The Academy

by Ridley Pearson

  Reddie slapped the spud against the octagon’s midcourt section, striving for a rebound that would reach DesConte. But Steel quickly saw the spud’s movement in terms of vectors, like a pool player knowing how the cue ball will come off the bumper. He took Reddie’s strike not as a challenge to DesConte, but as a pass to himself, darting past the front girl and assaulting the Argos formation. As DesConte braced to defend the strike, Steel intercepted and redirected the spud off the back wall. The spud leaped with a backspin and caught the rear defender in the back of the leg. She was out.

  The crowd cheered.

  DesConte collided with Steel, laying a shoulder into him and nearly knocking him down.

  The serve to restart play required the spud to touch two walls. The Argives, overeager to balance the teams with a strike of their own, touched the ball before it hit the second wall, and the ball was served by the Spartans instead.

  Players darted in and around one another, vying for positions of advantage, but being well coached, returned to formation. The Argives, down one player, adopted a 1-2-1, a straight diamond with DesConte on the left side, in the middle pair.

  Play continued. The constant shifting of formations clearly caught the Argives off guard. A second and third Argive were out. The Spartans retained all five of their players while the Argives were reduced to DesConte and the girl playing forward.

  It was as if DesConte changed gears—as if he’d been waiting for the pit to clear out some. He hit three Spartans in a row. In less than a minute he’d single-handedly evened the teams.

  Steel and Brenda Simple spread out. Whenever the pit got this empty, the game nearly became every man for himself. But Hinchman had coached them to resist playing alone, especially in reduced numbers, and Steel knew if he didn’t work with Brenda, he’d be sitting on the bench for the next game, and Cloris would be the one playing.

  DesConte played like a madman, seemingly everywhere at once. He moved with lightning-quick reactions, catching Steel from behind off a perfectly calculated rebound that Steel should have seen coming. He was out.

  The crowd sighed.

  But Brenda caught DesConte celebrating, and the Argive captain was retired, to more complaints from the crowd.

  The Spartans remained in the match: 3–2.

  Hinchman kept Steel in the next game. He personally eliminated three of the Argive starters, to enormous cheers from the crowd, and the Spartans won the game easily. The match was tied: 3–3.

  As play to the final and deciding game began, Steel realized the advantage he gained from repeated play, from facing the same five players in every game. By this, his third game, it wasn’t just a matter of anticipation, his ability to predict play, to see a few milliseconds ahead of each strike, every block and rebound. It felt more like he’d already watched the game on a DVR and knew exactly what was coming. He moved around the pit through openings other players didn’t see. He avoided DesConte’s shoulder blocks, darting through gaps and redirecting the spud without even giving it much thought—he seemed to just know where the spud was going to go. He took out three players, matching man for man the expert play of DesConte. It was down to two against two: him and Toby Taggart against DesConte and a thin, flashy boy with quick reactions.

  The thin kid took out Taggart by redirecting a strike aimed at Steel. It was not only a terrific play, but one that Steel had not seen coming. He caught a glint in the thin boy’s eyes: Argos knew what Steel was up to. Their coach had put in a player that Steel hadn’t seen yet. He’d saved some new plays to surprise him.

  With Taggart out, it was two on one. Steel got lucky and caught the thin guy on the heel. He hadn’t been trying to hit him, but the referee spotted the glancing blow, and the boy was out.

  Steel faced DesConte.

  The crowd was on its feet.

  He saw the heads of spectators bouncing up and down like they were dancing to wild music. He saw DesConte, crouched, shoulders thrown forward, about to serve. The spud struck two walls, and Steel redirected it. DesConte jumped up, and the spud passed beneath him without touching him.

  The crowd roared.

  DesConte sent a vicious strike straight at Steel. Steel dove to the side and avoided it, but was off balance as DesConte raced across the pit and sent the rebound at Steel again.

  Steel jumped, caught the ball, and sent it off a wall at DesConte. But with an easy block, DesConte avoided contact with his legs. He bounced it off a wall, passing it to himself and launched the ball backward between his own legs.

  Steel had never seen that move.

  It caught him in the shins.

  The crowd exploded: the match was over. The Argives rushed the pit and surrounded DesConte.

  Steel stood there, frozen, unable to move.

  But then DesConte broke from the celebration, approached Steel, and offered his hand to shake.

  Steel took the boy’s hand, and the crowd responded with a roar.

  “That was amazing play for a first match, kid,” DesConte said.

  The Argives grabbed DesConte and continued their celebration. Steel climbed out of the pit and Hinchman wrapped an arm around him.

  “I’m sorry,” Steel apologized.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Hinchman said. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. This is only the beginning of the season. And yet this match will be talked about for a long time to come—and for only one reason. Because it was the first time people saw you play.”

  “But I lost the game.”

  “The team lost. It’s true. But it’s not a one-man team. Go take a shower. You did very well.”

  Steel looked around the crowd for the first time in a long while. He spotted Kaileigh, who was looking right at him. Her face brightened with the eye contact: admiration…concern that he was upset by the loss.

