the English department office after sixth period to look over the memo. “It doesn’t give us much to go on, does it?” he admitted. “Do you have any idea why the principal would want a meeting with you?”

Linda shook her head. “I’ve been anticharter from the beginning, and I know she carries a grudge. But other than that . . .” She shrugged her shoulders. “That’s it. I can’t think of anything I’ve done. Certainly not anything I can be disciplined for.”

“Well, we’ll just go in and see what happens,” Boyd told her. “But let me do all the talking. This is kind of a test case, and for all we know, Ms. Hawkes picked you at random just to teach us a lesson. She’s been itching for a showdown ever since your charter went through. She might just be trying to throw her weight around.”

“Maybe so,” Linda said. “But I was
not
chosen at random. She doesn’t like me, and if she can find some way to get rid of me, she’ll do it.”

“That’s why you need to let me do the talking.”

The campus was quiet, too quiet, as the two of them walked across the quad to the office. In previous years, seventh period had been a loose, amiable hour, a social time for many seniors, who often didn’t have a last-period class and who hung around the campus, waiting for the bus or their friends or simply socializing. But stricter rules were in place this semester, and there was a coldness to the quiet campus that Linda found uncomfortable as they strode up the walkway. She glanced between the library and one of the classroom buildings at the front of the school where the wall was going up. She might have been walking through the grounds of a prison or a mental hospital.

Both seemed apt metaphors for Tyler High.

They reached the office, opened the front doors and walked in. Suddenly everything stopped. It was like a scene from a movie, something filmed in slow motion. Typing fingers froze; hands halted in their passing of papers; conversations ceased. Then the principal came roaring out of her office in the back. “Get him out of here!”

Boyd held up a hand, indicating that Linda should not respond, but she was not about to let this outrage go unchallenged. “He’s my union rep,” she told Jody as the other woman approached the front counter. “I’m not going into a meeting with you without him.”

The principal smiled, looking remarkably sharklike. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible. The charter specifically prohibits union representation of any Tyler employee.”

“It does no such thing,” Boyd said calmly. “I have a copy of your charter right here in my briefcase. It requires approval of the charter committee to discuss matters
before
the committee—a stipulation that our lawyers do not believe to be legal—but it makes no mention of union representation of employees in disciplinary hearings before the principal.”