The Academy (15 page)

The shadow moved.

“
Coo-coo
,” came the call from the tree.
All clear.

He understood then that he wasn’t going to find Randolph and the boys on this side of the house. He was going to have to continue around the house, away from the protective eyes of Kaileigh.

He made his move. Low and quiet, he dodged a set of back steps, continuing past a storm cellar entrance, and hugged the next corner of the house, arriving to a long line of equally sized windows.

The flower beds along this side of the house had not been raked recently, so the fallen leaves crackled underfoot as Steel crept toward the first window. He saw inside to a music room and study, also dark. He hated to take even a single step, the crunching of the leaves seeming so loud to sensitive ears.

He slipped ahead to the next window and discovered the dining room. DesConte sat in a chair at the dining table, his back to the window. The three other boys flanked him. Randolph sat facing the far wall, where a portable screen had been erected. A projector, connected to a laptop computer, showed slides of what looked like a foreign country. A building in the pictures was large and surrounded by a tall wall. There was a guard booth. It looked to Steel like an embassy or some kind of official building.

The next slide revealed a neighborhood, but not like any Steel had ever seen. Each boy had a pad of paper and a pen and was taking notes on every new slide.

A class?
Was Randolph…tutoring the boys? History? Something for extra credit?

Steel felt like a moron. All this for…

But if just tutoring, then why had the boys snuck around, arriving here through the tunnels? That made no sense. Why tutor after hours when the boys belonged in their dorm rooms? Why try to hide that the boys were here in the first place? It couldn’t be tutoring—
not exactly
—and yet…

“
Who-who. Who-who.
” The warning cry carried faintly around the house. Kaileigh’s second warning.

The old woman?

Something jumped at him. It sprang from the sill of the very window he’d been peering through. A cat! It had been right there, right next to him, sitting so quietly, so dead still, that he hadn’t seen it. It pounced and landed on him, sticking its claws into his arm.

“Oww!” Steel shouted.

Everyone in the dining room spun toward the window. Steel ducked.

He heard Randolph shout, “GO!” Chairs banged to the floor. Footfalls pounded against and squeaked the plank flooring.

DesConte and the three others were coming after him.

“
Who-who! Who-who!
” The pigeon sounded far more agitated.

Steel took off toward the chapel. If he could only make it into the tunnels…

Kaileigh would see him running and could join him in the choir room. There was still a chance of getting away.

As he cleared the front corner of the house, he caught a blur through a window: two of the boys racing toward the front door.

The other two were no doubt headed to the back.

The screen door flew open just as Steel skidded to a stop.

He was facing Verne and a friend of Verne’s, an African American student named Earl Coleman.

What the heck was Verne doing here?

“Go!” Verne whispered. “We got you covered. Go!”

Steel scrambled away just as the boys came off the porch. He dove and hid in some bushes.

“What-a-we-got-here?” It was DesConte.

“Just out for a stroll,” Verne said. His eyes flashed in the dark.

The other two boys from the dining room reached them. Verne and Earl stepped forward, blocking the way to Steel’s hiding place.

Steel saw Kaileigh drop from the lowest branch and run around to the far side of the chapel. DesConte glanced in that direction, but missed getting a good look at her.

Steel sneaked away toward a stone wall.

“You want a piece of me?” Steel heard DesConte ask Verne and Earl.

Three minutes later, Steel and Kaileigh met at the chapel’s main doors. They ran inside, and Steel led her through the hidden door into the pipe room. They were in the tunnel now, keeping their heads low and moving as fast as their feet would carry them.

He led the way, turning right at the common room, heading past the metal rungs that led to the auditorium, and into new territory. The tunnel angled slightly left. Steel switched on and off sets of lights. Suddenly the tunnel extended a hundred yards or more in front of them: the dorms.

He found a ladder that roughly matched the distance to Kaileigh’s dorm. He led her up the ladder and found himself facing a panel of lumber construction. He worked with the panel and then noticed a peephole. He put his eye to it.

“It’s the boys’ bathroom,” he said. “Lower Two. A shower stall.”

Now he understood where, in his own dorm’s washroom, he’d lost track of the boys he’d gone after weeks before.

“The
boys’
room?”

“I don’t think you have any choice.”

He found that by pulling the panel toward him, it clicked and released. And he swung it open.

The washroom was empty.

“You know where you are?” he asked.

“Yes. My dorm’s directly overhead.” She looked terrified.

“Can you do this?”

She nodded.

“Okay. Better hurry.”

She stepped through the hidden panel and pushed it shut.

“What the heck?” he asked Verne when his roommate returned to their room fifteen minutes later.

“Is that ‘Thank you’?”

“Yes. It’s that and: What the heck? Where did you come from?”

“I followed you. Not me, actually. It was Earl who did that.”

“Followed me?”

“Went looking for you. You asked me to cover for you, you got me all curious.”

“And White Socks?”

“No sweat. He bought it.”

The boys undressed quickly, changing into pajamas. Steel tossed the laundry bags into the closet and moved the dummy head there as well. Second curfew was in three minutes. They could hear White Socks making his way from room to room.

