Caged Warrior (9781423186595) Read online

  Grade Report: Daniels, McCutcheon ID#: A0486632

  Period 1 A

  Period 2 A-

  Period 3 A

  Period 4 A

  Lunch (B session)

  Period 5 F

  Period 6 F

  Period 7 F

  “Periods one through four are all As and periods five, six, and seven are all Fs,” he noted.

  Principal Porter took the sheet of information and examined it. “Why?” he asked me.

  I fiddled some more with the drawstrings on my hoodie but remained silent. Mr. Freedman, seeing that my words would be few if any, took a shot at explaining it all for me.

  “Because McCutcheon never shows up to any of those classes,” he said. “After lunch every day, he’s ditching.”

  Principal Porter didn’t look shocked to hear news that one of his students was skipping class. In a school with so few security guards, so many corners to hide in, and such beaten-down facilities, there were always lots of kids out roaming campus when they were supposed to be in class. Ditchers were like roaches at Fenkell; every time you turned on a new light or opened a new door, fresh ones appeared.

  Besides, the list of kids with three Fs or more on their report card was probably longer than the list of kids without three or more Fs on their report card at our school. By at least a two-to-one ratio. D-town wasn’t called ground zero for America’s public schools for nothing.

  “Care to explain what is going on, son?” Mr. Freedman asked.

  My silence somehow inspired the white lady in the powder-blue dress to make a decision.

  “Mr. Daniels will be coming with me,” she said in a firm that-will-be-that tone. She then picked up her purse and stood. It was clear that wherever she was going, she planned to take me with her.

  “What? Where?” I asked.

  “To visit Radiance.”

  “Now?”

  Her penetrating blue eyes locked in on me. “Clearly, you are intelligent, McCutcheon,” she said to me. “Now, let’s just hope that you are intelligent enough to recognize exactly what you’d be missing.”

  “But right now?” I asked again.

  Slowly, she looked at her thin, silver wristwatch and read the black Roman numerals on its face. “It’s eleven seventeen a.m., Mr. Daniels. Do you have somewhere else you’re supposed to be?”

  It was like she was daring me to spill my secret. I mean, of course I had somewhere else. Loco’z by twelve thirty.

  Every day meant training by twelve thirty.

  I turned to Mr. Freedman. Then to the principal. Then back to the lady who’d come out of nowhere.

  I was boxed in and she knew it.

  “I’ll have you back before the school day is over, Mr. Daniels. You can resume your ‘activities’ then.”

  Leverage, I thought. She had it.

  I rose from my chair. Sometimes, you just have to tap out. It was off to Radiance.

  “By the way,” she said to me as she opened the door of a gleaming, brand-new BMW. I climbed inside the passenger seat and the sweet smell of luxurious leather hit me. I’d never been inside a BMW before. Every inch of her car glistened. “My name is Mrs. Notley,” she informed me. “I’m the headmistress of Radiance Academy.”

  “So, like, you’re in charge?”

  “No,” she replied. “God is in charge.” Mrs. Notley pushed the ignition and the car roared to life. “But I am most indubitably second-in-command.”

  SEVEN

  A manicured lawn. Spires on the buildings. A campus without any steel fences surrounding it like a prison yard. Though it was only a twenty-five-minute ride to Radiance, it felt like we’d arrived in a different universe.

  Mrs. Notley and I walked up the front steps, white as snow, that led into the main building, also painted gleaming white. I spied a plaque on the wall by the door, small but impressive looking. Curious, I went over to read it.

  PUGNARE AD CONSEQUI, CONSEQUI AD DA

  FIGHT TO ACHIEVE, ACHIEVE TO GIVE

  “It’s more than a motto,” Mrs. Notley commented. “It’s a way of life.”

  I tried to remember if our school had a motto. I think it was Go Panthers, or something like that.

  We went inside, and Mrs. Notley began to spell out all the benefits her school could offer. The extensive and diverse curriculum; the wealth of resources like an Olympic pool, full orchestra, and theater; and the one-hundred-percent success rate of the Radiance senior class being accepted to four-year colleges. Suddenly we stopped and she poked her head inside a classroom.

