The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy Read online

  Mr. Fiorello was trying not to laugh. “You kids go ahead and have your visit,” he said, making room for us by the bed. He went over and joined Ms. Lollyheart, who had been waiting near the door.

  “Anybody else changed their name since I got sick? I hate to be out of the loop, guys.”

  “All right, Cal,” Brook said, changing the subject, “let’s see how well you’re recovering. Can you say, ‘Nurse, there’s a slug in my bedpan’—”

  “Sorry, no,” she said. “My brain’s not up to Mandarin translation yet.”

  “Just trying to cheer you up.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m plenty cheery,” she said. “My dad’s here.” She gazed adoringly at the far end of the room, where Mr. Fiorello was chatting quietly with Ms. Lollyheart.

  “Yeah,” I said. “At least something good came out of being sick.” For a while at least, I thought. It was the perfect setup for heartbreak. Here was Cal as happy as a clam, Daddy by her side. Then the next thing she knows he’s getting on a plane for Goristovia. It wasn’t going to be easy.

  Just then Prescott, who had been really quiet on the drive out to the hospital and had not spoken since we entered the room, finally opened his mouth.

  “Cal,” he said, “I need to ask you something. You had to have been in a lot of pain when we left the gym. What on earth possessed you to go up the mountain in that condition?”

  I was shocked. “Cheez, Prescott,” I said. “Leave her be!”

  “No, actually that’s a good question,” Cal said. “I’ve been asking myself the exact same thing. There are some easy answers I could give, like I thought the pain would go away, or I didn’t want to ruin everybody’s good time, which is pretty ironic—since I ended up ruining it big-time, didn’t I?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Brook said. “It’s not important.”

  “Yes, actually, it is,” Prescott said. “Because what she did was reckless.”

  “You know, Prescott, sometimes—”

  “Hey!” Mr. Fiorello said. “Let’s everybody cool down, please. This is a sickroom.”

  “Sorry.” Brook was staring daggers at Prescott.

  “Guys,” Cal said. “Prescott has a point. What I did was reckless—which strikes me as weird, because I’m not usually a risk taker. There was something very complicated and interesting and psychological going on. I’ll get back to you when I figure it out. Okay, Prescott?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Do that. Because, you know what, Cal? You might have died. And believe it or not, I care what happens to you.”

  Two and a half weeks after she went into the hospital, Cal came back to Allbright—but not to Larkspur Cottage. She had to spend several more weeks recovering in the infirmary. That carried her right through Christmas and into the New Year, which meant we didn’t get to spend the holidays together, as we had planned. I was really sorry about that, though it wasn’t entirely bad. For one thing, with the week-and-a-half-long winter break, Cal wouldn’t be missing quite so many classes as she would have if she’d gotten sick in, say, February. And since I didn’t have Cal as my houseguest, I was able to use the free time to get ahead on my schoolwork and do some advance studying for midterms.

  Mr. Fiorello hadn’t been around for Christmas either. As soon as Cal was out of the hospital, he’d flown back to Goristovia—and her happiness went with him. Now Cal was a total mess, like she’d been when I first met her.

  I discovered this when school started up again and Brook and I went over to the infirmary to see her. It turned out to be a very unpleasant visit. I wasn’t used to being around that much negative emotion. Allbright kids are a cheerful bunch, and you kind of get used to it. Everybody’s pleasant all the time. It’s really nice. So to suddenly be with someone who’s absolutely miserable and who inflicts their pain on you—well, it’s really uncomfortable. As Dr. Gallow has pointed out in his lectures, everybody has problems in life, but what’s the point of dwelling on them? And really—isn’t it just good manners to keep your misery to yourself?

  Much as I loved Cal, I really felt she needed to pull herself together and stop moping. Develop a more positive outlook on life, so that people wouldn’t hate being in the same room with her.