“But—”

“You’ve got some explaining to do,” Verne said. “DesConte was ready to split your head open, I think.”

“You’re going to get into trouble,” Steel said. “You think he saw me?”

“He saw you, but I don’t think he knew who it was.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I got your back.”

“But why?”

“We’re roomies. ’Sides which, you’re now going to tell me everything that’s going on.”

“You think?”

“I know. I saved your butt. Me and Earl.”

“It’s complicated, and I don’t know it all.”

“I’m listening.”

“I can’t tell you,” Steel said, “what I don’t know.”

“We’re roomies,” Verne repeated. “So you’ll tell me what you do know.”

White Socks opened the door. “Keep it down in here. Shut your…trapp.” He’d amused himself. He pulled the door closed, and they heard him move to the next room.

“That’s original,” Steel said.

Verne chuckled.

Roomies, Steel thought.

The bleachers that surrounded the ga-ga pit on three sides were overflowing with students and faculty. Even more people were standing or sitting crossed-legged on the grass. The ever-present Connecticut wind was lessened by the pit’s position in the lee of the gymnasium, and the early afternoon sun remained high enough in the sky to cast strong but barely slanting shadows so that the pit seemed lit by spotlights.

As a reserve Spartan, Steel sat in the front row of one of the aluminum bleachers, with a few empty spaces between him and Hinchman. To his right sat Cloris Twiler, a horse-faced girl with wide shoulders and amazingly quick reaction times, the other Spartan reserve. Cloris expressed anxiety by worming her hands like a ball of snakes in her lap.

“Can you stop that, please?” Steel said to her.

“No,” she answered, without taking her eyes off the ga-ga pit.

The first of seven games had been no match at all. The Argos players—the Argives—led by DesConte, had proved themselves far more agile and fleet-footed. Their use of the boards—the octagonal walls of the pit—was precise and devastating for the Spartans. When in the hands of the Argives, the spud traveled as if it had a mind of its own, seeking out all Spartans and striking them below the knee with authority. The game was over nearly before it began, with the Spartans’ five members quickly whittled down to just one, Brenda Simple, who didn’t last long, being outnumbered as she was.

Hinchman psyched up the team for the second game, placing the Spartans into a defensive formation known as
gammon
—a play on the word
backgammon
, for the teammates lined up in an I-formation, but back to back. The gammon defense worked; the Spartans stayed in the game longer and got the upper hand, five players to three. Some adroit passing and the Argives’ striker, DesConte, was eliminated. A few strategic passes and the Spartans had won.

In a surprising move, the Argos coach retired a player and called upon a reserve, the results devastating: the Argives handily won the next two games, quickly getting up four players to two and then “running the pit”—eliminating the remaining players. In the process, Ronald Martinez, the Spartans’ foremost striker, was hit with a wild ball to the stomach and went over the pit wall backward, twisting his knee. The crowd hushed as Martinez went down, and groaned as he came up limping.

Hinchman turned to his bench: Cloris and Steel. There were no rules preventing him from loading his team with three girls, all of whom were formidable players, but his tightly set eyes lingered on Steel.

“Trapp,” he said.

Steel swallowed with difficulty, his eyes lighting upon two faces in the crowd: Nell Campbell and Kaileigh. He’d been so focused on the ga-ga pit in the early going, he hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever to the crowd. But now he felt both the joy and terror of being picked to play. They were behind three games to one, meaning a single defeat would cost Sparta the match.

Hinchman pulled him by the shoulders, leaned down, and spoke into his ear. “You’ve been watching the game,” he said. “I’m counting on that. Anticipate their every move. Exploit their weaknesses. You can do this.”

Steel nodded. Hinchman turned him toward the pit. He was greeted by his teammates with fist-pounds as he climbed over the wall.

There was DesConte grinning at him the way a wolf grins at a wounded lamb. The two teams, five players each, lined up on opposite sides of the pit. Hinchman elected a “2-3”—two players in front, three behind. The Argives stayed with the “1-3-1” they’d been using—a player out front, in this case a girl, three players behind her, with DesConte in the middle, and a remaining player behind the row of three, the other girl. DesConte, the team’s strongest player and best striker, was protected within a diamond of teammates. If the team structure could be maintained, it meant that there was a high percentage of probability that he would remain in play the longest, be the last Argive standing. This gave their team the best chance of winning.

The 2-3 chosen by Hinchman was a more aggressive lineup, as it put two strikers, Steel and Toby Taggart, up front against the Argives’ one. Their best overall player, their team captain, a boy named Reddie Long, was in the middle of their two girls, in the back row.

The referee tossed the ball into the middle of the pit and the play began.

Steel, while never taking his eyes off the spud, focused less on the play and more on what Hinchman had told him:
Anticipate, exploit.
Without giving it direct thought, he shook off his nerves and immediately knew exactly what each player was going to do
before
he or she did it. This included his own teammates. His ability to anticipate—
to know
—slowed the game down for him. He blocked out the crowd noise, even the voice of his coach, and watched as the ball began to move as if heavy and tired. He could calculate its direction and destination long before the spud arrived at a given point.

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.