The Academy (6 page)

He hadn’t brought his walkie-talkie, he realized.

What the hell was wrong with him? How did he expect to contact Rakeem if something . . .
happened
?

He stood there, listening, and was relieved to hear, from the area in front of the office, the squeak of Rakeem’s cart and the other man’s off-key voice as he rapped along to the music he heard on his headphones. Feeling not exactly foolish but decidedly less skittish than he had only a few seconds prior, Carlos glanced around the quad and decided to start his rounds with the PE department. The gym and connected sports buildings were out by themselves at the north end of the campus, separated from the other classrooms by the tennis courts and the pool, and though he usually left that area to the last, he didn’t want to be out there by himself later at night. He’d rather get it over with in the early evening and spend the rest of the time doing the classrooms with Rakeem close by. If things went well, maybe he’d even get up the nerve to clean the music room.

He thought of the tuba and the slow beat of that invisible drum.

Maybe not.

The night air was cool. A soft breeze ruffled his hair as he made his way around the north edge of the quad to the open corridor that led between the social science classrooms. The corridor looked long. Much longer than usual. Like one of those movie scenes where the camera pulls back and makes an ordinary distance suddenly seem stretched out impossibly far. Ahead, through the arched opening at the opposite end, behind the darkened tennis courts and the fenced-in pool, the rounded bulk of the gym loomed before him.

Enrique was right, Carlos chided himself.
Maricón
.

He forced himself to continue on, walking forward at an even pace as though nothing in the world could faze him. He needed to get over these jitters or he’d have to find a new job. He couldn’t spend every night at work scared of his own shadow.

If he could only get on day shift . . .

Carlos reached the PE department—what the school administration called the “sports complex”—and was about to go into the gym and give the wooden floor a once-over when he paused by the girls’ locker room. All through his junior high and high school years, that tantalizingly off-limits chamber on the other side of the gym wall had been the holy grail for him and his buddies, the one place on earth they most often speculated on and fantasized about. Even now, the locker room had not entirely lost its allure, and whenever he went in to scrub the concrete floor or mop the tile, he couldn’t help but think of all those hot young bodies in here during the day, naked, showering, dressing, undressing.

But something was wrong tonight.

There were voices coming from the locker room and there weren’t supposed to be. Any summer practice had ended hours before, and at this time of evening, the PE department should have been as silent as a tomb.

Tomb.

Shit. Why had he thought of that word?

Carlos shivered. Sound could do weird things here in the PE department, he rationalized. The big echoey gym with its exposed beams and high ceiling, the tiled bunkerlike showers, even the coaches’ offices with their windowed half walls, all distorted the resonance of voices and often made them sound as though they were coming from a room or section of building that they were not. So while there wasn’t supposed to be anyone in here at this hour, it was entirely possible that one of the coaches had left a radio on in an office or something. There could be a perfectly innocent explanation for the fact that he heard people talking in the girls’ locker room.

But he didn’t think so, did he?

No.

Carlos tilted his head, put his ear closer to the crack between the double doors. He could hear both male and female voices, and there was something about their tone that made him pause, that kept him from opening the door and peeking inside to discover the source. They were not
just
talking; there were moans and yelps, grunts and gasps. It sounded like an orgy, but not one that he would ever care to join. Yes, he heard cries of pleasure and the light rhythmic slapping of skin, but there were other sounds as well, disturbing sounds, and male laughter that was harsh, cruel and far too loud. He tried to make out words, did his best to decipher what was being said, but everything was muffled. The only thing clear was that brutal laughter.

It sounded like his dad.

Carlos’ heart tripped in his chest, its beat stumbling as he recognized the familiar cadence. His father used to laugh every time he’d hit him—which was often—but he had not thought of that in years. Right before the old man had left for good, he’d beaten him with the buckle end of a belt and they’d both been naked and his dad had had a boner. Carlos had never told anyone about that, had successfully tamped down that memory and had not even recalled it himself until now, but the pain and humiliation caused by that act were still there and still stung, and they prompted him to take out his master key and yank open the locker room door.

Silence.

Silence and darkness.

He had not imagined what he’d heard, and he turned on the lights, holding tightly to the handle of a broom, ready to use it as a weapon should he encounter any sort of threat.

He walked forward slowly. At first glance, the locker room appeared to be empty, but he checked in the coaches’ offices and went up and down each aisle anyway, looking for signs of anything amiss. He didn’t expect to find anything—didn’t
want
to find anything—but halfway down the center row, on the low flat bench between the two banks of temporary lockers, lay a pile of wet bloody towels.

From somewhere in the shower area came the sound of a loud slap, followed by a girl’s scream.

And that deep harsh laughter.

His dad.

Carlos ran back the way he’d come, his fingers hurting from clutching the broom handle so tightly. He didn’t bother to close or lock the door behind him, or even take his cart. He simply sped as fast as he could away from the “sports complex,” running past the empty tennis courts, and through the open corridor between the social science classrooms—

Where he nearly knocked over Rakeem.

“Jesus!” Rakeem yelled. He had finished with the office and was heading over to the first-floor classes.

Finished with the office?

That was a one-hour job on a good day. It had been only about ten minutes. Carlos examined Rakeem’s face, looking for any indication that something out of the ordinary might have happened. “You okay?” he asked.