  “Come, take a look,” Mrs. Notley said, motioning me in. Perhaps it was a coincidence, perhaps not, but the class she’d selected for me to see was science, my favorite subject.

  We entered a room without any desks, just lab tables and workstations with black office chairs that had wheels on them so that the students could slide around and easily move from one location to another. None of the kids seemed even to notice that their principal had just come into the room. Weird, I thought. Most kids usually snap to attention when big shots enter a classroom, but these students seemed not to have noticed.

  And they weren’t pretending, either; they were just too caught up in their work.

  I scanned the class. Most of the students were huddled in small groups, some around microscopes, others around tablet computers, all working or talking or reading or writing. And not one kid had his or her head down taking a mid-morning nap.

  I looked at the front board.

  Who murdered Mrs. Stephanie DeAngelo?

  • How?

  • Where?

  • When?

  • Why?

  EVIDENCE! EVIDENCE! EVIDENCE!

  “Oh, good morning, Mrs. Notley.” I turned and saw a short woman carrying a big beige box. She looked so pregnant it seemed as though she might pop by lunch. “Excuse me,” she said. I stepped aside and reached to hold open the door for her so she could more easily enter the room.

  “Thank you,” she said waddling by.

  Was that the teacher, I wondered? Not even inside with the class? At Fenkell, if a teacher left a room filled with students without any supervision you could be damn sure that by time she got back somebody would have been either tied up, bleeding, or set on fire.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Clascus,” Mrs. Notley replied. “Is this the new forensics unit?”

  “Yes, crime scene analysis. Those students over there are analyzing DNA blood samples; in the back corner they’re working with fingerprinting; to the left we’re co-teaching with math by having them look at the verification of evidence using Newton’s Law of Cooling and...” The teacher stopped mid-sentence and then called out to the entire class. “Okay people, I’ve got your hair samples.” She set down the beige box. “Each team needs to send up a representative. And not in five minutes but NOW.”

  A moment later plastic bags of human hair were being distributed to each of the group representatives who’d rushed over. Being preggers didn’t seem to slow this woman down one bit.

  “Uhm, Jennie,” Mrs. Clascus asked seeing that she still had one bag of hair that hadn’t been handed out. “Aren’t you sending up a teammate?” Mrs. Clascus waved the bag at this Jennie in a “come and get it” manner.

  A girl in a black sleeveless top lifted her eye from a microscope. “No need, Mrs. C.”

  The teacher paused, unsure. A few students quieted down to listen in. Apparently everyone here was like some sort of student detective.

  Jennie exchanged a knowing glance with three other kids—her teammates, I assumed. They all silently debated whether or not to share some secret with the rest of the room. A moment later Jennie shrugged and announced, “Not to spoil your weekend plans, everybody, but as it turns out, Mrs. Stephanie DeAngelo wore a wig.”

  “WHAT!?” A giant groan echo
ed through the room as if hours of valuable time working on some aspect of this project had just been lost.

  And more importantly, hours’ more worth of new work now seemed to be ahead for these teams. Hours of work that would snatch up their weekend.

  Mrs. Clascus smiled. “I knew they’d figure it out at some point,” she said to Mrs. Notley about her scheme to misdirect the class and try to get their scent off the real murderer’s trail. “I just thought it would take them until next week.”

  The class buzzed with this new information, and each of the teams threw themselves deeply back into their work trying to calculate the consequences of this new knowledge on their case.

  “This is McCutcheon,” Mrs. Notley said to Mrs. Clascus, introducing me.

  “Hey,” she said. “New student here?”

  “He’s considering it,” Mrs. Notley told her.

  “Know anything about anatomy?” the pregnant teacher asked me. “Bones, blood, blunt objects forcefully striking the human head?”

  “Um, a little,” I answered.

