The Academy (33 page)

“For this we actually have to meet someone. My source.”

“Clandestine stuff. Who?”

They’d reached Mrs. Habeck’s room. “Chelsea James. I need to go in, get her out of her history class, and then she’s going to take us to see something even most of the teachers don’t know about: scout training.
Female
scout training.”

Myla had seen the male scouts train before. It was hard to miss them. With their militaristic uniforms and their constant marching exercises on the lawn in front of the school, it was almost as if they
wanted
everyone to see and know what they were doing. Myla thought that it was part of an effort to intimidate the rest of the student population, something she’d told Roland Nevins at the last student-council session, though of course Roland had denied it.

The female scouts, however . . .

They were trickier. They wore the patches just like the boys, but they still had no uniforms and they never seemed to do things together. It was rare, in fact, to see two female scouts even speaking to each other. They were so secretive that they flew completely under the radar—a lot of people had probably forgotten that they even existed—and again Myla thought that was probably intentional.

Rachel had withdrawn a hall pass from the back of her notebook and was filling it out. “Wait here,” she told Myla. “I’ll be back in a sec.” She walked into Mrs. Habeck’s classroom, and Myla glanced around the quad. There was graffiti all over the short wall that bordered Senior Corner: insults and obscenities, crude depictions of male and female genitalia, symbols she didn’t recognize but that reminded her of Arabic writing. Myla frowned. She was pretty sure none of that had been there before lunch.

Rachel emerged from the classroom with Chelsea, a girl Myla had seen around but didn’t really know. Chelsea looked at her coolly but did not say hello. She was wearing a Tyler Scout patch herself, and Myla found herself questioning the girl’s motives.
Why
had she come to Rachel in the first place?
Why
was she offering to take a reporter to a training session? She certainly didn’t look like any sort of whistle-blowing ideologue. Indeed, there was something hard and cunning about her, an indefinable quality she shared with all the other scouts Myla had seen.

But then she let her guard down, and Myla saw that she was just a scared kid, a regular high school student caught up in something she didn’t believe in or understand. “Thank you for coming,” she told Rachel. “And writing about this.”

“Thank
you
for telling me about it.”

Chelsea glanced around the quad. “Come on. We’d better get going. This is the best time to show you what’s going on.”

“What if they catch us?”

“I’ll say you’re doing a story for the paper on how much better and more well-trained we are than the boys.”

“Is there a rivalry between you two?” Rachel asked excitedly. “Are you competing with each other?”

“No,” Chelsea admitted. “We just do what the principal tells us. The boys, too. But it
might
work.”

What if it doesn’t?
Myla wondered. But she said nothing.

They walked through the corridor toward the lunch area. “We’ll take a shortcut,” Chelsea said, hanging a left. She led them past the auto shop, past woodshop and metal, around the side of the shop building to a dirt footpath that led through a narrow trash-strewn section of ground between the building and the fence that separated it from the sidewalk and street outside. They trekked up and down short small mounds of hard-packed earth, kicking aside beer bottles, Coke cans and potato chip wrappers. The path wound around the back of the building and joined a cement sidewalk that passed through an open area west of the sports complex. Ahead was a series of pens and corrals housing a couple of sheep, a few goats and a cow. Beyond that was a barn.

Myla had never been on this part of the campus. She didn’t know how that was possible after nearly four years here, but it was. She was vaguely aware that the school had a Future Farmers of America program, the FFA, but she had no idea where they met or what they did, and it was a surprise to her to find this barn and these pens way out here in an area that she hadn’t known existed. What made it seem even more remote was the fact that here the nine-foot wall that would eventually enclose the whole school was finished. They were cut off from the city outside. Neither the houses nor the street beyond was visible, and it reminded her in a way of Disneyland. There was that same sense of being in a hermetically sealed world.

From within the barn, they heard female voices. At this distance, Myla wasn’t sure whether they were talking, fighting, laughing or screaming. Something suddenly occurred to her. “This is fifth period,” she said. “Shouldn’t they be in class?”

“Yeah,” Rachel agreed. “You’d think they’d practice before school or after school or during lunch.”

“We train in shifts,” Chelsea said.

Myla still didn’t like that “we.”

“Someone is out here
all
the time. That’s the way Principal Hawkes wants it. Every period of the day, a group of girls is out here practicing fighting techniques.”

Rachel had her notebook out. “Who are you training to fight?”

“They haven’t told us yet.” Chelsea stopped walking. “From here on in, we have to be quiet. If someone sees us, let me do all the talking. Okay?”

Myla and Rachel nodded.

“We’ll go around the side of the barn. There’s a window there where you can see in, and it faces the backs of the girls.”

“What about the teacher, the instructor or whoever’s training you?”

“There is no instructor fifth period. That’s why I picked it to show you.” Chelsea lowered her voice. “That’s also why it’s more dangerous. Now no more talking.”

They left the path and hiked around the corrals and pens, crouching low and running across a section of open dirt until they reached the side of the barn. As Chelsea had said, there was a window in the wall, a small square just about eye level next to a hook holding a coiled rope. She peeked in first, then moved aside and let Rachel have a look.

Myla went last. There were far more girls here than she’d expected, probably close to twenty, and she did some quick math. Seven periods with twenty girls each. A hundred and forty girls? That didn’t seem possible. There were only three hundred kids in the entire senior class. Maybe this was the peak, though. Maybe other periods had fewer recruits and that’s why Chelsea had taken them here now.

