The Academy by Ridley Pearson

Author:Ridley Pearson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction - Young Adult
Publisher: Disney Publishing Worldwide
Published: 2011-08-31T18:41:07.078000+00:00

Living at the Corinthians was not without its rules, and there was one Mrs. D. was particularly firm about: the boys were expected to return directly from school each day. Mrs. D. would not tolerate their loitering on city street corners, something she believed was the “root of all evil” and a major factor in boys their age having brushes with the law. More to the point, even a single encounter with police could mean expulsion from the Corinthians. None of the boys wanted that.

Taddler stuck to the rules as much as possible, as much as any boy could stick to any set of rules, which meant at least some of the time, but nothing close to all of the time. The straight-back-from-school rule was a little fuzzy when an operation was underway. As co-leaders of Project Armstrad, he and Johnny were allowed some leeway.

That was why Taddler was currently riding a city bus down Commonwealth Avenue. For these fifteen minutes he was just another kid in the city, not someone cast out of a state institution. Not a kid all alone. Not hungry and feeling sorry for himself. He was just a regular kid. He enjoyed the ride and the resulting ten-minute walk from the bus stop toward the hotel. The streets were alive with traffic—big beautiful cars spit-polished shiny and clean. He promised himself that someday he would own three, maybe four, such cars; that he’d have a garage big enough to fit all of them, and a house that made the garage look tiny. Everyone in the house would have their own room, and each room its own bathroom, and there would be a kitchen with a refrigerator stuffed full of food—glorious food like mac and cheese and hamburgers and vanilla milk shakes—and a drawer in the kitchen packed with bags of potato chips, another brimming with candy. This was the dream of nearly every boy at the Corinthians, and one they took turns elaborating on. What else might such a house contain? A giant plasma TV? A computer with video games? A foosball table?

His plan was simple. He would walk fully around the Armstrad, as he’d already done more than ten times, each lap on a different day of the week, always with a pad and pencil close by so that he could duck into a coffee shop and write down anything special he’d seen. (He also happened to like the shortcake cookies at the Coffee House.) With Project Armstrad so important to Mrs. D., and the promise of leaving Corinthians in the offing, Taddler intended to do this right. Johnny was supposed to be doing much the same as Taddler, but he tended to procrastinate. His assignment was to watch the front door for how the bellmen handled the arrival of children, to identify the house detectives, to find out which kitchen workers took cigarette breaks and when, and if possible, to identify the kind of radios used by the staff. This last bit was the most important.

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