The first Academy shuttle ran late on Sundays, leaving the Marblehead bus stop at ten a.m., arriving at the security gate at the Academy 355 causeway twenty minutes later. Aside from a few employees on that already-hot Sunday morning, one sheepish boy was slouched in the back, arms folded, head rested against the window, fast asleep.
“Do you have your ID?”
Kris cocked open one eye to see a dark-green-suited security guard scrutinizing him with suspicion.
“Oh, yeah, sure.” He yawned and reached in his jeans pocket to produce the ID he’d been given almost a week before, when he’d hopped a ride with Ed and Tess and that strange girl, Addie Emerson. Eons ago, it seemed.
The guard frowned and handed it back to him. “This is temporary. It expired yesterday.”
Now what was he going to do? He really needed to get back to his dorm. Not that he had any illusions of staying. If Foy hadn’t already banned him from campus, he would once he had a chance to read Dexter’s email.
“Can’t you just let me get my things?” Kris said. “I’m leaving today.”
The unsmiling guard whipped out a radio and called his office with as much urgency as if he’d caught a wanted terrorist trying to sneak into school. After a clipped discussion, he said, “There’s a note for you to go to Administration. It’s in Chisolm Hall, which is on the other side of the quad—”
“I know where it is.” Kris got up and headed out to the quad.
A pack of students ran by, their sneakered feet pounding the road in rhythmic unison. They took one look at his rumpled shirt and unshaven face and laughed.
“Hard night?” asked one, chortling.
The proverbial Walk of Shame.
Not that he, technically, had anything to be ashamed about, aside from what he had done months before to Addie and the Whit, for which he would never, ever forgive himself.
He kept replaying that disastrous confrontation from the night before, the confusion, then disbelief, then shock on Addie’s face, when she realized he was still with Kara. He could almost feel her disappointment like it was his, the heartbreaking, crushing shame that she’d ever let herself have anything to do with a creep like him.
And she was right. It was all his fault. He was the person who’d wronged her the most. How was that even possible?
“Oh, stop moping, Condor,” Kara had said last night as he sulked on the couch of her parents’ lavishly appointed Back Bay apartment. “Don’t you get it? That’s the thing about people like her. They don’t care. They don’t have feelings.”
He could have socked her then. If she’d been Mack—who certainly would have said something as obnoxious—he would have. But he just couldn’t hit a girl. And he refused to let her drag him down further into the pit of moral decay by daring him to violate his one remaining shred of decency.
“Addie does have feelings. She’s amazing. She’s better. Smarter. Her brain . . .”
“Okay, okay. I get it. You have a thing for Addie Emerson,” Kara interrupted. “You just should have told me instead of leading me on.”
What? Incredible. He threw up his hands, exasperated. “Every time I tried to break up with you, you wouldn’t listen or you’d threaten to do something crazy.”
“I did not. Stop exaggerating.” She rolled her eyes, got up, and staggered to her bedroom. “You can crash here, if you want, and dream about your precious little evil-scientist girlfriend. Don’t wake me up in the morning, though, I need my beauty sleep. You can see yourself out.”
There was no thank-you. No appreciation for how he’d guided her safely to the red and then the green lines of the T, keeping her steady as the trains lurched so she wouldn’t barf over fellow passengers. Actually, Kara did vomit—right on his shoes—but not until they were a block away from the apartment.
He couldn’t wait until he could leave Back Bay. If there was one highlight of that horrendous experience, it was the comfort he took in knowing he would never have to answer her hourly texts or listen to her rant and rave about poor, innocent gerbils.
The administration building was closed, of course, so Kris had to wait on the steps until Mr. Foy arrived, having been alerted by security that Kris had been on the shuttle.
Foy didn’t even grace him with a glance as he bounded up the stone steps in his white shorts and shirt to unlock the massive front doors. “In my office. This won’t take long.”
Clearly, Kris’s arrival had dragged the headmaster away from his regular Sunday morning tennis match, which meant he would be extra annoyed. Kris trudged up the stairs, each step leaden, wondering what was even the point. If Foy was going to kick him out, then just kick him out. Have security wait while he packed up his things and they could escort him to the gatehouse.
