The Academy (3 page)

Daily school life soon absorbed the freshmen. Encouraged by teachers and advisers alike, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, Steel fell into a routine. He was awakened by his dorm master sometime after 6 a.m., was due in the common room by 7:00, in coat and tie, just ahead of breakfast in the dining hall—a chaotic, noisy assembly with smells of butter and syrup, cinnamon and chocolate, where students clambered for plates and trays while the authorities—coffee-swilling teachers assigned as heads of tables—attempted order.

Classes ran from 8:30 to 2:30, Monday through Friday, and until noon on Saturday, when at last the necktie could be left in the closet for thirty-six hours. Mandatory athletics filled the late afternoons, with a quick return to dinner that presaged the rigors of study hall.

There were tardies and truancies and disciplines meted out in the first few days, done so in a public manner so as not to be missed.

What was at first dizzying soon became comfortable, which Steel assumed was the point. He missed home, and was tempted to call, but his father had encouraged him to go at least two full weeks before doing so. Steel had made it through two weeks of science camp two summers in a row; he could make it through the first two weeks of Wynncliff.

The football and soccer teams, both varsity and JV, boys and girls, had been announced a couple of days ago, causing a stampede in the administration building. Steel had tried out for soccer but had not made the cut; he’d seen Kaileigh’s name on the girls’ JV list.

Wynncliff’s Third Form—ninth grade classes—were harder than any he’d ever taken, and he’d been consumed by mandatory study hall until 9 p.m. five evenings a week, only to return to his room and do homework for another hour after that. He’d be lucky if he got B’s.

His roommate, a stout African American kid named Verne Dundee, from New Haven, Connecticut, was a nice enough guy, but he went to sleep listening to hip-hop through a pair of leaky headphones. Steel, being a light sleeper and no fan of hip-hop, didn’t appreciate the annoyance, but had yet to gather the nerve to say anything about it. He’d read in a school pamphlet—
Dorm Life for Dummies
—that the best way to be a good roommate was to allow privacy and space. He wasn’t sure how noise pollution from leaky headphones fit into that agreement, but he wasn’t going to push it.

As he tried to fall asleep, he heard the squeak to the door of the boys’ room down the hall. It was the thirteenth squeak since Steel had entered his room for the night.

Lying there on the upper bunk, trying his best to ignore the irritating, hollow pulse from Verne’s headphones, Steel awaited the fourteenth squeak—door squeaks came in pairs: entering and leaving. Sometimes that pairing was thrown off by one boy holding the door for another, but politeness was not commonplace in Lower Three. In fact, the older boys tended to torture the younger ones—hazing them and turning them into shoe-shine boys and personal butlers. More to the point, this most recent squeak of the washroom door had come on its own, nearly thirty minutes after the mandatory lights-out at 11 p.m.

He waited through one endless song squealing from Verne’s headphones, and was well into a second by the time he felt his bladder suggest that a trip to the boys’ room wasn’t such a bad idea.

He headed down the hall in his bare feet, the cuffs of his pajamas sweeping across the polished stone floor. At night, only half the hallway ceiling’s orb-shaped light fixtures were left burning, saving energy but leaving a long, dim corridor. The lavatory was located in the center of the dorm. The door squeaked as Steel entered.

The fourteenth squeak.

He fully expected to run into someone—a boy responsible for the door’s thirteenth squeak, but to his surprise, the place was empty. There was no one standing at the urinals, no one taking a shower, and all three stall doors hung open. He checked the toilets just to make sure. Empty. He shrugged, decided to let it go. Clearly someone must have held the door for someone else at some point—a reasonable explanation. And though the timing of the squeaks didn’t exactly fit, he pushed it out of a mind already too crowded with math and the anxiety of the following day’s test.

A murmur of deep, adolescent voices approaching from the hallway sent him into a frenzy. At least two boys, it sounded like. There was no set rule that an underclassman couldn’t go to the bathroom at night, but it wasn’t the set rules he was worried about; it was the unwritten rules of the dominating upperclassmen. If they caught him in here alone, they were likely to force him to clean a toilet with his bare hands, or pick the hair out of a shower drain. One boy, Otis Reed, had been harassed into drinking a handful of water straight from a toilet bowl—which in turn had caused the kid to blow his dinner all over the washroom floor and had been a great source of humor for the upperclassmen of Lower Three. Steel had no desire be found.

To avoid detection, he scrambled up onto one of the toilets and pushed the stall door closed just far enough to screen him from view of the mirrors over the sinks. If one of the boys tried to use this stall, he was toast, but he took that chance.

