The Academy (16 page)

The door banged open. Two other boys entered, carrying another victim headfirst. Their faces were covered too. Time seemed to slow as they spun their captive around. As the person’s face came into view, Steel nearly screamed.

Kaileigh!

She whipped the red hair out of her flushed face, glanced at Steel, then to the boys, and straightened her skirt.

“If you touch me again, you’ll all go to jail,” she said. She appeared ready to continue her complaint, but the leader held up his hand.

“Trapp…your shoes. Would you care to explain the mud on them?”

Steel looked down at his shoes. He hadn’t even seen the mud until that moment. He knew he could easily explain it, so he simply “rewound” his memory, like a DVD going backward at high speed. He searched for that moment when he’d stepped onto the JV football field or some part of the front lawn…put his mind’s eye in an entirely different scene: he was in Randolph’s garden; he was hiding beneath a window.

He swallowed dryly.

“Ms. Augustine,” the growling boy said, “can you explain the sap on your left hand?”

Kaileigh looked at her hand as if it belonged to someone else.

Then, in unison, Kaileigh and Steel looked at each other. They were two criminals caught by the police.

“Mr. Trapp, whatever you saw—and I think we both know what I’m talking about—you are urged to forget, to dismiss. As hard as that may be for someone with your memorization skills, it’s wickedly important to your remaining at Wynncliff. If you like it here, and I think you both do, you’ll go back to your studies and forget whatever it is you think you were doing putting your noses into other people’s business.”

“Who are you?” Steel said.

“That is not the response I was hoping for,” the boy said. But then Steel wondered if he had it right. Was this, in fact, a boy? Or was it an adult, a teacher, perhaps, dressed in a school uniform? The thought of that gave him a chill. What was going on? Nell Campbell’s warning came back to him.

“Ms. Augustine,” the boy/man continued, “your situation is far more precarious….” And that was another thing, Steel thought: the growling boy didn’t talk like a boy at all. “You have a keen and intelligent mind. You have demonstrated language skills that are far superior to those of your peers. But don’t think that buys you a position here at Wynncliff. The school is bigger than any one student.”

Steel again wondered if the stocky boy behind the leader wasn’t DesConte. There was something so familiar about him.

“If you continue to snoop around, you’ll both be expelled.”

“Because you’re hiding something,” Steel blurted out.

Even though the boy was wearing a hockey mask, Steel could tell the person was grimacing.

“I will answer that in this way: Wynncliff is not your normal school. I think you are
both
aware of that by now. It is special. Unique. You are here because you are also special and unique. Not everyone at the school is so special. You might say there are two schools in one. But that’s all I can say for now. You’ll have to…trust me…that it’s in your best interest to wait just a little bit longer.”

“How long? Wait for what?”

“I respect and admire such curiosity. Yours is a special situation. Never before have two students been in the situation you’ve been in.”

“We didn’t mean to make any trouble,” Kaileigh said. “Steel thought…we both thought…we were worried someone was planning something awful…like the kind of thing you hear about on the news. That’s all it was! We didn’t want to be hating ourselves the rest of our lives because we let something like that happen. We had no idea about some secret society or something. No idea whatsoever.”

“Well, now you know,” said the voice behind the bandana. “If you tell anyone what you think you saw, it will be denied and you will be expelled. If you break curfew or do any more exploring, same thing: you’re out.”

“How long before we know what’s going on?” Steel repeated.

“Soon,” he said.

“How soon?”

“It doesn’t matter!” Kaileigh said.

“I’m not sure you’re going to make it, Trapp. You’d be well advised to listen to Ms. Augustine. What we have in mind for you—where this is all leading—it requires a great deal of patience. And at your age, patience is one skill that can’t be taught. It has to be learned.”

At your age
, the person had said. It wasn’t a student behind that bandana: Steel had been right.

