Read The Academy for Free Online Page B

tough words would prove to whoever—
     
     

whatever
     
     
    —was in here that he was not scared.
     
     
    But just the acknowledgment that he thought someone or something was in here, that he didn’t believe the noises he was hearing were simply random night sounds, made him even more afraid, and with that unpausing dirge in the background, he turned tail, pushed his cleaning cart out of the music room and locked the door behind him. He left faster than he would have liked—it was obvious he was running away—but it still felt good to be outside again, out of the confines of that creepy chamber.
     
     
    He hadn’t brought his walkie-talkie, he realized.
     
     
    What the hell was wrong with him? How did he expect to contact Rakeem if something . . . happened ?
     
     
    He stood there, listening, and was relieved to hear, from the area in front of the office, the squeak of Rakeem’s cart and the other man’s off-key voice as he rapped along to the music he heard on his headphones. Feeling not exactly foolish but decidedly less skittish than he had only a few seconds prior, Carlos glanced around the quad and decided to start his rounds with the PE department. The gym and connected sports buildings were out by themselves at the north end of the campus, separated from the other classrooms by the tennis courts and the pool, and though he usually left that area to the last, he didn’t want to be out there by himself later at night. He’d rather get it over with in the early evening and spend the rest of the time doing the classrooms with Rakeem close by. If things went well, maybe he’d even get up the nerve to clean the music room.
     
     
    He thought of the tuba and the slow beat of that invisible drum.
     
     
    Maybe not.
     
     
    The night air was cool. A soft breeze ruffled his hair as he made his way around the north edge of the quad to the open corridor that led between the social science classrooms. The corridor looked long. Much longer than usual. Like one of those movie scenes where the camera pulls back and makes an ordinary distance suddenly seem stretched out impossibly far. Ahead, through the arched opening at the opposite end, behind the darkened tennis courts and the fenced-in pool, the rounded bulk of the gym loomed before him.
     
     
    Enrique was right, Carlos chided himself. Maricón .
     
     
    He forced himself to continue on, walking forward at an even pace as though nothing in the world could faze him. He needed to get over these jitters or he’d have to find a new job. He couldn’t spend every night at work scared of his own shadow.
     
     
    If he could only get on day shift . . .
     
     
    Carlos reached the PE department—what the school administration called the “sports complex”—and was about to go into the gym and give the wooden floor a once-over when he paused by the girls’ locker room. All through his junior high and high school years, that tantalizingly off-limits chamber on the other side of the gym wall had been the holy grail for him and his buddies, the one place on earth they most often speculated on and fantasized about. Even now, the locker room had not entirely lost its allure, and whenever he went in to scrub the concrete floor or mop the tile, he couldn’t help but think of all those hot young bodies in here during the day, naked, showering, dressing, undressing.
     
     
    But something was wrong tonight.
     
     
    There were voices coming from the locker room and there weren’t supposed to be. Any summer practice had ended hours before, and at this time of evening, the PE department should have been as silent as a tomb.
     
     
    Tomb.
     
     
    Shit. Why had he thought of that word?
     
     
    Carlos shivered. Sound could do weird things here in the PE department, he rationalized. The big echoey gym with its exposed beams and high ceiling, the tiled bunkerlike showers, even the coaches’ offices with their windowed half walls, all distorted the resonance of voices and often made them