Redemption Prep

by Samuel Miller

  It wasn’t scientific, but it was proof: she had a good sense for these things, even if she wasn’t always exact on the details.

  Seven, six, five minutes to mass. Something was definitely off. Maybe she’d been given the wrong instructions, or maybe whoever she was supposed to meet had seen that it wasn’t Emma waiting and turned around. Either way, she wasn’t going to wait and miss mass to find out. She shoved both of her arms against the sides of the tree, pulling hard against the mud to lift herself up, but the branch wasn’t strong enough. It split with a loud crack.

  “Neesha?”

  Her hands shot in opposite directions and her balance swung forward. She hit the mud hard, her whole body sinking into it, and rolled onto her back, cracking open like an egg.

  Above her, a dark-purple-and-yellow Adidas windbreaker was floating in the breath of God, glaring down.

  “I fucking knew it!”

  She could see a dark brown face below the hood. “I knew it,” he said again, high and tentative. “Oh, this is so messed up!”

  He pulled his hood back. Ahmad Galbia—Zaza, as he had been called since he was seven years old—had a thin layer of black hair that stopped too high on his forehead, and a wide face, but maybe that was because his narrow glasses threw off the proportions. For as many times as she’d seen him, and it was many times—in the lab almost every day, weekends included, for three years—he’d never been this animated.

  “As soon as I heard about this, I was like, ‘That’s Neesha’s project,’ I just had to see it for myself and I was fucking right! Do you have any idea how much shit you’re in right now?”

  She groaned as she pulled herself up from the ground, bringing her face-to-face with him. He was short, only a few inches taller than her.

  “They’ll end you. They’ll confiscate your work, they’ll take away the project, and they’ll ban you from winning the trophy—”

  “Money, please.”

  He shut up.

  Neesha smiled, watching his hand hover over his pocket. “What?” she asked. “Are you going to not buy it?”

  He sighed and dropped a clean white envelope on the stump between them.

  “What are you even doing here?” she asked as she began to count. “It was supposed to be someone from the basketball team.”

  “I am on the basketball team—I do the stats.”

  “And the dirty work.”

  “I guess.”

  He didn’t say anything else. It said an embarrassing amount about his self-esteem that he was willing to run an errand like this for guys who cared so little about him that they asked him to run an errand like this.

  “Where’s Emma?”

  “Not here.”

  “Why?”

  “She had to make a phone call.”

  “That’s strange.”

  “No it’s not,” she said reflexively, but it was a little strange. Part of the agreement she’d made with Emma a week ago was that Neesha would never be the one to take anyone’s money. But tonight, for their biggest sale yet, Emma had begged her to step in.

  “How many people know you’re doing this?” Zaza asked.

  “Where is this money coming from?” Neesha ignored his question, asking her own as she tucked the first thousand back into the envelope.

  “Um.” He rubbed his head. “I don’t know. I guess everybody pitched in. I think somebody’s parents—”

  “God, Aiden is so fucking rich.”

  “Yep. It’s crazy. He’s completely divorced from any kind of real-life proportionality. His mom will ask him, like, ‘Do you want to order a waterbed for your room?’ And he’ll be like, ‘Yeah, but let’s get two or three, just in case.’ Which sounds like it would be great but it actually creates real problems, like, what is he even gonna do with the extra waterbeds—”

  “This is only half of it.”

  Zaza’s eyes flipped back and forth in the dark. “Yeah.” He rubbed the top of his head again. “That’s what Emma said. Half for her, half for you.”

  “You pay in full. What we do with the money after has nothing to do with you.”

  “Are you sure? Emma said to split it up—”

  “No, we don’t split it up!”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, throwing his hands up. “Feels like we could just go to Emma—”

  “Put it on the stump.”

  He frowned at her, then reached into the same pocket and removed an identical envelope, staring at it a moment before handing it over. Neesha’s breath steadied as she counted in silence.

  “Just for the record,” he said. “You have the same motivation I do to lie, and if I go back to Emma—”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “—she’d be more likely to believe you, which makes me more susceptible to getting screwed than you. So if you compare the odds that one of us is lying—”

  “Shut up.”

  He did.

  It was an exhaustingly typical attitude. It was always the innocent ones who expected the most, like because they were a television version of nice, they believed they were entitled to everyone’s best behavior, even though usually their manners were being weaponized to some end, like sex, or stealing large sums of money.

  “Okay, we’re good,” she said, dropping a small baggie of clear pills on the stump in place of the envelopes and turning to carve her way down the mountain.

  “You’re making a mistake.” Zaza hadn’t moved behind her. “All this, for a couple grand? It’s not worth it.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Neesha muttered to herself without looking back.

  She took a wide route back to the chapel, wiping the forest off as she ran. Zaza was right, but not in the way he thought he was. He was right that it wasn’t worth it for the money. The extra cash was nice, to buy cigarettes off the maintenance workers or send money home to her mom for her sister’s birthday. But that wasn’t what made “all this” worth it—it was the trophy.

