Academic Assassins

by Clay McLeod Chapman

  Averting her gaze, I found my own reflection in the polished surface of her desk staring back up at me.

  What’re you looking at?

  “I am curious,” she continued. “Were you able to find your inner-you?”

  He hasn’t sent me a postcard yet, I thought.

  I scanned the office. The entire room looked as if it had been hand-carved. The book cases, the paneling along the walls. Even the mantle along the fireplace was fashioned from some chunk of cherrywood, whittled with ornate floral patterns.

  I spotted a plaque hanging on the mantle. Scorched into the wood in ornately blackened script, it read:

  Parens Patriae

  Merridew followed my eyes. “One of our residents made that for me. It is Latin. Do you know Latin?”

  I solemnly shook my head—No dead languages for me, sorry.

  Merridew smiled and nodded. “It means—The state as parent.”

  So she was supposed to be my mother now?

  I’ll stick with my family-free diet right now, thanks.

  “I take a personal interest in all my wards, Mr. Pendleton. Each is special to me in his or her own very unique way. But I must admit, I have been looking forward to your visit for quite some time now. It is not every day that we have the privilege of welcoming such a distinguished guest as yourself to our humble facility.”

  Distinguished? That was a first. I turned my head to see if there was anyone else in the room, just in case she wasn’t referring to me.

  “It is silly of me…” Merridew demurely bowed her head and blushed like a bashful china doll. Her lips lifted into a smile, sending a series of fissures through her porcelain complexion. “But I could not help myself. I simply had to personally welcome you to Kesey. I have followed your case with great interest for quite some time now. I secretly hoped the judge would send you here….”

  Merridew leaned forward over her desk, as if she were about to fill me in on a little secret.

  “As fate would have it, I am acquaintances with Judge Abraham Goldfarb. When I learned he was presiding over your trial, I personally reached out to him and…well. Here you are.”

  Lucky, lucky me.

  “I would like to discuss the provisions of your new home, if I may.”

  Home. Just hearing her say the word made my stomach lurch.

  I’d lost my home. I’d turned my back on my home.

  I didn’t deserve a home.

  “You will not find a program quite like Kesey anywhere else in the state. The country, for that matter. Of course there are other treatment facilities, but what sets our serious offender program aside from the rest is something quite special.”

  She paused, figuring I’d bite.

  “Love.”

  I kept quiet. Merridew stood from her leather chair and walked around to the front of her desk. “I believe it is time you were given the love and attention you have been missing for all these years.”

  She perched herself on the desktop in front of me and crossed her legs.

  “I want to apologize.”

  Apologize?

  “We have failed you,” she said. “The system has failed you. Adults have failed you. Even your parents have failed you. Please…accept my sincerest of apologies.”

  Merridew leaned over and rested a hand on my knee.

  “When all your options had dried up and you hit a dead end, you finally found your way to me. To Kesey. Right where you belong.”

  Her fingers squeezed my knee so hard, I thought she’d pop my patella.

  “I give you my word, Spencer—you will not slip through society’s cracks.”

  She said my name. My first name. I hadn’t expected to hear her say it.

  Spencer.

  It sounded so foreign, coming out from her mouth. Was that even my name anymore? I’d gotten so used to Pendleton-this, Pendleton-that—I couldn’t even recognize the sound of my own name.

  “You are my problem now,” she said. “All mine.”

  Then she hugged me.

  YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE…BUT IT HELPS!

  A cute kitten clung to the end of a rope, sticking its adorable tongue out at me as it held on for dear life—Hang in there!

  The poster was taped to the opposite side of the control room window. It felt like I had been staring at it for hours as Babyface, Nailbiter, and I waited for the orderly sitting behind the Plexiglas partition to buzz us through a set of steel double doors.

  There was an electric hum. The lock released.

  Our cue to move.

  I glanced at the kitten one last time before entering the admission ward.

  Hang in there, little fella….

  I noticed the black, bullet-shaped surveillance camera mounted to the ceiling.

  So much for privacy.

  We were brought into a room with no windows.

  We were told to stand in a line.

  We were told not to talk.

  That won’t be hard.

  Don’t even think about breathing ’til we tell you to, I expected one of the men in starched white to say. We got ways of sucking the oxygen right outta your lungs.

  Babyface had been uncharacteristically quiet all through “processing.” His spirit seemed to sag the second we passed through the double doors. Not that I blamed him. Something was definitely off about this place. There was an oppressive weight to the air inside. My own chest had deflated a bit. You really had to struggle to even breathe in here.

  I turned to Nailbiter to see how she was holding up. She had wrapped her arms around her chest, hugging herself tightly. The bruise from the bus’s window had blossomed across her forehead, like a smashed raspberry.

  “Don’t let them inject you with anything,” she whispered to me. “They implant you with a tracking device. A little microchip under your skin. Then they’ll always be able to find you, no matter where you go. They’ll hunt you down.”

  A steel door opened behind us. Nailbiter instantly dropped her eyes to the floor without another word, feasting on her index finger.