  He forced a smile onto his unwilling face and won a smile back from her. A friend tugged on her arm at the same time the Spartans headed toward the gym, and the moment was gone.

  Steel took his time undressing, letting the upperclassmen on both teams use the showers first. Everyone but him seemed to have already forgotten the match, whereas Steel couldn’t help but remember every detail, every shot, reliving the plays that had gone wrong. Especially the leaping, backward-through-the-legs shot that DesConte had won the game on. He’d won dramatically, triumphantly. There was the usual locker-room banter going back and forth, jokes and teasing, and Steel wanted none of it.

  He was the last to leave the locker room. His hair was still wet, and he hadn’t fully tightened his necktie, wearing it knotted but loose beneath an open shirt collar. If he spotted a teacher he could cinch it up quickly enough.

  He was four steps down the hall when someone grabbed him from behind. The person was strong and lifted him right off his feet. A strong hand clamped down over his mouth. Before he could even think to kick, a second person had him by the legs, and he was being rushed down the hall and into the empty wrestling room.

  The boy holding his legs wore a bandana tied over his face as a mask, which prevented Steel from seeing his face. The same was true for the guy who had him by the shoulders. Steel was dropped onto a cushioned mat in the wrestling room, and he heard the door being closed and bolted.

  He faced the two boys. Their matching blazers and ties made them look a lot alike, but there were differences. Steel noted their shirts, belts, and shoes.

  “What the—?”

  “Shut up,” said the taller and stockier of the two in a voice that wasn’t his own. He disguised it by making it into more of a growl. Not DesConte, as Steel had originally wondered: the shoes didn’t match. This was a student he’d never met face-to-face before. He’d have remembered him otherwise.

  The two upperclassmen just stood there, staring down at him. As if they were…waiting for something. Or someone. Steel knew better than to try to run for it, or, for that matter, to even speak. He raised up onto his elbows, dread seeping into him. Were they going to hurt him? Punish him for being
the only Third Former to make a ga-ga club team? Hit him with a blow dart? Maybe some kind of hazing ritual. He’d just completed his first match as a club player—perhaps there was a rite he was meant to pass through. On the other hand, perhaps they were going to beat the snot out of him for nearly winning.

  The door banged open. Two other boys entered, carrying another victim headfirst. Their faces were covered too. Time seemed to slow as they spun their captive around. As the person’s face came into view, Steel nearly screamed.

  Kaileigh!

  She whipped the red hair out of her flushed face, glanced at Steel, then to the boys, and straightened her skirt.

  “If you touch me again, you’ll all go to jail,” she said. She appeared ready to continue her complaint, but the leader held up his hand.

  “Trapp…your shoes. Would you care to explain the mud on them?”

  Steel looked down at his shoes. He hadn’t even seen the mud until that moment. He knew he could easily explain it, so he simply “rewound” his memory, like a DVD going backward at high speed. He searched for that moment when he’d stepped onto the JV football field or some part of the front lawn…put his mind’s eye in an entirely different scene: he was in Randolph’s garden; he was hiding beneath a window.

  He swallowed dryly.

  “Ms. Augustine,” the growling boy said, “can you explain the sap on your left hand?”

  Kaileigh looked at her hand as if it belonged to someone else.

  Then, in unison, Kaileigh and Steel looked at each other. They were two criminals caught by the police.

  “Mr. Trapp, whatever you saw—and I think we both know what I’m talking about—you are urged to forget, to dismiss. As hard as that may be for someone with your memorization skills, it’s wickedly important to your remaining at Wynncliff. If you like it here, and I think you both do, you’ll go back to your studies and forget whatever it is you think you were doing putting your noses into other people’s business.”

  “Who are you?” Steel said.

  “That is not the response I was hoping for,” the boy said. But then Steel wondered if he had it right. Was this, in fact, a boy? Or was it an adult, a teacher, perhaps, dressed in a school uniform? The thought of that gave him a chill. What was going on? Nell Campbell’s warning came back to him.

  “Ms. Augustine,” the boy/man continued, “your situation is far more precarious….” And that was another thing, Steel thought: the growling boy didn’t talk like a boy at all. “You have a keen and intelligent mind. You have demonstrated language skills that are far superior to those of your peers. But don’t think that buys you a position here at Wynncliff. The school is bigger than any one student.”

  Steel again wondered if the stocky boy behind the leader wasn’t DesConte. There was something so familiar about him.

  “If you continue to snoop around, you’ll both be expelled.”

  “Because you’re hiding something,” Steel blurted out.

  Even though the boy was wearing a hockey mask, Steel could tell the person was grimacing.

  “I will answer that in this way: Wynncliff is not your normal school. I think you are both aware of that by now. It is special. Unique. You are here because you are also special and unique. Not everyone at the school is so special. You might say there are two schools in one. But that’s all I can say for now. You’ll have to…trust me…that it’s in your best interest to wait just a little bit longer.”

  “How long? Wait for what?”

  “I respect and admire such curiosity. Yours is a special situation. Never before have two students been in the situation you’ve been in.”