  The Discovery Trophy was a four-foot, diamond-studded beaker that sat at the front of Dr. Yangborne’s classroom all year round. At the end of the year, it was awarded to the most innovative breakthrough in the C-School. More than just the physical award, it came with a full-ride scholarship to California-Berkeley, a full legal team to register and patent the product, and a commitment to find manufacturing. The students who won it were immediately elevated from senior high students to practicing chemists. Previous winners had gone on to be the heads of labs and CEOs of pharma companies. In her Year Two, she’d come in fourth, with a hormone booster she created from scratch; she refined it in her Year Three and finished in second. This year, she’d gone a completely different direction, synthesizing something new, effective, and useful.

  And she was going to be able to prove it.

  She slid into the first open seat she could find, five rows from the back and off the center aisle of the chapel. As soon as she sat, the organ ripped through the sanctuary, starting the music. Everything shook as the pipes screamed—the windows, the pews, the Bibles tucked into the seat backs. The overhead lights bowed into darkness for a moment, then popped back on. The whole complex was on an old grid, relying on two hundred miles of cable to get power from Salt Lake, so sometimes, when the draw got to be too much, electricity would dip in and out. Instructors had jokes for it; others had learned to ignore it entirely. Father Farke, for his part, used every blackout as an opportunity to shout, “Alas, his light has arrived!” Neesha wanted to remind him that, because the light was supposed to be constant and blackouts were a temporary interruption, it was actually the opposite—his light had disappeared.

  The prelude ended, leaving everything in the church still once more. The whispering stopped and Father Farke made his way to the front to select a holy candle-lighting person. Emma had volunteered.

  Emma loved this shit. She was one of the people at the school who was actually a Christian. Neesha had never been to church before Redemption and found the whole thing to be creepy. The chapel was f
ar too big for the number of students, and every window had a still-frame Bible story stained into it—the American version of the stories, where the characters were white and the Middle East looked like Texarkana. The biggest mural, in the very front, was a forty-foot rendering of Noah’s ark, in which twelve super tall and super naked passengers flew a boat away from a raging flood. Craziest of all, clouds of smoke billowed from a source just out of the frame.

  She assumed the choice to put it at the front of the church was some kind of warning to students. Come to mass or die in a fire.

  Emma moved quickly, candle to candle, checking over her shoulder behind her. Neesha sat up, watching. Usually Emma was graceful, but tonight she looked uneasy. Behind her, a student let out a light moan, and Emma checked over her shoulder. The bells on top of the church rang out, and Emma leapt, nearly knocking over one of the candelabras.

  As Father Farke moved into the announcements, Emma carried a single candle back up the aisle toward Neesha, slowly, to protect the fragile flame in her hands. She kept her eyes focused forward, past all the students who watched her, until she got to Neesha. She glanced to the right, ever so slightly, and she held up one finger in front of the candle. A question.

  Neesha raised her hand to her face and scratched her nose, with one finger. Her answer.

  It was the code they’d developed; the simplest binary form of communication: 1 meant good, 2 meant bad; 1 meant success, 2 meant failure; 1 meant yes, 2 meant no.

  Emma smiled. Neesha smiled back. The lights of the chapel flickered on and off.

  Aiden.

  AIDEN STARED AFTER where she’d just disappeared into the back of the church; she didn’t bother to look in his direction.

  “. . . faster around picks, that’s the only way we beat these fucking giants, you know? Shoot them out the gym.”

  He’d made himself impossible to ignore, combed his hair back just the way she always did it up for him and smiled with a poster-quality apology face. Still, she looked the other way.

  “Plus, I’m trying to show off this jump shot for the scouts, okay? Make it fucking rain a little, you know? Splash splash? Aiden? Hello? What do you think?”

  Dirk was talking down at him from a two-inch height advantage. All the guys were listening.

  He cleared his throat. “I think you guys talk about basketball too much.”

  “Please.” Dirk’s breath smelled terrible. “Just this week, care a little bit, please? I’d like to play in the professionals.”

  Aiden rolled his eyes. “Yeah, alright, I’ll get off faster, just as long as you can get your giraffe-ass body out far enough to set them.”

  Everybody but Dirk laughed.

  “Besides.” Aiden stared forward. “The scout’s coming to watch me.”

  Because the school was so remote, the basketball team played three games a year, and only one in their home gym. Next Tuesday would be their first exhibition, against the previous years’ McDonald’s All Americans, and Coach Bryant had confirmed it for them in practice today—the Dallas Mavericks were sending a scout. Aiden hadn’t told the guys, but it was his dad who called the scouting department, to set up the trip. He was the one they were coming to watch.

  “Just don’t be mopey forever, okay?” Dirk asked. “You look like Eeyore for last two weeks. Your game looks like it, too.”

  No one on the team disagreed.

  “Really?” he asked. “Alright, well, keep talking this shit and see how much you even get the ball next week.”

  Dirk’s shoulders fell. “You’re right, bro. My bad.” The rest of them nodded apologies.

  “By the way,” he said, leaning forward, patting Zaza’s shoulder, speaking loud enough for everyone to hear. “Hold on to that five hundred for me till later, okay?”

  Zaza nodded, and the group was silent. Aiden tried one more glance at the back of the church, but Emma wasn’t there.

