The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy Read online

  Prescott shook his head. “You’re wrong,” he said, “shockingly wrong.”

  “All right, Prescott,” Cal countered. “You’re a scientist. You believe in the scientific method, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s try an experiment. Let’s prove this thing one way or another. Am I shockingly wrong—or am I shockingly right? For one month, all three of you stop eating the brownies. During that time, I won’t say another word about it. But on February twenty-seventh, one month from today, let’s talk again. Are you willing to do that? In the interest of science—and the truth?”

  “They expect us to take the brownies in the dining hall,” Brook said. “It’ll seem weird if we don’t.”

  “No problem. Just take one when you go through the line, then when nobody’s looking, wrap it up in a napkin and stick it in your pocket. Throw it away later.”

  Brook nodded. “Okay,” he said. “That works.”

  And so we agreed to try the experiment, though I think I can speak for the others when I say we all felt terrible about it. We loved Cal, but we also felt incredible allegiance to the school. Sneaking around, disposing of napkin-wrapped brownies, just considering the possibility that they might be doing something bad to us—it all felt so sleazy and disloyal. Because, you see, I really did believe that the Allbright Academy had my best interests at heart. I really did feel incredibly lucky to have the chance to maximize my potential….

  12

  February 27 arrived and we had our meeting. But it was only a formality. We had already been feeling (and discussing) the changes for a week by then. Like Superman gradually losing his powers—the flying and the X-ray vision and all that—we were turning back into plain old Clark Kents. It was disturbing for all of us, each in our own unique ways.

  Cal, of course, was ahead of the rest of us, but she continued to struggle with her emotional life, without the joy juice or whatever it was they had put in the brownies. She was learning how to be happy on her own, to come to terms with her personal tragedy. Apparently, she found this a life-changing and empowering experience. It was like she’d gained a new and permanent type of superpower: the ability to deal with her own feelings.

  Not surprisingly, Prescott didn’t say much about what he was feeling, but I suspect it was a little humbling for him to discover that his famous brilliance had not been entirely his own—that now, without chemical assistance, it had slipped a notch. He was still a great student, as he’d always been, but not as great as he had come to think he was. Since being the best at everything was Prescott’s reason to live, this was no small deal.

  Brook, to the dismay of his PD counselor, changed his name back to Brooklyn, started growing out his hair, and went back to writing poetry. He was incredibly angry about the whole brownie business, which kind of surprised us—he had always been so mellow. But once he saw how much of his individuality he had given up so he could play out some life scenario the school had written for him, he was devastated. He couldn’t believe he’d been so compliant. He was so full of shame and rage that, for a while there, I really worried about him. But he poured a lot of it into his poetry, and that seemed to help. He finally got back the old Brooklyn calm that had helped him through his weird family life all those years.

  As for me, I learned to accept being ordinary again. Studying wasn’t such a breeze anymore, I was no longer compulsively neat, and I couldn’t always concentrate on my schoolwork. Sometimes I didn’t even want to concentrate on my schoolwork. And then, of course, there were the emotions: I actually felt them, the highs as well as the lows. But none of this bothered me nearly as much as the memory of how horrible I had been to Beamer and my family. What a totally creepy, prissy, awful person I had been! It kept me up at night, just thinking about it.

  And while I’m on the subject of my family, that was something else I was struggling with at the time—whether or not to tell Mom and Dad about Allbright and the brownies.

  I had, after all, two perfectly normal, loving parents who wanted to be involved in my life—unlike Cal, whose dad was far away (both emotionally and physically), or Prescott, whose parents didn’t seem to give him much thought, or Brooklyn, whose mom and dad were too intense to deal with. I had none of these problems, and I really felt my parents deserved to know what was happening to me.

