Empowered Academy 1985 Read online

  The divan groaned under his weight as he took his seat next to me, prompting Mr. Silva’s voice in my head once again: Find your tribe. Why couldn’t I get his voice out of my head? I was almost starting to wonder if Mr. Silva might have secretly been psychic as well. Besides, was Ramsey even “my tribe?” Judging by appearances, the two of us couldn’t have been more different, but I supposed it was worth a shot.

  “Hi,” I said, turning to him with a smile.

  “Emily, right?” he said in his deep, gravelly voice. “I’m Ramsey.”

  I was shocked not only that he knew who I was, but also by how fixated his gaze made me. His deep-set eyes seemed to penetrate me, stripping away all of my defenses and exposing me to him naked. I couldn’t help but notice the twinge between my legs as he bore into me with his stare, the slight curve of his lips expressing a playful and almost knowing smirk.

  “Yeah,” I replied excitedly. “How did you know?”

  “Hot list,” he said casually.

  “Hot what?” I asked, thinking I had misheard him.

  “You’re number one on the hot list. It’s this piece of paper a bunch of the guys pass around. We’re pretty strict with our grading criteria,” he explained in a tone that seemed to imply it was something I should be proud of.

  Just like that, all of the attraction that had been growing for Ramsey disappeared in a puff of smoke. I hated guys like him—ones who thought their good looks justified their objectification of women. I almost felt disappointed in myself for finding him so physically attractive, as though I was betrayed by my own body.

  I was going to tell Ramsey off, but then Matt, whose room we were all in, cried out, interrupting my thought.

  “I got it!” he effused. He had been fiddling with something that had a bedsheet draped over it in the middle of the room, and now he finally popped out from behind whatever it was.

  “Hope you guys enjoy this,” he said with a self-satisfied smile on his face. “It was a major pain in the ass getting this into the Academy.”

  In one quick flourish, he ripped the bedsheet away and dramatically gestured to the TV set that was underneath with one hand. Most of us just chuckled.

  “Valiant effort,” said Carl, “but in case you forgot, we don’t get cable at the Academy, Einstein.”

  “Bogus,” Lizzy called out from in between her stud sandwich.

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” Matt said, shaking his head from side to side. “Do you really think I would have gone through all the trouble of getting this beast back here without this?”

  Matt victoriously pulled out a Back to the Future VHS tape from behind the TV and held it up as though it were the Holy Grail. He was met by a wave of adulation from the others, but I had to say something.

  “Whoa, guys, that’s illegal,” I said. “We’re not supposed to have outside media at the Academy. We could get in trouble.”

  I wasn’t trying to be a buzzkill; it just seemed wrong to be breaking the Academy rules.

  “Take a chill pill, Em,” Lizzy said with a laugh.

  “I’ve been waiting to see this for months,” Ramsey said seriously, which was actually kind of funny to me since I hadn’t taken him for a film buff. “Must watch. Don’t be lame.”

  “If you snitch on us...” Carl began.

  “I’m not gonna snitch,” I said. I felt the weight of everybody’s eyes on me and wanted to say something just to stop them all from staring at me. “It’s just... Maybe keep the volume low so we don’t get caught?”

  “Goody two shoes,” Ramsey said, apparently having reached his verdict on me. He kind of talked like a caveman, which reaffirmed my suspicion that he was little more than a hunk with a rockin’ bod and not much going on upstairs.

  I wanted to protest more, but I decided against it. Matt popped the tape in the VCR. I tried my best to just enjoy this rare treat, but throughout the whole movie—and maybe it was only because I’d been chewed out by my dad earlier today—I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that in so flagrantly breaking Academy rules, we were all letting the country down.

  Chapter 6

  Ramsey

  “Bro, you told her about the hot list?”

  That was Chad, the coolest person I knew at the Academy. The two of us were heading toward Field Survival, our first class of the morning.

  “Bro, she freakin’ asked me,” I said.

  “Yeah and if Ronald Reagan asked you to tell him your birthday, would you?”

