The Academy (9 page)

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 young 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.

Steel’s incredible powers of memory had worked to his favor. Hinchman never had to repeat a concept twice. If he outlined a play on a whiteboard, Steel had it memorized instantly, requiring only repetition in the pit to perfect it. But over the weeks of early morning practice, another benefit of his reliable memory revealed itself. He came to realize that each ball possessed individual characteristics. Some were smoother than others; some were slightly more or less inflated; each ball bounced differently. Steel could visually capture each bounce, each reflected angle like a camera taking high-speed shots. If he and Hinchman spent a few minutes passing and shooting at each other, Steel’s photographic brain recorded and learned the nuances of each ball. He taught himself to measure the force with which the ball was struck, so that the next time Hinchman’s hand started five inches, or a foot from the ball, Steel knew how fast it would travel and at what angle it would leave the ground. He then calculated the trajectory, and he found it easy to predict both its path and its rate of travel. All of this happened in but an instant, and yet he found it an effortless task—he knew
exactly
where the ball would go practically before it was hit.

He had never adapted his gift to a sport; he’d always considered himself more brainiac than jock, so his early success with ga-ga inspired him to try all the harder, to practice agility moves on his own, to learn striking techniques—slapping, spinning, and clubbing the ball—and to listen carefully to everything Hinchman taught him. It was not uncommon to hear the slap of an open palm striking a ball across the playing fields in the free time between the end of organized sports and the dinner bell, and to look out to see a solitary figure—Trapp—working against the brick wall of the gymnasium.

The tryout, with twenty students competing for the seven spots on Sparta, began just after lunch, in a forty-minute time period before the start of afternoon classes. As a club sport, ga-ga could not cut into organized athletics, so Hinchman and the other club coaches found, and took advantage of, whatever free time could be had. The boys didn’t bother removing their ties; they simply peeled off their school blazers and entered the pit. The girls wore stretch-fabric bike shorts beneath the khaki skirts they were required to wear to classes. The twenty students were divided into four teams, and play began. Ten players became nine, eight, seven…and the play intensified. Five…three…and finally a team won. The other ten players entered the pit, and another round began. At the end of play, the teams were recombined by Hinchman, who was furiously taking down and studying notes on his aluminum clipboard.

It should have been simple enough. The twenty students would be reduced to fifteen after the first cut; to ten following the second tryout; and down to eight, by the end of the third.

It might have been simple enough if it hadn’t been for Steel. Nineteen of the tryouts were Fifth and Sixth Formers, many returning team players. All except for Steel. Just the idea that a Third Form student would try out for a club team rankled many of the upperclassmen who had tried, and failed, to make a club team in the years prior.

So on this particular warm September afternoon, with students having little to do until the 1 p.m. bell, group by group, they began to fill the octagonal wooden bleachers that had surrounded the ga-ga pit for the past forty years. Matches often filled up the stands as students came out to support their club teams. Tournaments at the end of each semester were standing room only. But seldom, if ever, had more than a handful of the curious or bored gathered to watch a tryout.

The phenomenal abilities of the young Third Form student escaped no one. It seemed that the spud was magnetically repelled from him. Moreover, he was an unselfish player, willing to pass rather than to take the strike. He seemed to see the pit, the angles, the movement of players, in ways others did not. He stood out from the moment play began.

Steel had been coached by Hinchman to not worry too much about this first round of tryouts. The competition would be tough, but there were always four or five students out of their depth. Hinchman felt that, with all the hard work Steel had put into it, he was fairly certain to make the first cut. After that, it was anyone’s game. But Hinchman had only been vaguely aware of a boy out playing shots against the gymnasium wall late afternoons. Had failed to connect that this boy might possibly have been Steel.

Steel’s superiority and confidence revealed itself immediately. In the first round alone, he had three assists and two strikes, had been the last player standing for his group, meaning he played a role in the elimination of every player in the opposing group. Hinchman had to recheck his notes several times to believe this. Such dominance had not been seen in the pits for over twenty years. It had to be some kind of fluke.

By the time the second round began, Hinchman secretly tested Steel further by saddling him with three of the worst performers from the first round. Word spread quickly through the small school—the action was at the ga-ga pit. The stands filled.

Hinchman had never seen anything like it: faculty and students alike crammed onto the bleachers, pointing out players and talking among themselves—
at a tryout
.