  The flickering lights in the chapel were getting much worse, bowing in and out every few seconds, graduating to a strobe.

  Aiden’s parents had sent him to Redemption with that one goal in mind—make the league. There were other schools, other teams, but his dad decided Redemption was the clearest shot. They’d sent coaches to his AAU games with crazy facts and figures about their success. When Coach Bryant visited, he brought two NBA players, Redemption alums, who used words like “revolutionary” to describe the system. They sold him on that dream that he’d come here, train with the best, showcase for the scouts, and go straight to the draft. For four years, he’d followed that path, starting since his Year One, and leading the team in scoring since Year Two. In four years, he’d never missed a practice, or shorted a workout, or sat out a scrimmage.

  Now, here he was, a week away, and all he could think about was the fact that his girlfriend was ignoring him. Whether she knew it or not—and how could she not?—Emma was jeopardizing the most important week of his life.

  “Emma told me to meet her tonight—” he started to whisper to no one, but as the lights dimmed again, he was interrupted by a moaning noise, like the drone of an alarm.

  “Oh . . . oh . . .” It echoed through the church like a warning siren, but all the guys in his section groaned.

  “Fucking Eddy,” Dirk muttered.

  Aiden leaned forward to find where Eddy was sitting. Faces were flashing left and right, snapping around in search of the noise. It looked like some of the students were blinking incessantly, others clenching their jaws. He couldn’t tell if it was actually happening, or inside his own eyes, but students everywhere seemed possessed with tiny, almost unnoticeable shakes. The entire congregation had a vibration.

  Eddy got louder and louder. “Oh . . .” His voice was wailing, quivering in every corner.

  “Oh, oh—” Dirk yelled. “Just get to it already!”

  The whole sanctuary laughed.

  “What is that?” a Year One asked.

  “This kid Eddy,” Dirk explained. “He’s a weird boy. Very messed up.”

  “I think he’s possessed,” someone else whispered.

  “Oh . . . oh!”

  The lights of the chapel began to flicker violently, much faster than before, waves of power drops coming in and out like a storm cell was descending on the mountain. Up and down the congregation, students shuffled restlessly around the old pews creaking and cracking below them. Aiden could hear their panic in the grinding of their teeth, coming from all around him. Why was it so loud?

  “Well . . .” Father Farke spoke over Eddy’s moaning, his microphone still working. “We’ll have to wait for the Lord to allow us to continue.” He stepped back from the pulpit and made his way to the window, watching the sky like he was waiting for something to happen.

  And something did happen, but it didn’t come from above. It came from the fifth row. The moaning turned into screaming, and the screaming turned into a recognizable word—

  “No!”

  Students in the front started to crash into the center aisle, screaming and knocking over the candles. With no light, Aiden couldn’t see where they were running, or what they were running from, but the screaming just got louder.

  “Go, go, go!” Next to him, Dirk started shouting and shoving. Aiden backed up, standing on the pew to let them pass. Two huge candles at the front of the chapel roared to life, and Aiden got his first clear look at the chaos.

  Eddy was standing above the herd, swinging his arms wildly, screaming like he was in pain. He had a Bible in one hand and his other balled into a fist, lashing at the bodies around him. Those bodies had fallen over each other trying to get away. A bigger kid tried to subdue him and Eddy squared up the Bible against his head. The kid fell backward, holding his eye.

  At the front, Father Farke and the other clergy members were huddled, scared. The rest of the instructors were still assessing the situation from the balcony. No one was moving toward the center aisle. Someone needed to stop this. Aiden saw his moment, and he charged.

  The backs of t
he pews were about five feet apart, only a few inches of wood but enough for him to catch and propel himself to the next. He leapt around students, row to row, straight for where Eddy had picked up another Bible and was throwing it into the crowd.

  He landed on the pew next to Eddy, catching him by the arm before he could swing forward again. Eddy tried to bring his other hand in to help, but Aiden curled over to receive the blow with his back. Eddy was a small kid, but his fists were surprisingly fast and strong, burying themselves below Aiden’s ribs before pulling back and hitting him again, two, three, four times. Aiden snaked his left arm around Eddy’s chest, and with a half-nelson grip, he lifted, driving Eddy off the ground, off the pew, sending them both crashing into the center aisle.

  Eddy’s body writhed in pain, and Aiden used the moment to look up for a staff member. He could hear them shouting, but a wall of students surrounded them, standing on pews to create a grandstand. Eddy cowered below him, his gray Metallica T-shirt stained with blood. “No,” he was still shrieking. “No! No! No!”

  “Can somebody help him, please?” Aiden shouted. The crowd just roared in response.

  Aiden turned back. “Relax!” he shouted down at him. “Eddy, you have to relax!”

  Eddy snapped back and Aiden took no chances, capturing both of his hands and driving them backward into the carpet until Eddy stopped trying to fight.

  His body went limp, and for a moment, Aiden felt his advantage. Maybe he’d lost his shit for a second, but at this moment, Eddy was a defenseless student, half his size, collapsed and bleeding underneath him, squashed like a bug against the chapel floor. The worst part was his eyes, now bruised and lost in a mess of hair, were staring straight up into Aiden’s, terrified.