The Academy

by Ridley Pearson

  “Enough. All three floors of the four dorms—no cameras inside actual dorm rooms or bathrooms. But all of the school buildings, including classrooms, the gym—but not the locker rooms—a lot of cameras covering the grounds.” He pointed out many of the areas on screen as he listed them.

  “The chapel?” Steel asked.

  “Most of the outside. Nothing inside.”

  “Which I found interesting,” Kaileigh added.

  “The administration building. The common room and dining hall. The gym, inside and out…I think I said that already.”

  “I asked him to show me the other night when you said those guys went missing in the Lower Three bathroom.”

  “They were recorded?” Steel gasped.

  “The cameras record through a blade server to a disk farm,” Pennington Cardwell said. “I haven’t been able to find where the farm’s at, but I can lift the information from it. All of the images—every single camera—are left on a disk for a week—seven days exactly—then compressed and archived to the memory farm. They probably use tape backup, or optical disk. Without the backups, the only thing I’ve got is from the previous week. That may be a storage limitation. It’s entirely possible that they don’t keep anything for longer than a week, though I doubt it. You gotta believe they keep the stuff a lot longer. That way if they spot something—someone smoking, or a boy and girl messing around—they can go back and try to establish a history.”

  “And you were right,” Kaileigh said to Steel.

  “Was I?”

  “You’re mocking me,” she said. “It’s not that I didn’t believe you.”

  “It isn’t?” he said.

  “About the bathroom. About the door opening an odd number of times,” she said.

  “When she first told me you’d counted the times the bathroom door opened and closed…” Cardwell said. “But then I counted them on tape. I gotta say, it like totally blew me away that you were right.”

  Steel shot a look at Kailiegh. She’d obviously told Cardwell about his incredible memory. He didn’t want that going around school. Wynncliff Academy was his chance to start fresh, to avoid the freak label.

  Cardwell III cued up the video in question, directing Steel to watch the center computer, where instead of four panes, now the view from a single camera filled the screen.

  “Lower Three, just after curfew last Sunday night,” Penny said. He hit the space bar and the video played. It wasn’t the clearest image. Black and white, dimly lit and fuzzy.

  Steel watched two large boys come down the hall and enter the washroom.

  “Now look at the time code,” Penny said. He set the video into a faster play mode. A clock timer in the upper corner advanced through ten o’clock and beyond. Steel saw himself enter the washroom. He recalled hearing the squeaking hinge and then finding no one inside the washroom. Then at 11:23 p.m. three large boys exited the washroom. The faces were not clear enough to recognize.

  “I was in there,” Steel muttered to himself. “And they were not.”

  “Show him the other one,” Kaileigh said.

  It took Penny a few minutes to set up another video. During this time, Kaileigh and Steel said nothing. They exchanged a few looks. Steel’s curiosity would not let go.

  “Okay,” Penny said. “There are four cameras mounted up on the chapel, giving a bird’s-eye view of the front lawn, the dining hall, and other stuff. This is the one looking toward the street.”

  The staticky, dark image, lit only by some distant streetlights, included the chapel’s side entrance to the choir room. Steel watched as two blobs—he and Kaileigh, he realized—sneaked up on the door and went inside.

  “Just let it play,” Kaileigh said, catching Penny before he advanced the video.

  They waited about a minute. Four large lumps came out of the same door and disappeared around the corner and out of sight. Steel clearly remembered peering out from beneath the pipe organ and seeing the face of a boy he now knew to be Victor DesConte.

  “Is that the last we see of them?” Steel asked.

  “No,” Penny said.

  He advanced the video. The time clock read 11:25 p.m. If Steel was right, that gave enough time for DesConte to have gotten to the admin building, met with Randolph, and return—though it didn’t begin to explain it.

  “It’s about the same time of night as they left the washroom last Sunday night.”

  “So this is something they do regularly?” Steel said. “What do you suppose they’re planning?”

  “No clue,” Penny said.

  “We need to get into those tunnels,” said Steel.