  Of course, I didn’t say any of this to her. She was still recovering from a terrible illness, and I figured I ought to cut her some slack. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and since Brook was unusually quiet and Cal was depressed and withdrawn, we were stuck with this really awkward silence. It was awful. Somebody had to say something.

  Finally, spotting a pile of books on the table, I said, “Oh! So you’re starting to get caught up on your schoolwork. That’s great!”

  “Yeah,” Cal said. “I have a tutor who comes by in the mornings and works with me. Mr. Canaday. He’s really nice.”

  “Great! I should have known that Allbright would do something like that, give you a private tutor. Isn’t this an amazing school? We’re so incredibly lucky—”

  “Yeah, but to be honest, I’m kind of not in the mood for schoolwork right now.”

  “Really?” I was shocked. “Why not?” She had missed so much school, she was so far behind. If it had been me, I would have been frantic by this point. “Don’t you want to get caught up? You have all this time, sitting around in the infirmary. You shouldn’t waste it doing nothing.”

  “I’m doing something. I’m thinking.”

  “Never too late to try something new,” Brook said, managing to be funny and at the same time move the conversation away from gloom and doom. He’s better at that sort of thing than I am.

  “True,” Cal said, not cracking a smile. She seemed to be studying an empty spot on the wall behind us.

  I couldn’t stand it any longer. It was the old “elephant in the room” thing. Maybe it would be best just to get it out there and deal with it. I reached over and touched her arm. “Cal,” I said, “we know how much you miss your dad. We’re really sorry.”

  She nodded slowly but didn’t say anything. I heard Brook, behind me, give a quiet little sigh. There really wasn’t anything left to say.

  “We’ll be back tomorrow,” I said.

  “Sure. Thanks for coming.”

  Then, just as I was about to shut the door, Cal called me back. “Franny,” she said, “will you do me a favor?”

  “Sure. Anything.”

  “Ask your brother a question for me.”

  “All right.” That seemed weird. “What?”

  “Do they serve brownies in the Violet Cottage dining hall? Will you ask him that for me?”

  11

  By the end of January the weather was warm again. The snow had long since turned to slush, then disappeared. And Cal, who was finally declared fit to return to normal life, was back on the trail with us.

  Since that day in the snow Prescott had made himself a regular part of our hiking group, and we actually didn’t mind all that much. His social skills had continued to improve—he even made jokes sometimes. Not often, but now and then. We almost kind of liked him.

  Now, the particular day I’m about to describe to you—a very important day, a turning point in this whole story—started out no differently from any other, except that Cal seemed quieter and more thoughtful than usual. (She’d stopped being moody and depressed, thank goodness, but she’d never bounced back to her perky old self.)

  We’d been hiking for about twenty minutes when she stopped and pointed to a cluster of fallen logs just off the trail. “Mind if we sit down over there for a minute?” she asked. We figured she was tired and needed to rest. We said that was fine, and everybody found a place to sit.

  “There’s something I need to tell you guys,” Cal said. “It’s really important. I just hope you’re not going to think I’m crazy.”

  Brook raised his eyebrows. “Wow! Can’t wait to hear this!”

  “You’ve got to listen to the whole thing, though, before you decide to haul me off to the loony bin. Okay? It’s complicat
ed.”

  We agreed, though at that point we still thought it was going to be funny.

  “You know I wasn’t able to eat anything for a long time after the surgery,” she began. “They fed me through an IV tube. Then once the infection was under control, they wanted me to start eating again. They wouldn’t let me leave the hospital till they knew my, you know, plumbing was back in action.”

  “Uh-huh,” Brook said. Where was she going with this?

  “As soon as I got past the broth and Jell-O stage, Ms. Lollyheart brought me a basket of brownies.”

  “Yeah, always with the brownies,” I said.

  “Exactly. I was polite and thanked her, of course, but they were the last thing in the world I wanted to eat. So, I threw them away.”

  “Okay,” Prescott said slowly. He was watching her like a hawk, probably wondering why Cal thought her digestion and eating habits were a subject of special interest.

