“I’ll bet,” Ms. Sionov said, holding out her hand for the phone. “Where is your partner in crime today?”
“Interview at CU,” I said, still searching. “It must be a school-wide override.”
“Then why isn’t everyone else’s phone ringing?”
Which was a good point. I dug some more and finally found the phone. “See,” I said, showing her the dark screen. “I told you it was off.” I hit “display,” and the words “Assembly 1 P.M. Mandatory Attendance” came up.
“I told you it was an override,” I said.
Ms. Sionov grabbed the phone away from me to look, and right then Fletcher Davis’s phone began to ring and then Ahmed Fitzwilliam’s. And Ms. Sionov’s.
She handed me my phone and ran to turn hers off. While she was gone, I forwarded Kimkim the message. “What’s up?” I added, gathering up my stuff and starting for the auditorium.
“No idea,” she messaged back. “Mine just rang, too. Do you think the snowboard team finally won a match?”
“That wouldn’t be Mandatory Attendance.” Our principal, Mr. Fuyijama, loves calling assemblies, to announce fire drill evacuation routes or the revised lunch schedule or the junior varsity sudoku team’s taking second place at State—but those are all Optional Attendance. Assemblies to announce university acceptances and scholarships are Mandatory Attendance, but it couldn’t be that. We were still in the middle of entrance-exam-and-interview season. Which was why Kimkim wasn’t here.
“Can you make it back by one?” I messaged her.
“Just barely,” she answered. “Save me a seat.”
I maneuvered my way down the crowded hall, where everybody was asking everybody else if they knew what the assembly was about. Nobody seemed to know. “I hope it isn’t the ‘responsible behavior’ talk,” I heard Sharlanne say.
“Oh, frick,” I messaged Kimkim. “Please don’t let it be one of Mr. Fuyijama’s speeches.”
“I’ll find out if it is,” Kimkim messaged back. As I said, Kimkim’s a computer genius. She can hack into anything, including the Euro-American Union Department of Defense. And Mr. Fuyijama’s daily planner.
“Thanks,” I said, starting toward the girls’ bathroom so I could hide out in one of the stalls if it turned out to be one of his very long speeches, but before I could cross the hall, Coriander Abrams came careening down the hall, clutching her phone and squealing, “Ohmigod! Ohmigod! A Mandatory Attendance Assembly! Theodora, do you know what that means?” She grabbed my arm and dragged me into the auditorium, squealing all the way. “This could be it! Do you think I have a chance? Tell me, honestly, do you? Isn’t this absolutely incred?”
When she finally let go of me (her friend Chelsea had come up and was hugging her and shrieking, “I know it’s you! Ohmigod, a cadet! You are so lucky!” and she had to let go of me so the two of them could dance around), I messaged Kimkim, “Never mind. I know what it is.”
I should have guessed. I mean, the Academy’s all anyone’s talked about since the IASA recruiter was here last September to give her little pep talk. As if anybody at Winfrey High needed a pep talk. Three fourths of them had already applied, and the other fourth would have if they’d thought they could pass the entrance exams. I don’t know why they even bother sending a recruiter.
It was one of the many annoying aspects of having to go to school. I had wanted to do remote learning like everybody else, but my mom was a nostalgia freak, and she had somehow talked my dad into it.
“I thought you said you wanted me to be independent and not go along with the crowd,” I’d said to him.
“I do. And what better place to do that than in a crowd?” he’d said, and told me a long and pointless story about the time he’d set off a stink bomb in the lunchroom.
So for the last three years, I’ve had to put up with Ms. Sionov’s ridiculous phone rules, locker combinations, school lunches, Mandatory Attendance assemblies, and everybody drooling to get into the Academy.
It’s almost impossible to do—they only take three hundred candidates a year, and less than half of them are from the Euro-American Union, so there’s fierce competition. Candidates have got to score astronomically high (how appropriate!) on the Academy’s entrance exams, have to have taken tons of math and science classes, be in perfect physical condition, and pass four separate levels of psychological tests and interviews.
But even that’s not enough. With over fifty thousand eager applicants to choose from, IASA uses all sorts of strange algorithms and extra criteria to make its picks, and nobody knows exactly what they are. The recruiter who’d come to our school had said meaningless things like “Cadets must demonstrate dedication, determination, and devotion” and “We’re looking not for excellence, but for the exceptional,” and when Coriander asked her, “What can I do to improve my chances of being chosen?” she’d replied, “The Academy wants not only the crème de la crème, but the cream of the crème de la crème.”
“I’d suggest you learn to milk a cow,” I’d told Coriander.
“Oh, shut up,” she’d said. “You’re just jealous because I’ve passed the first three levels of the application process.”
Some years it seems the Academy selects mostly kids who’ve taken astrophysics and exobiology (even though we haven’t found any life anywhere out there that’s bigger than a virus), and other years ethics. Or Renaissance history. Five years ago, there’d been a study that seemed to indicate students in schools had a statistical edge over home- and remote-schooled kids, which meant everyone going to Winfrey High except me was there because they thought it would increase their chances of getting an appointment.
And, apparently, for one person, it had.
My bet was that it was Coriander. She’d taken Renaissance history and ethics and exobiology and everything else she could think of, had gone out for sports, forensics, and community service with a vengeance, and had so completely monopolized the questioning of the recruiter that I’d finally raised my hand just to shut her up for a minute.
“Yes, you have a question, Ms.—?” the recruiter asked me, smiling. She was one of those perky PR types IASA sends out.
“Baumgarten,” I said. “Theodora Baumgarten. Can you explain to me why anybody in their right mind would want to go to the Academy? I mean, I know it’s so you can become an astronaut and go into space, but why would anybody want to? There’s no air, you’re squashed into a ship the size of a juice can, and it takes years to get anywhere interesting. If you get there and aren’t killed first by a meteor or a solar flare or a systems malfunction.”
The entire student body had turned and was staring uncomprehendingly at me as if I was speaking ancient Sumerian or something. The recruiter gave me a cold, measuring glance, and then turned and said something to Mr. Fuyijama.
“You’re gonna get detention,” Fletcher said.
“Any other questions?” the recruiter said, pointedly avoiding looking in my direction.
“Yes,” Coriander said. “How many space engineering classes do I need to take?”
“I hope you weren’t planning to apply to the Academy,” Kimkim said as we left the auditorium, “because I think you just blew whatever chance you had.”
“Good,” I said. “I have no desire to leave terra firma.”
“Really? You have no desire to go to the Academy at all?”
“No,” I said. “Do you?”
“Of course,” Kimkim said. “I mean, Mars and the rings of Saturn and all that. And getting to be a cadet. I’d love to go, but I don’t have the math grades.”