The Academy

by Zachary Rawlins

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  “Well, I am totally fucking screwed,” Alex said glumly, piling lettuce from the salad bar into a bowl. “What the hell was Windsor talking about, anyway?”

  “Yeah, I felt that way at first too,” Vivik agreed cheerfully, using tongs to pull hot rolls from a basket. “Just be glad you didn’t join mid-session. I hear Windsor made some kid take a midterm last year a week after he enrolled.”

  “Vivik!” Emily protested. “That did not happen.”

  “This cafeteria is alright, though,” Alex allowed, puzzling over a variety of pasta.

  He wasn’t kidding. The cafeteria was actually nicer than most of the restaurants Alex had been to. The dining hall itself was huge, easily capable of seating a couple hundred, though there were only thirty or forty students eating at the moment. One whole wall was nothing but windows, and the afternoon sun filtered pleasantly through the trees.

  Alex had been eating with Michael at the staff canteen for the last few weeks, which they’d generally had more-or-less to themselves, and he’d developed a fair amount of respect for the food, which he’d eaten in quantities that astounded him. But, he had to admit that the student facilities were no worse. It was still institutional fare, with the same over-reliance on casseroles, pasta and salad that had been consistent at every cafeteria he’d been to, but the quality was considerably better than anything he’d encountered before. The lasagna that he’d heaped on his plate looked positively edible, and the lettuce for the salad was neither wilted nor ancient.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Emily said, taking a carton of milk from a refrigerator, “you just need a little grounding and you’ll be fine. It’s not actually harder than any other class you’ve ever taken, you just aren’t familiar with the subject matter.”

  “It is much easier when you are raised into it, isn’t it, Emily?” The owner of the grave voice was the black-haired girl from class, who was standing behind them, holding a lunch tray of her own. Up close, Alex was surprised at how young and small she was – she looked like a very serious middle-schooler. She was flanked on either side by one young man who Alex remembered from class, and another, much older one that he didn’t think he’d ever seen before. She was not smiling, but she wasn’t scowling this time, either. Alex couldn’t think of a better way to describe her than severe, her hair parted neatly down the middle and worn straight and spilling over the shoulders of her ornate black dress. “You were planning on telling him, right?”

  Emily sighed theatrically.

  “Well, I was going to introduce you anyway – Alex, this is Anastasia Martynova, the scion of the Black Sun cartel, along with her comrades-in-arms, Renton Vidor, and Edward Krylov.” Emily picked up her tray and started to walk away. “Now, can we eat our lunch in peace?”

  Anastasia looked at Alex thoughtfully. Her lace-fringed black dress looked too hot for the weather to him, in an overly gothic sort of way. He wondered how much younger than him she was, and why she was in the same class with him. She didn’t look more than thirteen or fourteen. Maybe she was a gifted student? Did they even have such things, here?

  “Choose your company carefully, Alexander. You spend enough time associating with Emily, and people might start making assumptions,” she warned.

  Alex nodded diplomatically, totally unsure of what to make of her advice. Anastasia shrugged and then turned away, motioning for the two boys to follow her. Renton – the older, blond kid – grinned at Alex in a troubling way, while the younger Edward gave him a friendly nod before departing.

  Alex stared after them for a moment, then gave up trying to figure things out, and followed Emily and Vivik over to an empty table to eat his lunch. He got in maybe five bites.

  He heard the goon walk up behind him, heard him snickering. And Alex knew there couldn’t be any good reason for anyone to be standing right behind him. But he wasn’t there to start shit, either.

  “Hey new kid.” Alex turned to face him, sighing. He was a big guy, with deep set, mean eyes and the cauliflower ears of a wrestler. “Seems like you’re already pretty popular around here.”

  Alex stared evenly back at the sneering boy. He couldn’t see any benefit in responding, so he didn’t.

  “You got something to say to me, fag?”

  He leaned close, and Alex winced at his breath, and wondered if he ever brushed his teeth. Alex tried to look away without seeming bothered.

  “No? You scared or something, huh?”