  I heard a rattle of keys. A gruff, buzz-cutted man wearing a white uniform stood before us. His nose looked as if it had been broken so many times, it was now permanently crooked. The upper half of his left ear was missing. There were several indentations along the crescent contours of the lobe—like teeth marks.

  Had somebody bitten his ear off?

  He had a black leather belt clinched around his waist. Quick inventory: two key chains, a walkie-talkie, a pen, and a pad. And if I wasn’t mistaken, I think I saw a remote control.

  This guy must be in charge of changing the channels.

  A cloth name tag was sewn across his uniform’s chest pocket.

  GRAYSON.

  “Have a seat,” he ordered, wheeling over a television set that looked like it had been manufactured in nineteen eight-two. Its faux wooden cabinet was laced in graffiti.

  Teluhvizin rotz yer brane

  Yer brainz rotted alredy

  A mindz a teruble thing to waste

  Only someone had scratched through the “w” in “waste,” turning it into a “t,” so it now read—

  A mindz a teruble thing to taste

  How long had it been since I turned on a television? Months, probably. Nearly a year. I had no idea what was even on anymore.

  “Where’s my popcorn?” Babyface demanded.

  Funny, I thought. That sounded like something I’d say.

  Grayson knocked Babyface upside his head with a VHS cassette—a VHS cassette? What is this? The Stone Age? Impact made a hollow plastic—THWACK.

  “Ow!” he shouted. “What’s the big deal, man?”

  Grayson slipped the cassette into the VCR and pressed play without a word.

  Showtime.

  It took the television a moment to warm up. A distorted image slowly materialized from the murky black depths of the fish-tank screen. Blues and reds were washed out in a bland sheen of murky algae green. The corners of the scr
een had burnt out, leaving behind brown blots where no image could emerge.

  A young woman wearing a pantsuit with enormous shoulder pads and a plasticized perm waltzed among the flowers before the building we were now in. She addressed the camera with a warm smile, as if she were talking just to us.

  To me.

  “Welcome to the Kesey Reclamation Center,” she said. “We are a private residency program that provides specialized education services for teenagers with social and emotional difficulties. Our students have a broad range of psychological and emotional conditions—including personality and thought disorders, clinical depression, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as a history of general delinquency that prevents them from functioning in the traditional classroom environment….”

  Don’t tell me. Not another touchy-feely summer camp.

  No—something about this place was different from New Leaf. I couldn’t put a finger on it, but my Spidey-senses had been shrieking ever since we arrived here.

  Wait a minute, I thought. That woman in the video.

  I recognized her.

  It was the program director. Merridew. Only…younger. She no longer had that football helmet of a blonde perm—but I was positive it was her.

  “Kesey stands on five acres of land generously donated by the city in the hopes of rehabilitating and reeducating our next generation of young leaders….”

  “This is where we wash, rinse, and tumble dry your brain.” Babyface held out his hand, palm up, and waved, total game-show hostess-style.

  Who writes this kid’s material?

  Grayson thwacked him upside the head with his palm. “Pipe down.”

  “I can sue you for abuse, you know!”

  “Be my guest.”

  Babyface sure didn’t seem to have any problem repeatedly putting his foot in his mouth—kinda like someone I used to know.

  Back to the video tour. Kesey was its own self-sustainable kingdom. It had its own power plant and water supply. It even had a hospital. Kesey was a completely self-contained city-within-a-city for a world that would rather forget its citizens.

  We would never leave this place.

  The younger Merridew passed by a cluster of buzz-cutted kids on their knees, busy planting a colorful array of flowers alongside the walls of the building.

  Those kids must be in their forties by now.

  Or dead.

  “Our wonderfully lush gardens have become a point of pride for Kesey,” she declared. “Residents have the privilege of spending a portion of their day tending to the beautiful begonia and bloodroot flowers that cloak our campus every spring….”

  “You telling me I’ve got to garden?” Babyface shook his head. “Forget that.”

  There was an abrupt edit in the video. Merridew was now walking along a yellow line painted down the middle of the main hallway. Her enthusiasm was as impenetrable as her perm. That plastered-on rictus never cracked, always smiling at the camera. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was looking directly at me.

  “From everyone in our administration, we want to wish you a healthy recovery. It does not matter how many other institutions you have tried. Kesey will welcome you with open arms. Our main goal is to reclaim your—”

  Grayson slammed his palm over the power button and the screen went black.

  Guess the grand tour’s over.

  “First lesson of the day,” he said. “Kesey is not a juvenile detention center. Juvie would be too good for you. Kesey is not a military academy, though every staff member here has been trained for combat. We are at war and you are the enemy. Kesey is not a loony bin. To earn yourself a reservation in this palace, you’ve got to be beyond bonkers. The God’s honest truth—Kesey is all of these things. Only worse. Much worse. ’Cause Kesey is the only place that could house the likes of you.”

  He stared straight at me, fuming through his nose, as if he expected me to react. He was taking me in. Sizing me up. Assessing me to see what I was made of.

  I could tell he wanted me to lash out.

  Did he actually want me to hit him?

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, a grin slowly creeping across his lips. “Wanna call your mommy and daddy? Help me, Mommy! Save me, Daddy! I’m swo scwared!”