  “Well, so then I moved over to the infirmary, and they brought in my food from the main kitchen. The usual yummy stuff, only I still wasn’t hungry. I tried to eat, but nothing tasted good to me, so I mostly picked at my food. The nurse kept nagging me to eat more and—here’s the strange part—when I told her I absolutely couldn’t, she said, ‘Well, at least try to eat your brownie.’ I thought that was weird. Don’t you?”

  “Not really,” I said. “They’re full of vitamins and fiber and stuff, remember? They’re good for us.”

  Cal shook her head. “Come on, Franny, think about it. We’re already taking vitamins. And the food here is incredibly nutritious. So what’s with the brownies?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, hold that thought. We’ll return to it. So, anyway, after a while I got so sick of the nurse bugging me to eat the brownies that I started crumbling them into the potting soil of that poinsettia you guys sent me. When she’d come back to get my tray, she’d be so psyched that I had eaten my brownie like a good girl. Never mind that I hadn’t touched my fish and had only eaten three green beans and, like, a bite of salad.

  “Do you remember, back then, that I said I’d been doing a lot of thinking? Well, here’s what I was thinking: I noticed, shortly after I got here last summer, that I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I’d think about my dad, and how I’d hardly ever see him and how he was in so much danger, working where he does. And nothing came. No emotions. Nothing at all.

  “I talked to my PD counselor about it, and she said I was just making a wonderful adjustment to a situation that was beyond my control. It was a healthy response. And I thought that made sense. I was glad about it. I had spent too much of my life feeling miserable, you know?

  “When my mom found out she had cancer, it was already too late. It had spread and she didn’t have much time left. So she made me this video. Every time she thought of something she wanted to tell me, that she thought I’d need to hear some time in the future, she would set up the camera, sit in front of it, and talk. She must have worked on it for weeks, because she had on, like, twenty different outfits over the course of that video. I think it’s what kept her going, there toward the end, the thought of giving me motherly advice from the grave. For a long time after she died, I would watch that thing compulsively, over and over, crying and just wallowing in grief.

  “Then when I finally got over that, and was moving forward and cheering up a little, my dad started drifting out of my life, and it began all over again, the grief and the self-pity. Between one thing and another, I’ve been a total basket case for a good part of my life. So naturally, when I got to Allbright and stopped feeling all that pain, it was, like, this huge relief. I thought, boy I must have been really depressing to be around! How could anybody stand me? And by the way, Prescott, while I’m on the subject, I have an answer to your question now—about why I went up the mountain when my insides hurt: because I couldn’t bear to be Cal-who-is-forever-having-problems anymore. I was determined to be cheerful no matter what. I would just tough it out and smile through the pain.”

  “Pretty good analysis, Dr. Freud,” Prescott said. “But what you did was still incredibly stupid.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Cal said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Cal, we’re still waiting to hear what this is all about,” I said.

  “I know. Sorry. So, anyway, I had this feeling I was really a changed person, like I said. Did any of you notice that I was different?”

  “Yes,” Brook and I said in unison.

  “Okay. There were other things too. Schoolwork was easier for me than it’s ever been before. I felt smarter all of a sudden, and more motivated. Things didn’t distract me so easily; I could concentrate and remember things incredibly well. All of this was totally awesome! But I did have these weird visual sensations, especially the light. It seemed brighter and clearer and—”

  “—blue,” Prescott said.

  Jaws dropped all around. “Yes,” I said. “Me too. It wasn’t dramatic or anything, but I noticed.”

  “Aha!” she said. “This is going to be easier than I thought. Didn’t any of you think that was strange?”

  “I did at first,” I admitted. “But it was so subtle—and pretty soon I got used to it. It started to seem normal.”

  “I actually mentioned it to my PD counselor,” Brook said. “She told me it was just the quality of the light in the mountains. Said everybody comments on it when they get here.”

