I’d never been on a quieter school bus. Kids were whispering to each other in tight, breathless tones as the bus clipped stray branches from the endless forest pressing in on either side of us.
“This isn’t even a two-way road,” I murmured to Lorena, the girl sitting beside me. When we’d loaded onto the bus in Annapolis, she’d dropped down beside me and just started talking. Normally I wasn’t comfortable talking to people I didn’t know—especially attractive girls my age—but Lorena had made it easy, keeping the conversation going for four hours, effortlessly filling in the awkward pauses I created. But even she had grown quieter when the bus had turned down this road.
Lorena peered out the window. “Where is this school? My folks told me this would be the greatest thing ever for my college application, but I don’t know about this. This is freaky.”
My mom had said the same thing. She’d said it was an educational program for the country’s best and brightest. If it was successful, the government might expand it nationwide. She seemed to think the purpose of my entire childhood was to prepare me to get into a good college. I got as much say in this boarding school decision as I’d gotten when it came to competing on the neighborhood swim team, or attending math camp all last summer when all I’d wanted to do was decompress and play video games. Which was to say, I got no say.
Nothing I had said could change her mind. Dad, meanwhile, had been too busy bending over backward in his efforts to be liked by his new wife and stepchildren to even express an opinion about where I went to school.
The road was a jet black ribbon of blacktop that looked like it had been poured yesterday. The bus we were riding in, on the other hand, was old. My seat had a hole in the vinyl with foam bulging out of it. I plucked at the foam nervously.
“What do your parents do?” Lorena asked.
“Dad works for the power company. My mom’s in the CIA.” Lorena looked impressed, so I added, “Don’t picture someone in cool sunglasses traveling the world with a bunch of different aliases. She’s a dork. She does data analysis.” And what an argument I’d had with my dork mother over the phone. I still couldn’t wrap my mind around that. Out of nowhere, she had convinced Dad to agree to pull me out of school and send me to a boarding school. Mom had said we couldn’t refuse, given the stakes.
I was in middle school. My college applications six years from now? Is that what she considered high stakes? Probably.
“You said you don’t see your mom much, right?” Lorena asked.
“Vacations, mostly. How about you, what do your parents do?”
The bus broke out of the trees so suddenly it startled me. The question forgotten, we peered out the window. A high, black, steel fence ran along the roadside like something out of a maximum-security prison. Up ahead, massive security gates swung open as we approached. I watched them shut behind us, fighting a rising claustrophobic panic.
Lorena pressed in beside me to get a better look. “What is this? Is this a school or a prison?”
The narrow strip of blacktop took us into a wide, flat field, but I could see the fence curving around us in the distance. Why would there be a huge security fence around a boarding school? New places made me nervous enough when they didn’t have giant fences around them.
“Look at that!” a tall, skinny kid in the back of the bus called, pointing to my right.
We were passing beautifully landscaped brick walkways and gorgeous park areas with fountains and benches. I reached for my phone to snap a few photos, then remembered we hadn’t been allowed to bring our phones. Because they interfered with your concentration. They distracted you from your academic pursuits. These were the same reasons I’d been given for why the school was in the middle of nowhere. All part of the plan to turbo-charge our young minds, if we didn’t lose them first.
The wide, brick walkway was lined with shops, including an ice cream parlor and an arcade. That, I had not expected. At least there’d be something to do besides school. Still, this place was beyond weird.
We pulled onto a loop road that ringed a big oval lawn. On the other side of the lawn sat a one-story brown brick deal with evenly spaced windows along the front that screamed middle school.
As we got back in our seats, I wiped my clammy palms on my pants. Until now, I’d held it together pretty well, but the sight of the school had set my heart thrumming. I’d never been away from home, except for the occasional sleepover. And even those made me nervous. The truth was, everything made me nervous.
“Wait. Is that what it looks like?” An auburn-haired girl in a private school jacket was pointing over the rooftop of the three-story building to our left, where a cherry red track snaked high into the air. There was no mistaking it: it was the top of a roller coaster. Not a big job like you’d find at Busch Gardens, but more like something at a traveling carnival. Still, it was a roller coaster.
The bus squealed to a stop in front of a big building that looked like a town hall, with white pillars and wide concrete steps. The driver, a guy in his forties with a perfect haircut who looked nothing like a school bus driver, pointed. “Straight in those blue doors. Don’t worry about your luggage—it’ll be delivered to your dorm rooms.”
My legs were shaking as I climbed down the steps of the bus behind Lorena. I half expected that now that we were off the bus, Lorena would wander off to find cooler kids to hang out with, but as we stepped off, she glanced back to make sure I was still there.
“I am freaking out right now,” she said. “This place has bad vibes.” She held her hands up, palms out, like she could feel them.
