Undertow (8 page)

Bex kneels beside me. “There's my wild thing,” she says with a proud grin.

“Stay in your seats!” the soldier roars. He's on his radio shouting for backup. Seconds later the door flies open and ten heavily armed men storm into the room. They stomp down the aisles and drag Deshane and Jorge into the hall, then come back for Ghost.

“Get your hands off me,” he hisses as they pull him out of the class.

There are hands on my arms too, and I realize I'm not being helped to my feet. I'm being arrested.

T
he gymnasium is now a temporary holding cell
for students waiting for the bus to the Tombs. Twenty-five desks complete with chairs bolted into the hardwood floor make up five neat rows. I'm handcuffed to one. Some whimpering freshman is to my right. Ghost is to my left, grumbling in his barky language, and Deshane and his pals are behind me, laughing. They aren't taking any of this seriously.

I, however, am freaking out. We've been here for three hours, and I've been trembling every minute of it. What I did was dumb. Apart from the fact that I'm going to be stuck in a jail cell with who knows what, a trip to the Tombs will put me into the system. I just invited the police to peer into my hiding places, uncover my secrets, examine my DNA. Flags will go up. Questions will be asked about my parents, about why my mom doesn't have a Social Security number or a driver's license or a birth certificate. They will come for us, just like my father warned they would, and it will be my fault. Right now I'm missing my phone. I just wish I could call them and tell them to run.

The doors to the gym open, and footsteps approach. A man in a tight, short-sleeved oxford shirt and khaki slacks approaches, along with a small handful of soldiers. He's got a crewcut and a jaw like a mason block and a hint of a tattoo poking out of his sleeve. When he gets to my desk, he stops, sips from a mug of coffee, and eyes me up and down.

“Soldier, can you take Ms. Walker's handcuffs off?”

A young private unfastens the cuffs. It feels good to be out of them. My wrists have been rubbed raw, but being free also means I'm on my way to jail.

“Come with me, Ms. Walker,” he says.

“Who are you?”

“I'm David Doyle, the new principal.” He wanders toward the exit.

I look back to the soldier, expecting to find his gun in my face, but he's not paying any attention to me. He goes back to where he was stationed and turns his eyes to the other students.

“Ms. Walker?” Doyle is gesturing impatiently. “Please keep up.”

Two things could be happening here. Maybe he's escorting me to the police van for transport to the Tombs. Or (and this feels more likely) he's already figured out what I am and he's trying to lure me out of the room to avoid causing a scene. Neither of these is a good scenario, but I don't know what other choice I have but to follow him. I might have Alpha blood, but I do not have their strength and speed. Fighting my way out of here is not an option.

Doyle leads me out of the gym and down an empty hallway to a door that has a sign on it that reads
nurse's office
. He reaches into his pants pocket and takes out a ring of keys, then unlocks the door and gestures for me to enter. I'm expecting to be forced into a chair and questioned, but there's no one in the room—in fact, it doesn't look like too many people have ever been in this room. Ancient first-aid equipment is pushed against the far wall. A blood-pressure machine leans near a stack of crumbling boxes vomiting yellow medical files onto the floor. A dusty eye chart has fallen under a desk, and a poster of the human skeleton hangs precariously by one strip of tape. Everything was shoved aside to make room for a wall of surveillance monitors. There are thirty of them in all, and each screen reveals a different part of the school. I can see classrooms, hallways, down every shelf in the library, the teacher's break room, and even under the bleachers in the gym. Mr. Ervin is teaching his class. A soldier is stationed at a door, armed and ready. Two cops are putting Deshane into a police van outside the back of the building.

Mr. Doyle gestures to an empty chair, but I ignore him. I need to be on my feet so I can run. This is what my father taught me.

“What happened to Mrs. Channing?” I ask.

“She has been reassigned,” he says.

“Am I going to the Tombs?”

He takes a long sip of his coffee and eyes me up and down, like he's not sure what the answer is yet.

“Just relax, Ms. Walker.”

