The Academy Read Free Page B

strength that Steel admired. She wasn’t afraid of much, and she’d demonstrated that she could think clearly under pressure. Better than that, she was a science geek—her invention for the National Science Challenge might have won if it hadn’t been stolen. And more than anything, she treated him as if he were normal. Around her, he didn’t feel like the freak of nature that everyone else thought he was. She rarely mentioned his memory skills, and when she did it was to tease him.
    He wanted to trust his father in sending her here, and yet…why hadn’t he mentioned her coming? Why had he dropped Steel off without a word about Kaileigh?
    “We’re going to have fun,” she said, the two of them lugging her suitcases toward the dorms.
    “Yeah,” he answered, outwardly agreeing with her. Internally, he couldn’t help thinking: But there’s got to be more to it than that .

Daily school life soon absorbed the freshmen. Encouraged by teachers and advisers alike, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, Steel fell into a routine. He was awakened by his dorm master sometime after 6 a.m., was due in the common room by 7:00, in coat and tie, just ahead of breakfast in the dining hall—a chaotic, noisy assembly with smells of butter and syrup, cinnamon and chocolate, where students clambered for plates and trays while the authorities—coffee-swilling teachers assigned as heads of tables—attempted order.
    Classes ran from 8:30 to 2:30, Monday through Friday, and until noon on Saturday, when at last the necktie could be left in the closet for thirty-six hours. Mandatory athletics filled the late afternoons, with a quick return to dinner that presaged the rigors of study hall.
    There were tardies and truancies and disciplines meted out in the first few days, done so in a public manner so as not to be missed.
    What was at first dizzying soon became comfortable, which Steel assumed was the point. He missed home, and was tempted to call, but his father had encouraged him to go at least two full weeks before doing so. Steel had made it through two weeks of science camp two summers in a row; he could make it through the first two weeks of Wynncliff.
    The football and soccer teams, both varsity and JV, boys and girls, had been announced a couple of days ago, causing a stampede in the administration building. Steel had tried out for soccer but had not made the cut; he’d seen Kaileigh’s name on the girls’ JV list.
    Wynncliff’s Third Form—ninth grade classes—were harder than any he’d ever taken, and he’d been consumed by mandatory study hall until 9 p.m. five evenings a week, only to return to his room and do homework for another hour after that. He’d be lucky if he got B’s.
    His roommate, a stout African American kid named Verne Dundee, from New Haven, Connecticut, was a nice enough guy, but he went to sleep listening to hip-hop through a pair of leaky headphones. Steel, being a light sleeper and no fan of hip-hop, didn’t appreciate the annoyance, but had yet to gather the nerve to say anything about it. He’d read in a school pamphlet— Dorm Life for Dummies —that the best way to be a good roommate was to allow privacy and space. He wasn’t sure how noise pollution from leaky headphones fit into that agreement, but he wasn’t going to push it.
    As he tried to fall asleep, he heard the squeak to the door of the boys’ room down the hall. It was the thirteenth squeak since Steel had entered his room for the night.
    Lying there on the upper bunk, trying his best to ignore the irritating, hollow pulse from Verne’s headphones, Steel awaited the fourteenth squeak—door squeaks came in pairs: entering and leaving. Sometimes that pairing was thrown off by one boy holding the door for another, but politeness was not commonplace in Lower Three. In fact, the older boys tended to torture the younger ones—hazing them and turning them into shoe-shine boys and personal butlers. More to the point, this most recent