  I didn’t get his reference—I wasn’t even sure he did, actually—and that made me mad; made me feel like I wanted to smash something, but I knew I couldn’t smash Chad because we were bros, so I tried to calm down as we headed into the guys’ locker room. We had to get into sweats for Field Survival, which was held outside on the Academy grounds.

  “Anyway, who cares?” I said as Chad and I started undressing next to each other. “She’s a square anyway. Her dad runs the Academy or whatever.”

  “That’s the Architect,” Chad corrected me. “Her dad’s a congressman or a senator or something.”

  “Whatever,” I said, ripping my shirt off in frustration.

  It felt good to let my heavy bulge out of the tight school trousers they had us wear. Chad and I began putting on the gray sweats we had to wear for class.

  “So did you make a move on her?” Chad asked with a smirk.

  “I told you, she’s a square,” I said, pulling my tight-fitting sweater over my head—it was actually an XXL, but I was so jacked that my pecs and traps stretched against it big time. “I’ll admit she’s the hottest girl in the school—for now—but that’s too much trouble. Besides, she’s probably a virgin. I don’t wanna deal with that.”

  This made Chad laugh. “V-card,” he said, putting his hand out for a high five.

  For the second time today, I had to repress the urge to smash Chad. I begrudgingly smacked my palm against his, the thunderous crack of our epic high five echoing throughout the locker room, though for me it meant nothing.

  I was in an uncharacteristic mood. What was it about Emily that made me want to smash things more than normal whenever somebody brought her up? I had to admit that I watched the entirety of Back to the Future last night with a mondo boner in my pants just from being next to Emily on the sofa, but that shouldn’t have been enough to let her get inside my head like she had.

  If it was anything, it could have only been her hotness, because her personality ground my gears. I didn’t even know the difference between a congressman and a senator; all I knew was that Emily was lame. I liked smashing, which meant I like breaking the rules too, as rules were just things you smashed in the abstract, and Emily was like the anti-smasher; she liked following the rules and even tried to complain that we were watching a video in Matt’s dorm.

  Once I was all geared up, Chad and I made our way out the locker room’s secondary exit that led outside along with everybody else in our Survival class. Most of the girls were already outside, waiting in the shade of a big tree near the tennis courts. We had passed a long winter, but now it was early April, and the spring air filled me with energy—and lust. I started scoping the girls out as we walked toward them. There were only five, which was typical in a class of twenty given the ratio of dudes to chicks at the Academy.

  Four of them had been in the class this past month, which is when it got added to my schedule, but there was one new addition and—speak of the Devil—it was Emily.

  As soon as I saw her, a surge of blood rushed to the thick organ barely hiding in my sweatpants, bringing it to half-mast in one healthy throb. Regardless of everything I’d just told Chad—her annoying by-the-book attitude; her stupid family—I couldn’t ignore the primal urge, the nagging desire to rip her clothes off and take her right here under the tree, which was about as big and hard as I knew my dick would be if it ever had the chance to do what it wanted.

  “Dude, fresh meat,” Chad said, apparently having noticed Emily’s presence too.

  “
I got dibs on her,” I growled.

  “Dude, what?” Chad said in shock. “You just said you hated her about two minutes ago.”

  “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t, but I got dibs on her,” I said, squaring up to Chad. We duked it out every couple of months, and after each fight we just became even harder bros, so I wasn’t afraid of standing up to Chad for... For what? For Emily? What the hell did that even mean? No—I had to have been overreacting.

  “Sorry, bro,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know what’s up with me today. Forget what I said. If you want her, go for it.”

  Chad had been ready to throw down, but after I apologized, we were back to being copacetic. We chest-bumped in solidarity.

  “You know I could hear you two buttbrains basically this whole time, right? You guys are gross,” Emily said.

  I thought we had been far enough away, but Chad and I had never been known for being quiet, so I guessed it was possible she heard us. The four other girls standing around Emily were all laughing, but I didn’t know if it was at me or at Emily.

