by B D Grant
“Good job! If you’re not early then you’re late, I like to say.”
“More like be early or you better hide,” Lia says jokingly to Rebecca.
They both chuckle on their way get pizza and chat with the lunch ladies before coming to sit with us.
“How is the food?” Rebecca asks the table when she sits.
“Wonderful. Thank you,” Anne says as she starts eating her food and more of my cheese sticks.
As soon as Boston was out of sight she unleashed her appetite. I’m down to just the pizza thanks to her.
“It’s good, thank you. Can we get seconds?”
Rebecca has already taken a bite so Lia answers, “I know all to well what bottomless pits boys can be. Go ahead, help yourself.”
Donna greets me at the counter and gives me two more plates of what I had.
“That cake was delicious.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she says in a tired old voice and winks at me.
I walk back to the table thinking of Gran. She was not a fan of junk food like this. She said she loved me too much to feed it to me so I would eat my weight of it at friends’ houses.
“Can I call and check on Gran when we are done eating?” I ask Lia.
“Oh sorry Kelly, I forgot to tell you. I spoke with the doctor while you were in your room. She is still in the same state as you left her. Her scan revealed more bleeding in the brain but he said that was expected. He assured me she is being taken exceptional care of but he will let us know if there are changes. I can have flowers sent if you would like.”
The only flowers she grew in the yard were azaleas.
“She wouldn’t want you to spend the money. Will I get to see her soon?”
“If she wakes up I will bring you.”
If? Who does this woman think she is? She doesn’t know Gran or she wouldn’t be saying if. I’m getting mad so I keep eating so I don’t throw this table across the room.
The subject changes to Anne’s childhood.
“I used to think my parents were drug-heads because of me. I thought if I could just be better, less troublesome they would love me.”
“Anne, none of what your parents chose to do was a reflection of your actions. All kids are hard to handle at times it is part of growing up.”
My foster family told me the same thing Ms. Lia.”
Mr. Grad walks in the cafeteria.
“I’m ready for them,” he announces and walks back out.
“Okay kids don’t worry with your trays we’ll take care of them. Hurry up before he leaves you both.”
She basically takes our trays from us. I still have food in my mouth. She can’t really mean for us to get up in the middle of lunch to go to gym? Anne is already leaving the table. Rebecca raises her eyebrows at me with a look of, “Did you not just hear me.” on her face. I reluctantly leave my lunch behind.
We walk down the hall and Mr. Grad is nowhere to be found. Anne points to an open door on the right.
“Come in and have a seat.”
The room looks like any other classroom with a board on the wall, the teacher’s desk in front of it, and desks facing the board. He passes an erasable pen to each of us.
Then he says, “Don’t worry it is just a health history we give to all new students.”
He sets a questionnaire in front of us that has fifty-five questions. This is no health history I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t even call it that. The first five questions ask about allergies, past surgeries, and medications. The rest is an in-depth family history form. It wants names, relation, locations, date of births, and the last time I was in contact with any family members. I only have three family members that I know of and two, my mom and grandfather, are dead.
I imagine Anne only has her good-for-nothing parents or she wouldn’t have been in a foster home. It takes both of us all of five minutes to hand them back to him. He doesn’t seem pleased as he looks through mine probably because of all of the blanks.
“This is a sad family tree you got.”
“It’s more like a twig but that’s all I got,” I say.
“I normally offer a short break after this but since neither of you took that long we can just dive into the last part.”
He doesn’t try to comfort us when his gives us what looks like a book. I wish it were a book because when I flip it over it’s a standardized exam. Heaven help me. It takes all that I am to not stand up and walk out, throwing the exam in the trashcan on the way.
I flip through the exam and there is no way this is going to happen. I signed up for strong-kid-with-no-parents school. I’m not going to I-want-to-be-a-doctor school.
“I haven’t even made it to ninth grade yet,” Anne says looking in horror at the exam, “I think this is a mistake. Can you get Ms. Lia please?” She’s scanning the first page and looking more like she’s going to have a break down by the second.
“Don’t worry we only want to get a baseline of your knowledge up to this point. You are not expected to ace this thing. Give it your best shot. We don’t kick kids out because they don’t know all everything.”
I guess this is the fine print Anne’s best friend, Lia chose to overlook in her pitch about how great this place is. I start the exam and it’s mostly read a paragraph then answer questions about what you read.
I start to gain confidence finishing the English section quickly. I flip to the next page then the next. Chemical compounds, physics, and questions about anatomy terms that I couldn’t even pronounce much less tell anyone what they mean. The confidence is gone along with any color in my face. I steal a glance at Anne.
Crap, she’s wiping tears off her cheek. Why didn’t Lia at least warn her about this stupid test? She acts confident and strong but she’s just a kid. Lia showing up when she did was probably a dream come true for her, like finding out she was a lost princess. She sniffles trying to breath through her runny nose.
I raise my hand for Mr. Grad.
“Yes, Kelly.”
“I’d like a coin, please.”
“For what?”
Anne looks at me crazy like Mr. Grad is.