  “And that would help us, how?” Kaileigh inquired.

  “We talked about this! What if these guys are planning something awful?” he asked. “You know, something really bad, like what you read about in the newspapers? A school shooting. What if we can stop that?”

  “Couldn’t we just tell someone?” Kaileigh asked.

  “We can’t tell the headmaster about my hacking the system,” Penny said. “You gotta find another way.”

  “We need to get into those tunnels.”

  “It feels wrong to me,” she said. “I was invited to go here. I don’t want to get kicked out. This is way better than home.”

  “Are you saying you’re not going to do it?” Steel said.

  “No, of course I’ll do it,” she said. “I just don’t want to get caught missing curfew.” Her face tightened with the thought.

  “Yeah…but if Penny can watch the cameras and help us move around campus without being seen, how would we get caught?” Steel said.

  “Knowing us, we’ll find a way,” Kaileigh said.

  The dining hall teemed with bleary-eyed students dressed in disheveled uniforms staggering through a cafeteria line while half asleep. Coffee and tea flowed freely, as did the Coca-Cola and Red Bull. The school expected students to use caffeine in moderation but did nothing to police the situation, leaving some students cranked before the first class bell, their eyes stuck open as if held that way by toothpicks, their lips twitching, their feet dancing beneath their desks.

  Steel was presented with his choice of hot or cold: an assortment of cereals and yogurts, or today’s offering of biscuits and gravy: a sallow breaded material on top of “mystery meat” and slathered beneath a ghostly gray gravy. He headed for the Frosted Shredded Wheat, snagged a watered-down orange juice, and poured himself a breakfast tea.

  He exited the kitchen into the dining hall, an enormous room with pale maple-paneled walls from which hung this month’s gallery of student art—ghastly attempts to paint Campbell’s soup cans. There were forty round tables, each surrounded by ten uncomfortable wooden ladder-back chairs built sturdily enough to survive decades of abuse. At each table sat one faculty member and nine students. Lunch and dinner had mandated seating; breakfast was a free-for-all.

  Steel spotted Kaileigh sitting at a table of all girls. He found a chair at a table with his roommate, Verne. He sat down, said nothing to anyone, and began eating. Third Form students risked all sorts of derision and razzing if they spoke first at the breakfast table. The conversation only included you when your name was mentioned.

  His attention landed on the headmaster’s table, where he spotted Victor DesConte, two other boys Victor’s size, three snobby-looking Fifth Form girls, and three students he didn’t recognize. Steel had long since learned to read lips—a skill he kept to himself. Not even his parents knew how good he was at it. But for him, reading lips was only a matter of memory—how words were formed by the mouth, tongue, and lips.

  He tried to eavesdrop on the conversation at the headmaster’s table, only to realize they weren’t speaking English. In fact, the more he watched, the more he came to understand they weren’t all speaking the same foreign language. Instead, they seemed to be speaking three or four languages at once, but back and forth as if each understood clearly what the other was saying. Wynncliff was widely recognized as the prep-school equivale
nt of Middlebury College—a language-intensive school (six foreign languages were offered), but he’d never expected to see something like this.

  Benny the Bulb was overseeing Steel’s table. He chastised a student for hogging the milk and told him to refill the pitcher. He caught Steel staring across the hall at the headmaster’s table.

  “Foreign languages, Mr. Trapp,” Benny the Bulb said. “Breakfast at the headmaster’s table forbids English. He’s something of an expert, is our headmaster. He speaks German, Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, and Spanish. Fluently, I might add. He can lapse into any at any time. It’s quite a challenge to keep up with him. Only a few students are up to the task.”

  Steel found it amazing that the brutish Victor DesConte was fluent in anything other than bullying.

  “Have you considered pursuing a foreign language, Mr. Trapp?” the Bulb asked.

  “I’m taking Mandarin,” Steel said. He had his father to thank for that.

  “Advanced mathematics? Computer science?”

  These were Mr. Morgan’s courses. Steel knew better than to speak ill of either.

