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I smiled, remembering his thoughts on how he’d been abandoned at the hospital when he was young and considered us to be so similar because of it. “Did you ever belong to another team?”
“Sure,” he said. “Lots of them.”
“What happened?” I asked.
He laughed, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. “To make the longest of long stories short, I wasn’t very compliant with the Academy at first. Too much practice at being disobedient. I always ran off to do things my own way. I was too independent. Too much trouble. Not trusting anyone to work with me.”
Maybe I should have been more surprised to hear about him being disobedient, but Mr. Blackbourne once told me about how Dr. Green once wore ripped jeans and had cigarette behind his ear at an early age: the picture of a troublemaker. “Were they going to kick you out?”
“They could have, but they were willing to try me out. Given that I’d graduated from school at a very young age and was already in an accelerated education program, they thought me too valuable to let go without putting in an effort.” He sighed and nodded. “And then one day they introduced me to Mr. Blackbourne. Owen. He was this kid with every hair in place, shoes polished. I mean, just looking at him, I wanted to untuck his shirt and throw him in the mud. Not to hurt him, but he looked like he needed it.”
I smashed my lips together, trying not to laugh at the idea of Dr. Green pushing Mr. Blackbourne into mud. It was such a wrong thought. “But you’re still together.”
“Right,” Dr. Green said. “It was an odd thing. Owen was a loner, or tried to be. He didn’t fit in well with other groups, either. So the Academy teamed us up. If we could manage to get through an assignment in one piece and stick it out together, they promised they’d give us a chance to pick whatever team we really wanted in the future. Even if it meant we had to recruit from the outside. We just couldn’t be alone. It’s not part of the Academy way to act independently.” He turned his head and grinned at me. “They did that on purpose. Tempted us with something we wanted: to be in charge of our own team. Joke’s on them. We took their bait, but then we kept them to their promises.”
“How?”
Dr. Green’s grin grew, and he turned the car onto another street, checking out the rearview mirror. “We picked one of the hardest assignments we could get our hands on. Owen’s a stickler, I could tell that from before. All we had to do was talk to each other, and we knew we’d take their toughest challenge, get the most out of it. It was tough, especially with Owen being all ‘we’ve got to follow the rules’ about it, but we won. And in the end, we not only graduated from the Academy, but we were permitted to bring in anyone we wanted to create a team of our own design. And then one day Owen found Kota and the others...the rest is history.”
“So you stuck together?”
“We were perfect,” he said. “He was annoyed with me for the longest time, but he never gave up on me. I think that was the issue before. He’s damn loyal, but no one understood that when he was harsh with his criticism. He was just showing he cared. He’s got the biggest heart ever, though. Maybe I understood, because I had a tiger mom and grew up with it. I could handle it. We had a few issues to work out in the beginning. He made me quit smoking. I made him eat a candy bar. We traded off, but it worked out. The point is, you absolutely can choose your team, and sometimes it just clicks when you’re together. You feel it. You can always choose.”
It never occurred to me that an Academy member could work with different teams and eventually pick one they wanted to belong to. I mean, I knew it, but it sounded like shopping around for the right pair of shoes. You tried on a few styles until you found a set that matched. “But girls are usually teamed up with other girls?” I asked.
“Those are mostly friend groups. There’s a small handful of sibling groups or relatives that work together, but it’s rare for family members to join. Kids eventually want to move on from parents, and siblings aren’t always willing to stick together. There are a few couple teams, and some multiple couple teams, meaning a quad of two girls and two boys, or three boys and three girls. Usually those work out only if the girls are lesbians and the boys are gay. It prevents jealousy when you know the other partner isn’t going to be attracted to anyone else in the group. It’s just easier. You spend so much time with your team that you have to really trust each other. Anyone you date outside the group has a hard enough life when you have to keep them in secrecy about what you do. Even under normal circumstances, our team was never looking at an easy road.”
That sounded like the opposite of what they would want. “So...it would be easier for me to join the group if none of the guys were interested?” I wasn’t sure what I was suggesting, I was simply trying to get a better picture as to what I was dealing with.”
“It’s never easy,” Dr. Green said. “But the easy way doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. Owen and I put together a large team, and now we’re looking to include you. We were already sort of misfits in our own right even before you got here.”