  “You wish, airhead,” Chad said. I wasn’t sure how that related to what Emily had just said, but it seemed like an appropriate rebuttal, so Chad and I high fived again. This one was even louder than the one in the locker room.

  “Alright, knuckleheads,” Ms. Warren yelled from behind as she walked towards where we’d all assembled for today’s class. “Today’s lesson is tracking. We’ve got—oh, yes, there’s a new addition to the class. Everybody welcome Emily Stride. I’m sure you all know her.” Emily curtsied and then Ms. Warren continued: “Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes, today’s lesson is tracking. The Architect has let us use some of her decommissioned drones for this exercise—the ones with the ball bearing wheels—and I’ve already had them scatter themselves throughout the forest here.” She motioned to the forest near the tennis courts. “Today’s exercise is simple: use what you’ve learned these past few weeks to track down and find as many drones as you can. You’ve all seen them before so you should have an idea of what kind of tracks they leave. The group that finds the most drones wins. All the other groups lose and will have to compose a report on tracking due next week.”

  Everybody groaned upon hearing this. Survival was the lamest class, and maybe the most useless (after Philosophy, at least).

  “Emily is new to survival training, so she needs to be paired with somebody experienced...” Ms. Warren said, scanning the students as she spoke. Her eyes stopped on me. “Ah, perfect. Ramsey, you take Emily. Everybody else, get into groups of two and get out there.”

  The girls near Emily giggled. Emily rolled her eyes and made a barfing gesture with her finger, which made her little friends laugh even harder.

  I wasn’t laughing, though—not because Emily’s stupid gesture upset me, but because I didn’t want to get stuck with some preppy square for an important assignment like this (there was no way I was doing that extra homework).

  “Teach,” I said, “no can do; I’m a lone wolf. Stride is only gonna slow me down.”

  “You can be a lone wolf once you graduate, Mr. Wakefield,” Ms. Warren said in a bored tone. “For now you’re still a student, and you’ll follow the rules like all the other students. Understood?”

  Chad nudged me in the ribs. “Try not to splooge your ooze out there, marshmallow face.”

  Like so many times before, I didn’t understand the slang that Chad used, but it sounded generally like something I could get behind, so he and I fist-bumped and then he jogged off to find his own partner.

  “What did he just call you?” Emily asked as she walked toward me.

  I sized her up from head to toe and I liked what I saw very much. I remembered that when I first saw her at the Academy, I thought she was just an ironing board with a pretty face, but after seeing her around more often, I came to realize that she was actually packing a smoking body (that’s why she got bumped up to number one on the hot list), and her outfit for this class proved that today; she was slender with a thin waist—the type I could wrap my two hands around completely—but she had curves where it mattered. As she walked closer, I used my keen eyesight to detect the subtle bounce of breast tissue that even her sports bra couldn’t fully hide. I had guessed she was a B cup before, but now I was considering she might actually have been C. Her dark brown hair shined gloriously in the late morning sunlight like the glaze on a freshly microwaved chocolate Pop-Tart.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just stay close and try not to slow me down too much, okay? I’m basically a master at tracking, and I do not want to write any extra homework.”

  “I’ll have you know that I already read the survival textbook once through before joining this class,” Emily said as we began treading into the forest. “I probably know more than you.”

  I only grunted in reply, not wanting to waste my breath arguing with her. While the Academy’s main building was the mansion where our dorms and classrooms were, the Academy grounds were mostly made up of dense forest that took up a decent portion of the Hither Hills state park. The air became colder as we walked deeper into the forest.

  I could avoid arguing with Emily, but it was impossible to keep my eyes off her. She was quite a bit shorter than me, and I kept looking down at her from the corner of my eye. From that angle, I could see how delicate and well-formed her features were, and the longer I looked, the more my balls ached with desire.

  Then, out of nowhere, Emily suddenly pivoted to the left.

  “Hey!” she yelled. I turned to where she was facing and didn’t see anything there. “That’s cheating, dipstick!” she added. “Go track your own drones.”