  And yet. And yet. If I did make that phone call, the repercussions would be huge. Not only would Mom and Dad yank us out of Allbright in a heartbeat, they’d make a huge stink—complain to the school, call the papers, call the police. What sane parent wouldn’t do those things? And then the bad guys—whoever they were—would have plenty of warning to cover their tracks or flee to Brazil. I didn’t plan to hang around Allbright forever, but now that we had an inkling of what was going on at the school, I wanted to see the thing through.

  And so, even though it made me feel squirrelly inside, I decided not to tell my parents—at least not yet. I made up for it by taking Zoë aside and telling her to stop eating the brownies (no need to tell J. D.—he wasn’t eating them anyway). I said she had to do this secretly, that I’d explain everything to her later, when I knew more, but she’d have to trust me for the moment. That bought me some time. Now all we had to do was get some solid proof against those scumbags so we could nail them to the wall. (Yeah, okay, I watch too many old movies.)

  It was Brooklyn who came up with a plan to get us started. He pointed out that it would be a really good idea to get our hands on some of that brownie mix so we could see what was in it. So the next day after classes were over, he skipped PE (claiming he had twisted his ankle and wanted to stay off of it for a few days) and went over to the central kitchen. (All the school’s food is prepared in one place and then delivered to the various cottages.) He just walked in the door and went up to the first person he came to, a guy who was busy chopping onions. Brooklyn explained that he had gotten into trouble, and as punishment he’d been given the choice between a week of detention and a week of work duty. He’d chosen the work, so they had sent him over to the kitchen to make himself useful. Help sweep up and stuff.

  “That’s Reuben over there,” the man said. “He’s the guy you need to talk to.”

  Brooklyn repeated the same story to Reuben, who looked surprised.

  “I never heard of work duty at Allbright,” the man said. “Or detention, either. What the heck did you do?”

  “Well, um, I burned a letter. And unfortunately, there’s not actually a fireplace in my room.”

  Reuben heaved a big sigh and looked disgusted. “You set your room on fire?”

  “No. Just, you know, set off the smoke alarm. Anyway, here I am, at your service.”

  Reuben grunted and looked around to see what needed doing. “Well, you can rinse out those trash cans. Empty ’em in the Dumpster, then take some of that detergent there, and the hose out back, and clean ’em out.”

  So that’s what Brooklyn did, all afternoon. The next day, he was back.

  “How long you in for, anyway?” Reuben asked.

  “A week.”

  “Hmm. Well, okay, see those canisters there? Marked ‘sugar,’ and ‘flour,’ and stuff? You can top ’em off. Take ’em into the storeroom—c’mon, let me show you.”

  Brooklyn tried hard not to grin. Like Brer Rabbit and the briar patch, the storeroom was the very place he wanted to be! He ever so casually picked up his backpack and carried it in there with him.

  “Set your canister on the table, here. See? Now, since this one says ‘flour,’ you go over to the shelf here, where the big bags of flour are, and you take the clip off and very carefully pour it in. Don’t be making a mess, now, okay?”

  “I won’t.”

  “Wipe the canister down with a damp cloth before you put it back on the shelf in the kitchen. There’s always a little flour dust gets on the outside, and then it gets on the shelf. We like to keep a clean kitchen.”

  Finally Reuben couldn’t think of any more instructions for what was, ba
sically, a really easy job. He went back to his own work and left Brooklyn to it.

  As soon as he was alone in there, Brooklyn started searching for anything that looked like brownies or brownie mix. It was a big storeroom and there was a lot of stuff in there. After about five minutes he figured he’d better finish with the flour canister and move on to another one. He didn’t want to arouse suspicion.

  After the flour, he filled the sugar canister and searched the shelves for another few minutes. He did the same with the salt, the rolled oats, and so on.

  Then he lifted the next canister down from the shelf. BROWNIE MIX, it said.

  Finally!

