Alphas #1 Page 4

  Shira tapped her nails against the platform railing, and the sky cleared instantly. “Unless…”

  The single word hung in the air. Bee’s eyes widened in anticipation. Charlie held her breath.

  “Unless”—Shira turned toward her longtime assistant—“you resigned. Then Charlie wouldn’t be related to anyone.” She grinned.

  “What?” Charlie locked eyes with her mother’s, a barrage of sentiments passing silently between them. Bee’s fluttering lids seemed to ask if this was what she really wanted. If she would be okay without her. If this would make her happy.

  Charlie felt like her brain and heart were going to explode. Her mom was in a one-sided game of truth or dare with Shira, where Shira thought up outlandish dares for Bee, and Bee had signed confidentiality agreements that would prevent her from ever telling the truth or daring to call her bluff.

  Until now.

  “Very well.” Bee stretched up to her full height of five foot two. “I quit.”

  “Are you kidding? Mom, you can’t!” Charlie blurted. Ever since her dad died, Bee had worked birthdays, holidays, weekends—work was as much a part of Charlie’s mother as afternoon tea. And as much as Charlie abhorred Shira, she wasn’t sure Bee could cope without her.

  “It’s okay.” Bee reached for her daughter’s hand. Her lips were set in her this discussion is over line. Pride twinkled behind her brown eyes. “It’s your time, Charlie. And I’ve been meaning to visit Mum and Dad in Manchester for twelve years. Don’t you think I’m overdue?”

  “Are you sure about this, Bee?” Shira asked.

  Bee gave a nod.

  “Very well.” Shira nodded back.

  It was a done deal.

  A look flickered across Shira’s face that Charlie had never seen before. The corners of her lips lifted. Her brows relaxed behind her glasses. Was that respect or the release of gas?

  Bee pulled her daughter close and whispered into her ear. “Everything I did was for you. You have a gift. It’s time you shared it.”

  “But Mom, I can’t—” Charlie whispered back, unable to fully process what had just happened. Within minutes, the entire course of her mother’s life had changed. And for what? A boy?

  “Do we have a deal?” Shira extended her arm.

  Bee elbowed her daughter in the ribs. Charlie surrendered and offered her right hand.

  “No.” Shira shooed it away. “The other one.”

  “Huh?” Charlie slowly held out her left.

  Shira stepped to the edge of her platform, leaned forward, and slipped a bracelet off Charlie’s arm. In a single motion she popped open the cameo and removed the round picture of her son. Pleased, she handed it back.

  How did you know about the photo? How did you know which bracelet it was in? How can you just take that from me? Charlie wanted to shout. But she couldn’t. Her stomach was in her throat.

  The sky buzzed. A fleet of gold-tinted PAPs circled overhead, waiting for clearance to land. Shira nodded at Bee. Bee signaled the crew to bring the planes in. It was her final job for Brazille Enterprises.

  “As long as you’re here, you will focus on your studies,” Shira stated, watching her protégés descend onto the runway and roll to a stop. “Darwin is off-limits. When you break up with him, leave this conversation out of it. A true alpha makes sacrifices for her goals. And he will be your first sacrifice.” She made a fist around the photo and squeezed. “Understood?”

  Charlie gasped. Break up with Darwin? Charlie inhaled deeply, trying to steady herself with her breath. How could she lose her mom and Darwin, all in ten minutes? Then again, what was the alternative? Boarding school in New Jersey? A long-distance relationship with the two most important people in her life? At least now she’d be able to see one of them. And maybe in time, if she got the grades, Shira would see that she was good enough for her son. And her mom could get her job back and—

  “Understood?” Shira pressed.

  “Understood,” Charlie managed.

  Shira’s lips curled back against her teeth. To the untrained eye, it might have looked like a smile. But Charlie knew better. It was the look of a predator preparing to devour her prey.

  “Welcome to Alpha Academy.”

  4

  ALPHA ACADEMY

  BUBBLE TRAIN

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5TH

  12:18 P.M.