“Sit.” Foy pulled out his own chair and sat at his imposing mahogany desk, where a green folder waited. Opening it, he removed a letter on Academy 355 letterhead and slid it to Kris.
It was one paragraph long.
It was his expulsion.
“I spoke to your parents last night. As you know, they’re on the Cape, but they’ll make arrangements for you to return to Connecticut this afternoon. They understand that you are to leave immediately.”
Kris closed his eyes. This was even worse than he’d expected. Not that he cared about getting expelled or even having to go to the all-boys military school in Colorado. Both of those paled in comparison to the fact that he wouldn’t even have a chance to apologize in person to Addie.
The letter required his signature of agreement. Kris picked up the pen and hesitated. If he signed this, there was no going back.
“You know what the real tragedy is here, Mr. Condos?” Foy asked. “It’s that I had planned for you to meet me here tomorrow so that I could offer you another year at the Academy.”
Kris clicked the pen. Please stop, he wanted to say. Just don’t.
“You may be surprised to learn that I’ve been monitoring your progress. Every afternoon, I checked in with Buildings and Grounds, where your supervisor, Robert, had nothing but praise for your work ethic. You arrived on time, ready to put in a hard day’s labor. You even woke before dawn to clean out the hornets’ nest. But it was something Robert said to me that really gave me pause,” Foy continued. “It was that he’d spoken to the security guard who caught you in the lab last spring with the can of spray paint. And the guard told him that you’d been trying to cover up the words, not write them. Is that true?”
“Yes,” Kris whispered.
“Speak up, boy. I can’t hear you.”
Kris lifted his chin. “Yes, sir.”
Foy got up and went to the window, gazing toward the rec fields and tennis courts, where a group of middle-aged men were standing around talking, waiting for his return.
“Then why did you intentionally sabotage Dexter’s experiment? Was it because of your animal rights stance?”
“I would like to say it was,” Kris answered. “By now you know my feelings on the use of lab animals. The way he kept shocking those crabs over and over was sick.”
Foy nodded. “Much has been written on how the pursuit of science is often fraught with sacrifices.”
Rhesus monkeys. “Yes, sir. But that’s not why I took his crabs.” Okay, that was a full-on admission. Point of no return. “I saw that Dex was doing everything he could to bad-mouth Addie Emerson’s experiment, the one I’m in.”
“Yes. Dr. Brooks has informed me that you’ve been diligent in this regard, too. Go on.”
“The way I saw it, Dex couldn’t get his act together by the award deadline. His crabs weren’t trained or whatever. So he stuck with Addie until his crabs were ready and then he started bashing her project so you guys would substitute his instead. I just felt like that was unfair, so I evened the score, so to speak.”
A silence settled over the room, the only sound coming from the pfft pfft pfft of the lawn sprinklers below the window.
“No matter the reason, you have committed a dishonest act, which school rules dictate requires immediate and permanent removal.” Foy sighed. “Even if on some level I must admit I do sympathize.”
Kris went back to the letter and was about to sign when he had a sudden thought. “Sir, is it possible for me to leave tomorrow?”
Foy pivoted from the window and this time regarded Kris with a look that bordered on regret. “I’m afraid not. If you read the handbook . . .”
“I have, sir, but the last experiment is today. Lauren Lowes and I are supposed to have an overnight on Owl Island. It’s a major part of Addie’s project, and if I don’t do it, she’ll have no choice but to withdraw from the Athenian Award.”
Foy considered this. “Let me call a quorum of the trustees and see if that’s acceptable. In the meantime, you need to sign the letter and clean out your dorm room. I’ll let security know what has been decided.”
I, Kristopher John Condos, hereby admit that I have violated Rule #2 of the Academy 355 Student Code of Conduct by knowingly and intentionally committing an act of dishonesty, the penalty for which is immediate expulsion. By signing this letter, I agree not to appeal this decision. I acknowledge I must leave campus immediately and that I may not return unless specially invited by a member of the Administration and/or Faculty.
Kristopher J. Condos
It was done.