Ivy Academy

IA is a WIP, started for NaNoWriMo, unfinished, still working on it. If you wish to read more, please let me know.

Ivy Academy

Chapter One

“St. Christopher, Amy.”
         
The name lifted Evan from his lull of boredom, pulling his eyes and attention to the front of the room. Amy St. Christopher was a name he’d never heard before- a new addition to the horrid little cult that comprised homeroom Gamma-6 of Ivy Academy. And the Amy St. Christopher in question was a girl he’d never seen before- a very bored-looking blond who trudged up to the front of the room, hands in the pocket of her fraying tan trench coat. The coat was almost as big as she was, as if intended to hang on a much larger frame. Shuffling to the homeroom attendant, she accepted her I.D. card, her life line in Ivy Academy, along with her deep blue lanyard, identifying her as another member of the female sophomore student body.
         
At Ivy Academy, the I.D. card was everything. It was the key into the building. It was the food voucher at lunch. It opened the locker and the dorm rooms. It held the grades and the credits- Ivy Academy currency. If you didn’t have your I.D., you might as well be deaf, blind, dumb, and lame. Evan twirled the plastic card between his fingers, scattily watching Amy St. Christopher return to her seat. He had destroyed his various cards various ways- burning, tossing into a wood chipper, baking into a cake and feeding it to the principal. He had received more I.D. cards than any sophomore in the history of IA- seven. This year, he aimed to at least double that number. You don’t need a lifeline. Evan was living proof of that, he liked to think.
         
“Ok,” Madame Homeroom Attendant, a pleasant looking young brunette, smiled brightly at everyone. “I understand that you are likely used to sitting in strict alphabetical order, but I refuse to treat my sophomore homeroom like cows moving in rows into a slaughter house.”
         
A weak chuckle from the class. Amy St. Christopher, Evan noted, smiled, and rolled her eyes. He very much agreed. Madame Homeroom Attendant could try all she wanted, but she was not going to be able to penetrate the mental shells of Gamma-6. Or her own mental shell, for that matter.
         
Amy St. Christopher was looking bored again. She hadn’t so much as looked across the room in his direction.
         
Madame Homeroom Attendant spoke again, “You may pick your own seats.”
         
Evan couldn’t help but look around the room. Bimbos 1, 2, and 3 had wheedled themselves toward him…somehow. However…the seats nearest Amy St. Christopher were empty, In fact, every seat nearest Amy St. Christopher was empty. She sat in the very middle seat of the very last row, right next to the window that looked over onto the IA Track and Field field. The white light sun lit her blond hair like a halo; she still hadn’t taken off that trench coat. Evan hesitated, weighing his options.
         
The cackle of Bimbo 2 made up his mind for him.
         
He stood, adjusting the flame-pattern bandana around his hairline, separating his spiked hair and forehead. Wading between the desks and chairs, he slung his school bag over his shoulder- simply a black backpack filled with crumpled papers, two lights, a pack of matches and six sharpies- and sank into a chair across from Amy St. Christopher.
         
She didn’t even look up. Evan furrowed his brow. She seemed to be…tracing shapes and swirls on her desk with one short, stubby, turquoise-nailed finger. This called for serious intervention. He pulled a wrinkled piece of loose leaf from his bag. Scrawling a message, he folded it into the triangle often referred to as a paper football and flicked. It soared across the aisle, landing on the very edge of the desk. Had it fallen a fraction of a millimeter over, it would have fallen off the desk entirely. Evan grinned. “Skills.”
         
Amy St. Christopher did not seem to agree. Her gaze shot from the paper triangle to his eyes, shooting daggers and darts at him. They were the downright weirdest eyes Evan had ever seen. He had seen eyes that changed color. He had seen eyes where the right was blue and the left was brown and vice versa. He had seen eyes that were different shades of whatever color they were. But he had never seen eyes that were spotted- her eyes were a light shade of blue, and then splotched with brown, like some Technicolor Dalmatian.
         
With dexterity that he wouldn’t have expected from her baby-like hands, she unfolded the triangle without so much as tearing a corner. Rolling her eyes, Amy St. Christopher folded the paper into a neat little square and placed it back on Evan’s desk.
         
“I wasn’t ignoring you. I simply have nothing to say to you.”
         
Now it was Evan’s turn to roll his eyes, disbelieving that she called him on his attempts. “It said it’s not good to ignore your surroundings.”
         
Amy St. Christopher smiled. It was a weird smile. Kind of like she was calling him out on ignoring the fact that she had called him out. “I know what it said. And I know what you meant.”
         
Lacing his fingers behind his head, Evan let out a low whistle. “You’re definitely weird.”
         
He hadn’t meant to say it out loud. Typically, Evan wouldn’t care. IA was an practically an alien planet. He was used to weird people. But this girl was a weirdo amongst weirdoes. A Mega Weirdo. Still, he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. This wasn’t the kind of girl he wanted to piss off…or hurt.
         
