The Academy (14 page)

Steel thought of it as a two-pronged mission.

“So first we’ll get the camera back from the chapel,” he said. It was just past dinner, the forty minutes of downtime before study hall. He, Kaileigh, and Penny shared a concrete bench in the rarely occupied patio outside the school library.

“If we don’t, I’m toast,” Penny said. He’d explained his situation about five times. Steel didn’t want to hear it again. Penny’s obsession with hacking the school’s computer system and constantly monitoring faculty and administration e-mails, student report cards, and departmental reports had led him to discover that maintenance planned to replace backup batteries in every security camera and smoke detector in the school. There was no question they would discover that one of the cameras was missing: the one that the three had moved into the chapel. Unless it was returned this very evening, an investigation would be launched, and just the thought of that terrified Penny.

“It will be easier to get it back than it was to put it there,” Kaileigh said. “Don’t worry, Penny.”

Her genuine concern for Pennington Cardwell III annoyed Steel, in part because she was treating the two boys so differently: she seemed barely aware of Steel’s existence while doting on Penny.

“Once you have your precious camera back,” Steel said, “we’ll need a leg up. Specifically,
I
will need a leg up,” he clarified. “The plan is that Kaileigh will already be up in the tree. So don’t go anywhere.”

“You’re doing this with him?” Penny asked Kaileigh in a whining voice.

“He needs a scout,” she said. “I have one of the best pigeon calls you’ve ever heard, if I do say so. I took care of an injured pigeon for most of the summer a few years ago, and we learned to communicate.”

“You talk to birds?” Penny sounded suspicious.

“Only pigeons,” she corrected. “And I didn’t say I can talk to them, I just said I can sound like one.” Kaileigh was proud when it came to her pigeon speak.

You learn something new every day, Steel thought.

“But I thought you two…” Penny said.

“We were what?” she asked.

“You know,” Penny said.

“I
know
what?”

“That the two of you weren’t exactly…speaking.”

“Us? No. That is
so
yesterday.”

“Remember: immediately after study hall,” Steel told Penny. “Kai and I will leave our books in cubbies and head straight over to the chapel while we’re still allowed to walk around campus. We’ve got to get the camera out and be up in the ash before curfew.”

“I’ll wait for you at the sundial,” Penny said.

“And why should I do this?” Verne asked, his face buried in a volume of Chaucer.

“Because I’ll help you with that book.”

“You’ve read it already?”

“Yesterday.”

“You finished it yesterday?” Verne said, astonished. “But it was only assigned yesterday.” He was on page ten. “Besides, this jerk doesn’t even write in English!”

“I had some free time. It’s Middle English. That’s part of the point of the assignment.”

“You’ll write my paper for me?”

“No, but I can help you understand what’s going on in the book.”

“Crocodile Done Deal!” Verne said.

“We could both get in trouble,” Steel cautioned.

“I’ll get in a lot more trouble if I fail English,” Verne said. “Besides, White Socks doesn’t do anything but swing open the door on that first check and look at the bunks. It’ll be fine.”

Their dorm master had gotten his nickname years before. Steel didn’t know if it had to do with the baseball team or the fact that the man only seemed to own one color of socks. “He does a roll call.”

“I’ll tell him you’re out cold, that ga-ga practice got to you and you’re zonked. You think he’s going to come in and pull back the covers? You walk on water as far as the faculty goes.”

“Not true.”

“Is too, and you know it. The first Third Former ever to play for the Spartans? Are you kidding me? You know how many teachers are impressed by that?” He laid the book down on his chest. “You know how many kids hate you for that?”

Steel hadn’t considered this, and hoped Verne was wrong. Kids hating him? That had been what he’d come to Wynncliff to get away from. Was it something he would never shake, something he was bound to endure forever? He’d been working hard to hide his memory skills from his fellow students. Speaking up less in class, keeping his quiz scores hidden from prying eyes. He’d been given the chance at a fresh start—his parents must have known how badly he’d wanted that—and now Verne was telling him he’d already failed.

“You okay?” Verne said.

“Yeah.” He considered his options. He needed Verne’s help. “If you wouldn’t mind, maybe you could set up my bed for me right after study hall. You can use both our laundry bags for your body, and Mr. Henry for my head.”

Mr. Henry was a modeling bust that Steel had smuggled out of the art room. The head was incredibly lifelike and wore a wig roughly the same color as Steel’s hair.

“Yeah, okay,” Steel said.

“You just better not get caught coming back into the dorm,” Verne said. “Can’t help you there.”

“I’ve got that covered,” Steel said. In fact he hadn’t explored on this end of campus, but the tunnels were his and Kaileigh’s only chance to go unseen on their way back.

“Second check is at eleven sharp. Don’t screw that up.”

The eleven o’clock bed check often involved White Socks confirming a boy’s presence in his bunk. In truth, the ten o’clock curfew wasn’t that big a deal; it was the final curfew that the dorm masters paid strict attention to.

“I’ll be back by ten thirty.”

“You’d better be.” Verne picked up the book and returned to reading. “Stupid thing might as well be in Latin. I’m counting on your help.”

Steel, Kaileigh, and Penny met at the sundial shortly after study hall, the campus teeming with Third and Fourth Form students eager for a few minutes outside before being confined to their dormitories for the night. They headed into the chapel and, after a few minutes of ensuring that they were alone, hurried upstairs and retrieved the security camera. Why Penny couldn’t have done this on his own, Steel didn’t know, except that Penny was a bookish, pale boy who didn’t seem to have an ounce of nerve or adventure in him.