  “What is your problem, Steve?” Emily asked sharply, impaling lettuce with a plastic fork. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

  Steve’s eyes narrowed.

  “He one of yours, Emily?”

  Alex noticed a hint of caution in the idiot’s voice. Alex was starting to understand why orphans were so much more vulnerable at the Academy. It was a lot like how things had worked back at the Youth Facility, where the only thing more dangerous than being in one of the gangs was not belonging at all.

  Emily shook her head.

  “He just got here, Steve. Why don’t you try not to make us all look like assholes this time, huh?”

  “Why don’t you stay the fuck out of my business, Emily? If he isn’t one of yours, then it isn’t any of your concern.”

  “This is boring,” Alex said, turning back to his lasagna. “You don’t have shit to say to me, anyway.”

  He set his teeth when Steve flicked his ear with the tip of his index finger, determined not to make a noise. It was painful, but controlling his temper was more difficult. Alex was tempted to settle things right then, but he reminded himself that it would be better to pick his time.

  “You’re lucky, fag. But one of these days, your girlfriend won’t be around, and then you and me are gonna have a little talk.”

  Steve’s grin was dumb, obscene.

  “I think we probably will,” Alex said, trying to sound more confident than he felt, struggling to cut the crust of the lasagna with a frustratingly dull plastic knife. “Watch your back, asshole.”

  “Whatever.” Steve stood for a moment, leering, and then he sauntered off to bother someone else.

  For a long moment, the table was silent, as Emily and Vivik stared at Alex. Alex shoveled food in his mouth without paying it any attention, forcing his shoulders to relax, his jaw to unclench.

  “So, Emily, was what Anastasia said about you true?” He kept his voice casual, trying to cut a roll in half with the questionable plastic knife.

  “Sure,” Emily replied, opening her milk, still looking at him with obvious concern. “I was going to tell you. There’s nothing sinister about it. I was born into the Raleigh Cartel, on the opposite side of the fence as Anastasia. But since I’m still a student here at the Academy, I’m unaffiliated.”

  “Emily,” Vivik said around a mouthful of salad, “you aren’t being entirely honest with Alex.”

  Emily set her milk back down on the table and then glared at Vivik.

  “How so? I still haven’t made any decisions, yet. I’m not like Anastasia – my family isn’t particularly important.” Emily looked pleadingly at Alex. “I’m not trying to recruit you, Alex, I promise.”

  “Not yet anyway,” Vivik muttered, pulling the foil cap off a container of yogurt. “Weren’t you going to do some introductions, anyway?”

  “Well, I’d hoped to finish lunch first,” Emily complained, glaring at Vivik. “But since you’re getting all pushy about it.”

  Emily looked around the room briefly, and then pointed to a nearby table where two boys and a girl sat, talking quietly and seriously.

  “So that table over there are the other Hegemony cartel kids from our class – the girl is Louise and the guys are Manual and Gary.” Emily turned around in her chair, and pointed to a set of two tables in the center of the room, each with several students eating lunch at them. The conversations here seemed to Alex to be a bit more natural, more appropriate to the age of the speakers, if not the setting. “Those are mostly orphans, over there,
Rise, Sujan, and Chris at the near table, and that’s William, Choi, and Marko at the far table. You already met Anastasia and the Black Sun contingent…”

  “And what about them?” Alex asked, pointing at the far corner of the room.

  “Who?” Emily asked, turning around to look. “Oh, bad scene.”

  “How so?” Alex asked, feeling his gut tighten. Even from here, he could hear the big guy’s tone of voice, and he didn’t like it at all. He couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he’d been around enough to read between the lines.

  “The bastard from earlier, his name is Steve, and his hanger-on is Charles,” Emily said grimly, “and they are bad news for the girl sitting at that table.”

  “The weird one with blue hair, we call her Eerie, she’s half-Fey.” Vivik looked down at his food and shrugged. “The one they aren’t bothering, the redhead, Margot, is a vampire.”

  “Wait, what?” Alex stared at Vivik, his fork frozen halfway to his mouth.

  “It’s… complicated.”