But she didn’t seem hurt or pissed off. She didn’t smile, either. It was as if she’d heard that phrase so many times the words had lost their meaning for her. She returned to tracing the invisible designs, ignoring him for real this time.
         
Shit.
         
He looked around the room. The trio of bimbos were comparing classes.
         
“Can I see your roster?” he asked, turning back to Amy.
         
She shook her head. “We won’t have any of the same classes.”
         
This pissed him off. Right away, he could tell she was calling him stupid. He wasn’t stupid! He just didn’t give a shit about school! Who did care about school? People who had nothing else going for them. He’d get by, with or without clearance from the Board of Education. There were ways. There was always a way.
         
Amy rolled her eyes. “Do you have all sophomore classes?”
         
What kind of dumb question was that? Evan knit his brows. “Yeah…?”
         
“Well, I don’t.”
         
Evan’s eyes widened as Amy pulled her roster card from her pocket and handed it to him. Advanced Calculus, first period. Advanced chem., second period. Lunch, third period. Her roster was a punishment, straight from the depths of Tartarus. In horror, Evan handed it back to her.
         
“Damn, girl. What are you, some kind of evil mastermind?”
         
There was that funny smile again, as if all of this was a joke and Evan had unknowingly stumbled upon the punch line. “The mission statement made this school look like it was mass producing super-human teenage super spies. One look at the student body, however, and I knew that wasn’t the case.”
         
A grin pulled at the corners of Evan’s lips. Whoever this super genius was, he liked her.



         
The bell signaling the end of homeroom buzzed a few seconds after Evan decided that indeed, he thought I was an incredible specimen of the female species. He thought he was so slick, so cool, so different from every other idiot I found myself surrounded by as I waded through the sea of students in the corridors. It’s not that people are so different at their core; they all come from the same place, they just go in different directions with it.
         
And I do say they. Not we, they. Because wherever they come from, I don’t. Sure, one day, my dad knocked up my mom and his sperm fertilized her egg and thus, little peanut me was conceived. I spent nine months marinating in her womb and then I was squeezed out four days early; it took her thirty six hours of labor. She loves me because there’s a chemical in her brain that was released at my birth and makes her feel attached to me. My dad was as nice as anyone can be between spells of Smirnoff. My little sister is four years younger than me, and has an IQ of 121. She’s pretty and popular and a sweetheart. This is where someone would normally confide that she’s really a demon and she makes my life miserable and my parents love her more than me and all that. But it’s not true. So maybe I am a bit jealous of her. It’s just that she’s so perfect- so perfectly  normal.
         
When I was seven, my psychiatrist recommended to my parents that I take an official I.Q. test. A perfect two hundred. I’m as smart as they come.
         
So what was I doing at Ivy Academy?
         
The basic story is, my parents didn’t want me to grow up in a laboratory, but public school (even Mastermind- literally, master mind, which is supposed to be Philadelphia‘s best public school for geniuses) wasn’t working out for me. So it was decided that one of the best-rated boarding schools in the country was the best choice for me.
         
The truth was, I more or less talked a teacher into a nervous break down that sprang entirely from her insecurities of her drunk mother and abusive father and anorexic older sister who made her feel fat. And her fear of clowns.
         
She had it coming to her.
         
I can’t say I liked or disliked IA. The school itself was beautiful, inspired by the Globe Theater, apparently, but much too modern looking to be an adequate…home. I was very scared, I admit, being in my homeroom that very first day. Never before had I spent a night away from someone in my family. Never before had I bothered to get along with the milk duds I went to school with. I had hardy bothered to speak to the milk duds I went to school with. They tried to strike up conversation, at first, but I quickly squashed the notion that I would be friends with any one of those nitwits. I just had to go to school, get my work done, and go home. That was all.
         
Something about Ivy Academy made me think I would not scrape by so easily. Or alone.
         
I was planning my survival strategy when Evan interrupted me. I couldn’t say I was certain about what was in his mind. I know what forces would pull a boy across the room to me, or push him, given the circumstances- trying to avoid a group of bimbos, or being alone, or…attracted. But I really couldn’t tell what Evan wanted. I think it’s safe to say that he didn’t know, either. He seemed to be the sort of delinquent who pretended that he didn’t care about what was happening around or two him. But I wasn’t so easily fooled.
         
Because if he didn’t care about anyone else, he wouldn’t have moved to avoid the gaggle of lemmings. And if he didn’t care about human contact (which I gathered he rarely received in IA, at least of any positive sort), he wouldn’t have moved next to me.
         
You see, when people say they hate people, sometimes they lie, and sometimes they’re being perfectly honest. But when people say they don’t need anyone else, they’re only bullshitting themselves.
         
We had a free day that first day, after home room. I made a bee-line for my dorm building, Anthony Hall. I was on the third floor, room thirty seven. I would be sharing my sophomore year with Cada Phanvahn and Renata DelRossi.
         
