9 Students Remaining
There’s a gravity in Ashlyn’s expression as she holds my gaze, a weight pulling at the air between us. “It’s a nice night for a walk, don’t you think?” she says after a moment. And then she walks out the door, leaving our tea untouched.
I only hesitate a moment before following her.
It’s not late, but the campus is already very dark.
Dimly lit paths cut through swathes of black, the grounds beyond fading away into shadow.
Ashlyn chooses our route deliberately, steering us away from the well-lit paths frequented by late-night students, toward a stretch of bare dirt worn through the grass and shrouded by overhanging trees.
Dirt and gravel crunch under our shoes. Ashlyn moves with purpose, her steps sure and quick as she leads us deep, deep into the dark.
Finally, when we’re completely hidden from the main walkways, Ashlyn turns to me, her face deadly serious. “You shouldn’t have said that.”
I look around us, shivering. There’s nothing nearby except for bare trees and grass, a few patches of dead wildflowers. “Is it safe to talk—”
“Nowhere on campus is completely safe,” Ashlyn explains. “But there aren’t any cameras on the paths back here, and he has a harder time when we’re outdoors. The wind messes with the microphones.”
I’m surprised. “We thought he was using our tablets to spy on us.”
“He figured you’d think that. The tablets are clean; it’s the rest of the campus that’s bugged.” Ashlyn motions to the area around us. “This is a well-known dead spot. It’s where students from my semester went when we wanted to talk without being overheard.”
My heart thumps harder in my chest. “So, you were a student?”
Ashlyn’s shaking her head. “I don’t know how you found that out.”
“Why did you come back here?” I want to know. “If you passed—”
“I only passed my first semester,” Ashlyn explains. “Once students have passed their first semester, they return to help the next semester of students, as TAs.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” I point out. “Yours was the only name I recognized from the summer semester. The others—”
“Luminary isn’t the only school like this,” Ashlyn says. “There are others all over the country. I don’t know how many.”
My heartbeat picks up. Other schools like this one? That means other kids being tortured, being killed. I feel suddenly sick to my stomach. “Is that why you tried to warn me?”
“Warn you?” Ashlyn looks surprised. “About what?”
A chill moves through me. “About how awful this place is!”
“Lia, this program saves lives. The only students admitted to Luminary are the ones who need to be here,” Ashlyn explains. “Kids who are in danger of drug addiction and teen pregnancy and arrest and—”
“School violence?” I snap, cutting her off. “How could subjecting us to violence keep us from committing it ourselves? People are getting hurt! These lessons—”
“The lessons are what make this place so brilliant,” Ashlyn says, a kind of fervent heat in her eyes.
“Other programs for troubled teens don’t have the same focus on education that we do.
They just try to treat the behavioral issues.
But Wyatt could see that there was a need for a program that incorporated cutting-edge educational tactics with behavior modification.
In fact, addressing one helped with the other.
Raising a student’s blood pressure increases their ability to recall information, while experiencing real-world consequences for their actions helps students steer away from riskier behaviors. If you put them together…”
If you put those things together, you get a school like this, where tests are life or death, and disobeying the rules could lose you a limb or get you electrocuted.
“That’s sick,” I say. I think of the list of names I found, the word terminated written after so many of them. “Kids have gotten hurt, Ashlyn. They’ve died.”
Ashlyn’s expression is stony. “It’s not like any of you have done any better in normal schools.
Look at your track record. Juvenile correction, arrests, kicked out of every school you’ve ever been admitted to.
The students here have overdosed on drugs or had sex, they’ve spread disease and risked teen pregnancies they weren’t ready for.
Left to continue down the paths they were on, who knows what might have happened!
They could’ve bullied one another online until they were so depressed they’d think the only way out was to swallow a bunch of pills, or they could’ve brought a gun to school and shot up half their class.
Can you honestly tell me this place is worse than all that? ”
I’m shaking my head. “You can’t know that anyone here would ever do that!”
“We do know. The tests are never wrong. There are certain things you can only learn about yourself through experience,” Ashlyn says, talking faster now. “That’s why parents send their kids to us.”
I feel sick to my stomach. I was so sure Ashlyn had been the one to leave the note and the notch marks. I can’t believe I was so wrong. “Who was in my room your semester?” I ask.
Ashlyn’s eyes go distant for a moment, remember. “Her name was…Cameron, I think. She didn’t last very long. She didn’t believe in the curriculum, which Wyatt figured out pretty quickly. See, Lia? Whatever you might think about our curriculum, it works.”
“But only if you survive it,” I say. I lean against a tree, my legs shaky. A breeze rustles the branches overhead. It smells like leaves and old paper.
Ashlyn looks me dead in the eye and says, “So survive it.”