The door squeaked—for the fifteenth time since lights-out.

The boys’ voices echoed off the washroom tile, the sounds mixing with the drumming of blood past Steel’s ears to where he couldn’t distinguish what was being said. It seemed to have something to do with soccer practice. Somebody said something about “the program.”

He waited, his heart attempting to break out of his chest, his bare feet delicately balancing on the toilet seat, fearing that if he moved even slightly, the seat might also squeak and reveal him to the boys.

Silence.

It hit him all at once. One moment he’d been staring down at the black toilet seat trying to keep from moving, the next, an eerie
drip-drip-drip
from one of the sinks.

No squeal of the door hinges having come open again. No sound of a urinal flushing, or the sinks running—beyond the slow, tortured dripping of the faucet. He waited far longer than he needed to, fearing that the boys had sensed him and were waiting to spring at him when he climbed down. But he did climb down, and there was no pounce, for there were no boys. The washroom stood empty. Completely, totally empty.

Had he, in fact, fallen asleep while trying to avoid Verne’s hip-hop? Had he sleepwalked into the washroom and dreamed the rest? He reminded himself that two boys had entered the washroom. No boys had left. And yet the washroom stood empty.

He conducted a complete tour one more time just to make sure.

Empty.

Thirteen squeaks. Then fourteen. Then fifteen.
No sixteenth squeak. Again, an odd number.
A washroom where upperclassmen disappeared.
He wondered about this place, about the boys
he’d seen in the gym, what his father had gotten him into—him and Kaileigh—and what, if anything, he should do about it.

Academy assembly on Monday mornings meant an auditorium of yawning students sitting before Mr. Bradley Hastings, a thick-necked but handsome man, youthful in appearance and strong of voice. Announcements were kept brief, variations to schedules made loudly, and dismissal conducted in an orderly fashion.

Steel recorded everything about these assemblies, from curious looks between headmaster Hastings and a few of the more senior teachers, to the groupings of students.

It was during such a dismissal that Steel spotted and caught the eye of Kaileigh—though to be fair, she was already waving frantically at him from the opposite aisle.

They met in the mail room, a dismal, dimly lit warren of tiny post office pigeonholes. The mailboxes required a memorized three-letter combination, A–K, to open. Everything about Kaileigh was conspiratorial as she took Steel by the wrist and literally dragged him down two lanes of mailboxes and around the corner to a dead end, where, it was rumored, a boy had once been beaten and left for nearly three hours before discovery. It was clearly just such isolation that Kaileigh sought, or believed she required.

“Sorry,” she said, seeing confusion in Steel’s eyes. “But I absolutely must talk to you.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off.

“I need your help,” she said.

Again, he wanted to say something, and again she interrupted before he got the chance.

“I was in…the little girls’ room…” she said, blushing, “and I overheard something that absolutely needs checking out.”

“The other girls in the room disappeared?” he asked, speaking quickly and forcing his words between hers.

“What?” She laughed. “Why would you say that?”

Steel had wanted to bring up the apparent disappearances from his dorm’s washroom, but her ridicule prevented him from doing so. He shrugged and gestured for her to continue.

“I’m not even sure who said it,” she confessed. “I don’t know the other girls well enough yet to tell them apart by the sound of their voices, but it was two girls talking and not wanting to be heard. I’m certain of that. And one says to the other how she broke the no-food-or-drinks rule in the chapel. She had smuggled a cup of coffee into the chapel, when Mr. Randolph suddenly emerged from the common room, on his way home. The chapel floor had apparently been waxed, and the girl had lost her balance and dumped the decaf next to Sir David.”

Sir David was a glorious Italian marble statue of a dashing knight kneeling on one knee and holding a four-foot marble sword, with a space carved out of his back and shoulders to hold the school Bible, an oversized illustrated King James edition bound in red leather.

“She panics because Randolph is a religious man—him having lost his wife and all—and maybe he was not heading home but to the chapel for a few prayers before dinner, or maybe to play the chapel organ or something. He does that almost every night, supposedly. And there’s her decaf, in a puddle at the foot of Sir David. So she goes to mop it up, seeing how much of it she can contain with a napkin, and to her surprise, it all comes up. One napkin. An entire cup of coffee.”

“So she was okay,” Steel said purposely, wondering why he was using what little free time he had to listen to her, when he could have been doing something important, like playing PlayStation.

