Academic Assassins

by Clay McLeod Chapman

  I recognized one of those cadets. Is that Grayson grinning behind the glass? Everyone here must have been military. Merridew had amassed a staff of soldiers.

  I heard heels click-clack across the floor as Merridew entered behind me.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  She was carrying something. A slender brown strap. A leather belt.

  A collar.

  “Mr. Pendleton,” she said. Rather than sit behind her desk, Merridew knelt before my chair so that we were eye to eye. “Two visits in one day. I hope we are not making a habit of this….”

  The smooth, even tone of the foundation spackled across her cheeks cracked around her lips. She had a marble mouth.

  “Not one to mince words, are we? I admire that.”

  I couldn’t help but focus on the thing in her hands. It seemed to slither as she talked. I almost forgot that I was supposed to be listening, and had to hop back into her monologue midsentence. “…believe you will fit right in here at Kesey.”

  She presented the collar to me as if it were a gift from a great aunt who had absolutely no fashion sense whatsoever.

  Give me a minute, I thought, with some scissors and a Sharpie, I could modify this accessory to fit my own specifications. Maybe write my favorite band name across the side in Wite-Out, maybe slip a few safety pins along the strap. Possibly scribble a Magic-Markered heart with an arrow piercing the vena cava:

  SULLY + SPENCER 4-EVA

  Merridew was talking again. “Let me assure you, my goal is not to penalize you. My goal is for you to reenter the world. To be a member of society once more. To be a responsible citizen. How does that sound?”

  I like the no-punishment part, I wanted to say.

  “We at Kesey do not believe in pharmaceutical interventions. We do not use psychotropic medications here. I have seen how they are completely overused and abused by other facilities. They are a crutch—not a cure! No…I prefer to focus on the root of the problem rather than bury it with a prescription.”

  Merridew didn’t say anything for a moment, staring at me. Her smile never wavered, those lips as firm as chiseled rock.

  “Here at Kesey, we prefer to emphasize the three selves.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “I have isolated the three tenets that make an upright citizen.”

  She brandished her index finger.

  “Self-awareness.”

  She brought up her middle.

  “Self-discipline.”

  Finally her ring finger.

  “Self-respect.”

  I stared at those three wrinkled digits, examining the manicure of her nails.

  “If we can reinstate these three selves into our residents, I believe we can refashion the most serious offender into a responsible and successful young adult.”

  Good luck with that, I didn’t say out loud.

  The expression on her face faltered. “You do not believe me, do you?”

  Had I hurt her feelings? I actually felt a twinge of guilt.

  I slowly shook my head—no. I didn’t mean anything by it. Honest. She had a real lovely prison-asylum here.

  “We cannot make a person change,” she said. “That desire needs to come from within you, Spencer. I truly believe that we can motivate our boys and girls to want to become better people.”

  She had said my first name again.

  “Of course,” she said, “our residents are still held accountable for their actions. They need to be. But rather than thinking of Kesey as the final destination on an endless procession of stopgaps and half-measures, we provide an opportunity for our residents to decide to avoid delinquent behavior for themselves.” She paused for dramatic effect. “And how do we do that, Mr. Pendleton? By emphasizing the three selves—correct!” She clapped her hands. “Self…?”

  Up came her three fingers again, one after the other.

  Index.

  “Awareness,” she prompted. “Self…?”

  Middle.

  “Discipline. And self…?”

  Ring.

  “Respect!” Merridew seemed pleased, her grin spreading across her face. She unlatched the buckle on the collar. My eyes locked onto a tiny, flattened black box sewn into the center. A coil of red and green wires snaked out from the plastic square, a flat-faced foam disc fastened at its tip.

  Merridew raked her tongue over the foam’s surface. I swear I heard a sandpapery scrape as she licked. She pressed the pad against my forearm.

  So I’m going to be hooked up to an electrode all day? What exactly does this black box do? Keep track of my movements? Record my brain waves?