  After ten minutes of fruitless searching, he went to find Reuben. “The brownie mix,” Brooklyn asked. “Where is it?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ll show you.” He slid a cardboard box off the bottom shelf. “I don’t know why they can’t pack this stuff in smaller boxes,” he grumbled. “Weighs a ton.” He lifted out a large Ziploc bag full to the brim with brown powder. There was a label stuck on the bag; it looked like somebody had made it on a computer. BROWNIE MIX, RECIPE VARIANT II, it said. Then there were instructions—how many eggs to add, how much oil and water, what temperature to cook it at, and so on.

  “Keep the mix in the bags,” Reuben said. “It’s already pre-measured. Makes it easier for the cooks. Just slide the bags into the canister like this.”

  “What does that mean, Recipe Variant II?” Brooklyn asked.

  “Oh, that’s the regular mix. They just use Recipe Variant I at the start of school and after long vacations. Then they got Recipe Variant III—that’s for the baskets they send home for Thanksgiving and Christmas and spring break. Beats me why. They all look exactly the same. Maybe they’re different flavors or something. Anyway, you got the drill?”

  Brooklyn said yes and picked up a handful of fat Ziploc bags. The minute Reuben left, Brooklyn slipped one into his backpack.

  So, now that we had a sample of the brownie mix, Prescott said he could take it to his mom’s lab over the weekend and run a chemical analysis on it. While he was at it, he decided to check out our multivitamins, too. His cover story, as far as his parents were concerned, would be that he was finishing up a chemistry lab assignment.

  “But you’re not taking chemistry,” I said.

  “Yeah, but Mom doesn’t know that.”

  “She doesn’t know what classes you’re taking?” I was astonished. My parents knew the name of every teacher I had (before I went off to Allbright, anyway), when I had a math test, what book we were reading in English, what sport we were doing in PE—the whole nine yards.

  “My parents don’t really get into the details of my life,” Prescott said. “As long as I make straight A’s and take the most advanced classes and get medals on awards day, they’re happy.”

  “Won’t they notice, when your report card arrives and it says ‘biology’?”

  “Nope. ’Fraid not. They’ll just check to make sure I got all A’s.”

  I felt truly sorry for Prescott just then. From the sound of it, he was little more than a life accessory to his parents—like the right house or the status car or the degree from the best university. Prescott excelled at the things they valued most. He rounded out their successful lives. “Our son? Oh, yes, he took the science, computer, and Latin prizes at school—but then he always does.” A few years down the road they’d be mentioning that he was at Harvard or Yale. And later still that he was at work on his doctorate from MIT. But as for the actual living Prescott, they didn’t pay much attention to him.

  That said, at this particular moment it was actually very convenient that he had such clued-out parents. He could just walk into his mom’s lab at Johns Hopkins and use the equipment and the chemicals and get help from the lab assistants. And no one would bother asking questions.

  Now, while Prescott was trying to figure out what had been added to the brownie mix, Cal and I had our own job to do. We spent the weekend at my house, preparing look-alike bags of ordinary commercial mix for Brooklyn to take over to the kitchen and substitute for the Recipe Variant II. Unfortunately, this meant making up a cover story to tell my mom too, which made me feel even squirrellier than I already did. I just kept reminding myself that I was trying to save a lot of kids from eating Recipe Variant II—and with any luck, nail those scumbags.

  What I told Mom was that Allbright was involved in a community-service project—taking brownie mix to homeless shelters and soup kitchens. This story was slightly less ludicrous than it sounds, because Mom knew all about the famous healthy Allbright brownies (the school sent a basket of them home with each of their students at Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks—and of course we now knew why). So, bringing such a nutritious and tasty treat to homeless people sounded fairly reasonable to her. Only she didn’t understand why we were buying commercial brownie mix instead of giving them the special healthy kind. Also, why did we have to empty all the mix out of the boxes it came in and transfer it into Ziploc bags? These were very good questions.

  “Well, see, the brownies we have at school don’t have any sugar in them. That’s good for us, since we have plenty of nutritious food to eat. But these people don’t have a steady diet, and they can really use the calories. So what we’re supposed to do is take the commercial mix out of the boxes and put them in the Ziploc bags. Then we deliver them to the kitchen at school, where they unzip the bags and add the wheat germ and vitamin powder and fiber and stuff to the mix. The school could have done it all themselves, but they wanted to get the students personally involved. To set an example of public service.”