“Nice game,” Verne said from the comfort of his bunk. He pulled the iPod earbuds from his ears. “What’s bugging you?”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Okay, there is something, but I can’t talk about it. You’ve got to respect that.”

“Whatever. The coach come down on you or something?”

“Something like that.”

“I can’t help if I don’t know.”

“Let me ask you something,” Steel said. “Before coming here, did you take some tests, or do something unusual or incredible, or anything like that?”

“I took tests. We all took those tests, right? Why?”

“Just curious,” Steel said.

“I won the Hunt.”

“You hunt?”

“The newspaper thing. It’s this weekend deal. There are these clues…it starts with a clue in the newspaper and—I don’t know—it’s like a treasure hunt, only really big, like for the whole city, for the whole day—and I entered it. I wasn’t supposed to. You had to be eighteen or something—and it’s supposed to be a team event—but I entered by myself and I won, and it was like this big deal.”

“And then the school contacted your parents,” Steel said.

“How’d you know that?”

“Is that what happened?”

“Yeah, this woman showed up. Mrs. DeWulf—I remember because I was thinking ‘da wolf.’” He cracked himself up, and Steel suffered through his recovery. “And she talked to my mom for a long time. Then I took the tests and stuff—”

“
After
the newspaper hunt, not before?”

“That’s what I just said, didn’t I? Why?”

“So I take it your winning…that was in the papers—”

“And on the news. Yeah. Youngest person ever to win the Hunt, and they made a big deal about how I’d done it all by myself. Listen, I mean, I know they asked me here because of the Hunt, but what’s the big deal?”

“What about your friends? How’d they get asked here?” Steel sat up on the top of his desk, facing the bunks. He saw a story unfolding, but he kept it to himself. He felt like he could answer the questions himself, but he allowed his roommate to speak.

“Well, Twiney…you know those stores, ExcelSport?”

“Yeah?”

“They have these rock-climbing walls
inside
the store.”

“Yeah?”

“So Twiney…he like
borrowed
a pair of gloves that he wasn’t exactly going to pay for—”

“He stole them.”

“Not exactly. He never made it out the door. His dad caught him, and Twiney’s dad is not exactly the most forgiving person, and he basically was going to smack Twiney back into the Stone Age for lifting those gloves. Except there was the rock wall, and so Twiney…he like jumped on that wall and went up it like Spider Man. No ropes, no nothing. Straight to the top in about zero seconds.”

“Let me guess: it made the news.”

“No. Not exactly. Sort of. There
was
this TV thing going on, this live deal, you know, the end of some road race or something where the winner got to shop in the store for five minutes without paying. And there was Twiney in the background, climbing that wall and all.”

“So it was on TV.”

“Yeah, definitely. Ten o’clock news. But not exactly on purpose or anything.” He set his iPod on a box that acted as a table, and he rolled onto his side. “What’s up with that, anyway?”

“Just curious,” Steel said, the words suddenly catching in his throat. He supposed just asking questions like this was in violation of what he’d been told to do.

“Yeah, well…you know what they say about that and the cat,” Verne said.

“Do me a favor: don’t tell anyone I asked you any of this.”

“Because?”

“I’m kinda like on probation.”

“I’m the one pulling weekend study hall because of the thing at Randolph’s. I didn’t think they even got a look at you.”

“Neither did I,” Steel said. And bending over to clean his shoes, he left it at that.

* * *

“We’re all freaks,” Steel told Kaileigh.

Entering the common room before dinner had been maybe the best two minutes of his life. About a million kids, including Nell Campbell, had congratulated him on his ga-ga game, even though he’d lost. For a few minutes he’d felt like Lance Armstrong or Tiger Woods or somebody. Interestingly enough, DesConte and the other Argives, while receiving some attention, did not get near the reception Steel had.

But now dinner—a Saturday special of rubbery meat in a gray gravy—was behind them, and he’d led Kaileigh out to the giant sundial that was situated on the front lawn, about thirty yards from the chapel. It was marble, with a series of marble steps surrounding its base, and it reached about twenty feet high. They sat on the second step, looking back toward the main building.

