The Secret Runners of New York Read online

  Many people, like my mother, compared it all to that crazy Christian dude who had convinced his followers to sell all their possessions because the world would end on May 21, 2011. When it didn’t, many found themselves broke and still very much here.

  And so Red and I just walked right past the ragtag group of sign-wavers and entered our new school, where my own personal hell would take place.

  ASSEMBLY

  The Monmouth School is located inside a 19th century Astor family mansion on Fifth Avenue. Above its aged stone entry arch is a coat-of-arms and the Latin motto: PRIMUM, SEMPER.

  First, always.

  That about sums it up.

  Monmouth is not your standard high school.

  Its students are rich. Really rich. Their parents are the kinds of people you see at White House dinners. Situated on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, overlooking Central Park, the school is one of the most exclusive high schools in America. Everyone who is anyone wants their progeny to go there and they do whatever it takes to make that happen.

  But with one of the biggest endowment funds in the country behind her, the famous headmistress of Monmouth, Ms Constance Blackman—she has been headmistress for twenty years—cannot be bought. As she puts it, there are other elements that make a child ‘Monmouth material’.

  Those other elements can be anything, really, but they usually pertain not to the student but to the student’s family. They might include a sustained contribution over many years to the cultural life of New York City or being the winner of an old and highly-regarded prize (read: Nobel or Pulitzer), but in the end, one asset trumps all others.

  Breeding.

  When I arrived there, the school boasted four students who were direct descendants of Mayflower families and three who had ancestors who had signed the Declaration of Independence.

  Monmouth disdained the children of modern celebrities and the nouveaux riches. Ms Blackman, a lifelong spinster of modest tastes who lived in a cosy apartment on the premises, delighted in turning down bribes. She had once famously declined an invitation to attend the Met Gala with a prospective parent, saying, ‘Why on Earth would I want to attend a function put on by a magazine?’

  Her job, she maintained, was simple. It was to retain Monmouth’s number one standing in the dual worlds of education and society.

  First, always.

  That said, there was one thing about The Monmouth School that Ms Blackman did her very best not to talk about.

  The missing girls.

  Over the last two years, three students connected to the school—all girls, all new, one sophomore, one junior, one senior—had gone missing.

  Just poof, gone. Without a trace.

  Never to be seen again.

  There was the smart girl, Trina Miller: a sophomore with a 4.3 Grade Point Average and an exceedingly bright future. She’d disappeared in January of last year, only five months after starting at Monmouth.

  Then there was Delores Barnes, the special-needs student. A moon-faced angel with Down Syndrome, Delores had been part of the ‘My Little Sister Program’, a program that paired students at Monmouth with kids from nearby special schools.

  Even though it was designed to show them how fortunate they were, the students from Monmouth mocked the program relentlessly. But they did it anyway, for that all-important ‘community service’ line on their college applications. Delores had been a junior and had disappeared in December last year.

  And finally, the most recent disappearance, that of Rebecca ‘Becky’ Taylor.

  Becky’s disappearance had been the most shocking of all.

  A vivacious and outgoing girl, within a year of arriving at Monmouth, Becky had become one of its most popular students. Everyone had thought she would be named Head Girl this school year. But then, back in March, on the very night she had been crowned ‘Belle of the Ball’ at the East Side Cotillion—the most exclusive debutante ball in New York—she had disappeared.

  Just vanished into the night in her snow-white debutante gown, never to return.

  Alone among the missing girls, Becky had left a note—a text—saying that, overwhelmed by the pressures facing her, she had thrown herself into the river, presumably weighted down so that she would never be found.

  It shocked many that a student as bubbly and popular as Becky could have been harbouring suicidal thoughts. You just never know, they said. She became a lesson taught in self-esteem classes.

  Of course, in all three cases the NYPD had been called and detectives assigned.

  Ms Blackman had even hired a former FBI investigator to look into the matter. The police, she said publicly, ‘fine public servants that they are, might not give this task the time and effort it deserves.’ In private, she put it another way: ‘Regular people use the police. We pay for, and get, a better service.’

  But neither the police nor the ex-FBI guy found anything that could lead them to the missing girls—no phones, no fragments of clothing, no bodies.

  Not a single thing.

  The FBI man investigated the possibility of kidnap in all three cases, but those efforts also came to nothing.

  It was puzzling, he said, that in this age of CCTV cameras, credit card records, and Find My iPhone, these three students could vanish from the face of the Earth.

  Nasty girls from nearby schools never missed an opportunity to goad Monmouth students about it, and I had only found out about the missing-girls issue when I had casually told someone about my new school.

  And as I walked under that old stone archway on my first day, I did it acutely aware that at the school where new girls go missing, I was the new girl.

  The 280 students of The Monmouth School gathered in the school’s theatre-like auditorium, a sea of blue-and-green tartan uniforms, murmuring quietly.

  I must say that, seeing it en masse, I liked the uniform thing even more, chiefly because it allowed me to remain anonymous. I didn’t want to stand out and in a uniform I could hide in plain sight.