  Merridew flipped a switch located at the base of the box. A barely perceptible hum resonated out from the collar. A red light pulsed with electric life.

  “It is still early, but from what I have read from your files, you possess an intense anger toward authority figures and a rather healthy distrust of adults.”

  I wouldn’t disagree.

  From her suit jacket pocket, Merridew fished out a remote control that fit in the palm of her hand. This channel clicker seemed to have only one button on it.

  One shiny, red candy–like button.

  “Everyone on our staff is in possession of their own Conduct Response Unit,” she said. “Think of it as a universal remote. If one of our supervisors witnesses you displaying any sort of unruly behavior, he merely has to aim his C.R.U. activator at your collar in order to administer a brief, three-second response.”

  …Response?

  Merridew pressed her thumb against the button. A torrent of electricity surged through the suction pad adhered to my forearm and I could feel the suction pad burrowing into the muscle as if her saliva has an acidic tinge to it and she’s a leech eating through my arm MOM IS SITTING IN THE COURTROOM SHE’S CRYING I LOVE YOU MOM I’M SORRY my muscles instantly cinched into a knot both hands clenched into fists but I can’t move my hands I can’t move my arms or my legs I’m frozen my muscles won’t move can’t run can’t stand THEY WON’T LET ME TALK TO MY MOM I JUST WANT TO HUG HER BUT THE OFFICER WON’T LET ME Spencer get up get up—

  Merridew’s thumb lifted off the button.

  The tension in my muscles immediately slackened. My body sagged to the floor like a sack of potatoes, released from the black box’s lightning-bolt grip.

  There was a residue of electricity in my teeth. It had a metallic aftertaste that overwhelmed my mouth.

  My vision blurred. I had to blink to bring Merridew’s office back into focus.

  She patiently waited for me.

  Smiling.

  “As long as you are within the line of sight, our C.R.U.s are capable of transmitting a response from over fifty yards.”

  That grin lingered across her lips, sugar-masking something sour. Her breath smelled like some calcified bottle of cough syrup stashed at the far back of your medicine cabinet and forgotten.

  “Our goal is to instill a sense of right and wrong within you. For the longest time, that internal switch has remained flipped to right with no regard to those actions that civilized society might consider wrong. I intend to fix that switch.”

  Merridew held up the C.R.U. remote. “With this—”

  She pushed the button and lighting piercing the back of my eyes I can see the storm brewing dark clouds spreading in my head MOM I LOVE YOU MOM HELP I have to run inside or I’m going to get drenched run run hide quick before it’s too late—

  Her thumb lifted off the button.

  The backward arc of my spine released itself like a rubber band snapping. My body flopped forward. My lungs had seized. It felt as if my rib cage had completely clenched. I couldn’t keep the air in my chest. Was I having an asthma attack?

  This witchy administrator wants to kill me, I thought.

  Nobody was around to stop her. She had complete control.

  “The C.R.U. is our way of providing you with a signpost,” Merridew continued. “The next time you find yourself at the cr
ossroads between right and wrong, you can make an informed decision on which is the appropriate path for you to choose.”

  Merridew slowly lowered the remote.

  “If you attempt to remove the electrode around your neck,” she said in an even tone—no emotion whatsoever—“you will receive a response. If you try to take your collar off, you will receive a response. Is that understood?”

  Merridew lifted the C.R.U. and I instantly flinched, bracing for another shock.

  Nothing.

  “See?” Merridew’s warm voice drifted through the darkness. “You are in control of your actions, not us. It is only when you make a decision outside of the socially accepted standards of behavior that we offer you a reminder.”

  My eyes were still closed. Teeth clenched. In the blackness behind my eyelids, a quote from Brave New World came to mind—“Now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock.”

  When I finally opened my eyes, I realized Merridew had been waiting for me, arms crossed at her chest, her remote control from Hades nowhere in sight.

  “The choice is always yours, Mr. Pendleton. Yours.” Her lips lifted, her smile radiating a warmth that brought to mind heat waves emanating off a piece of roadkill left on the highway during a blisteringly hot day in August. “Any questions?”

