Free The Academy by Bentley Little Page A

kitchen as she stepped through the door into the living room. He was grinning, but Linda found nothing funny about the question, and the look she gave him wiped the smile completely off his face.
     
     
    He walked around the end of the counter, wiping his hands on a kitchen towel. “That bad, huh?” he said sympathetically.
     
     
    She sighed. “No, not really. But it’s definitely different from last year. And not in a good way.” She skipped her after-school session with Mary, but told him about Jody’s creepy behavior, her own failure to engage the kids in an off-topic discussion, and the general feeling of unease that she had about Tyler, including the cold shoulder and hostile stares she received every time she went into the office.
     
     
    “Like I said before, you could transfer to another school if you really feel that strongly about it.”
     
     
    Linda shook her head. “I’m not sure I can, actually. It may not be allowed under our charter. Besides, this is my school. I’d rather stay and fight than just run away and abandon it.”
     
     
    “I didn’t realize you were so patriotic.”
     
     
    “Despite all your talk, you didn’t move to Canada during the George Bush years, did you?”
     
     
    “No,” he admitted.
     
     
    “Same thing.”
     
     
    “There’s no chance that you could be laid off or fired, is there? I mean, you’re obviously on their list, and you have little or no recourse—”
     
     
    “If they ever tried something like that, I’d have them in court so fast their heads would spin. They have no cause. I’m a good teacher, I have ten years of positive evaluations to prove it and I have witnesses from both sides of the aisle. They don’t have a leg to stand on.”
     
     
    “Still . . .”
     
     
    “What brought this up?”
     
     
    Frank sighed. “Word is that they’re going to be out-sourcing a lot of the company’s IT functions. So my job’s not exactly secure. And at least one of us needs to be gainfully employed.”
     
     
    “Are you sending out résumés?”
     
     
    “Not yet. This is just scuttlebutt. It might not even be true. Who knows? Maybe it’s the exact opposite, and I’m in line for a raise or a promotion. In which case, putting feelers out would stop those chances cold. So I’m just going to wait and see.”
     
     
    She kissed him and tried to smile. “We both will,” she said.
     
     
     
    Six
    Kate Robinson sorted through the contents of the white folder-sized envelope that Tony had brought home from school and left on the kitchen counter for her. An appeal to parents to join the PTA . . . a discount offer from a private company offering math tutorials . . . a notice that Back-to-School Night was coming up and that attendance was mandatory for all parents . . . an ad for Target . . . a Coca-Cola coupon.
     
     
    When she’d first received notification near the end of summer that Tyler High was going to become a charter school, Kate had been happy. She’d been reading about the academic successes of charters in the Los Angeles Times, including an editorial suggesting that even more schools in the L.A. district should be granted charter status, and she thought it a good thing that Tony’s school was following suit. Now she was not so sure. She didn’t like the commercial tie-ins that were popping up, the growing emphasis on fund-raising and other peripherals that had little or nothing to do with education.
     
     
    She also didn’t like the fact that parents were now required to donate either their time or money to the high school. She and Tony’s father had been forced to sign a contract stating that they would volunteer to work at Tyler for a minimum of twenty hours each semester. If they did not sign it, Tony would have to attend one of the district’s traditional high schools: either Washington, which was in a bad area, or Fill-more, which was on the other side of the city and very inconvenient to get to in the morning. Such a thing seemed illegal, making parents sign a contract to a