  It’s embarrassing what a good liar I am. I prefer to think it’s due to my lively imagination rather than any criminal tendencies. But the bottom line is, my story worked. Mom not only didn’t question us further, she agreed to take us shopping and pay for the mix and the bags and the stick-on labels. And she didn’t mind that we took over the kitchen to pour all that mix into all those Ziploc bags (though she did make sure we cleaned up afterward).

  Cal and I had brought our backpacks home empty. Now we filled them to bursting with bags of fake Recipe Variant II. There were still quite a few bags left over, so I dug around in J. D.’s closet and found his old Chipper Chipmunk backpack from second grade and filled it up too. When we carried them back to Allbright, who was to know they weren’t full of books?

  We met on the trail the following Monday to report on our various activities. Prescott said it was going to take him a little longer than expected to finish the analysis, but he had found out a few things, which were as follows: (a) the vitamins were just vitamins, (b) three different chemical compounds had been added to the brownie mix, and (c) it looked like all three compounds were previously unknown. He thought this last part was particularly interesting. I thought it was particularly creepy. The scientist who had been helping him had agreed to keep working on the chemical analysis for him during the week, which would definitely speed things up.

  The delay wasn’t really a problem, though. Whatever those compounds were, they didn’t belong in the school’s brownies. So the first order of business was to get the bags of Recipe Variant II out of the boxes in the kitchen storeroom and replace them with bags of plain old ChokoDream—which is why Brooklyn wasn’t there for our meeting on the hiking trail. He was back in the kitchen with his new friend Reuben.

  The night before, Brooklyn and I had done one of those cool trade-offs, like they do in the movies, where two guys sit next to each other on a train, each carrying an identical briefcase. They put them on the floor at their feet, then when it comes time to leave, they make the switch by casually picking up each other’s briefcase. Only we did it in the dining hall, with backpacks. (Yeah, I know, we didn’t really need to be that subtle. But it felt so cool.)

  When I got back to my room, I locked the door, took all the bags of brownie mix out of J. D.’s Chipper Chipmunk backpack, transferred them to Brooklyn’s empty backpack, and set it aside. The next nigh
t we’d do the trade-off again. Later, he and Cal would meet at the circle of benches to do the third switch. Brooklyn would have all the bags of regular brownie mix safely in his room. The rest was up to him.

  “Not again!” Reuben said. “What now?”

  “It involved a water balloon. Not so bad, really—but it was a second offense.”

  “You are something else, dude.”

  “You miss me?”

  “Didn’t have time to.”

  Brooklyn didn’t get anywhere near the storeroom that Monday, but he did accomplish something important. Reuben set him to wiping down all the counters with Clorox. When Brooklyn reached the part of the kitchen where all the canisters were, it occurred to him for the first time that the cooks would use the brownie mix in the canisters first—and only then would they go to the box in the storeroom. If we wanted to get this thing started right away, the canisters were the place to begin.

  And so, when Reuben was safely occupied elsewhere (and everybody else seemed too busy to care), Brooklyn took all the storage canisters down and began wiping the shelf with Clorox too. Once he had all those canisters spread out on the counter, no one would notice that one of them went missing for a few minutes—because Brooklyn had carried it off to the broom closet, where, in almost complete darkness, he took the nine remaining bags of Recipe Variant II out and put bags of ChokoDream in their place. Now the very next batch of brownies to come out of the kitchen would be harmless. The Allbright student body was about to go off its meds.

  That was a great start, but Brooklyn still needed to get into the storeroom to do the heavy switching out. And so, on Tuesday he told Reuben that the kitchen staff was complaining about his backpack, that it was in their way. Brooklyn wondered if he could keep it in the storeroom.