23 Students Remaining
I picture Mando’s hand again and again as we’re led through the halls. His light brown skin and torn cuticles. The long, slender bones. The curve of his knuckles.
And then I hear the sound of a mallet slamming on wood. The crunch of bone.
The next thing I know, I’m sitting in a hard, narrow chair in the auditorium, Scarlett sobbing softly beside me.
All around us, students are demanding answers, wanting to call their parents, wanting to go home.
Ashlyn and the other TAs keep repeating Wyatt’s line: Mando fell.
He hurt his hand. But no one seems to be buying it.
Jada demands to have her phone back. Seven wants to know where Mando is now, if he’s going to be okay.
A couple of students say they want to go back to their dorms and pack.
I can’t bring myself to say a word. All I can think about is how Mando wanted to make movies.
He wanted to be a director, like Francis Ford Coppola.
How can he hold a camera if they destroyed his hand?
And then Wyatt walks onto the stage at the center of the room, and we all fall silent.
“I know we’re all upset by what has just happened,” Wyatt says. “But the most important thing is not to overreact. There’s no reason life on campus needs to feel any different.”
What the hell is he talking about? We just saw a student get maimed. I look over at Scarlett, but she’s got her head buried in her hands, her shoulders rising and falling with her muffled sobs.
“You will notice some changes over the coming days,” Wyatt continues. “Phone privileges have been revoked for now, and the campus has been placed in lockdown.”
This, at last, breaks me out of my stupor. Anger rises inside me, blotting out my fear. “You can’t just keep us here!” I shout. “We have rights!”
Wyatt squints into the audience, as though trying to locate me, but before he can speak, Lynn steps onto the stage and clears her throat.
“No, you don’t, actually,” she says. She’s standing just behind Wyatt, as always, half hidden in the shadows. “Your parents and guardians have rights. And they want you here. So this is where you’ll stay.”
I feel a sinking in my gut. “What does that mean?”
Lynn motions to the TAs stationed around the room, and they begin handing out envelopes. I recognize Tammy’s obnoxiously bubbly handwriting even before it reaches me. My name’s on the front. I glance at Scarlett and see that she has an identical envelope with her own name written across it.
“This can’t be good,” she murmurs.
I exhale and tear mine open. Inside, I find a handwritten letter:
Dear Lia,
By now, you’ve surely realized that Luminary isn’t just a school—it’s so much more than that!
I’ve been instructed to write you a letter explaining why I’ve enrolled you, and to encourage you to work your curriculum, so that’s what this is.
Please give me the respect of reading all the way to the end.
When I first met Wyatt Sullivan and told him about your situation, he was quick to disabuse me of any notions that you were just a free spirit.
Once you completed your testing, Wyatt called me to talk over your results, and what he had to say was…
illuminating, to say the least. According to his data, teenagers with your morality scores are at high risk of dropping out of school, developing severe drug problems, and engaging in violent behavior.
Obviously, you have to understand why that terrified me, given who your father is!
Wyatt and I agree that Luminary was not just my best choice—it was my only choice.
Your individual curriculum has been designed to curb these negative traits and help you become the kind, responsible, well-behaved young woman we both know you can be.
The staff at Luminary are experts, and they’ve assured me that, by the end of the semester, you’ll be an entirely different person.
Please don’t fight them. Work your curriculum!
Best,
Tammy
I crumple the letter into a ball once I’ve finished reading, the anger inside me hardening into rage. I feel confused and blindsided and sick all at once.
This place isn’t really a school. It was never really a school. It’s some sort of recovery center, the kind of place they send troubled teens whose parents think they need to be fixed.
Tammy lied to us. And Wyatt and Lynn and Ashlyn—everyone at this school lied to us. We aren’t students. We’re patients. This whole time, we weren’t being taught, we were being treated.
“What does your letter say?” I ask Scar once she’s finished reading. She sniffs as she carefully folds her letter and places it back in its envelope.
“According to my tests, I’m susceptible to peer pressure, drug use, and teen pregnancy,” she mumbles. “But I don’t believe any of that. I think she just sent me here because I stopped doing whatever she told me to.”
I grab Scarlett’s hand and squeeze. As bad as this feels for me, it’s got to be so much worse for her. I expect this kind of thing from Tammy, but Scarlett’s always seen her as a sort of mother. I can’t imagine how betrayed she must feel.