“The Academy wouldn’t like it if I joined with you, though. Because they’ll ask me to try out other teams.”
“They might, unless you tell them you don’t want to.” He squeezed my hand, and then picked it up to kiss the palm. He glanced at me, his light green eyes sparking. “You’ve got the choice. Be honest with how you feel about it.”
I squeezed his hand gently in return. I settled in, checking out the mirror to see who might be following us while absorbing the information.
I dazed out, lost in my own head. I’d just have to tell the Academy that I wanted to be with the team.
But Kota didn’t want me to join.
And I wasn’t sure where the others were on this. Gabriel had flipped out this morning. Would the others?
If I couldn’t join with their team, would I still want to be involved? If I’d met another team instead of Kota’s, would it have been the same?
Could I ever join a girl team?
I tried to picture it, but couldn’t. A girl team? My gut tightened. If I had to join a girl team, I wasn’t so sure I would join at all.
Maybe it was because meeting new people, strangers, made me uncomfortable. I held that thought. The unknown was scary.
Still, I cared about my team. I’d prefer to stay with Kota and the others. I just had to convince them it could work out.
Maybe, in the end, I’d have to sacrifice. Maybe it meant never joining the Academy at all. Join the Academy or stay with my team. Even then, we might come across new rules that might restrict the team.
Slowly, I focused on a car behind us, a dingy old brown car. I recognized it at first, and wasn’t sure why. Didn’t... didn’t Mr. McCoy have a blue car? That must not be him. Maybe just another car that had drifted in...
But when Dr. Green turned, that car followed.
I sat up, studying it. “Isn’t...isn’t that Mr. Morris’s car?”
Dr. Green checked his rearview. “Yeah.”
“Is he driving?”
“No, it’s McCoy.”
I let out a slow breath. “So he talks to Mr. Morris. Or somehow he borrowed his car.”
Dr. Green kept his eyes on the rearview. He released my hand, sitting up. “Hendricks has a lot of teachers working for him. He could have ordered Mr. Morris to give up his car.”
“Mr. Morris might know more about Mr. McCoy and what he’s up to.”
“You should stay away from him,” Dr. Green said.
“But he’s my teacher at school. And he’s talked to me before.”
“I know,” Dr. Green said. He pursed his lips, staying quiet and thinking for a moment. “Something bugs me about him, though.”
“Kota said the same thing once,” I said.
“Then he’s probably right,” Dr. Green said. “Kota’s not one to be judgmental. If something’s off about a person, he’s usually spot on. I get the same feeling about Morris, too. I don’t know if he’s dangerous, but there’s somethi
ng not right about him either. In any case, any information you give to him, McCoy might get as well.”
I realized it was probably true that Mr. Morris would give information to Mr. Hendricks or Mr. McCoy if they asked. Somehow I felt we could use this to our advantage, giving false information, and in exchange, learning something. Even if they fed us lies, they’d be talking to us. Isn’t that what they wanted?
I curled up in the seat, watching the neighborhood go by, and the sun starting to rise, giving the sky a nice shade of blue and pink stripes across low clouds. It was a beautiful, albeit chilly morning.
I watched the brown car. Despite me wanting to gain traction with the boys, other things stood in our way. The urgency to get McCoy out of the way intensified.
FAST AND FASTER
Soon, Mr. McCoy turned off from following us. Presumably, he’d run out of gas and had to refuel, or had found it pointless.
“This is good,” Dr. Green said. “We’ll see if he follows us later. Tonight after school, you should randomly go with someone, though probably not home. Maybe not even home with the boys.”
“Maybe the hospital?” I asked. “Or even a hotel?”
“Let’s try...I don’t know. Don’t talk about it now.” He reached out to my hand again, squeezing it, and then sighed happily. “Now I get you to myself.”
I smiled, glad that Mr. McCoy was gone. Even if he might not be able to see into the car, having him right behind us made me feel like he was watching our every move.
“Are you hungry yet?” he asked.
“A little.”
He drove toward Summerville, toward school, but stopped at a small corner shop, getting a cold bottle of Mocha Frappuccino coffee for me, a vanilla Frappuccino for himself, and a couple of breakfast burritos.