“I’m tired of singing inny-meany-miny-mo to myself for every question so I figured flipping a coin would be faster to pick answers. Unless, your plan is for this to take all week to finish.”
“All out of change. Stop wasting time.”
“He may need you to read it out loud for him,” Anne says to Mr. Grad smiling. There’s the Anne I like to see.
“That’s a great idea,” I tell her enthusiastically, “Would you?”
“Stop wasting time or we WILL be here all week,” Mr. Grad sits back and opens a book.
Two hours pass by the time I finish. I look at Anne and she still has a couple pages, so, in fear of making her cry again by turning mine in I just sit there. Mr. Grad is staring at me when I look up but he doesn’t say anything to me.
“Time’s up,” Mr. Grad says standing up from behind his desk.
Before Anne can protest I say, “We weren’t told about this test and now you are not only telling us it was timed but that we’re out of time?”
“The cutoff for accepting complaints was yesterday,” he says nonchalantly. He takes the tests from us, “You get to take a fifteen minute break before orientation. If you need the restroom go to your rooms but no funny business.”
He leaves the room. I stand up and stretch while Anne does the same.
“So after seeing the three students earlier, you think they really brought us here to make us janitors?”
She looks me like I’m stupid, “Oh that’s right, you were getting seconds when they told me about Boston. The younger boys were caught with a dirty magazine and having that stuff is against the rules. They admitted Boston was the one who gave it to them.”
“So, janitorial work is their punishment.”
“You are a genius Kelly, don’t let anyone tell you any different.”
I smile at her sarcasm, “So
I should turn all my magazines over then I guess.”
“Oh gross! I’m going to my room before I barf,” Anne rushes out the room.
“I was just kidding,” I say but she’s already out the door leaving me in this eerily silent classroom.
I walk to the front of the room to Mr. Grad’s desk. My curiosity is in full force. On top of the desk is a notepad and pens that look brand new, untouched. I look around the room and listen for footsteps from the hall but I don’t hear anything. I slide open the top drawer and find the book Mr. Grad had out while we were taking the test. I open the book carefully like it might bite me if I move too fast. There’s a piece of paper folded up inside of it.
I take the paper out, forgetting the book, and unfold it. He drew a line in the middle of the paper separating both sides. My name is written on the top half with a line connecting to Diane Edwards, my mom, and beside her name is a question mark with two names: Mitchell and Donovan. Both names have Dyna next to them. A line below my mom’s name connects to my grandparents’ names. Gran and I never knew my dad so seeing these two names next to my mom’s name is surprising.
How does he know my mom’s name? I put it on the family history paper, duh.
For him to have two names as my possible father he must have known her well, right? Why didn’t he tell me he knew her?
“What are you doing?” A woman’s voice from the door cuts through the silence of the room.
I jump back, surprised by her sudden presence. It’s the secretary from the front office who was answering the phone when we came in.
She walks into the room with an armful of folded clothes under her arm, “I said, what are you doing?”
“I, uhh, just finished taking a test. I’m on break.”
“Where’s the girl?” She says stepping out the door and looking down the hall.
I shove the paper into my pocket when she turns her head, “She went to her room.”
I walk toward her innocently, getting away from the desk.
She looks back at me, “You can give her these then.” She hands me the stack of clothes from under her arm. “Yours are on bottom. Be dressed and waiting outside by the end of your break. Mr. Grad will be waiting.”
“P.E. uniforms? Did she tell you why we needed them?” Anne holds the shirt in front of her with a look of disgust on her face.
“She told me right after we had a deep discussion about the exam we took and before supper we are going to have tea and further discuss how weird this place is.”
Anne doesn’t look amused and takes her shorts from me and turns back to her room.
“Maybe Mr. Grad already knows we did bad on the exams so he is going to make us run a mile as punishment.”
She turns back smiling, “They wouldn’t do that. Maybe, they have horses or something cool for us to do to make up for that ridiculous test.”
“We’ll see,” I say walking to my room to change.
Anne and I are dressed in our new uniforms walking down stairs to meet Mr. Grad. She was right, they look exactly like P.E. uniforms except there is no place on the front of them to write your name on the shirt or shorts. Stiff and scratchy, they need to be washed a few times like Gran did for me as a kid every year before school started to get clothes soft.
“Where are we supposed to meet him?” Anne asks.
“She said to meet him outside.”
We walk down the hall and out the front doors of the building. There is no one outside other than the two of us.
“You sure she said he was going to meet us?”
“Yup. I’ll go ask her if he’s late or something?” I turn back around to go to the front office.
“There wasn’t anyone in the office. I looked when we walked by. Let’s try the back.”
The building looks so much bigger from the outside. The windows are too tall for me to see into any of them as we pass.
“Want to race?” Anne says, not waiting on my answer, takes off running.
She’s faster then I thought she’d be but I catch up quick none-the-less. I get beside her and slow down long enough to tell her she runs like a girl just as we get to the edge of the building.
I make it around the side of the building right when Anne pushes me hard into the building. The left side of my body scraps the rough bricks but I catch my balance. I can’t believe she would play so dirty. I run with everything I have to catch up, but she is already out of sight having passed the next edge of the building leading to the back of the school.
