The Academy (8 page)

Kaileigh led him toward the arts and sciences building, a neoclassic two-story brick building with white trim and double chimneys. This differed from the science lab, an ugly structure erected in the 1950s that was all glass turquoise and salmon panels. Thankfully the lab had been hidden slightly down the hill, beneath the school library. The arts and sciences building stood just behind the administration building in a field of mowed grass adjacent to the JV football field, and not far from the gymnasium/natatorium.

Steel listened to Kaileigh, amazed by her abundance of energy and her ability to make anything sound as if the fate of the free world hung in the balance.

“Have you met Pennington?”

“Pennington Cardwell the Third?” Steel asked, unable to contain the disdain he felt for the boy.

“You don’t have to sound so thrilled about it.”

“It’s just…he’s so
preppie
, you know? I mean what’s with ‘the Third’ and all that?”

“It’s his name, Steel. In fact, Steel isn’t even your name, is it? It’s Steven. So who’s calling the kettle bleak?”

“It’s
black
,” Steel corrected. “The pot calling the kettle black? It’s irony, Kaileigh: they’re both black.”

“Which is exactly my point: my parents don’t want me, Pennington’s ancestors probably came over on the
Mayflower
or something, and you’re some freak of nature. It’s not as if any of us in this place are exactly normal, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. None of us are ordinary.”

“
Is
.”

“What?”

“Forget it.”

“What’s with you, anyway?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re all angry, like.”

“I’m having a bad day,” he stated. He didn’t really feel like he was having a bad day, but it seemed the easiest way to stop the conversation. “So what about Pennington Cardwell the Third?”

“Well, if you wouldn’t interrupt all the time.” She slowed as they approached the building, finally stopping as they reached the twin white doors. “Penny’s a computer nerd. Computers and photography. Fourth Form.” She sounded impressed.

“So?”

“So when he was twelve he was arrested for hacking traffic cams. They had these cameras at the tollbooths on the highway meant to take pictures of license plates of cars that ran the tolls. His father got this summons or something, saying he owed like thousands of dollars for running tolls. His father is a banker. He rides a
bike
to work in Boston. It was totally messed up. But the court made him pay or lose his license. So Pennington takes a digital picture of the judge’s license plate and then hacks the system and makes it so the judge has run like fifty tolls going back two years. Just to show that it could be done, and that it had been done to his father. Only there were people who didn’t appreciate it, and Penny got busted, and eventually, a couple years later, he ended up here at Wynncliff.”

Steel was indeed impressed, but for some reason he didn’t want Kaileigh knowing this. “So?”

“So, you’ve got to admit, that’s pretty cool. Just that he could do something like that.”

“I guess.”

“You really are having a bad day,” she said. “Is everything okay?”

“Fine.”

“So anyway, Penny…well…I guess I should let him tell you.” She swung open the heavy door. The inside of the arts and sciences building felt new. All the paint—white paint—glistened, and the brass hardware sparkled. It reminded Steel of a dentist’s office or a new office building: the smell of the paint and new carpet, the gentle hum of air-conditioning, and the way that as the doors closed, they shut out all sound. They hurried up a flight of stairs. Kaileigh moved with a sense of urgency. Steel wondered what was going on. He found her excitement contagious.

She knocked once on the computer lab’s blue door and swung it open.

Pennington Cardwell III looked like a banker. He had a tight small mouth and a severe posture. He stood up from a chair in front of three computer monitors—all of them showing different Sudoku games—and he was all of five feet tall. Smaller than Kaileigh. His hair was trimmed short, above his ears and in a straight line at the back. He had gray eyes, a sharp nose, and a face that looked smart and much older than he actually was. Steel got the sense that Penny Cardwell III was sizing him up, the way he took a step back after shaking hands.

“You sure?” Cardwell’s eyes narrowed as he looked over at Kaileigh.

She nodded.

“Sudoku?” Steel asked. He glanced at the wall clock. He had homework to do. He’d heard of a Sudoku club, but had zero interest in it.

“It’s just a pastime,” Penny Cardwell III said.

“You have time for pastimes? I’m impressed.”

“Third Form takes some getting used to,” the boy said. “The homework.”

“Tell me about it,” Steel said.

“But it’s weird: I think Fourth Form is actually a little easier. I mean, there’s more work, but somehow it gets done quicker.”

“We’re like trained dogs,” Kaileigh said. The three of them laughed—Steel out of nervousness. There was an electrical charge in the air. Pennington Cardwell III gave off a deep calm, a brainiac thing that Steel found disconcerting.

“Kaileigh mentioned that you and her…you’ve discovered that not everything at Wynncliff Academy is what you might call explainable.”

Steel flashed Kaileigh a vicious look: she shouldn’t have said anything.

“It’s all right,” Penny said. “I’m not a faculty stooge or some informer or something. We all have our curiosities about this place.”

“Show him,” Kaileigh said, encouraging Penny.

“I need his agreement first.” Penny faced Kaileigh with full intensity. “Do you promise not to tell anyone what I’m about to show you? If you should tell, I will find out something about you and expose you. I’m quite capable of that, and I promise that whatever it is, it will get you in trouble. And if there isn’t anything there, then I’ll invent it and you’ll still get in trouble.”

“I told him about your father,” Kaileigh admitted.

“Like that,” Penny Cardwell said. “Exactly like that.”

“I promise,” Steel said.

Steel was sized up one final time, and then Penny hit some keys, and the screens changed from Sudoku to video. Each monitor was divided into four windows. It took Steel a long few seconds to see that each window showed a part of the campus. Some were in color. Most were black and white.

“I hacked the admin computer late last year, just before summer break. It took me all year. It started out…all I was after were some library books. Rentals. You know: you have to put your name on a list? I wanted to move my name up so I could get the new
Artemis Fowl
before anyone else. It turned out I had to hack the school system to break into the library. Besides grades and financials, I found this.”

“Security cameras,” Steel said.

“Funny that they don’t tell us they’re watching everything we do,” Penny said.

“How many locations?” Steel asked, his curiosity piqued.

“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 equivalent 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.