The Academy by Bentley Little Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
     
     
    “Hey, Myla,” Ed said. “Did you find a new boyfriend in Denver?”
     
     
    Leave it to Ed to just blurt it out. Brad reddened, but he watched her face carefully to see the reaction. Myla blushed. “Of course not.” She kept her eyes focused exclusively on Ed. “Did either of you?”
     
     
    “No!” Brad said quickly.
     
     
    She met his gaze for the first time, a look of relief on her face. “I thought—”
     
     
    “No.”
     
     
    “ I think you two have some issues to discuss. I’m out of here.” Ed held up a hand. “Later days.”
     
     
    “See you in math,” Brad said. He met his friend’s eyes, hoped his gratitude showed on his face. He turned back toward Myla. “So . . . what’s your first class?”
     
     
    “PE.”
     
     
    “At eight in the morning? That’s rough. Let me see your schedule.” Before summer started, they’d both tried to arrange it so they’d have as many classes together as possible. Now they compared printouts. Sure enough, they each had third-period biology, fourth-period English and sixth-period economics. Their hands touched accidentally, and both quickly pulled away, folding their lists of classes and putting them back in their binders. Brad’s skin tingled. All the feelings he’d had for Myla last semester were still there, though he’d known that already. “So you didn’t meet anyone else—?” he began.
     
     
    Just at that moment, the bell rang. Students started rushing to get to their homerooms, but the two of them remained where they were.
     
     
    Myla shook her head. “Why would you even think that?”
     
     
    He wanted to explain, wanted to talk it out, but she had to get all the way across campus to PE, and he had to go to the next building over for Spanish. “We’ll discuss it later,” he said. “You’d better get going. I’ll see you in biology.”
     
     
    The disappearance of Van Nguyen was big news all over the school. It was mentioned in the morning