The Secret Runners Read online

  Hell, sometimes I didn’t know how he and I had shared the same womb.

  A bare two minutes older than me, Red was everything I was not: chill and all-but-unflappable. Nothing could rattle him. “It’s that extra level of maturity I possess,” he’d tease me. “Since I am a little bit older than you.”

  He made friends easily, effortlessly. You could throw Red into a room full of strangers, and within twenty minutes, he’d be chatting and laughing with a bunch of them.

  I wished I could do that.

  I liked to think I was pretty good at small talk and could get along with most people. The problem was the intro.

  I was painfully shy when I met people for the first time. I just had to get to the conversation. Once there, I was actually okay; reaching it was my problem.

  Blue had been my dad’s nickname for me—my real dad’s—as in sky blue. (I actually couldn’t remember him ever using my real name.) Get it? Red and Blue. And since my dad’s name was Dwight, he had loved to say, “Look at us three: Red, Dwight, and Blue!”

  Dad jokes. You hate them when you hear them every day, but trust me, you sure do miss ’em when he’s gone.

  I said, “Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”

  I yanked myself from my mother’s grip and got out of there as fast as I could.

  * * *

  —

  Our new school was directly on the other side of Central Park, maybe half a mile away, so Red and I walked there.

  I have to admit, despite all the other things I hated about my life, I liked that walk.

  Our building was on Central Park West, not far from the American Museum of Natural History, and Monmouth was on the Upper East Side, on Fifth Avenue near the Met, so we walked along the lovely tree-lined paths that swooped over and beside the ever-busy 79th Street Transverse.

  At that time of the morning, it was quite delightful.

  Delightful, that is, except for the crazies and the religious weirdos who had become regular sights on the sidewalks near landmarks like the Met and most of the major entrances to Central Park, holding up their signs and bibles.

  The happier nutjobs wore tinfoil hats and danced around like idiots. They carried signs like:

  THIS ST. PATRICK’S DAY

  IS GONNA BE THE BEST ONE EVER!

  YOU SHOULD HAVE ASKED HER OUT.

  FORNICATE! SPEND! LOOT!

  AFTER MARCH 17

  IT AIN’T GONNA

  MATTER ANYMORE!

  The religious ones were older and more serious. They held their placards silently and stoically. Their signs were less colorful.

  LUKE 21:25–26

  1 JOHN 5:19

  THE WHOLE WORLD LIETH IN WICKEDNESS!

  AND HE SHALL DESTROY THE SINNERS! ISAIAH 13:9

  THIS IS GOD’S VENGEANCE.

  WELCOME TO THE RECKONING.

  I didn’t care much for the St. Patrick’s Day stuff. It had been all over the news when that old scientist had first made his announcement a year or so ago, but March 17 was still seven months away. After the initial media fervor, people had gotten bored with it, and soon the whole thing had become just another Y2K, Comet Hale–Bopp, or 2012 apocalypse. It blew over.

  Many people, like my mother, compared it 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 was located inside a nineteenth-century Astor family mansion on Fifth Avenue. Above its aged stone entry arch was a coat of arms and the Latin motto Primum Semper.

  First always.

  That about summed it up.

  Monmouth was not your standard high school.

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

  But with one of the biggest endowment funds in the country behind her, the famous headmistress of Monmouth, Ms. Constance Briggman—she has been headmistress for twenty years—could not be bought. As she put it, there were other elements that made a child “Monmouth material.”

  Those other elements could be anything, really, but they usually pertained not to the student but to the student’s family. They might have included 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 trumped 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 signed the Declaration of Independence.

  Monmouth disdained the children of modern celebrities and the nouveaux riches. Ms. Briggman, a lifelong spinster of modest tastes who lived in a cozy 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. Briggman 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 gentle girl with Down syndrome, Delores had been part of the My Little Sister Program, a program that paired students at Monmouth with kids from nearby 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 disappeared in December last year.

  And finally, the most recent disappearance, that of Rebecca Taylor. Becky’s disappearance had been the most shocking of all.

  A vivacious and outgoing girl, Becky had become one of Monmouth’s most popular students within a year of arriving. Everyone had thought she would be named Head Girl this school year. But back in March, on the night she was 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 harboring 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. Briggman 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 kidnapping 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 theater-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 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. Briggman 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. Briggman 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 battle-ax,” a handsome boy with wavy blond hair in the row behind me snickered. “When it’s over, it’ll just be her and all the cockroaches.”

  A nearby teacher hissed, “Mr. Summerhays. Shh!”

  Ms. Briggman 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 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 Bradford looked like a guy who rowed crew for Harvard and modeled 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 in pre-K….”

  The Head Girl looked about seventeen, and she was similarly attractive and well presented: tall and statuesque, with blond hair, light freckling, blue eyes, and a thousand-watt smile that seemed to me a little too practiced. Her school uniform fit her like 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.

  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 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 honor 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 blond 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 was confident that she herself was destined for even bigger things.

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

  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 hadn’t gotten 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 humble-bragging 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. Briggman 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. Briggman smiled kindly at Red and me. “Why don’t you come up onstage so we can all get a look at you.”

  Of course, Red sprang out of his chair at the invitation and bounded up to 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. Briggman 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 face-plant, 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 a 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 ionized gamma radiation, which the world soon shortened to “the gamma cloud.”

  It was basically a moving body 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 the next year.

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