“I'm relaxed.”

“You're shaking.”

Mr. Doyle sits down in a rolling chair, then uses his feet to move toward me, creeping along like a spider greeting its entangled lunch. He smells of aftershave, cigarettes, toothpaste, and some chemical he uses to make his hair look wet. His chinos are those wrinkle-free kind. Everything is locked down and tight. There's no way he's really a principal. He's probably a cop. Only cops care this much about how they look. Plus, I've never met a teacher with a tattoo—at least not one where you could see it.

“Please, Ms. Walker, sit down,” he says.

It doesn't sound like a request, so I sit, reluctantly, in the chair closest to the door.

“Did you know that forty-two percent of the student body at this school have been charged with a misdemeanor?”

Cop.

“How come you're not one of them?” he continues as he rolls over to a little desk in the corner and snatches a manila folder from the top. He rolls back and flaps it in front of my face. “Because according to your file, it looks like you were headed in that direction. Three years ago you were caught on the roof of your middle school smoking pot.”

“I wasn't actually smoking it.”

“You were also in detention fourteen times for being disrespectful. You were one tardy away from an in-school suspension. You were almost expelled for passing around a flask of gin.” He pauses, as he thinks I need to let it all sink in, like it wasn't me who actually did those things.

“I'm not sure what the question is,” I say.

He grins and sips his coffee. “And then one day you changed. You turned into a model student. Your grades got better. You started showing up on time. You haven't cut a class in three years. There isn't a complaint or mark in your file. Other than a few extra sick days for migraines, you're a model student. Why is that?”

“My father threatened to arrest me. He's a cop. You know how that is.”

He cocks an eyebrow. “I'm not a cop.”

“Well, you're not a principal.”

He smiles and leans forward, a cat patiently waiting for the mouse to poke its head out from under the radiator. “I have a theory about you. Would you like to hear it?”

“I don't know what you mean,” I whisper, but my head is screaming,
He knows.
I can't panic; I just have to remember what Dad told me to do. I look to the door. There aren't any windows, so it's my only option. I can beat him out of the room if I push his chair. He'll roll back, and if I push hard enough, he'll probably fall off.

“Here's what I think: you got tired of being a pain in the butt.”

“What?”

He pushes off with his feet and rolls across the room to look at his monitors. “Being a screwup got boring. Plus, you knew if you had any chance of getting out of the Zone, it was probably college. So you turned yourself around. Good for you, but now, here's the interesting thing about Lyric Walker. You still have the respect of your classmates. You've got friends that are black, Latino, and Asian. You mingle with the gangsta wannabes and the honor-roll kids. They like you. They count you as one of them. You're a real chameleon, but it works for you. Today someone twice your size decided not to run you down when you told him to stop.”

“Actually, he did run me down.”

“I saw that kid. He went easy on you.” Doyle laughs, and it sounds real.

“Sounds like you've figured me out,” I say. I don't think he knows. But I'm not about to let myself relax. I nudge my chair to have a better angle toward the door.

“I think so. I also think you could be a big help to me.”

“Help?”

“Lyric, in three months, ten more public schools are going to do exactly what we're doing here at Hylan: four here in Coney Island, three in Gravesend, and three in Brighton Beach. A month after that, there will be fifty schools throughout Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. By the beginning of the next school year, there will be Alpha in schools all over the five boroughs.

“I was brought here to make it work, so we can get them off the beach in as peaceful a manner as possible. It's good for the city and the nation. It's good for the Alpha, too. This should have been the plan all along. Sending in those soldiers, God rest their souls, was shortsighted. It set us back years in our war with them, but now we have a plan that will work.”

“We're at war with them?”

“Lyric, we're at war with everyone who's not like us,” he says as if I should already know that. “And do you know what our greatest weapon is, Lyric? It's you, the American teenager. Your lifestyle is as powerful as a nuclear bomb, and it works everywhere we drop it. Your two-hundred-dollar sneakers, Twitter, hip-hop—boom! boom! boom! It worked in Russia, it's working in China, and it's even working in parts of the Middle East. Now it's time we unleashed this weapon on the Alpha.”