Maybe not.

She saw a couple of girls who weren’t seniors, and though she’d thought the scout program was open only to twelfth graders, it looked like that wasn’t the case.

The girls stood silently in line in the center of the barn, facing away from the window, each of them clutching a spear in her right hand. Apparently, there were no left-handed scouts, a fact that was probably irrelevant but that she filed away in her brain nonetheless. Lying in front of them on a mound of hay, bloody and writhing, was a cow. It was, no doubt, a cow that the FFA kids were feeding or raising, but the scouts had appropriated it and seemed to be using it for target practice. Or, more accurately, torture practice. Standing before the animal, Tiffany Leung raised her left hand and used her right to jab the spear she was holding into the cow’s shoulder. It lifted its head, bleated in agony, then let the head fall back again, too weak to fight.

Tiffany moved off to the left. The next girl in line stepped forward, thrust her spear into the cow’s rear end, eliciting an even more horrible moan of pain, and then twisted it before pulling the spear out and following Tiffany to another station, where the girls were throwing their spears at the carcass of a chicken that had been affixed to a wooden post.

On the wall to the left of the tortured cow, Myla saw, were shackles. Two above and two below, their chains ending in manacles and fetters, they were clearly designed for human restraint.

She moved away from the window. “My God,” she breathed.

Rachel was writing in her notebook.

Chelsea nodded somberly. “That’s what they make us do. And they say this is just the beginning of it.” She said no more, but Myla immediately thought of those shackles on the wall.

Silently, the three girls made their way back to the center of campus the way they’d come. Clutching her hall pass, Chelsea left them at the social sciences building. “Don’t use my name,” she pleaded. “Don’t mention me at all.”

“I won’t,” Rachel promised.

Myla looked at her friend, at a loss for words.

Rachel looked grim. “Worse than you thought, isn’t it?”

It was and it wasn’t, Myla decided. She could never have imagined the specifics of what she’d seen today, but it was definitely in line with what she’d suspected lay under the surface of the school this semester. Still, she nodded.

“Do you have a quote for me?”

Myla shook her head numbly. Her brain wasn’t able to come up with a pithy response to all that she’d witnessed, and Rachel seemed to understand. “I’m going to write the article tonight. I’ll show it to you tomorrow. Meet me in the morning before school. By Senior Corner.”

“Okay,” Myla agreed. “I’ll try to think of something to say.”

But Rachel didn’t show up the next morning.

Although Myla got to school at seven thirty and waited until the bell rang, there was no sign of her old friend, and she had to run all the way across campus to make it to PE on time. At Nutrition, she told Brad she had something to do and went up to the school newspaper’s office, the room adjacent to Mr. Booth’s class. The adviser was there, proofreading pages along with the editor, and several students were typing on computers lined up on a table against the far wall.

“Excuse me,” Myla said. “I’m looking for Rachel Jackson-Smith.”

The students looked at one another, eyes wide, then turned to Mr. Booth. The adviser calmly finished proofing the paragraph he was on, then glanced over at her. His eyes were cool, unreadable. “I guess you didn’t hear,” he said. “Rachel was killed last night by a drunk driver.”

She’d been hoping for the best and expecting the worst, but the words were still a shock, and they took a moment to sink in. “Rachel’s . . .
dead
?”

Mr. Booth nodded. “We’re working on a front-page tribute to her right now. Would you like to see it?”

There was something surreal about this whole scene: the unflappable instructor, the uninvolved students, the way the news of this tragedy was being treated like . . . news. Rachel was someone they knew and worked with and were supposed to have cared about, but her death might just as well have been the announcement of a new teacher’s hiring or the score for Friday night’s football game. Feeling stunned, she walked over to the adviser and read the article he’d been proofing. In it was the answer to every question she might have asked about the facts of the accident—it had happened at the intersection of West Street and Lincoln Avenue at approximately eight thirty; she’d been wearing a seat belt, but her car had no air bags and she’d died at the scene; the drunk driver was an unemployed construction worker with a suspended license—but it was all presented coldly, dispassionately, as though it had occurred in another state and involved someone none of them knew.

Not only did that seem wrong; it seemed . . . suspicious, and for the first time she looked at the newspaper office as though it were one of the stops on yesterday’s tour, as though Rachel were showing her another example of something eerily off base here at Tyler High. She looked up at the adviser, took a deep breath. “Rachel was working on a story,” Myla said. “About . . .” She realized she didn’t know how to describe it. “About strange things that are going on here on campus.”

“Don’t know anything about it,” Mr. Booth told her.

She looked at Richard Park, the editor, but he averted his eyes, found something to stare at on the floor.

“I went with her yesterday to look at a PE class, a square-dancing class and a training session for female Tyler Scouts,” Myla said, exasperated. “The PE teacher was
naked
and making her students
spank
her, the square dance was
obscene
and the scouts were killing a cow in the FFA barn. Rachel was writing an article to expose all that and other things she’d uncovered.”

Mr. Booth shook his head. “She would have told me if that’s what she was doing, but she never said a thing about it and there’s nothing like that in her file notes or on her Web page. We checked her computer this morning for any work that remained outstanding, so we could reassign it to someone else.”