The Academy by Bentley Little Read Free Book Online Page A

“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