  We were all quiet for a while. Then Prescott cleared his throat. “Come on, Cal, you’re going in about ten different directions here. Where are you headed with all this?”

  She sighed. “Okay. Franny, do you remember when Brook and I were at your house and your friend came over?”

  “Beamer.”

  “Yeah, Beamer. And he was leaving and you were having a fight, only we accidentally overheard?”

  “Yes.” Not a moment I cared to recall.

  “Do you remember how Beamer said you had changed? And J. D. jumped in and agreed—said that Zoë had changed too?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, when I was lying there in the hospital and later in the infirmary, I started putting all this stuff together. Why do kids change so drastically when they come to Allbright? Why are the students all so perfect? No bullies, no dummies. Everybody is good-looking and well-behaved and polite and cheerful and tidy and ambitious. Does that sound like any normal group of kids you’ve ever known before?”

  “We’re a picked group,” I said. “So we’ve already got a head start. Then they teach us to maximize our potential, help us discover our weak spots so we can work on them. It’s not mysterious. Why shouldn’t we be successful? And frankly, I’m glad there aren’t any bullies here and everybody is nice.”

  “Yeah, I know all that, and I don’t care much for bullies either. But I want you to ask yourself this: Why are we all so compliant? Even Brook—remember how you made fun of PD when you first got here? ‘They’re gonna give me grooming tips?’ Two months later, your counselor says your dreadlocks look ‘fussy’ and you go and cut them off. And then suddenly you’re dropping poetry in favor of something that ‘increases your impact on society.’ And you change your name to something more conventional. I’m not picking on you, Brook. We’ve all changed. Whatever they tell us to do, we do. Only, apparently, that’s not the case with J. D. You have to wonder why.

  “Of course, I didn’t know your brother before, Franny, but he doesn’t seem like your typical Allbright student to me. He’s not all…polished, you know? He doesn’t have that ‘little adult walking around in a child’s body’ sort of feeling about him. He’s just a regular ten-year-old kid.”

  “Eleven.”

  “Fine, eleven. But my point is, he’s normal. Tell me honestly, has J. D. changed since September?”

  “Not really.”

  “Aha. So maybe that’s why he could see what was happening to us.”

  “But—,” I said.

  “Let me finish, please. Then you can ask questio
ns.”

  “Okay.”

  “So I started thinking about how the kids over at Violet Cottage are called the Allbright oddballs. But they aren’t really all that odd. They’re no different from lots of kids at my other schools. They just seem odd by comparison to the rest of us because they haven’t had the Allbright makeover. So I started to wonder if there was something different going on over at Violet Cottage, something that would explain why we had changed and J. D. hadn’t. Franny, remember the question I asked you, when I was in the infirmary?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, did you ask him? Did you ask J. D.?”

  I nodded. “He said they do not serve brownies over at Violet cottage.”

  Cal smiled in satisfaction. “Everybody following my drift?”

  Nobody said a word. The tension was so thick you could swim through it.

  “C’mon, people! J. D. wasn’t being medicated, so he noticed the difference! He could see how the rest of us have changed.”

  “Medicated?” This from all three of us, in unison.

  “The brownies,” Cal said. “They’ve been medicating us with the brownies!”

  Brook literally recoiled at the suggestion. “Oh, please!” he said. “That’s ridiculous, Cal. Why on earth would they do that?”

  “To create designer children, I guess. Perfect products. So much easier to teach.”

  “How could you possibly believe that?” I said. “They have our—”

  “—‘best interests at heart.’ That’s what you were going to say, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And then one of you” (she pointed first to Brook and then to Prescott) “was going to say, ‘We’re all so incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to maximize our potential so we can be of service to this great country of ours.’ Tell me honestly that you weren’t.”

  Nobody said a word. It was a horrifying moment.

  “We’ve been programmed, guys,” she said. “Those lectures Dr. Gallow gives us every week, we never question any of it. We accept it like God’s gospel truth. I did the same thing, but then I stopped eating the brownies and came to my senses.”