home.”
That had been yesterday, and this morning Randy was still not convinced that Peter was right. He felt terribly alone, and when he went to look out the window, and saw nothing except forest beyond the fence that surrounded the Academy, a slight chill rippled over him. But then there was a tap at the door, and Adam Rogers stuck his head in.
“You better get dressed. If we aren’t down for breakfast in five minutes, we won’t get any.” Adam came into the room and perched himself on the bed while Randy pulled his clothes on. “You from around here?”
“Eastbury.” Randy sized Adam up as he tied his shoelaces. He looked younger than Randy, and was smaller, but his body was wiry and he looked like he was fast. “Where you from?”
“Georgia. That’s down south.”
“I know where it is. I’m not stupid.”
“Nobody said you were,” Adam said by way of apology, “but lots of people don’t know where anyplace is. Come on.” He hopped off the bed and led Randy out of the bedroom and down the stairs into a large dining room. There were two tables in the room, around one of which the other four boys were seated. At another, smaller table sat Louise Bowen. “She thinks she’s a den mother or something,” Adam whispered as the two of them slid into the two vacant chairs at the big table with the other boys. “But she never talks to us in the morning. Just watches us.”
“Why?”
“Search me. But that’s one of the neat things about this place—they watch you all the time, but they practically never tell you what to do.”
“Yeah,” Peter Williams agreed, grinning happily. “Not like at home. My mom was always telling me I was going to hurt myself, or get in trouble, or kill someone, or something. And then I ran away one day, and the cops picked me up, and ever since then she was always on my case.”
The other boys began chiming in. As Randy listened, he began to think maybe he’d been wrong to be so suspicious yesterday. All the stories sounded familiar. Most of the boys had been lonely before they came to the Academy, and some of them bragged about how much trouble they’d caused in the schools they’d gone to before.
“But what do you do here?” Randy asked.
“Go to class and play,” Peter replied. “It’s neat, because we don’t have as many classes as regular school But we play lots of games. They teach us boxing and wrestling and some other stuff, but a lot of the time they just let us do what we want.”
“Anything?” Randy asked.
Peter looked at the other boys questioningly, and when they nodded, so did he. “I guess so. At least, they never told any of us not to do anything.” He paused, as if turning something over in his mind, then went on, his voice more thoughtful. “But they always watch us. It’s funny. There’s always someone around, like they want to know what we’re doing, but they never tell us much about what to do. Except in class. That’s just like regular school.”
“How come there’s only six of us?” Randy suddenly asked. It seemed to him that the house was big enough for a much larger group than they made up, and he’d always thought private schools had hundreds of students.
Adam Rogers glanced toward Louise Bowen, then leaned close to Randy and whispered. “There used to be more,” he said. “When I got here, there were ten of us.”
“What happened to the others?” Randy asked.
Peter frowned at Adam. “They left.”
“You mean their dads came for them, or they went to another school?”
Across from Randy, a red-headed boy with a sprinkle of freckles across his nose shook his head. “No. They—”
“Shut up, Eric,” Peter broke in. “We’re not supposed to talk about that.”
“Talk about what?” Randy demanded.
“Nothing,” Peter told him.
Randy turned his attention back to Eric. “Talk about what, Eric?” he asked again, his eyes locking onto the other boy’s. Eric started to open his mouth, then dosed it and looked away. “Tell me, Randy insisted.”
Eric glanced uneasily toward Louise Bowen. She appeared not to be listening to them. Still, when he spoke, his voice dropped to a whisper, and Randy had to strain to hear him.
“Sometimes kids just—well, they just disappear. We think they die.”
“Die?” Randy breathed.
“We don’t know,” Peter said “We don’t know what happens to them.”
“Yes, we do,” Eric whispered miserably. “Nobody’s been here more than a few months,