A woman with short silver hair wearing a gray suit stood waiting just inside the doors of the building, which was a wide-open atrium. She led us into a room filled with rows of seats, like in a movie theater. There was a packet on each seat. I wiped my sweaty palms and picked mine up.
An exhausted-looking woman giving us a big, enthusiastic smile stood at a podium up front. Her black hair was tied back so tightly it tugged the skin on her cheeks and the corners of her eyes.
“Welcome to Sagan Middle School. My name is Ms. Spain.” She took a sip from a bottle of water. “You’ve been selected from thousands of students to take part in this unique program. What you learn here will change your lives and the lives of countless others.”
I exchanged a look with Lorena. Countless others? Yes, I was sure we were going to change countless lives with our tireless pursuit of pre-algebra here at Sagan Middle School.
“Why don’t we start with some of the basic rules?” Ms. Spain said. “Some of the rules will seem strange, but you must follow them if you want to complete the program successfully. Now open the envelope that was on your seat.”
Ms. Spain told us to take out our earpieces, and she held one up so we could find ours in our envelopes. I located mine rolling around at the bottom. It was pea-sized and clear.
“Insert the earpiece into your left ear.” She demonstrated with the one she was holding.
I had no idea what this was about, but I did as I was told. The earpiece was small enough that it stuck down low.
“From this moment on, you are to keep the earpiece in your left ear at all times—even when you’re sleeping,” Ms. Spain said.
I looked over at Lorena, who gave me a look like, Can you believe this?
“Whenever a prompter says something to you through your earpiece, you are to immediately repeat it aloud.” Ms. Spain held up a finger. “Unless the first word is Direction or Do not repeat. A Direction is something you are to do, not say. If your prompter begins with Do not repeat, he or she has something to say to you. If it’s a question, answer out loud. Does everyone understand?”
Everyone nodded. No one was sticking the earpiece in their nose, or talking, or fidgeting in their seats. This was nothing like my school at home, which I already missed, even though I had not been particularly popular there. I reached for my phone, wanting to get a picture of this orientation to show to people when I got home, then remembered I didn’t have it anymore.
“What the heck is going on?” Lorena was staring at her earbud, pinched between her thumb and finger.
The auburn-haired girl in the private school jacket shushed Lorena. Lorena glared over her shoulder at the girl. The look was clearly a warning not to shush her ever again.
I missed my phone. I wasn’t sure I could go four phoneless months without having a complete mental breakdown.
“You’ve been chosen not just because you’re intelligent, but also because of your maturity,” Ms. Spain went on. “We’re counting on that maturity.” She paused and looked up and down the rows, making eye contact with each of us. “Tomorrow you’ll meet a very special classmate. She looks different than you or anyone you’ve ever met. She—” Ms. Spain trailed off, trying to find the right words. “I’ll be honest: you might find her frightening to look at. But it’s important you don’t stare. Treat her like any other student. Your prompters will guide you through the earbuds.”
There was more about schedules and mealtimes, when we’d get to call home, and all of the fun we were going to have at the movie theater, the ice cream shop, and the carnival, but it was hard to concentrate, because the same words kept echoing in my head. You might find her frightening to look at.
What did that mean? Was she a burn victim? Did she have that elephant man disease where parts of her were horribly swollen? I didn’t like this. From the looks on their faces, my new classmates didn’t either.
* * *
I stopped in the doorway of my room, horrified. The room was lined with low, cot-like beds. Eight of them. No one had said anything about roommates, let alone eight of them. I’d been looking forward to having some alone time. At home, my bedroom was my refuge from my three stepsiblings, the place where I could relax and think my private thoughts in peace.
Lorena squeezed past me. “Ooh! Dibs on the window!” She ran toward the bed closest to the window and leaped onto it, bouncing. She stretched out, cradled her head in her palms, and let out a satisfied sigh.
Coed? The dorms were coed? I wasn’t going to survive this place. As a few other kids passed me, I raced to claim the bed closest to Lorena. If I was going to share a room with seven other people, I was at least going to sleep near the one person I knew. I took a seat on the bed to claim it and looked around what would be my bedroom for the next four months. There were paintings on the wall that you might see in a hotel room—a beach scene, a farmhouse seen through a picket fence, an abstract with a lot of purple. As I sat there, it occurred to me that I was probably sharing a bathroom with a bunch of people as well. This was a nightmare.
“This is pretty sweet!” a stocky, baby-faced guy two beds down and across from me said, staring at the ceiling from his bed. He sat up. “Hey, we should organize a touch football game on that field in front of the school.” A couple of the other people in the room seemed interested. I acted like I hadn’t heard him.
Lorena sprang up. “We should take turns telling creepy stories after lights out!”
“No,” a thin girl whose bed was close to the door said. “I don’t want to be up all night,”
I was pretty sure I was going to be up all night either way.