“Earth to Steel! Have you ever used a school napkin? They’re the size of half a Kleenex. There is no way it could have absorbed a full cup of coffee. Which is the whole point.”

“A napkin is the point?” he said, deciding to keep his editorials to himself.

She jutted her chin out, then arched her eyebrows. She did everything except say, “How stupid can you be?”

“The coffee disappeared beneath Sir David,” she said. “That’s the only explanation.”

He kept quiet, still not getting it.

“I take it you’ve studied fluids and liquids,” she prompted.

“Some.”

“Sir David has to be a half ton of marble sitting atop a marble floor. There is no way a cup of coffee could fit in the space between the marble of his pedestal and the marble of the floor. The only logical conclusion—and this is the
same
conclusion the two girls had—is that there is negative space beneath Sir David.”

“Negative space.” It blurted out of him.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she pressed.

“I doubt it, but it’s possible. A crypt?”

“Yes. Or an underground burial ground or tomb, or something! It’s like
National Treasure Three
is what it is. And we’re like Nicolas Cage.”

He debated telling her about the fifteenth squeak.

“What?” she asked. He hated the way she could read his mind. It wasn’t the first time.

“I wouldn’t be so sure it’s a crypt,” he said.

“Why not?”

And so he told her about the boys disappearing from the dormitory washroom. He finished by saying, “It’s a little harder to make upperclassmen disappear than a cup of coffee.”

“You’re thinking they went into some kind of hidden staircase or tunnel?” she said.

“I wasn’t exactly thinking that,” he said. “Not until you came along.”

“Like a network of tunnels or something under the school?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But it might be worth checking out. Sir David. Tonight.”

“But we could be expelled,” she said.

“But now that you’ve told me, I have to know,” he said.

“No you don’t.”

“I do. It’s just the way I am. And besides, they’re not going to expel us if we turn up some ancient tomb that goes back to 1660. That’s when the chapel was built, you know?”

“That’s impossible,” she said. “The school was founded in the late eighteen hundreds.”

“Yeah, but the chapel was built in 1660 in
England
, Kaileigh. It was taken down, shipped across the Atlantic, stone by stone, and reconstructed here in 1881, soon after the founding of the school, which was then a priory.”

She looked at him, impressed.

“So I read that pamphlet they gave us at orientation.”

“And remembered every word.”

“My curse.”

“But a priory! That’s monks, right? Monks loved tunnels and crypts. And I heard the school has a history of secret societies and clubs.”

“From whom?” he asked. He’d not heard any such rumors, but the idea of secret societies appealed to him. He thought of the boys with the blowguns. He thought about his father having worked to get Kaileigh accepted.

“What did you mean by ‘They’re not going to expel
us
’?” she asked.

“You’re going to let me do this alone?” he said.

Her eyes pleaded with him. She didn’t want to be dragged into this.

Steel said, “The first day of school, right before I met you?”

“Yeah?”

“I saw some guys. It was so freaky, I haven’t mentioned it to anyone.”

“Freaky, how?”

“Maximum freakiness,” he said. “I missed a sign saying the gym was closed, and I kind of
let myself in
, and I saw these guys—upperclassmen, I think…” He paused, realizing how stupid this would sound. “Ahh…using…blowguns in the gym.”

“Blowguns…”

“I know how it sounds, but I’m serious: they were shooting at mannequins.”

“Mannequins…”

“And the coach was telling them to shoot harder if they wanted the darts to work.”

“Darts…”

“Yeah…” He felt about an inch tall.

“So you’re saying this is a weird school,” she said. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“No, I’m saying these guys…I mean, they’re obviously
different
. Right? I mean, you think Blowguns 101 is on everyone’s elective list? They’re different like…I’m different,” Steel said.

“And where do I fit in?” Kaileigh sounded like she was ashamed of not being a freak of nature.

He avoided answering her. “So if there’s a tomb beneath the chapel, or if there’s a bunch of tunnels or something,” Steel said. “Or if there’s a group of students doing something in secret, I’ve got to know about it.”

“Because of the way you are,” she mocked.

“Don’t, okay?” he said. “We’ve both seen the stories on the news about boys doing stupid things in secret at schools. It doesn’t usually turn out so great for the other students. I need to know what’s going on, and I need to know from you if you’re in or out. I’m going to check out the chapel. You can do what you want.”

She pursed her lips, deep in concentration. “If I get kicked out of here, your father will not be pleased,” she said.

“So let’s not get caught,” Steel said.

“Right,” she said sarcastically, shaking her head, but allowing a small smile to reveal itself. “Good idea.”