At first glance, my dorm looked like candy store hell. Its walls were alternately pastel pink and bright turquoise, and the carpet was blindingly yellow. Half the floor, however, was covered in newspaper, and  huddled over in the corner over interior design magazines was a tiny Asian girl with dark hair and dark brown skin and purple-framed glasses.
         
In a flash, she spotted me and sprang before me. A bright grin lit her face, shiny with perspiration. “Hi! I’m Cada. Look at this room, it’s a nightmare! Don’t worry, I already got permission to redo the whole thing. I’m waiting for Renata to get back with the pizza before we decide on colors. You must be Amy! Nice to meet you, I love the coat. It’s great to have decent roommates. Last year I was stuck with a girl who listened to Cher endlessly and the other threatened to staple my face to the wall. Don’t unpack, okay? Not until the painting is finished. I think the furniture will do. I smell mozzarella sticks!”
         
She whirled past me, leaving me to ponder how someone so tiny could hold so much air and where the source of the mozzarella smell was.  A tall, reedy girl slunk past me, placing  a pizza box and three paper delivery bags on the desk in the center of the room. Her hair was black and fiercely curly, and she was skinny as a pencil and equally as long as one. Her black pants were falling from her hips, clinging to dear life by a thread bare green belt. A black t-shirt revealed paper white arms and long hands. She turned to me; her face didn’t match the rest of her features- soft oval face and a slender nose, pale blue eyes and soft lips, adorned with a thin silver hoop.
         
“Bon appetite,” Her French accent was perfect. Hesitating, I wondered if pushing my luck was a good idea. But these were the girls I would be spending the remainder of my school year with.
         
“Parlez-vous français?” My French was pretty good. I suppose you could call me fluent.
         
Renata’s eyes lit up, and she began to speak very rapidly. Apparently, she had been born in Italy, and her father was a native Italian, but her mother was French. She had lived in France since three weeks of age and decided to take advantage of IA’s foreign exchange program for high school. Her English, she told me, was good because she had studied it for eight years.
         
Cada’s sharp cough interrupted the rest of Renata’s life story. “Renata, I’ve never heard you talk so much! I thought you were practically mute. Anywho, I was thinking we should have a shin-dig sort of thing, you know? Just to get to know each other, all that jazz. We have Coke, Sprite, pizza, mozzarella sticks, chicken strips, salad, and brownies. Renata, how did you carry all this?”
         
With a laugh, Renata began unpacking food and setting out plates and cups. “Coke or Sprite?”
         
Cada answered first. “Have you ever had a mix? It’s wonderful.”
         
Making a gagging sound, Renata poured a half Coke, half Sprite mix and took a sip. “…Huh. Not bad, at all. Amy?”
         
You have to understand, I had no idea how to answer. I’d never before had a soda. My sister drank fruit juices and I drank milk and my mom drank protein shakes and fiber juices. Four years ago, my dad bought a juicer and smoothie maker and began making drinks all the time. I  never even thought to drink soda.
         
Well, I thought, that might me a good place to start explaining everything wrong with me. “I’ve never had a soda.”
         
“Really?” Cada’s eyes widened. “Never?”
         
“Nope.”
         
“Have a mix!”
         
And so it was decided that my first soft drink would be one of my own roommate’s design. I took a sip. It was insanely sweet, but the bubbly fizz felt funny. I wanted more.
         
The next few hours found us on the floor, propped up on cushions with Styrofoam trays of foot scattered about us. We talked and I even laughed. We sang songs we knew and told stories from our memories. Renata had never eaten a snail in her life, but Cada had, as a dare, not a fancy French dish. None of us liked pink, but we all agreed that the ceiling would be white. We would paint the walls deep blue and cover them with silver stars and neon swirls, and posters, and collages. Cada had skipped one grade. We all couldn’t eat apples that were too soft, and decided that my first soda was long overdue. It was unanimously agreed that barbeque sauce and honey mustard was the best combination of sauces ever, closely followed by salsa and ranch dressing. Renata and I both hated soft rock but loved 80s British synth rock. Cada and I hated to swear socks when we could help it and agreed peanut butter was only good in cookies. We talked about food and paint and music and school. We talked about our families and our teachers and though I did not take part in the comparing of classes, I learned that Cada and I both shared Latin with the juniors. We were all scholarship students. We loved horror stories, but only if they were based on a true story or event.
         
“You know, this school is supposed to be magical,” Cada nodded vehemently.
         
“Really?” Renata asked with interest. I munched on a mozzarella stick, listening in intent.
         
Cada, welcoming an audience, nodded again. “Yeah, my mom told me about me about it. It’s apparently built on the site of a major witch burning, and the spirits of the murdered women still haunt the grounds.”
         
“What’s the story, exactly?” I asked.
         
With a shrug, Cada sipped her Sproke-Cite concoction. “Not sure. But wouldn’t that be interesting? Maybe one of the teachers will know.”
         
My first night in Ivy Academy went well, I would think. It was very comfortable, which stunned me more than anything I would face that year. And, in spite of my quiet hopes and prayers, it was not a prelude to what the rest of the year would be like.