  I was on death row. I had my very own portable electric chair choking my throat.

  I couldn’t look at her anymore. My eyes drifted across her desk, halting on a framed photograph. It was turned just enough that I could make out half of a face.

  A boy’s acne-riddled cheek.

  Leaning over Merridew’s desk, I turned the picture frame toward me.

  Compass…?

  What was a school picture of Compass doing framed on Merridew’s desk?

  “Ah.” She let out a lighthearted sigh. “I see you recognize my grandnephew.”

  She picked up the picture frame and smiled at the image of Compass.

  “Jim had such potential,” she said, drifting off into her own thoughts. “Our family had such high hopes for him. He could have changed the world.”

  She lowered the frame. Her smile diminished, lips sinking to a slit of pink.

  “Then you came along, Mr. Pendleton, and you took that away from him.”

  How could she be blaming me for this? Compass had runaway long before I met him.

  Merridew placed the picture back on her desk.

  I need to get out of here.

  I need to get out of here.

  I need—

  The smile leapt back onto her face, like a spider hopping onto its feet.

  “I have been aware of your exploits from the very beginning,” she said. “Burning down your school. House arrest. Camp New Leaf. The list goes on and on….Such a rascal! But wherever you go, other children follow. Whatever you say, other children listen. You are a leader, Mr. Pendleton. A natural-born leader.”

  She brought the C.R.U. up for me to see. Her rusted-red nail polish looked more and more like dried blood.

  “Once our Conduct Response Units make their way into schools across the country,” she said, her sugary breath drifting over me. “It will be because of your painstaking input. Thanks to you, students with behavioral problems everywhere will finally have a chance at becoming model citizens once and for all….”

  So that was Merridew’s master plan. Mass-produced dog collars for the nation’s student body. Fresh off the assembly line and onto the necks of kids everywhere. Armies of zombified Stepford Students marching through every school.

  Sugar and spice and everything fried.

  Zaps and jolts and electrified bolts.

  P’s and Q’s and curtsies and bows. Yes, ma’ams and no, sirs heard all across the country. If Merridew could convince the Board of Ed that her torture devices worked in an academic environment, students all across the country would soon be choking on her patented brand of brutal collars.

  We’re not just talking about Kesey. Teachers everywhere could shock their kids into submission with the mere touch of a button. Classrooms everywhere would be the backdrop of mass shock-a-thons. Kids would become nothing but shuffling hordes, their brains fried from too many jolts.

  “You are the perfect specimen,” she said. “If I can rebuild you, rehabilitate you, reclaim you—then I can reclaim absolutely anyone. I want you to lead my program into the future, Spencer—and I want all the other rabble-rousers to follow right along behind you, just as the children of Hamelin town followed the Pied Piper into his cave. Will you do that, Spencer? Will you be a leader for me?”

  I could just picture it: A nation of electroshocked lemmings.

  You better believe I wasn’t going to be Merridew’s test subject.

  I’m nobody’s lab rat.

  You hear more than you see in the Ant Farm. Sounds come at you from all different directions, but you never see their source.

  The chain-gang jangle of an orderly’s keys.

  The crashing static on a two-way radio.

  The distant shouts of an ant as he’s wrestled into a four-point restraint by the Men in White.

  Sometimes I wonder if I’m really hearing all these different sounds or if they’re just the noises bouncing off the inside of my skull.

  How did the ol’ saying go again?

  If you aren’t crazy coming into Kesey, you sure would be by the time you left.

  If you ever left.

  It was social hour. Ants were free to roam about the ward, though I chose to hole up in my pod. I could hear the others murmuring just outside my cell, but I didn’t feel like socializing yet. I was busy with a little science experiment:

  How to Disarm a Battery-Powered Electroshocker.