  Skye skipped down the plane’s stairwell, downgrading her smile from high beam to low so as not to blind anyone with her excitement. Her mint, jersey-knit dance skirt ballooned up, and she shoved her hands in her skirt pockets to push it down around her long, tan legs. Just as her ballet flats made contact with the gold carpet that cut across the Jetway, the door of the private plane closed behind her.

  A glass tower rose in the distance, and green caterpillar-shaped trees waved in the breeze. She arranged her white-blond wavelets behind her and blinked. Where was the welcome committee? Where was her adoring public? Where was anyone? She wasn’t used to being alone. It was her unwritten policy to have people around her at all times. The silence made her felt a little lost and a little grown-up all at once, like the first time she’d flown by herself to visit her grandma in Florida.

  Fishing her aPod out of her purse, she kept her eyes glued on the horizon, searching for signs of life.

  “Follow the gold carpet,” a honeyed Australian voice piped in.

  There, on the rectangular screen of her aPod, was Shira’s face framed by her famous red waves. Heel-toeing along the carpet, which sparkled like a thousand Swarovski crystals, Skye felt like Dorothy in Oz—only she never wanted to go home.

  The carpet led her through a thicket of Joshua trees, and when she emerged on the other side of the green pine curtain, she found herself staring at a pink sand beach and what appeared to be miles of blue water.

  “Ohmuhgud,” she gasped, noticing the high-def rainbow up ahead.

  WHOOOOOOO!

  A translucent train that looked like a massive string of see-through pearls slithered along the sand and stopped in front of her. Skye tried to scope out the other girls, but all she saw was the back of their blowouts as they climbed inside their personal train cars.

  Was a student body more alpha than OCD’s even possible? And if it was, what did it look like? September Vogue? She was gagging to know. Or was the bitter taste of chocolate in the back of her throat the jet’s mini cupcakes going AWOL after the private plane ride?

  Once inside, Skye settled into an egg-shaped Lucite chair. An identical one faced her; only it was empty. For a moment Skye tried to imagine who she would want joining her on this dreamlike adventure, if she could pick one person to fill the seat. She ran through her long list of friends, boyfriends, and dance friends. But no one from the past seemed good enough for the future. Not even her perfect mother. Not when the future looked like this! Why wear last year’s dance shoes in next year’s recital?

  A small silver wheel next to the chair turned like a mini Ferris wheel, rotating an assortment of mini snacks—tiny bags of veggie chips, bite-size brownies, and those mini candy bars that kids get at Halloween—the kind Skye had never outgrown and loved year round. Miniatures made her feel like she was larger than life, like the world was in the palm of her hand.

  She grabbed a tray of mini beakers filled with colored water—blue, purple, pink, and yellow—and took a sip. They looked like drinkable glow sticks and tasted like candy. Then she turned her attention to the @-shaped map that suddenly appeared before her.

  A blinking gold arrow next to the words Skye Hamilton is here was flash-traveling from the opening of the circle toward the a inside. Skye fought the urge to press her glossed lips to the train’s window to get a better view of the miragelike oasis that rose out of the dusty desert. Clear water and palm trees were whisking by. She was moving!

  “Welcome to Alpha Academy, Skye.” Shira Brazille, dressed in a single-shouldered black Grecian dress and dark round sunglasses, suddenly appeared in the other chair.

 
; Skye gasped, and then giggled nervously.

  “Oh, hi, Ms. Brazille.” She choked back the bitter taste of chocolate once again. “It’s a total honor to meet you!” Right hand out like a true professional, Skye leaned forward to shake Shira’s hand, but her fingertips went straight through the Australian mogul and she fell to the floor.

  “You cannot interface with this hologram,” a stern British accent warned.

  Skye straightened back up, concealing her blushing cheeks behind a wall of blond hair.

  Shira cackled. “Nothing is ever what it seems, is it?” She kept laughing, like this was some practical joke they’d been pulling on each other for years.

  Skye faced the window, urging her cheeks to transition from fuchsia back to rosy glow.

  “My campus is inspired by the Acropolis,” Shira’s hologram explained as they zipped past palm leaves that turned to cherry blossoms like someone had hit “replace all.” Seconds later the heavy pink blooms turned to flowering cacti.