  “Well, you’re here at a good time then. It’s dead body week.” Mrs. Clascus turned and called out to her class again. “All right people, means, motive, and opportunity. Without those, you have no case.” I looked back out into the room. Jennie, the girl in the black sleeveless top, buried her eye in her microscope, then called two teammates over to take a look at something she’d just discovered. I wondered what they saw.

  “Gotta go,” Mrs. Clascus said. “More tricks up my sleeve.” The teacher slyly smiled then waddled off. It was like she was having more fun than any kid in the room.

  “Come, let’s head to my office,” Mrs. Notley said to me as she opened the door and escorted me out. Minutes later I was sitting in an oversized chocolate brown leather chair with creases that cracked each time I moved.

  “Radiance Academy was founded in 1853.” Mrs. Notley poured herself a cup of coffee. Wisps of steam rose as the black drink filled her white cup.

  And no, I wasn’t offered any.

  “Originally we were a private institution, but after the Great Depression, the board of directors converted it to a public school to better serve the community.” My eyes wandered around her large office. This lady owned more books than anyone I’d ever seen.

  “We became one of Michigan’s first charter schools quite some time ago, but with the past decade’s budget cuts, we’ve been forced to morph into an innovatively funded public/private hybrid model, with a waiting list that exceeds one thousand students per year.”

  I guess she expected me to be impressed.

  I wasn’t.

  “You know,” Mrs. Notley leaned forward, my laid-back attitude not doing much to impress her, “you might have won the lottery, Mr. Daniels, and that might not mean much to you, but now that you’ve had your number pulled, you should know one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It means something to me. I want you here. And I’m one of those persnickety old ladies that almost always gets what she wants.”

  She took a small sip of her coffee. No sugar, no milk; she drank it black. I shifted in my chair and the leather seat creaked again. “Do you know what the word persnickety means, McCutcheon?” Her blue eyes lasered in on me. “It means I am a pushy pain in the gluteus maximus.”

  Mrs. Notley reached for a bell, a small one that sat on the flat surface of her polished desk, and rang it. A moment later, the door opened behind me.

  “McCutcheon, I’d like you to meet one of our finest students, Kaitlyn Cummings.”

  I turned around and WOW! one of the hottest girls I’d ever seen entered the room.

  Tall, athletic, a look of intelligence and confidence in her eyes. And that white schoolgirl uniform with the plaid skirt, well…it looked like Radiance had a few more campus resources than I’d originally realized.

  I had to laugh to myself. Aw, looks like Miss Persnickety’s siccing the big dogs on me now.

  “Kaitlyn is our top candidate for the Archer Award, a prize so prestigious we only give it out once every five years—if there’s a worthy applicant,” Mrs. Notley said. “Which Kaitlyn certainly is.”

  “Thank you,” replied the pretty girl who’d just come in. She looked kinda shy about receiving the high praise.

  “And should she win, not only will her own tuition for the rest of her time here be paid for, but she’ll be also able to send her children to Radiance one day tuition-free. Alumni connections run deep here, McCutcheon. We’re what you might call a well-endowed institution with a highly motivated base of support for our objectives.”

  “Pugnare ad consequi, consequi ad da.” The girl said the words as if she’d repeated the phrase many times before. “It means...” she said, turning to me.

  “‘Fight to achieve, achieve to give,’” I said, finishing her sentence for her.

  She paused. “You speak Latin?”

  “No.”

  Her brow wrinkled.

  “The engraving at the front of the school,” I said. Apparently few visitors actually bothered to read it.

  “Oh,” she replied.

  “Kaitlyn,” Mrs. Notley said. “McCutcheon is considering a variety of educational opportunities next year, but it is my profound hope that Radiance will be his ultimate choice. Would you mind giving him Part One of the tour, please?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Notley.” Kaitlyn turned to me. “Welcome to Radiance.” Our eyes met. Hers bright with intelligence, spirit, and life. Mine dark, deep, and full of secrets. “If you’ll please follow me.”

  I rose and smoothed out my jeans.

  “Lead the way.”