  I studied my distorted reflection in the steel latrine, struggling to get a good look-see at my collar. The battery was encased inside a black plastic box fastened to the back of the strap, positioned directly on top of the vertebra in my neck. A small electrode snaked out from the black box—like the sucker on a red-and-green-wired remora. Those deep-sea parasitic suckerfishes attach themselves to the belly of a shark and feed off whatever leftovers funnel out from their host’s mouth.

  This collar was a parasite, alright—and it’s feeding off of me. It wasn’t going to let go until it had sucked me dry.

  I tugged on the collar to examine the electrode fastened to my neck.

  What’s stopping me from tugging it off? I can just peel the pad like this and….

  All of a sudden a jolt of electricity rushed through and I instantly feel like I’m a fish with an electrified hook stuck in my mouth I can’t wriggle free there’s electricity in my teeth there’s lightning behind my eyeballs DAD YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO PICK ME UP AN HOUR AGO there’s an ice pick in my eardrums there’s a jolt in my spine there is a burning white-hot coil of electricity the filament on a lightbulb don’t touch it YOU PROMISED DAD WHERE WERE YOU don’t touch I just touched an electric fence I stuck a coat hanger in a wall socket I plunged my tongue straight into a broken lightbulb stop please my mind is on fire and the shock finally stops and I flop back against my cot. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs had locked. Coughing, I peered out of my pod and found a surveillance camera positioned directly outside the Plexiglas partition. Its lens tightened on me, the angry red eye of its indicator light burning bright.

  I limply waved hello to whoever was watching.

  Scratch that plan.

  “Hey—fresh meat.” A scrawny ant leaned against the entrance to my pod. He had heavy gray bags under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. “You seen Mickey?” He wiped his runny nose against his fingers, revealing a crude tattoo of a circle—an O or maybe a zero—etched into the skin between his thumb and index finger. “You deaf? Has Mickey come around here or what?”

  I had no idea who this Mickey was, and I wasn’t about to open my mouth to tell this punk that.

  “You’re hopeless, man,” he said, giving up on me. “You see him, you tell him I’m looking for him. Mickey kno
ws who I am.”

  Just then, the bell rattled throughout the Ant Farm.

  “Everybody line up,” Grayson shouted from the gallery floor, the jingle of his keys sounding like sleigh bells. “Move it, move it, move it!”

  This scrawny kid nodded for me to follow him.

  “Headcount happens three times a day,” he said. “Once in the morning just before breakfast, once following lunch, and once at night, right before lights out. If somebody’s missing during roll call, Grayson puts Kesey on lockdown.”

  I shuffled out from my pod and saw the rest of the ants line up along the Yellow Brick Road. Everyone made sure his toes didn’t cross the painted edge.

  Walking down the gallery, I glanced past the glazed-over eyes of each resident—unblinking, as glassy as a pair of marbles sewn into a stuffed animal.

  I took my place in line.

  Babyface stepped up next to me, strapped in with his own dog collar. “Looks like they gave us the same accessory, huh?”

  Buttercup followed a step behind Grayson, trailing after him like his own shadow. She held back as Grayson kept wandering down the row of ants. Her lips puckered ever so slightly at me, as if she were waiting for a kiss. “Feeling at home? Finding everything you need?”

  I stared forward, keeping quiet.

  Is Buttercup flirting with me?

  Grayson counted off each resident as he went—“One, two, three, four….”

  I decided to do a little tally of my own. Five Men in White. The orderlies at Kesey weren’t doctors or nurses, like the medically trained staff on duty. The orderlies had one job. All they had to do was what the name implied: Maintain order. As in—keep things under control, uphold the status quo, and make sure nobody hurts themselves or anyone else….Unless they’re the ones doing the hurting.

  Most of the Men in White I’d seen so far wore the telltale signs of past skirmishes—scars lining their cheeks, bite marks on their noses, missing chunks of cartilage.

  We are at war, Grayson had said, and you punks are the enemy.

  He made his way down the row, the retractable key chain fastened at his hip rattling with each step, counting off—“Five, six, seven…”