  “Maybe when I get to Sixth Form,” Steel said, thinking this the politically correct answer. But he was shot a hot look from one of the upperclassmen at Morgan’s side.

  Wrong answer. Obviously, you didn’t wait until senior year to take a Morgan class.

  Morgan’s thin lips twisted into a gnarly smile. “While true that I instruct primarily Sixth Form students, Mr. Trapp, it would hardly be a precedent for an underclassman such as yourself to express at least a passing interest in the subject matter. And should such an interest be voiced, said student might also discover that said master offers tutorial instruction in said courses, the tutoring often resulting in early acceptance to advanced placement study. Computer science is at the very heart of all business, commerce, communication, health care, finance, and even the arts, Mr. Trapp.” This part sounded rehearsed to Steel. “Getting an early start can be beneficial to a student’s acquisition of certain upperclassmen’s privileges. I can see on your face that this is news to you. Oh yes, Mr. Trapp: academic advancement has its rewards at Wynncliff Academy. We treat AP placement as incentives. If you want to discuss this further, I’m in my office every evening after football practice.”

  Benny the Bulb had been the JV football coach for something like twenty-four years. He’d had a losing record only one of those years, when a medical complication had sidelined him. It was said that he applied the advanced mathematical concept of statistical probability to his play-calling, and that it gave him an enormous advantage over the competition.

  “Yes, sir,” Steel said.

  “I’ve heard about that memory of yours,” he said. “Wouldn’t mind putting it through the paces.”

  Steel felt himself blush, astounded that he might be the subject of gossip among the faculty.

  “We’ve all heard,” said one of the upperclassmen to Morgan’s right. She was a handsome girl with vibrant green eyes and a contagious smile. Steel felt a little jolt of electricity at being the object of her attention. Most upperclassmen wouldn’t give a Third Former the time of day. And here was an upperclassman girl staring at him like she was dying for him to say something back to her.

  “It’s not like I have a choice about it,” he said modestly. “It’s just one of those things.”

  “Nell Campbell,” she said, introducing herself.

  “Any relation to Seymore ‘Soupy’ Campbell, class of seventy-two, Yale graduate in astrophysics?” Steel said, showing off. He’d read about him in the alumni directory.

  Nell’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. Her teeth were as white as his mother’s best table china. Mr. Morgan cocked his head, clearly impressed as well.

  “So it’s true,” Nell said, as if she’d discovered some national secret. “How’d you do that?”

  “Is he your father?” Steel asked. He knew he was: he could see the similarity from the picture that had also been in the book. He was about to display this knowledge when a beefy guy with a freckled face came up behind Nell Campbell and laid his hands on her shoulders. The behemoth looked right at Steel and let him know to shut up. The hands on the shoulders indicated some kind of possession. Steel felt certain of it.

  Nell Campbell did not look pleased to be interrupted, and Steel suddenly felt in the middle of things.

  He was only halfway through the shredded wheat, but he asked the Bulb to be excused, and was up and away from the table before he did something stupid.

  The whole girl thing was new territory to him. He didn’t know all the rules.

  He ran smack into Kaileigh. She looked a little miffed as she said, “Who’s your new friend?” She was staring directly at Nell Campbell.

  All he’d wanted was a bowl of cereal. Suddenly everything seemed too complicated.

  “I’m out of here,” Steel said. It was the only thing he could think to say.

  Today, Mrs. D. had come to the Corinthians to tutor the boys in math and reading. This was their least favorite thing to do. But the right to a bed and three meals a day came with this string attached. More important to the boys, she rewarded the two best students each week with tokens to a nearby video game arcade, or gift certificates to California Pizza Kitchen. For this reason, and this reason alone, competition was fierce. Some actually studied throughout the week in anticipation of the quiz that came at the end of tutoring.

  Now, with the quiz over and with Little Peter and Saul the week’s winners, the boys were eager to have Mrs. D. gone so they could get back to life at the boathouse.

  “Boys!” Mrs. D. announced. She never raised her voice. The mere act of addressing them as a group won silence and their undivided attention.