  The grin quickly evaporated from his face.

  “Nobody’s gonna save you, kid. Not anymore. You did this to yourself; now you’ve gotta suffer the consequences all on your lonesome—and I’m here to help.”

  From this close up, the more I could focus on the imperfections of his face—the craggy curve of his miss-set nose, broken a few too many times to heal correctly ever again; ragged channels of flesh from past stitch work, his cheeks sutured into train tracks; a slender white scar along his lower lip. Not to mention the missing ear. All I saw was a jigsaw puzzle that had been put back together wrong. Rather than snap the appropriate pieces in their proper place, whoever had worked on it decided to force the interlocking tabs into whatever order they wanted, jumbling the picture up altogether. What was left was a face full of mismatched features.

  “The brochure says we are a residential center that specializes in youth offenders with mental disorders and blah blah blah,” he said. “That’s a bunch of bull. We’re in the business of warehousing human beings down here—and business is booming, thanks to you. We are a zoo and you are the animals. Is that understood?”

  What is up with this drill instructor? Had he been fired from military school?

  I decided to stare at the floor.

  Apparently, that wasn’t the right choice. Grayson slammed his heel on my foot. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, but my throat tightened around the shout and shoved the sound back into my chest before it could escape.

  Grayson leaned his face into mine, our noses nearly touching.

  “Is that understood?”

  Babyface raised his hand. Grayson turned and stared, repulsed at the mere presence of this kid. “What?”

  “There must’ve been some kinda mistake.” Babyface shook his head. “I’m not supposed to be here. They got me locked up in the wrong place.”

  Grayson smiled. You could tell he loved his job. Welcoming in the fresh meat.

  “Oh yeah?” he asked. “Why’s that?”

  “I’m not crazy—like her.” Babyface pointed to Nailbiter. “Or him.”

  He pointed at me.

  That stung.

  “You might not be crazy now,” Grayson said. “But trust me—you will be.”

  Grayson pointed to the yellow line painted on the floor. It extended out from the room and across the entire length of the hallway, much like the divider lines on a highway. The slender thread of paint snaked around the far corner and disappeared.

  “Rule one,” he shouted. “Follow the Yellow Brick Road. Your feet should never step off the yellow line. Even for a second, even just a toe. Is that understood?”

  Silence. Were we supposed to answer him?

  “Here are rules two through twenty.” Grayson jabbed his finger at a list taped to the wall. “I don’t care if you tattoo them to the back of your hand—you will know these rules by the end of the day. If you can’t spout every last one back at me before lights out, you’re spending the night in the Black Hole. Is that understood?”

  We all nodded this time.

  Crystal clear.

  Nailbiter was dragged off to the Hive. That’s the nickname for the girls’ ward. She turned to me as one of Grayson’s fellow Men in White took her by the arm.

  “Get me out get me out get meeeeee ooout….”

  Even after she disappeared down the Yellow Brick Road, I could hear her voice. It lost its shape as she slipped away, until it didn’t sound human anymore.

  THE GROUND RULES

  No running for the fence.

  No weapons.

  No harassment or bullying.

  No hairstyles.

  No sch
ool supplies: pens, pencils, or Magic Markers.

  No vandalism or gang activity.

  No tobacco, drugs, or alcohol.

  No outside food (unless it has been authorized).

  No chewing gum or candy.

  No civilian attire, hoodies, or baseball caps.

  No jewelry of any kind.

  No cell phones, electronic devices, portable video games, MP3 players, or musical devices of any kind.

  No freedom. No escape. No getting out of here alive.…

  They were going to take our hair away. “To prevent spreading lice.” Grayson beamed, and I caught a glimpse of his stained teeth. Probably drank too much coffee.

  Babyface sat down in the swiveling barber chair first. If he didn’t look like a tyke when he had his hair, he sure looked like a toddler once it was all gone.

  Somebody get this kid a diaper.

  Our brainwashed barber couldn’t have been older than fourteen himself. The first thing I noticed about him was the dog collar wrapped around his neck.

  Just like the kids in the garden, I thought. Does everybody wear one of these?

  A red flashing light at the back pulsed in a steady rhythm, almost like a heartbeat. I could have sworn I caught a glimpse of a wire snaking around his throat.

  “All jobs here at Kesey are filled by residents,” Grayson explained over the buzz of the clippers. “Everybody’s got chores to do, just like happy li’l worker ants.”

  “Next.” Our barber nodded to me.

  I sat down and he draped a smock over my shoulders.

  “Hold still.”

  The buzz of the clipper’s teeth vibrated through my bones.

  “We cut our hair as a show of solidarity,” I remembered Peashooter had said when he forced the Tribe to shave our heads. “Consider it an act of tribal camaraderie.”

  That had been a lie. This was how people like Peashooter—plus places like Kesey—took your individuality away. No hair, no identity. Just buzzed skulls.

  You become a cog in the wheel.

  Nameless.

  Faceless.

  Nothing but another number.

  Bits of my hair drifted to the floor, like autumn leaves falling to the ground.