Did Tammy know what was waiting for us here? I wonder. Did they tell her exactly how dangerous the tests would be? Or that we’d be punished by being forced to type on a laptop that administered electric shocks? That sneaking in a cell phone could result in them smashing our hand?
As much as I hate her, I can’t make myself believe that she did. She would never have sent us here to be tortured.
Would she?
“What’s your letter say?” Seven asks.
It’s later in the evening, and we’ve gathered in the Innovator living room, along with the rest of our dormmates. Those of us who are left. There aren’t many: just me and Zo, Seven, Jada, Sofia, and two boys I don’t know well, Tyler Campbell and Aarav Patel.
“My foster mother thinks I’m going to drop out of school and get addicted to heroin,” I say. I decide to keep the school violence part of my letter to myself. That hits a little too close to home. “Yours?”
“My conservative Southern grandmother isn’t a fan of my gender identity,” Seven informs me. “Shocker.”
“Why are they doing this to us?” Zo asks, scooting closer. “I mean, I get it, the general vibe of my letter was how much I suck. But how is torturing me supposed to fix that?”
“Tough love?” Seven guesses.
I shake my head. “No, this goes beyond tough love. This place is twisted. Those TAs looked like they got off on hurting Mando’s hand.” All except for Ashlyn, at least.
I steal a glance at her. She’s on the other side of the room, talking to Tyler.
What would she do if I raced out the door right now?
Would she punish me, like they punished Mando?
I feel a phantom pain in my fingers, but I can’t picture her doing that.
She seemed just as bothered by what was happening as the rest of us were.
I let my gaze wander from the front door to each of the windows in the main room.
There are four total, each wide enough to climb through, only a few feet from the ground.
I wonder how quickly I could wrestle one of them open.
I picture wiggling through the space, triumphantly leaping to the ground, setting off at a run for the gates.
A feeling like heat gathers below my breastbone. I’m fast. I might make it.
But just as quickly as it comes, the heat disappears.
Even if the windows are unlocked, and even if I could get to one of them before Ashlyn stopped me, Luminary’s still surrounded by an impenetrable, eleven-foot-high solid brick wall.
I try to remember if the lock at the front entrance is manual or digital, but I can’t recall.
Either way, I would need to go upstairs to find either my lockpick kit or my master key, and even if I managed that without Ashlyn stopping me, I’d still have to contend with the security cameras mounted above the gates.
Could I break the lock before someone found me?
I just can’t accept that Tammy really knows what they’re doing to us here.
Maybe she’d be cool with me being tortured, but there’s no way she’d allow it to happen to her precious Scarlett.
If only there were a way to talk to her, tell her what was really happening in this place.
But our phone privileges have been suspended. So that’s out.
“We shouldn’t talk about this here.” Zo’s eyes dart to the other side of the room. Ashlyn’s still sitting in that armchair, but now she’s looking over at us, frowning. “I’ll hit you up later. Make sure your window’s open, okay?”
I shoot her a glance. “My window?”
Zo smiles at this. “My mom used to confiscate my phone and laptop all the time. I had to come up with an alternative way to keep in touch with my friends. Just keep it open, okay?”
I don’t expect to sleep that night, but somehow I do. It doesn’t last long—a few hours, at most—but when I wake, all of Luminary is drenched in moonlight.
I listen for sounds below, but I don’t hear anything. Pretty sure everyone in the dorm is asleep, or at least holed up in their room for the night. Grabbing my cloned master key and my lockpick kit (and making sure I leave my window open for Zo), I head for the door.
It’s cool outside, the leaves on the big oak tree stirring in wind I don’t feel. The night smells like wet earth and smoke.
I head for the main entrance, cutting through the back part of the grounds, like Ian taught me, so I won’t risk setting off the motion-activated lights or getting captured on camera. But when I reach the main entrance, I stop short.
There are guards stationed at the gate. Real guards, in black riot gear.
Holding guns.
I hover in the shadows, swearing under my breath. Sweat gathers on the back of my neck and under my armpits. What the hell are armed guards doing on campus? Do they expect the students to rush the gates? My eyes linger on their riot gear, their guns. Are they worried we’ll get violent?