  “We don’t kill them?” Alex asked incredulously.

  “Ha, uh, no,” Vivik sputtered. “Not since blood banks were invented, anyway.”

  “But they eat at the cafeteria? I mean, like, food?”

  “Well, yes,” Vivik said, brightening up at the change of topic. “Just because they can’t produce hemoglobin on the own doesn’t preclude them from varied nutritional requirements.”

  Alex glared, and Vivik sighed.

  “Yes,” he confirmed tiredly. “Yes, they eat food.”

  “There is an understanding,” Emily interjected, shaking her head. “The vampires have a sort of embassy, here in Central. The younger ones usually come to the Academy for a while. The only Fey I know about is Eerie, so I don’t know what her deal is, but she’s been at the Academy forever. They’re both students here.”

  “Except that they’re treated a bit different then everyone else, right?”

  Vivik looked up at Alex’s strange tone of voice, and tried to look him in the eyes, but Alex refused to meet his gaze.

  “Mostly, yeah,” Vivik admitted sheepishly. “Some people give Eerie a pretty hard time. Nobody bothers a vampire, particularly not Margot, but…”

  As if on cue, there was a crash and then a brief cry from the corner table. Alex didn’t even bother to look up.

  “And Steve, he’s a tough guy, right?”

  Alex stood up, still looking at the ground in front of him.

  “He’s the biggest and the strongest kid here, right?”

  “I guess so,” Emily said, worried. “At the moment. I think Anastasia left already, or he wouldn’t have pulled this.”

  “Alex, what are you thinking of?” Vivik asked, looking up with obvious concern. “The staff here won’t let anything too bad happen.”

  “Right,” Alex said, turning away abruptly and walking from the table. “That’s good, then.”

  “Alex?” Emily called after him, but Alex was already halfway to the lunch line.

  It was the same everywhere. Alex could have written a book about it.

  School. Mental hospital. Juvenile Hall. Work camp. Halfway house. Alex had been to them all, and he’d seen the same thing in every one of them. After the first few years, he’d pretty much gotten used to it.

  There was always someone who threw their weight around, someone who intimidated everyone else. It didn’t even matter that Steve hadn’t started on him yet – he would eventually. It was inevitable, Alex being the new kid, lacking the obvious security that came with the cartels. Even if Alex hadn’t had a giant bull’s-eye hanging on his chest, he’d be targeted for being new, different, and friendless. This was yet another price that Alex would pay for staying unaffiliated.

  He ran his eyes along the cafeteria counter, now half-disassembled by a host of white-clad staffers. Alex settled on a solid-looking metal tray.

  “I’m going to borrow this for a second, ‘kay?”

  Alex didn’t wait for an answer from the puzzled worker, heading rapidly off toward the corner table before his nerve gave out.

  Alex had spent some of the time after his trial in a State Hospital. Two weeks after he’d arrived, he’d been attacked by a couple Dominican kids in the kitchen where he mopped the floors. He’d ended up half-killing one of them with a metal cooking pot, and then spent two weeks in the infirmary with a hole in his gut from where the other kid had stabbed him. No one had bothered him again, after that. He’d even played cards with one of the Dominicans, a few times, while they were both the infirmary.

  It only lasted until he’d been transferred to a different institution, of course. The next time it had been a peckerwood cellmate, who’d probably grown up ten minutes down the road from Alex in some other white-trash hole, who had tried to bash his head in with a plastic chair.

  Alex wasn’t thinking very clearly, and his head was buzzing. Some of it might have had to do with the training, too – in all honesty, he’d been all jacked up for days, just looking for an excuse to try it out on somebody. And the Academy, in Alex’s eyes, was simply another institution.

  The redhead, Margot, was staring down at the plate in front of her, ignored and seemingly oblivious to what was going on around her. Even in the heat of the moment, he couldn’t help but notice that vampires ate a lot of salad, or at least this one did. Near the end of the table, Steve and Charles leaned over a girl sprawled out in spilled food and dishes. She was still sitting where she’d fallen, looking confused, and her eyes wide and blank. Her sweatshirt was splattered with red sauce, and the majority of a bowl of pasta sat on her skirt.