I charge around the building at full speed determined to not let her win. Just when I make it around the building I tackle someone, hard. It knocks the air out of me, I hit the ground, and land on my back.
I roll to my side and Anne is on the ground next to me.
“You sore loser,” she says standing up rubbing her shoulder.
I sit up trying to get air back in my lungs, “You cheated. That means I win by default.”
I stand up and look at her but she’s looking past me. I look behind me to see what she’s staring at. There is a big obstacle course set up in the back of the building. No wonder she stopped running when she got to the back of the building. There is some kind of obstacle course set up in a huge U-shape where the starting line is right next to the finish line. Mr. Grad is walking through the middle of the course toward us.
“You were right, we are being punished,” Anne whispers.
“Looks like you two have already warmed up for the last test of the day,” Mr. Grad waves to the course we are staring at. “As you can see, it will test your strength and endurance. You will start with hurdles then tire run to the monkey bars. Finishing the monkey bars you will have to move those big tires however you can to get them past the green line, run the curve to the wall that you will go up and over.
Next, you will have the balancing bars followed by the low crawl.” Anne is shaking her head ‘no’ the entire time he is explaining the course to us. “At the end you will climb the ropes to the plateau and ring the bell,” He makes it sound like everything is beside the next obstacle, but there are huge gaps where we will have to run to the next part.
When he finishes Anne looks at me to see my reaction to the course.
“I don’t know about her but I wasn’t told there would be tryouts. Lia said this was a school for others kids like us.”
“She didn’t tell me anything either,” Anne agrees.
Mr. Grad looks annoyed, “This is not a competition and you are already students at The Academy, but in order to place students correctly we have to know where every student stands mentally and physically. This is not public school; age is not an indicator of your abilities and never was. We do things better. Now go stand at the yellow marker and stretch.”
He walks to the bench next to the start and end markers, grabs a clipboard with the stopwatch sitting on it. I follow Anne to a yellow marker in front of the hurdle section of the course. She rubs her shoulder as we start to stretch.
“Did I hurt your shoulder bad?”
She begins stretching her legs, “No, it’s just a little tender where your hard head smashed into it.”
“Next time you’ll get out of my way.”
Mr. Grad goes over the course again after we finish stretching.
“Now remember this test tells us where to place you. Do your best. On your mark, get set, go!”
We take off to the hurdles. I clear them with ease leaving Anne behind. Thanks to football I can do tire runs in my sleep. Anne is falling farther behind when I get to the monkey bars. I’m starting to sweat. The bars seem to be farther apart than when I played on them as a kid. I stop in front of one of the big tires and take some deep breaths.
“No breaks until you’re finished!” Mr. Grad yells from behind me.
He is walking beside the obstacles keeping pace with Anne, but watching me. During a football boot camp one summer I had to flip tires so I know I just need to get in a groove. I line up my breathing with lifting and fli
pping to get through it. I run to the wall but stop to catch my breath again before climbing it. I turn and look at Mr. Grad expecting him to yell at me for stopping but he’s not paying attention to me. Anne is squatting down in front of the other tire trying to lift it up to no avail. She can lift it a couple inches before she drops it. Mr. Grad isn’t yelling at her. He’s leaning over next to Anne talking to her. I start walking that way to help her when Anne snaps her head toward Mr. Grad. She looks like she wants to kill him. She looks back at the tire and stands it up as if it was a feather. She doesn’t flip it end-over-end like I did. She stands it up and rolls it down the course.
Mr. Grad catches me watching, “You should be done by now!”
I go back to the wall, climb up it, and throw myself over it.
The balancing bars are the kind you see in gymnastic studios, however these stand higher in the air. This wouldn’t be that big of a deal except that I have a small thing with heights. The bars are tall with a three-step ladder next to it. I have to use the middle step to get on the bar even though I have always been the tallest I know of my age. Under the bars they have dug the ground out and made a mud pit. Not only will I fall even father than a normal balance beam, I will be covered in mud to top it off. I stand up on the beam without looking down. I exhale and take a step. I hear Anne running up to the other beam but I just keep looking straight ahead.
“Why aren’t you moving?” Anne asks standing up on her beam. I loose the little focus I had and look over at her walking down the beam. My fear must be visible because she starts laughing, “Are you really that freaked out?”
She turns on her beam to face me. I take another step to prove I’m not freaked out but I wobble like a toddler walking for the first time. She starts laughing.
“What are you doing? Stop talking to each other and move!” Mr. Grad suddenly yells from the end side of the beams.
Anne gasps. When I turn from Mr. Grad to look at her she is falling.
I begin to lunge toward her forgetting my fear. I’m quickly reminded as I lose what little balance I have. I flail my arms out and sink down on the beam in a squatting position, stabilizing myself with my hands. She hits the mud pit with a splat. I don’t know if she fell from laughing at me or if Mr. Grad surprised her when he yelled, but when she stands up there isn’t even a hint of a smile on her mud-covered face.