Steel paid little attention to his own accomplishments. His focus was on each player, the bounce of the ball, the method of striking, the footwork. Watching the first round both as a spectator and player, he had recorded the patterns of each player. Just as Hinchman had told him, a player performed in predictable ways. This player rose to her toes before a strike, but onto her heels in anticipation of a pass. One of the boys held his breath and pursed his lips before an attempted strike; another lifted his elbow higher before the attack. Each move, each face, each pattern was recorded into the neocortex of his brain, where it was permanently filed. Hinchman could recombine the groups all he wanted: Steel knew exactly what competition he faced before the first whistle ever blew.

The second round proved more difficult than the first. He would pass the ball, only to have his teammate miss it. Two on his team were incredibly slow to pick up a shot off the wall, and were quickly eliminated. Only minutes into the game, it was five players to Steel’s three, and Steel understood from Hinchman’s coaching the tremendous disadvantage this put him in. A few shots later it was four to two: he and a girl were facing four others. One of the opposition grew overconfident and struck the spud too hard. The ball bounced over the wall, and the player left the game. Three to two. Steel’s teammate was surrounded in a brilliant show of team play, and before Steel could offer a countermove to free her, she was struck and it was down to just him. Three to his one.

He knew what was coming—the triangle. They had performed it on the girl, and now they would come after him with the same technique.

The whistle blew.

Passing the ball, the other team worked to isolate Steel between them, to move him to the center of the pit. If he stayed too close to the wall, they could use quick passing and a deflection to hit him. But a properly executed triangle meant defeat. He and Hinchman had reviewed the problem formation a dozen times on the whiteboard. The one sure way—the only real way—to beat it was to intercept an early pass and make an immediate strike. Once a triangle formed and the passing sped up, the captured player was all but out. Eventually the legs would be exposed and hit.

Steel had memorized most of the idiosyncrasies of his opponents. It was now a matter of pushing away the pressure, of seeing his predicament as opportunity instead of challenge. Here was his chance to put into practice everything he and Hinchman had discussed.

Two of the three he faced were seniors, veteran players with championship competitions under their belts. They worked fluidly as teammates, so comfortable with the other person’s play as to use head and eye signals instead of words to set their plays. But Steel had seen most of this in the first round and had it committed to memory.

When the tall one—the captain—cocked his head to the left, Steel knew the triangle was coming. Before he ever saw the second senior move to occupy the position, Steel measured the movement of the captain’s hand from the ball, and he jumped into the passing lane, a step ahead of the boy for whom the pass was intended. Steel stole the pass, spun, and slapped the spud into a low skid. The senior jumped to avoid the strike, but what he didn’t realize was that Steel already knew that jump of his; Steel’s strike was not intended to hit him directly, but to rebound off the wall behind him and hit him in the calves as he came down.

The crowd erupted into a cheer. Many of the spectators came to their feet. The senior left the pit, snarling at Steel on his way out.

Hinchman held the ball, ready to resume play.

Steel felt good about his chances: two to one. The remaining senior, a girl, was a problem…she was a very good player. The junior, a boy, presented Steel with possibilities. He had a slow left hand and was clumsy when forced to spin to the left.

The spud hovered in Hinchman’s hand, ready to fall.

Steel spotted a familiar face in the stands. It was Nell Campbell, on her feet, eyes bright, her cheeks flushed with excitement. Her full attention, every bit of her energy, was focused on him. She was cheering, bouncing up and down, her hair lifting like a curtain over her head.

The whistle blew. The ball fell.

Steel turned too late.

He felt the cold slap of the spud sting his left leg. He’d been hit. He was out.

The crowd let out a collective sigh. Steel, confused and caught, glanced once to Hinchman—his coach was disappointed. Then to Nell Campbell. All the excitement had left her face. She turned, disinterested in him now, collected her books and left the bleachers. A good number of other students left as well.

Steel stepped over the wall of the pit, his first real taste of failure like a poison in his system. He wanted to hide. He wanted to run away. He wasn’t used to being beaten, and it hurt him all the more.

He found a seat with the other
losers
. Having lasted as he had, he was certain to make the cut and play in the second round. But he’d let himself down, allowed himself to be distracted. Worse, he’d let Hinchman down.

The following tryouts had yet to be scheduled. He understood he had more to learn than just technique. He had beaten himself, and that hurt most of all.

Worse, he could relive the cheers, the stands exploding as he broke the triangle. He’d never experienced anything like that—the thrill of massive adoration.

He wanted it again. He wanted more.