  “Aw, poor thing,” Steve said, crouching down beside the girl with an oafish grin. The other boy cackled. “It looks like you had another accident. You have terrible balance, freak.”

  Steve winked at Charles, who laughed even harder. Alex was very sure the toady wouldn’t be a problem.

  “Let me help you with that,” Steve said, reaching toward the pasta, and then, casually, flipping the girl’s skirt up, exposing her panties. Charles howled with laughter, and the girl gasped.

  “Hey, Steve…” Charles said nervously, much too late for a warning to help.

  Alex would have liked to have said something cool. He was so angry his hands were white where he gripped the tray, and he would have shared his opinion of Steve, Charles, and his tittering classmates who were watching, but words wouldn’t convey the message the way a metal tray upside Steve’s head would.

  He held the tray in both hands and swung it as hard as he could, catching Steve solidly behind his left ear with a meaty thud. Steve cried out in pain and surprise, and tried to turn around, but Alex had already pulled back for another swing. The second blow hit even harder than the first, connecting with the boy’s temple, and the tray warping with the force of the impact. Steve cried out again and fell to the floor, eyes closed, clutching his head.

  Alex stepped over him, smiled, and raised the tray above his head. Steve opened his eyes just in time for the tray to catch him in the mouth. Steve shrieked again, and then rolled onto his side, spitting blood and a tooth on to the cafeteria floor. Alex dropped the tray to the floor with a crash, thought for a moment, and then kicked Steve in the side of the head for good measure. He shot a warning glance at Charles, but he’d apparently decided to let Steve fight his own battles, or at least the losing ones, and was standing nervously several feet away, trying his best to look uninvolved.

  Alex walked over to the girl, who was staring at him in frank astonishment. He was surprised and pleased to see that her face was dry, that she was tougher than she’d looked. Or maybe she was used to it. Then Alex noticed that the girl’s striped panties were still visible, and he turned bright red.

  He held out a hand to her, struggling to simultaneously stare and avert his eyes.

  “Here.”

  For a moment, he thought the blue-haired girl would just stare at him, and got apprehensive and embarrassed. Then he felt a small, warm hand in his own,
and he pulled her gently to her feet, the remaining pasta splashing to the floor.

  Alex wondered why she wasn’t required to observe the dress code – the black skirt was part of the uniform, and maybe the black knee socks as well, but she also wore a loose grey sweater that hung off her shoulders that was clearly not.

  “Are you okay? Can you walk? Do you need help?”

  The words tumbled out, one after the other, faster than he could think. They just spilled straight out of his mouth and into the air, surprising and unfamiliar. His body felt very warm, for some reason, and all the lights had halos around them.

  “You aren’t hurt, are you?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head, looking puzzled and releasing his hand. “Who are you?”

  “The fuck are you thinking? You’re the one who gets hurt, dumbass,” Steve snarled, one giant hand clutching the side of his head, his face snarling and bloody.

  He’d propped himself up on the table with one arm, glaring unsteadily and swaying. Alex realized that the room had gone silent, and everyone, except the purported vampire at the other end of the table, was watching the scene develop. His anger flared again, and he turned around to face Steve.

  “I couldn’t understand you there, Steve. You develop a speech impediment all of a sudden?”

  Alex tried for a cocksure smile, but his voice squeaked as he walked forward, sure that he was about to get his ass kicked.

  “That’s it!” Steve howled. “You are fucking dead!”

  Alex didn’t see a transition, if there was one. One moment, there was a jerk that looked like a linebacker standing in front of him, and then the next, there was a living statue. Where there had once been skin, there was now something that looked like rock, stony grey protrusions jutting out of his torn uniform. When Steve took a step forward, the linoleum cracked under his weight.

  “Any other funny shit you’d like to say?”

  Steve’s voice had become a roar, and the enormous hand wrapped around his forearm felt like granite, the surface cold and abrasive. The pressure was immediately intolerable, and it was all Alex could do to avoid falling to his knees.