Newbies
James A. Moore

Brittany Corin folded the paper up and slid it into the envelope, writing down her home address on Longfellow Avenue. She left off the part about hating her brother, because she didn’t want to be too mean, just mean enough to let him know that he had made a big mistake sending her away. Chris had his reasons, that silly garbage about him being "marked," or "cursed," but she didn’t care.

She never asked for her mom to die and she never asked for her life to turn over and fall apart. There were a lot of things she had never asked for that she got stuck with anyway. Like being here, at the Dunhaven Academy. She’d already been in the place for most of a week, and she already didn’t like most of what she saw. The only thing she considered a plus was that she had a private room, because her brother was paying a lot of extra money to make sure she had a private room. She’d already set it up as best she could, but it still wasn’t home, even with the posters on the walls and the television and DVD combination covering most of one wall. That part was cool, but that was about where it stopped as far as she was concerned.

She didn’t have to wonder why her brother was paying extra for her to have a private room. Brittany knew it wasn’t regular policy at the academy. She had her privacy because sometimes she had nightmares. And sometimes, when she woke up from the nightmares, she was screaming. Thinking back on what the last two years had been like made her want to flinch.

She wasn’t the only new kid at the school, and she knew it. But she was the only one that mattered much in her own existence. It wasn’t that she was selfish, which she could be, it was that they had their lives and she had her own. She didn’t need to know anyone at the school if they wanted to be that way. As long as she kept telling herself that, she could pretend their attitudes didn’t hurt so much.

There were a few exceptions to the rules, naturally enough. Rejects and outcasts like herself that didn’t fit into any of the cliques that had formed even in the few days she had been at the academy. Dunhaven Academy was something of mystery to Brittany, with its ancient buildings and seclusion from most of the rest of the world, but kids in any place were still just kids, even when they tried to hide that fact.

One of the exceptions called to her from outside, his nasal voice just the right pitch to set her nerves on edge. "Hey, Brittany! Come on down!" Casey Chase was short, lean and very, very vocal. His voice was kind of like a goose honking; hard to ignore and shockingly loud when you looked at the size of him. He had the worse kept hair she had ever seen, a few glaring zits that refused to leave his face alone, more braces than should have been humanly possible, and apparently had developed a crush on Brittany.

Brittany was a pretty girl and she knew it. Her hair was a deep rich shade of red and her skin was usually pale as cream if she hadn’t managed to get herself a decent tan. She had light blue eyes and a few freckles on her face and her figure, if on the slightly skinny side, was definitely female. The point being that she had run across a few guys who thought she was pretty special and while she was always flattered, she didn’t necessarily know how to handle it. She didn’t want to push them away, but she didn’t want to lead guys like Casey into thinking she wanted to get to know them as more than just friends. It wasn’t always easy, and a few times she had found out the hard way that the guys she knew didn’t really want to know her very much if they couldn’t be her one and only.

Casey, she was pretty sure, wanted to be her one and only. She didn’t want the same thing. So, sighing, she went over to the window and looked down. Her room was on the third story, and there was a tree that had to be older than the Constitution of the United States outside that window, with massive branches just about strong enough to park a car on. Casey was at the bottom of the tree, standing between two of the incredibly thick roots. She breathed a sigh of relief. She’d half expected him to be on the branch right outside her room. As long as he didn’t start getting too gutsy they could still be friends, but if she ever thought he was trying to climb up to her room, she was gonna knock him right back down to the planet below.

"Hi Casey, what’s up?" She made her voice be cheerful and smiled. It wasn't really that hard to do, because despite looking about as sexy as a scarecrow, Casey was a really, really nice guy and when he wasn’t being the king of the negative attitudes, he was about as sweet as they came.

Casey smiled, showing enough railroad tracks across his teeth to blind her on a sunny day. "Hey! There’s another one missing!"

Brittany felt her stomach curl with frost at the thought. She was trying not to dwell on the two, now three, apparently, kids that had disappeared off the campus in only the first week. The administration was trying to keep it quiet, but kids noticed things and the student body talked and if there were words said, apparently Casey was the one to hear them.