With the camera in hand, they left the chapel and approached the giant ash tree at the back, which formed a sixty-foot-wide umbrella of foliage that bridged an area between the chapel and Mr. Randolph’s three-story Victorian. The tree was over six feet in diameter and nearly two hundred years old, its silver bark having peeled off in places, giving it a sick, patchwork appearance. The lowest branch was well out of reach. With Penny serving as lookout, Steel gave Kaileigh a boost, lacing his fingers together and providing a step for her. Even this was not enough. He had to lift her foot high in order for her to hook her arms around the wide branch. On the third try she managed to hook a knee over the branch and pull herself up.

Steel was next. Penny gave him a boost, and Steel bounded effortlessly into the tree, trying to show Kaileigh that boys were good at some things, even if girls thought them useless.

“Good luck,” Penny said.

“And to you,” Kaileigh returned, for Penny now faced the chore of returning the security camera to where it belonged, inside the library, and all before curfew.

“Is your roommate covering for you?” Steel asked Kaileigh as they ascended through the branches.

“She’d better. I gave her a leather-bound journal that my father bought me as a kind of diary. It wasn’t cheap.”

“I told Verne I’d help him with Chaucer.”

“Seriously? Will you help me too?”

“Sure,” he said, happy at the thought. This surprised him. He’d never really thought much about spending time with friends. Maybe that was why he hadn’t had all that many back home. Maybe starting over at Wynncliff was about more than hiding his incredible powers of memorization from others.

Up they climbed, higher and higher, the lights from the chapel windows fading to the thick of the leaves. There was music playing from Randolph’s house—a solo violin piece that was too good to be anything but a recording.

Halfway up the tree, about thirty feet, Steel paused in the crook of a branch. As in the lower branches, Steel found clusters of initials carved into the bark, some dating back over eighty years. It was as if the tree were a living yearbook, recalling all the students that had climbed it, all the students that had come and gone, many dead by now. The discovery both excited and chilled him, for lately the thought of death had been present in his mind.

“Perfect!” Kaileigh said in a whisper, seeing that from where they were, they had a good view through the branches of both the chapel to their left, Randolph’s house to their right, and the route between the two.

“Now we wait,” Steel said.

“And we hope.”

“They’ll come.”

“You think they will.”

“He called it an operation,” Steel reminded, “and they aren’t surgeons.”

Kaileigh suppressed a giggle, covering her mouth with her hand. For a moment Steel recalled what a strange and indefinable feeling it had been to have Nell Campbell’s hand across his own mouth.

The minutes dragged by and the campus emptied. The darkness settled around them, and for a moment Steel wondered about what they were doing, the risk they were taking compared to any possible gain. Kaileigh had tried to reason with him, had tried to tell him, but he hadn’t listened. Not until now, when it was too late. He checked the glowing hands of his wristwatch: first curfew had come and gone fifteen minutes ago. They hadn’t seen any teachers out searching, so they figured their roommates had covered for them so far. But how much longer could the ruse hold?

At twenty-five minutes past the hour, four people—upperclassmen—appeared from around the chapel. They moved silently and quickly, and just the way they hunched and hurried suggested something secretive, almost sinister. They cut a straight line between the chapel and Randolph’s house, where, to Steel’s utter amazement, they made their way to a side door that accessed the screened-in porch and let themselves in without knocking.

This convinced Steel that he was on to something. He swelled with a sense of purpose and nodded to Kaileigh through the branches. He pantomimed, pointing first to himself and then to the ground. She nodded. Once he dropped out of the tree, without a boost he couldn’t climb back into it. They were separating now. He’d promised he would come back to help her out of the tree, but both of them knew it wasn’t necessarily a promise he could keep.

“I know you’ll try,” she said.

“I will. I promise. No matter what, I don’t want you getting in trouble.”

“That’s sweet.”

“No…” he said, not wanting to be sweet. “It’s the truth.”

“I know. Forget it. Okay? I’ll be fine.”

“No heroics.”

“Shut up,” she said.

Steel smiled in the dark.

Steel dropped from the lowest branch and hit the soft ground silently. He stayed in shadows thrown from lights in the chapel and made his way to Randolph’s. The house, painted white with black trim, was surrounded by handsomely maintained gardens of rhododendron, forsythia, and honeysuckle. Steel ducked through the planting to get his eyes to a window. He hesitated, taking a moment to look up into the tree and see if could spot Kaileigh. He felt desperate to see her, to make contact, to gain encouragement, for his heart was pounding in his chest, his hands were cold, and his mouth was dry. He pushed out all thought of what might happen to him if caught, focusing on the task at hand.

He sneaked a look inside from the corner of the windowsill: an empty parlor lit by light from a hallway. He kept moving, next eyeing a butler’s pantry, also dark.

He was forced to leave the security of the bushes, hurrying around the screened-in porch and reentering the planting on the other side. He lifted to his tiptoes, raising his eyes above the sill, and then dropped like a sack of stones.

Not Mrs. Randolph, since Kaileigh had told him the woman had died. An older lady, she removed doughnuts from a box and arranged them on a large plate. Maybe she was a teacher Steel hadn’t met yet, or a kitchen worker, or school housekeeper. She had four glasses of orange juice and a cup of coffee on a tray.

Steel pushed his back against the house, his heart beating wildly.

“
Who-who…who-who…
” Kaileigh’s warning call sounded impossibly real. It flushed him with heat. He slumped lower, blood pulsing at his temples, and tried to slow his breathing so as not to be heard. He waited for what seemed like an impossibly long time.

Someone was either approaching him and the house, or Kaileigh had managed to see someone inside the house. Either way, she’d warned him off.

Then he spotted it: a shadow out across the grass. And he understood that the woman with the tray was standing in the window directly over his head. Had he made noise to attract her attention? Was she looking for him, for someone creeping around in the bushes? Steel didn’t know what to do. If he moved, if he made any attempt to run, she’d see him. If he didn’t, and she somehow knew there was someone out there, then he was a sitting duck.