“Sure.” Rakeem would not meet his eyes. “What are
you
running away from?”

He wanted to tell the other man what he’d heard, what he’d seen—if anyone would believe him, Rakeem would—but there’d been a hint of derision in Rakeem’s voice when he’d asked the question, and despite his suspicion that Rakeem had encountered something in the office, he thought about his partner’s earlier admonition against talking to Enrique.

Carlos wiped the sweat from his forehead, breathed deeply. “Nothing,” he lied. “Nothing. Everything’s cool.”

Four

“It’s gonna be a long fuckin’ day, dude.”

Brad Becker turned to see his friend Ed Haynes behind him on the sidewalk. Ed was out of breath, so he’d obviously been running, but he’d already fallen into the slow, unhurried shuffle he favored when in public and was pretending that he just
happened
to have arrived at this section of concrete at the same time Brad himself had.

He smiled. Ed always tried so hard to be cool, but that was something that was just never going to happen. The two of them had been best buds since third grade, when they’d found themselves in the same class and discovered that they were both fanatic
Star Wars
fans, and in all the time he’d known Ed, his friend had never fit in with any crowd, had always been the geekiest guy in any gathering. Of course, he wasn’t the most happening person himself, was just an ordinary, average member of the faceless majority. But Ed was not only a natural victim; he rubbed people the wrong way—and seemed to revel in it. Many times over the years, Brad had had to rescue his buddy from almost certain ass kickings by nearly every type of kid at school. Even girls.

This year would probably be no different.

“Heads up!” someone yelled, and from within a pack of students speeding by on bicycles came an apple that splattered on the sidewalk at Ed’s feet.

Brad grinned. “And so it starts.”

“Fuck,” Ed said.

The two of them trudged forward toward Grayson Street and the school. Brad sighed. “It was a short summer, Charlie Brown.”

“No duh. We’re old. The years are going to start speeding by from here on in. Blink and you’ll be middle-aged. Turn around again and you’ll be ready for retirement.”

“I won’t even be eighteen for another month.
You
won’t be eighteen until April.”

“Still.”

They turned the corner and saw, on the next block over, a yellow school bus turning into Tyler’s parking lot.

“I hate school,” Ed said.

“It’s not so bad.”

“My mom said that if I ditched any classes this year or drank alcohol at any parties or basically behaved like a normal high school senior, I wouldn’t be able to buy that car I’ve been saving for.”

“What a coincidence. Mine, too.”

“Strange, isn’t it, how our moms hate each other’s guts, are complete opposites politically, but are exactly alike?”

Brad laughed. It was true. Ed’s mom, a hard-core Rush Limbaugh Republican, refused to recycle or conserve energy because she didn’t believe there was any such thing as global warming. Brad’s mom, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal Democrat, refused to recycle or conserve energy because she considered the emphasis on such individual actions part of a conservative plot to keep the government from doing its duty and solving the problem itself. Neither of them bought into the think-globally-act-locally mind-set that their kids had learned at school and tried to bring home.

The two women were also simpatico when it came to donating money to charity. To Ed’s mom, making donations was like paying taxes—she worked hard for her money; why should she give any of it away? To Brad’s mom, it was another conservative plot—people
should
be taxed, and if individuals donated money, it kept
everyone
from having to make sacrifices.

The ironic end result of all these grand philosophical stances was that both moms acted the same in an unexpectedly large number of cases.

Like now.

“Ed, Ed, gives great head!” Larry Dodgeson shouted from a car filled with other jocks.

Without looking, Ed held up his middle finger.

“It’s gonna be a long fuckin’ day,” he said again.

At school, Ed had to go to the office to straighten out a mistake on his class schedule, so Brad stopped off at the lunch area to see if any of his other friends were around. The cafeteria wasn’t even open, and no one he liked was hanging around Senior Corner, so he walked through the quad, talked to a few kids he hadn’t seen since last year, and met up with Ed again by the lockers. He had the same locker he’d always had—at Tyler, they were assigned to students as freshmen and remained theirs until graduation—and though there was a built-in combination lock, he put on his own as well, slipping its curved bolt through the provided opening after tossing in his backpack.

Ed’s locker, one row down and two to the right, still had a big “EH” drawn on it in marking pen, though the lockers were supposed to have been cleaned during the summer.

The letters “EH” not only were Ed’s initials but stood for “educationally handicapped,” a euphemism for students with learning disabilities.

Some people just couldn’t get a break.

Ed took his lunch out of his backpack and put it on the small shelf near the top of the locker. “You heard about Van, didn’t you? Van Nguyen?”

“What about him?” Brad said.

“He got kidnapped or something. There’s a poster by the office.”

“I saw that, too!”

Brad turned around to see Myla Ellis approaching from the walkway that led to the parking lot. His pulse quickened. At the end of last year, he and Myla had been kind of, almost, sort of semi-dating. She’d spent most of the summer with her father and his new wife in Denver, and though they’d e-mailed each other almost daily, there’d been a shift in the tone of her messages sometime in the middle of July. They’d suddenly become less personal, more formal, and he’d followed suit. He half assumed that she’d met someone over there in Denver, but he didn’t ask, because he didn’t want to know. She’d been back at her mom’s for over a week already, but he hadn’t called her and she hadn’t called him, and right now Brad didn’t know where they stood. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants in as surreptitious a way as he knew how.