Read Online The Academy by Bentley Little - Free Book Online

think she was ruler of all she surveyed. “Power corrupts,” Steve Warren said when the subject arose, a sentiment echoed by several other teachers, and that about summed it up.
     
     
    For Linda, the office had become a very unpleasant place. Bobbi really had been taking notes at that initial staff meeting, or so it seemed, and she was definitely holding grudges. Whenever Linda went in to pick up her mail or use the copier, the secretary— administrative coordinator
     
     
    —would stop whatever she was doing and simply stare. Any phone conversation was instantly put on hold, all chatting with the other secretaries, clerks or administrators halted, and the woman would glare silently at Linda until she was out of the office. Linda had taken to going in with Diane or another friend in order to check her mailbox, and as cowardly as it was, she’d sent her TA down yesterday morning to make copies of a homework assignment.
     
     
    Now it was going to be even worse.
     
     
    She looked over at the office building and tried to imagine what Jody was doing in there right now. What stuck in her brain was the strangeness of the woman’s behavior at the end of the hallway and the creepiness of the way she’d stopped on the sidewalk to stare up at the window. The image in Linda’s mind was of the principal sitting perfectly still in a completely darkened office, smiling evilly, glowing eyes focused on nothing that could be seen by mortal eyes.
     
     
    Shivering, Linda turned away. She really did have work to do this morning. And the quicker she got down to it and stopped overdramatizing every little thing that happened to her, the better off she’d be.
     
     
    A carton of books had come in yesterday—class copies of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle —and it was sitting next to several reams of paper that she had yet to unpack. She put the paperbacks in her bookcase, then placed the paper in the supply cabinet. The nighttime custodians had erased everything on both blackboards, though she’d left a note instructing them to leave it all as is, and she painstakingly rewrote everything all over again before settling down at her desk and treating herself to a breakfast bar.
     
     
    It seemed quiet all of a sudden. Too quiet. She hadn’t really noticed while she’d been busy and moving around, but now that she was sitting still, the silence seemed oppressive. She was acutely aware that she was the only person in the building, and she walked over to the door and locked it.
     
     
    She needed some noise. She kept a portable CD player on a shelf behind her desk. Not an iPod or one of those small devices with attached headphones, but a cheap boom-box-looking thing she’d picked up at The Store several years back. She put in a reissued Nazz CD that Frank had given her for her birthday in June, and although she’d intended to spend this time making lesson plans, she found herself just sitting there and listening to the music. As a teenager, she’d owned the original vinyl album, and now hearing it again, she was brought back to those days. Even then, it had been a relic of another era, the music of an earlier generation, but that had been part of its appeal. She’d never dated much until her senior year in high school, and after her best friend, Maddy, had moved in the middle of ninth grade, she’d felt lonely and isolated. It was music that had saved her, that had let her know she was not alone. Particularly music from the late 1960s and early 1970s. She’d spent hour after hour in her room by herself, listening to records, and those songs had spoken to her. Albums like Nazz had not only understood and reflected back her feelings but promised something better. Art from an earlier age, it had contained the innocence of that time period but had also pointed the way to a tomorrow that was better than today.
     
     
    Listening to the same tunes now made her feel slightly sad, but it was a sweet sadness, and it made her think about the importance of