“And that's me?”

“Yes. You're going to befriend one of them,” he says.

“No.” The word comes out faster than my mind has time to manufacture it, but it's the right word.
No. No. No. No. No.

Doyle frowns and laces his fingers together. He stretches his palms outward, and his knuckles pop like tiny machine guns.

“Hear me out, Lyric. What I want is not such a big deal. Just walk to class with him, help him with his homework, introduce him to things you like. The rest will do itself. You're shaking your head. Give me one good reason why you won't do this, Lyric.”

“Samuel Lir,” I say.

Doyle sighs.

“You know Samuel Lir, right?” I say. “He's Mr. Lir's son. Three years ago, when people found out what he was, they beat the crap out of him! They nearly killed him. My father was the one who found him, stuffed under the boardwalk with his skull and both eye sockets crushed, his spine so mangled that parts of it were no longer in his back. They put him in a wheelchair. He couldn't feed or go to the bathroom by himself. He couldn't speak. And no one was ever arrested.” Then he disappeared.

“Samuel was one of them. You are not,” he says.

If only he knew!

“Oh, then let's talk about that kid they dragged from his car because he tried to raise money to buy the Alpha shoes, and the girl they set on fire for bringing them a box of canned food, or Kevin Folkes—”

“What if I promised you wouldn't be hurt?”

“Then you would be lying to me.”

“Lyric, I'm trying to help you out here. That stunt you pulled in class earned you a trip to the Tombs. I can make that go away, but—”

I leap to my feet. “Then send me to the Tombs. Prison sounds a lot better than being dead.”

He shakes his head slowly, then waves his hands in the air like he's swatting away a mosquito. My argument is a nuisance to him, a pest that, if ignored, will go away.

“Lyric, we all have to do our part to make this work. I'll call your dad tonight. We'll get this settled. You start tomorrow.”

“You aren't listening to me.”

“We'll get this settled,” he repeats. Arguing with him is pointless. Let him call my father so my dad can be the one to tell him to go to hell.

“You're going to be a huge help.”

“Can I go?”

Doyle nods, and I'm out the door in a flash, slamming it behind me. I run down the halls toward an exit door, but a soldier is stationed there. I turn and head for another, but it's guarded too. I lean against a bank of lockers to catch my breath and calm my mind. I'm in trouble, and I don't know how to fix it.

B
ack in the halls,
I'
m a rock star.
The story of my arrest spirals into a ridiculous mythology in which I faced down the justice system and spat in its face. I doubt they'd think I was so hardcore if they knew what really happened, or how I dread the final bell when the doors are opened and I have to share my “most wanted” status with my parents. My dad is going to erupt. Three years of carefulness, and I jeopardized it all before I even got out of homeroom.

Bex meets me at my locker at the end of the day and demands a high-five. “Fight the power,” she says.

I grab my things, and together we step outside into the waiting wall of noise. The crowd is bigger now and more hostile than this morning. Standing in the heat all day has soured their moods even further. Luckily, the police got wise and moved them back thirty feet so we don't have to fight our way down the steps to go home, but they can't protect me from my dad. He is waiting, arms crossed, eyes like charcoal briquettes.

“The Big Guy looks mad,” Bex says.

“The Big Guy
is
mad,” I say.

“What's the point of being a teenager if you can't get arrested every once in a while?” She laughs.

“This isn't funny,” I grumble.

He stomps toward us. “It wasn't even fifteen minutes, Lyric. Fifteen minutes and you got yourself wrapped up in this crap.”

“It wasn't her fault,” Bex crows. “She was trying to stop a fight. She's a hero.”

He's not listening. “We have to have a serious talk. Bex, will you be okay on your own?”

“She's staying over.”

“Not tonight. Absolutely not! I'm sorry, Bex, it's family—”

“No big whoop. Phone, please,” Bex says with outstretched hand.