  “We didn’t mean to make any trouble,” Kaileigh said. “Steel thought…we both thought…we were worried someone was planning something awful…like the kind of thing you hear about on the news. That’s all it was! We didn’t want to be hating ourselves the rest of our lives because we let something like that happen. We had no idea about some secret society or something. No idea whatsoever.”

  “Well, now you know,” said the voice behind the bandana. “If you tell anyone what you think you saw, it will be denied and you will be expelled. If you break curfew or do any more exploring, same thing: you’re out.”

  “How long before we know what’s going on?” Steel repeated.

  “Soon,” he said.

  “How soon?”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Kaileigh said.

  “I’m not sure you’re going to make it, Trapp. You’d be well advised to listen to Ms. Augustine. What we have in mind for you—where this is all leading—it requires a great deal of patience. And at your age, patience is one skill that can’t be taught. It has to be learned.”

  At your age, the person had said. It wasn’t a student behind that bandana: Steel had been right.

  “Nice game,” Verne said from the comfort of his bunk. He pulled the iPod earbuds from his ears. “What’s bugging you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Okay, there is something, but I can’t talk about it. You’ve got to respect that.”

  “Whatever. The coach come down on you or something?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I can’t help if I don’t know.”

  “Let me ask you something,” Steel said. “Before coming here, did you take some tests, or do something unusual or incredible, or anything like that?”

  “I took tests. We all took those tests, right? Why?”

  “Just curious,” Steel said.

  “I won the Hunt.”

  “You hunt?”

  “The newspaper thing. It’s this weekend deal. There are these clues…it starts with a clue in the newspaper and—I don’t know—it’s like a treasure hunt, only really big, like for the whole city, for the whole day—and I entered it. I wasn’t supposed to. You had to be eighteen or something—and it’s supposed to be a team event—but I entered by myself and I won, and it was like this big deal.”

  “And then the school contacted your parents,” Steel said.

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Is that what happened?”

  “Yeah, this woman showed up. Mrs. DeWulf—I remember because I was thinking ‘da wolf.’” He cracked himself up, and Steel suffered through his recovery. “And she talked to my mom for a long time. Then I took the tests and stuff—”

  “After the newspaper hunt, not before?”

  “That’s what I just said, didn’t I? Why?”

  “So I take it your winning…that was in the papers—”

  “And on the news. Yeah. Youngest person ever to win the Hunt, and they made a big deal about how I’d done it all by myself. Listen, I mean, I know they asked me here because of the Hunt, but what’s the big deal?”

  “What about your friends? How’d they get asked here?” Steel sat up on the top of his desk, facing the bunks. He saw a story unfolding, but he kept it to himself. He felt like he could answer the questions himself, but he allowed his roommate to speak.

  “Well, Twiney…you know those stores, ExcelSport?”

  “Yeah?”

  “They have these rock-climbing walls inside the store.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So Twiney…he like borrowed a pair of gloves that he wasn’t exactly going to pay for—”

  “He stole them.”

  “Not exactly. He never made it out the door. His dad caught him, and Twiney’s dad is not exactly the most forgiving person, and he basically was going to smack Twiney back into the Stone Age for lifting those gloves. Except there was the rock wall, and so Twiney…he like jumped on that wall and went up it like Spider Man. No ropes, no nothing. Straight to the top in about zero seconds.”

  “Let me guess: it made the news.”

  “No. Not exactly. Sort of. There was this TV thing going on, this live deal, you know, the end of some road race or something where the winner got to shop in the store for five minutes without paying. And there was Twiney in the background, c
limbing that wall and all.”

  “So it was on TV.”

  “Yeah, definitely. Ten o’clock news. But not exactly on purpose or anything.” He set his iPod on a box that acted as a table, and he rolled onto his side. “What’s up with that, anyway?”

  “Just curious,” Steel said, the words suddenly catching in his throat. He supposed just asking questions like this was in violation of what he’d been told to do.

  “Yeah, well…you know what they say about that and the cat,” Verne said.

  “Do me a favor: don’t tell anyone I asked you any of this.”

  “Because?”

  “I’m kinda like on probation.”

  “I’m the one pulling weekend study hall because of the thing at Randolph’s. I didn’t think they even got a look at you.”

  “Neither did I,” Steel said. And bending over to clean his shoes, he left it at that.

  * * *

  “We’re all freaks,” Steel told Kaileigh.

  Entering the common room before dinner had been maybe the best two minutes of his life. About a million kids, including Nell Campbell, had congratulated him on his ga-ga game, even though he’d lost. For a few minutes he’d felt like Lance Armstrong or Tiger Woods or somebody. Interestingly enough, DesConte and the other Argives, while receiving some attention, did not get near the reception Steel had.

  But now dinner—a Saturday special of rubbery meat in a gray gravy—was behind them, and he’d led Kaileigh out to the giant sundial that was situated on the front lawn, about thirty yards from the chapel. It was marble, with a series of marble steps surrounding its base, and it reached about twenty feet high. They sat on the second step, looking back toward the main building.