  EIGHT

  On a scale from one to ten, the girl taking me on this tour posted an eleven. And that cute little schoolgirl uniform she wore was enough to turn the head of a blind man. Without a doubt Kaitlyn owned the whole package but, thing is, girls threw themselves at me all the time. What—did Mrs. Notley think that just because she could get one of her students to shake her ass a few times, I’d suddenly come running back to her office ready to give up my whole fight career for the chance to wear penny loafers to a wussy prep school?

  What a freakin’ joke.

  “You have any ideas about which colleges you are going to apply to?” Kaitlyn asked me.

  “Not really.”

  “Still undecided about a major?”

  “Doubt I’m even going.”

  “No college?” she said. “Oh.”

  Kaitlyn walked us over to the engineering center where a few students were using artificial intelligence to create a robotics project.

  “Impressive,” I said.

  Next she took me to see a drama class where some kids were restaging a scene from Macbeth as if Shakespeare had written the play in text messages.

  “Impressive,” I said.

  “And this is our Alumni House,” she told me as we paused at another stop on our tour. The place looked like a quaint cottage with little yellow flowers surrounding it and an old-fashioned metal mailbox out front. There was even a white picket fence.

  “Immm-pressive,” I said.

  “Is something wrong?” Kaitlyn asked.

  “Wrong?” I said. “Naw. It’s just like, well, we got an alumni house where I go to school now, too.”

  “You do?”

  “Uh huh,” I replied. “It’s called the penitentiary.”

  I smiled. She didn’t.

  “That was a joke,” I said.

  “Hysterical,” she answered.

  This whole school was so over-the-top I just wanted to laugh. Kaitlyn, however, remained polite.

  “Would you like to see the new ecology project some of our students are currently working on?” she asked. “We’re using renewable energy sources in an effort to be more green.”

  “Would that b
e before or after we sample the caviar being served for lunch?”

  She put her hand firmly on her hip. “You think this whole place is a joke, don’t you?”

  “Not at all,” I said with a grin that showed, yep, I did. Kaitlyn pushed back her hair and narrowed her blue-green eyes.

  “Where do you go to school now?”

  “Like you don’t already know.”

  Her forehead wrinkled. “How would I know?” she said. “It’s why I asked.”

  Though I didn’t believe her because I was pretty sure that Mrs. Notley had already filled her in on my whole sad story, I humored her with an answer. “I go to Fenkell,” I said. “Fenkell High, near East Seven Mile.”

  “Oh, I see,” she replied as if a lightbulb had suddenly just gone off.

  “What?” I asked. “What do you see?”

  She chuckled in a now-I-get-it sort of way. “Hate to break it to you,” Kaitlyn said, “but I do not for one minute feel like I have to apologize for the excellence of Radiance.”

  “Nope, you don’t,” I said. “Not at all.”

  There was a sarcastic bite to my response that provoked Kaitlyn into rolling her eyes. She chuckled a second time, but it wasn’t a “ha-ha” type of laugh at all. “Let me tell you something,” she said in a tone I’m sure she never used with Mrs. Notley. “Yes, this school offers a lot, but I know how hard I work and how much effort I put in to do well around here. I mean, I have absolutely no idea who you think you are, but trying to make me feel guilty? That is so lame. You don’t know me. What are you, like some sort of stud football player?”

  “Why can’t I just be a regular ol’ student?”

  “That IS what I thought you were, a student,” she answered. “Till a minute ago. Now I just think you’re a, I don’t know…a guy with a bad attitude.”

  “Naw,” I said. “I ain’t a football player.”

  We took a few steps in silence, each thinking about what next to say. Clearly, I’d gotten her all riled up because she started in on me again without my having yet said another word.

  “Like I should really feel bad about all the opportunities I’m being given. Do you have any idea how hard I go at it to try to be the best? Up at the crack of dawn, living off of five hours of sleep every night just so I can try to make a few breaks for myself. What am I supposed to do, kick back and weep for all the kids who don’t have the same chances I’m being given?”