  The girls, I saw, sat in tight cliques that had no doubt been formed long ago. The sophomore boys slouched up the back, watching the girls. Teachers stood in the aisles by the walls, chatting casually with each other.

  And then silence—sudden and powerful—as Ms Blackman took the stage.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said, ‘welcome to a wonderful new school year at The Monmouth School.’

  The usual platitudes followed: about how privileged we were to be attending such a fine institution; how Monmouth would make us the leaders of tomorrow; an exhortation to the new senior class to provide the leadership that was expected of them; yada yada yada.

  And then Ms Blackman said a few things that actually interested me.

  ‘Do not let these times of hysteria distract you. Over the course of my life, I have seen many foolish people claim the end of the world is coming and I am still here.’

  ‘Not even a nuclear warhead could kill that old battleaxe,’ a handsome boy with wavy blond hair in the row behind me snickered. ‘When it’s all over, it’ll just be her and all the cockroaches.’

  A nearby teacher hissed: ‘Mr Summerhays. Shh!’

  Ms Blackman then said, ‘I will now call upon your Head Boy and Head Girl, Mr Bo Bradford and Ms Chastity Collins, to address you.’

  Two seniors sitting in the front row of the auditorium stepped up onto the stage.

  I didn’t mean to do it, but at the sight of them I did a double take.

  To call them ‘good-looking’ would be to oversimplify the matter. They weren’t just blessed with good genes. No, they had something more than that. These two high school seniors had been professionally styled.

  The boy filled out his racing-green blazer perfectly. He even made his garish tartan tie look sharp. With his exquisitely shaved square jaw, symmetrical cheekbones and laser-parted sandy hair, Bo B
radford looked like a guy who rowed crew for Harvard and modelled for Ralph Lauren in his spare time.

  Some girls beside me whispered breathlessly:

  ‘Oh my God, he is so hot, I can’t . . .’

  ‘He is a dime. I’d literally let him do anything to me . . .’

  ‘Good luck, he was practically betrothed to Misty Collins in pre-K . . .’

  The Head Girl looked about seventeen and she was similarly attractive and well-presented: tall and statuesque, with blonde hair, light freckling, blue eyes and a thousand-watt smile that seemed to me a little too practised. Her school uniform fit her like a glove, as if it had been tailored to her exact measurements, which I actually think it had.

  She spoke first, her voice perky and bright.

  ‘Hi everyone. If you don’t know me, I’m Chastity.’

  A light-skinned African-American girl with a gorgeous mop of curly bronze hair sitting to my left snorted. ‘Well, there’s the first piece of false advertising I’ve heard this year.’

  ‘Shut up, Jenny, you bitch,’ another girl whispered.

  The black girl named Jenny shrugged. ‘I mean, Chastity. Really? We all know Chastity loves to get all up-close-and-personal with the boys.’

  ‘I’m going to punch you in the uterus, Jenny,’ one of the other girls hissed.

  ‘Like you ever could, Hattie.’

  ‘How’s your job, Jenny? Still waiting tables?’

  ‘Ladies . . .’ a female teacher whispered from the aisle. ‘Miss Brewster. Miss Johnson. That’s enough.’

  I was so enthralled by the little battle going on in the cheap seats, I had tuned out of Chastity Collins’s speech.

  She was saying, ‘. . . and let us not forget our departed friend, Becky Taylor. God rest her soul.’

  The girl named Jenny snorted again. ‘Chastity should be thanking God. She wouldn’t be Head Girl if Becky Taylor hadn’t hopped off the planet.’

  ‘Miss Johnson! You will report to my office when assembly is over!’ the teacher in the aisle whispered.

  Chastity Collins continued, ‘. . . so sad to lose someone so talented and so promising so young.’ But then she transitioned brilliantly, her ‘sad face’ suddenly brightening.

  ‘On a lighter note, this year promises a very exciting social season. Monmouth has no fewer than three girls debuting at some of the most prestigious debutante balls in the city, including—and forgive me for being a little biased here—my sister, Misty, who will be attending both the International Debutante Ball and the East Side Cotillion as a junior, which is a very rare honour indeed.’

  The two girls who had exchanged barbs with the girl named Jenny patted a third girl on the shoulder.

  This girl was a younger, more compact version of Chastity Collins, with the same blonde hair, light freckling and blue eyes. But she had a harder face, a more serious aspect.

  I’d seen this kind of kid before. The younger sibling of the golden child, who, known only to herself, was destined for even bigger things.

  The girl named Jenny couldn’t resist a gibe. ‘Smile, Misty. Gotta work on that RBF.’

  The blonde girl named Misty turned to Jenny and unleashed what could only be described as a winning smile.

  ‘Thanks, Jenny, I appreciate the advice,’ she said.

  I saw Jenny frown for a microsecond, thrown by the fact that her taunt had not got a rise out of Misty.

  In the space of a few minutes I’d seen a taunt about sluttiness, a threatened punch to the uterus, some humblebragging by the Head Girl about the school’s social status and a dose of good old-fashioned mean-girl passive-aggressiveness from Misty. School, I reflected sadly, was school no matter how high the tuition fees were.