  Felix, one of our classmates with super speed, came walking out from behind a thick tree he was hiding behind. It looked like he’d been shadowing us, using his speed to keep himself hidden behind trees.

  “This assignment sucks anyway,” Felix grumbled.

  As Felix walked away, Ray, another student who could turn invisible, also revealed himself and joined Felix as they sulked off into the forest.

  “Why were they following us?” Emily asked.

  “I told you, I’m a master at tracking. They were probably planning to steal any drones we—hey, wait. How did you see him? He was behind a tree.”

  “Huh? Oh, I absorbed Brock’s power earlier during breakfast. It’s fading now, but I can still use it a bit,” Emily explained.

  I knew Brock. He had the ability to see through solid objects. Realizing this, the first thing I wondered was whether or not Emily was using this power to check out my junk, and that thought alone made me dizzy with anticipation. I knew from locker room experience that I was probably the most well-endowed guy at the Academy, so if she was scoping out my package, I was sure she liked what she saw. But then I had another thought.

  “Hey,” I said. “You can see through objects, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s kind of disorienting. I can even see through the ground if I want to.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “You can help us find these drones with that power. They’ll probably be hiding under thicket or—”

  “Excuse me?” Emily cut me off. “We’re not allowed to use our powers during this class, Ramsey. There’s no way I’m going to cheat just to get ahead for this exercise.”

  My brain had trouble understanding this; we had a clear path to victory and she was refusing to take it because of morals or something.

  “Did you not just see those two dumbasses using their powers to follow us?” I asked, gesturing in the direction that Felix and Ray had walked off in.

  “Yes, and we’re not going to stoop to their level,” Emily said. She continued walking in the direction we had been headed originally.

  I didn’t follow her. “Doesn’t it get exhausting being so prim and proper all the time?” I said, placing my hands on my hips and standing with my legs far apart, hoping that when she turned around she’d user her borrowed power to check out my package. “Or maybe you were just born this way?”
r />   Emily stopped in her tracks and turned around. She looked like she was getting pissed off, but that only made her hotter. “Don’t you get exhausted constantly thinking of ways to skirt the rules? A lot of people look at you and Chad and think you’re both ignoramuses, do you know that?”

  “No idea what that means, but people think we’re clutch.”

  Emily rolled her eyes and turned away from me again. I walked closer to her and was about to continue trying to convince her to use Brock’s power when she let out a squeal.

  “Look! This is definitely one of the drone’s tracks!” she said, pointing toward the ground.

  She knelt down and I came over. Sure enough, there was a long mark running across the mud on the forest floor that couldn’t have been from any animal.

  “See?” Emily said, turning around and sticking her tongue out at me. “We don’t need powers if we use our brains. Help me track this.”

  We followed the track a few dozen feet to the big stump of a dead tree deeper in the forest. There was an old, gray-metal drone—no larger than a cat—leaning against the stump. A dim, red light was flashing slowly on the part of it that looked somewhat like a head. I scooped it up.

  “Alright, we got one by the book; now can we speed this process up a little?” I asked, waving the clunky drone around as I spoke.

  “I’d rather prove to you that we don’t need it,” Emily said as she started looking for other tracks. “Or at least I don’t need it. If you want to cheat, find some way to cheat on your own, but keep me out of it.”

  She was acting like this stupid exercise would go on our permanent records if we were caught cheating. I thought it was ridiculous, but I was tired of arguing with her, and I had pretty much accepted that we’d end up doing the extra homework.

  Shortly after we arrived at another section of the forest, however, it was my turn to spot a trace of drone tracks crisscrossing through some fallen leaves. It took us a little longer than the last one, but eventually we found a second drone. I was sure some of the other teams hadn’t even found a single drone yet, so I started to think that maybe we could do this the old-fashioned way and still come out with the most drones. After I grabbed the second drone and tucked it underneath my arm, Emily and I both picked up the pace, moving on to find even more.