"What do you mean, Casey?"

"I mean there’s another mysterious ‘drop out,’" he replied, his voice loud enough to be heard a block down a busy Manhattan street, but he still sounded like he was trying to whisper out a conspiratorial secret. "That’s three so far. Come on down and I’ll give you the juicy details."

She had nothing better to do so she nodded and slipped her tennis shoes on over her half socks. Two minutes later, after a brief stop at the check in desk, where she wrote the time and her name and that she was leaving, she walked outside. Casey was right there, looking as eager as a puppy dog, but only if the dog had his mouth wired for sound.

Before she could do more than look his way he had a skinny hand on her arm and was pulling her to the side of the building. In some ways he was like the little brother she never had: always enthusiastic and eager to see her, but at the same time annoying to a fault and almost constantly underfoot.

"You gotta hear this, Brittany, seriously." His voice carried a slight New York accent, but it wasn't the cultured side of the five boroughs, it was like, the Bronx or Queens. That was one of the things she liked about him, he was more real than most of the others around here. Or at least he seemed it to her.

"So tell me your big news." She couldn’t help but smile. He was like a little old lady when it came to gossip, and he just couldn’t seem to get enough of it.

"Okay, so, we had Mary Devons and Jack Bronson disappear so far, right? Just drop out? Well, today I heard the Floor Administrator in Walker’s Hall talking about Michael Dobbins. Seems he left his room last night and didn’t bother to sign out. Seems like he decided to leave all of his stuff there, too, but the Admin was talking like maybe it was another disappearance. I checked Jack Bronson’s room half an hour ago and all of his stuff is still there. The room is locked up but its all still inside."

"So how did you check it out if it was locked up?" She was dubious and let it show in her voice. "I popped the lock, doofus." He rolled his eyes and shook that mop of brown hair.

"You broke and entered?"

"Duh. I’ve been doing that since I was like, five." She figured he was probably lying, but then again, she could see him making a long term mission out of finding ways to get cookies from the cookie jar without getting caught. That would have suited his sense of adventure.

"So, what? You think he was kidnapped?"

Casey shrugged. "Maybe, or maybe something even worse."

Brittany would have probably left well enough alone and brushed it off, but she knew just enough about disappearances to suspect something might be up. Still, the kids who had vanished really didn’t mean anything to her, they were just names she couldn’t even put a face to. It might sound cold, but people disappeared every day, and most of them were not taken away by killers or sold into slavery rings, contrary to what Hollywood and the National Enquirer might claim.

"It’s probably nothing, Casey and either way it doesn’t involve us. You’re lucky you didn’t get busted."

Casey blinked, apparently shocked that she didn’t seem to care. "You’re kidding, right? I knew Mary and Jack. Neither of them would be the ones to run away from this place, believe me."

Brittany shook her head. "Look, I’m supposed to meet up with Alan in a little while and do some studying. Ms. Lassiter is being a freak about the report on the history of New England, and Alan promised he’d help me." And there it was, that little flash of pout across his face before he hid it that said he hated her a little for asking Alan before she asked him. But Alan was a year ahead of her and he was cute and funny and charming as anything. Just as importantly, he seemed to like her and that was a nice feeling. Not that Casey liking her wasn’t okay, but between the two there was no contest. Alan Fairley was a little hottie, like a junior version of Justin Timberlake. Casey? Well, Casey wasn’t like that.

Brittany forced a bright smile on her face for him, and knew without benefit of a mirror that she looked apologetic at the same time, though she didn’t want to. "So, I’ll see you later, okay, Casey?"

Casey just nodded and turned away, his face unreadable, but definitely not smiling any more. "Yeah. Whatever. See ya ’round, Brittany." He didn’t quite run away, but almost and she felt like something stuck to the bottom of a tennis shoe as a result. Frankly, she didn’t like the feeling and that he made her feel that way left Brittany irrationally angry with him.