  “Taddler and Johnny. You nearly fouled up the Haymarket job. You took risks you shouldn’t have taken. You put yourselves in intractable positions that could have jeopardized everyone in this room.” She paused, and as she did, it seemed that no one but she was breathing. “But the fact is, you succeeded, and succeeded without being caught. You displayed bravery, cunning, and the ability to work under pressure, and for that you are to be commended.”

  From her purse she produced two small cell phones. “We can no longer risk using the walkie-talkies. These are push-to-talk cell phones, far more secure than the walkie-talkies. They operate on prepaid accounts, so there is no way to trace them to the owner, if found. Taddler and Johnny,” she announced to the others, “will be team leaders on this upcoming job.” She handed each a cell phone; the boys admired them greatly.

  “You are now entering the planning phase of a job at the Armstrad Hotel.”

  There was a collective gasp in the room. The Armstrad was known as the fanciest, most expensive, most lavish hotel in all of Boston. It had been in operation for more than a hundred and fifty years. It was also known as the hotel with the best security in town. For this reason—as explained many times by Mrs. D. herself—the boys had never attempted a job at the Armstrad. Just the mention of its name made some of them fear the assignment before they even heard it.

  Taddler swelled with pride as he received the cell phone. But there was something else going on inside him as well: curiosity. This wasn’t the Mrs. D. the boys had come to love and fear. She never passed out such rewards—some money here and there, yes, but never anything that could be pawned; poverty, it seemed, was one of the ways she kept the boys beholden to her. Even her tone of voice was different. The hard edge was gone. She was almost motherly to them. Taddler didn’t know what to make of it, but he suspected it was intentional. She was sending them a signal that this job was different. Very different.

  “Now listen up,” she said, as if the boys were not already hanging on her every word. “I have secured an incredible opportunity for two of you. Only two.” She looked right at Taddler, then Johnny. “The two boys who please me most on the Armstrad job will be given a real chance at something big.”

  She surveyed the group, one youn
g face at a time. “You boys mean the world to me. And yet you must understand I would never hesitate to expel you for bad behavior. I’ve done so many times. But now I’m offering you a way to get out of here. Do not take this lightly. I will select my two choices at the end of the Armstrad project. I expect you all to keep that in mind as you go forward with your assignments. We will start with general surveillance. This will be coordinated by Taddler. Johnny will plan the entrance and exit strategy. As you are all aware, the Armstrad represents a formidable challenge. Made more so by the fact that now, following the Haymarket incident, hotel security across the city has intensified even more, and there is a high alert for boys your age. You must be vigilant, extra careful in your surveillance. Whatever you do, be extremely cautious about how you return to the Corinthians, in case you’re being followed. Johnny, I expect you to make a different route for each boy, one that provides opportunity to check for tails. We can’t be too careful, gentlemen. Your futures are literally at stake.”

  Brian Taddler heard mention of his future and hardly knew what to do. It caught in his throat like a fish bone. If he’d ever considered his future—and he couldn’t remember having done so—it had only been to fear it: prison, a gang, drugs, the street. What Mrs. D. was talking about was none of that, but something different altogether. He rolled the word around in his mouth like a piece of candy. The future. It tasted sweet.

  It began as what should have been a simple ga-ga tryout. Steel had progressed under Hinchman’s coaching. He’d studied both solo play and team strategy, where the five players on either side attempted to avoid striking each other with the ball while also defending each other from the opponents’ attacks. As a game of elimination, one by one, a team member was eventually struck with the ball and forced to leave the game. The idea was to strike first and strike fast, quickly turning the numbers to your team’s advantage. If you could get up five–three or four–two, the odds put the win in your favor. For this reason, teams worked on passing and defensive drills that required lightning-quick reflexes and split-second timing. With proper movement within the octagon, and passing between players, a team could surround an opponent and strike on the back of the legs, a difficult, if not impossible area to defend. Conversely, with good communication between teammates, such attempted strikes could be avoided with jumps or deflections.