  Shortly after, Chastity ended her speech and the handsome Head Boy said some bullshit. Then Ms Blackman retook the microphone and went through a few administrative issues and I kind of switched off until she said something that made my blood run cold.

  ‘. . . thrilled to welcome two new juniors who are joining us from Memphis, Tennessee . . .’

  Oh, God, no.

  ‘. . . Mr Alfred and Miss Skye Rogers . . .’

  At the sound of my name echoing through that auditorium, I shrank into my seat. I wanted to shrivel up and die.

  Please don’t make us stand up. Please don’t. Please don’t.

  Ms Blackman smiled kindly at Red and me. ‘Why don’t you come up on stage so we can all get a look at you.’

  Of course, Red sprang out of his chair at the invitation and bounded up onto the stage, waving cheerfully at the student body.

  I edged out of my row and stalked up the steps, head bowed, shoulders hunched, trying to create the tiniest silhouette possible.

  At which point I tripped on the top step and went sprawling onto the stage like the biggest klutz in America.

  Red—God love him—caught me inches off the ground but the damage had been done.

  Giggles rippled through the audience.

  Blushing with mortification, I regathered myself and gave the audience a weak half-nod.

  Ms Blackman gestured for us to vacate the stage and I was off it in a flash.

  As I resumed my seat, I heard them:

  ‘Did you see her trip? How embarrassing . . .’

  ‘Oh my God, I would just want to die . . .’

  Then there came a voice directed at me. ‘Nice faceplant, Memphis.’

  More giggles.

  Damn, I hate girls.

  The assembly ended.

  And as I watched my fellow students filing out, talking and yammering, high-fiving and pointing, I thought, Even in a tartan uniform, school is a jungle.

  THE COMING END

  I should probably explain the whole St Patrick’s Day end-of-the-world thing that was going on.

  Long story short, no-one knew what to think.

  It had all started in August the previous year when an ageing scientist from Caltech named Dr Harold Finkelstein had written an article in an academic publication called Astrophysical Journal about a phenomenon he had spotted in space.

  He called it a cloud of high-density ultra-short-wave ionised gamma radiation which the world soon shortened to ‘the gamma cloud’.

  It was basically a cloud of electromagnetically charged energy that had wafted into our solar system. When Dr Finkelstein spotted it, it was passing Jupiter and, according to his calculations, the Earth—as it swept around the sun—was going to pass through it on March 17 next year.

  It was what would happen to the Earth and everyone on it when this event occurred that became the subject of intense debate in the scientific community, on morning TV shows and among the general population.

  It was Finkelstein’s position that it would be an extinction-level event.

  And it would not be pretty. It would be twenty-four hours of terror and misery.

  For gamma radiation would not be kind to the fragile human body. It would hurt it in several different ways.

  First, electrically. That would be the real killer, Finkelstein said.

  Almost every cell in our bodies relies on electrical impulses to survive. The human brain uses electricity to send signals to the rest of the body. When struck by the gamma cloud, the average person’s brain would fry and that person would literally drop dead where they stood.

  That would knock out 99.5% of the global population.

  But the gamma cloud was not, Finkelstein said, of a single uniform level of strength: it would be denser in some places and more diluted in others.

  This meant that different locations on the Earth would be hit with different levels of exposure, which meant some people—perhaps because they were hit by a lower level of gamma radiation or perhaps because they possessed a natural resistance to it—might survive the wave of death scouring the planet.

  Tha
t said, those survivors wouldn’t have a great world to keep living in.

  Because the same electromagnetic forces that would scramble the brains of most of the people on Earth would also have a devastating impact on every electrical circuit on the planet.

  In short, the gamma cloud would cause all electrical devices—TVs, computers, lights, power plants—to snuff out. Power would be lost. Mankind would be plunged back to the Stone Age.

  It was all pretty dire stuff.

  Twenty-four hours of death and suffering plus catastrophic power loss, which was why all the crazies—religious and otherwise—had got so lathered up about it.

  Of course, the media latched onto it.

  The late-night comedians had a field day, especially with the date Finkelstein had pinpointed for the coming apocalypse: St Patrick’s Day. It was an Irish conspiracy, Stephen Colbert joked, designed to allow Irishmen to drink more beer.

  Every network morning show brought on an expert, astrophysicists from around the world who had aimed their telescopes at the sky. Many agreed with Finkelstein, but almost as many didn’t.

  Even those who concurred with him argued that the cloud might simply miss us. It happened with comets all the time.

  But Dr Finkelstein stubbornly maintained that his calculations were correct.

  And, of course, the seventy-two-year-old scientist came under intense personal scrutiny himself.

  Every scholarly paper and article he had ever written was dissected. A plagiarism accusation from his undergraduate days fifty years earlier was dug up. A sexual harassment complaint—he’d been exonerated—was also found.

  Rival astrophysicists accused him of being a sad old man looking for attention in the sunset of his career.

  And then, maybe because of the intense media attention and speculation, Dr Harold Finkelstein did the most unexpected thing.