“What do you mean?”

“Not freaks, but with special skills. And probably not all of us, I suppose. There are too many students, but at least some of us. Me with my memory. And Verne solved this treasure hunt all by himself. There are obviously kids with physical skills, too—the guys I saw shooting the blowguns. A friend of Verne’s can free-climb.” A thought occurred to him. “Or maybe the physical skills are something you eventually need to know.” He paused. “You’re good with languages, right?”

Kaileigh didn’t often look embarrassed, but she did now.

“What?” Steel asked her.

“I won something too. Like Verne. It was…” But she couldn’t say it.

“What? Come on, Kai!”

“This impersonation thing. This stupid talent contest. It’s just this thing I can do.”

“Impersonation?”

She looked at him, closed her eyes, and said, “What? Come on, Kai!” sounding
exactly
like Steel. It was as if a tape recorder had played his voice back to him.

“Whoa!” he gasped.

“I know…” She blushed.

“Can you do that for anyone?”

“Anyone,” she said. She rattled off a few lines from President Obama, Miley Cyrus, and Orlando Bloom, each pitch perfect.

“Well,” he said, looking at her strangely, “that confirms it.”

“Confirms what?”

“That we’ve been chosen by Wynncliff for our…
unusual
talents.”

“We’re supposed to let it go. Remember? This is what the guy was talking about.”

“He scared you?”

“Duh! What do you think?”

“I think he was supposed to, but I don’t think they’ll expel us.”

“And this is based on?” She sounded angry with him. Or maybe she was frustrated.

“They need us.”

“As if!”

“That’s why Nell warned me, and why this guy warned us both.”

“Note the word, ‘warn.’”

“We’re part of something, and we don’t even know what it is.”

“The trouble with you is you think too much.”

“Reddie Long was one of them.”

“What?”

“Reddie Long. My own teammate on the Spartans. His belt and shoes. I spotted him tonight in the common room. His belt and shoes—same as one of the guys in the hockey masks.”

“I didn’t hear that.”

“There’s something going on.”

“You think?” Pure sarcasm on her part.

“They recruit kids with special talents.”

“You need therapy.”

“But for what?”

“Let it go. They told us to let it go.”

“If they were going to expel us, they would have already.”

“Based on some mud on your shoes? I don’t think so. They couldn’t do that, but they’ve warned us that one more thing like that and we’re gone. And I, for one, am listening.”

She stood.

“You’re going?”

“You’re going to get me kicked out of here, and I don’t want to get kicked out. For me, home is a governess and parents who are out of the country all the time. It is like majorly boring. I happen to like this place.”

“You’re ditching me?”

“I can’t do this, Steel. I’m willing to wait for whatever. I can’t risk it.”

“Who said I was going to do anything?”

“You have that look.”

“I was going to have Penny do it,” he said. “If Penny can hack the grades, then he can hack admissions. We can see what, if any, special skills the new kids have.”

“For what? What will that accomplish besides getting you thrown out?”

“Nell told me that someone was going to invite me to do something. The guy today. Same thing. Even my
dad
hinted that I’d be told something around Thanksgiving. ‘Information is the most important weapon,’ he said. Who knows if they’re going to tell us the truth? If we can figure this out ahead of time, then we’re better informed. Better prepared.”

“Not me,” she said.

“Kai!” he pleaded.

“Don’t get thrown out, Steel. I would miss you.”

“You’re seriously not going to do this? It was you who introduced me to Penny!”
I would miss you
; her words swam around in his head.

“Until you quit this stuff, I can’t even talk to you.”

“What?”

“I can’t talk to you. I don’t even
know
you anymore.”

She turned her back on him and walked away. Steel felt as if he’d been betrayed—his father was the reason she’d been invited to the school in the first place. And now she was deserting him.

“Kai!”

But she just kept on walking.