  “What is this place?” Skye marveled. She had been to the actual Acropolis and seen the ruins with her parents, but there was nothing Greek looking about the super-futuristic architecture springing up around her like pages in a pop-up book. Instead of marble structures crumbling, glass towers soared. The scenery reminded her of dancing—fluid and ever-evolving.

  “Behold the Pavilion,” Shira bellowed as they passed an oblong structure with white steel wings stretching out from its center, like a phoenix rising.

  “It has bris soleil—sunshades that open and close depending on the amount of sunlight.”

  As if on cue, the building’s wings began to flap, creating breezy shade.

  “Ohmuhgud.” Skye blinked her eyelids sharply, trying to snap a mental picture for her friends and family back home. No matter how many international dance tours her mother had been on, she had definitely never seen anything like this.

  “The Pavilion is the central gathering place. Inside are the health food court, shops, lounges, the spa, and a salon. You won’t need money to buy anything. Just good grades, which have a monetary value and will be immediately deposited in your personal account—you access it through your aPod. You can eat for a week off an A. But an F will leave you skinnier than salmonella. It’s just like life, m’dear. You fail, you starve.”

  Skye giggled on the off chance that Shira was joking.

  “You’ll notice that all the structures here are curved.” Hologram Shira pointed out the Zen Center (a giant building shaped like a cross-legged Buddha), the harp-shaped Music Hall, and the ark-shaped zoo full of endangered animals. “There are no angles at Alphas—in the architecture, anyway.” Shira threw her head back and laughed. She didn’t have a single filling in her entire mouth.

  The train looped into the ultramodern Tokyo Times Square-esque area, located to the north of the Pavilion. WELCOME SKYE! scrolled across each electronic billboard. Then the digital letters morphed into different images of her dancing. Skye’s performance at Juilliard last summer, showcases at Body Alive, home movies of her and her mother performing a pas de deux. A cell phone video of her and the DSL Daters freestyling. Were the girls in the other bubbles seeing this, or did they have their own greatest-hits reels?

  Shira’s hologram gestured out the window to a vertical farm, with each floor housing a different crop, from super fruits like açaí berries to staples like green beans or those adorable little grape tomatoes. “Alphas is one hundred percent green. Solar panels power the island, and every building is smart and energy efficient.”

  “Just like you,” Skye joked. But the hologram didn’t get it. Instead, it stared straight at her with a let me know when you’re done doing amateur stand-up so I can continue glare. “Sorry.” Skye bit her bottom lip.

  As the bubble train rounded another corner, rows of empty snow globe–shaped domes emerged. The train pulled closer, and Skye realized that there were no defining house numbers or street names to identify the residences, just the glittery autographs of the alpha females the houses were named for radiating off the glass.

  Skye clapped her hands together. Where else would Oprah, Hillary Clinton, Beyoncé, Mother Theresa, and Virginia Woolf be neighbors?

  “Welcome to your new home.” Shira’s image began to fade. “It may look yabbo on the outside, but trust me—it’s quite different once you get in.”

  The doors opened with boop, releasing Skye and a carload of chilled air in front of a house marked JACKIE O. Waves of heat threatened to melt her like Pinkberry, but the glass door of her new home sensed her presence and slid open.

  Inside, the house was divided into three floors, connected by a sweeping glass staircase that ran along the side of the circular walls. Skye raced through, squealing for joy with each new discovery. The collection of the original Jackie O’s glasses encased in glass, the smart kitchen with a giant touch screen full of snack options, the home theater complete with stage and lighting board, the Vichy shower bathroom, the study lounge with massage chairs, the walk-in uniform closet filled with an array of metallic-colored separates, the lap pool!

  “Hello?” Skye called, hoping to share the excitement with a real person.

  Next, she headed up a seemingly floating glass staircase anchored by transparent glass to the bedroom upstairs. The space was wide open and loftlike, with a giant dome skylight that filled the room with light. Five canopied beds were arranged in a horseshoe, each dressed up in a fluffy white comforter.

  “Phew,” she muttered, relieved. Five beds meant five girls. She wouldn’t be alone forever.

  “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing,” said an uplifting female voice.

  “Hullo?” Heart thumping, Skye scanned the room. “Who said that?”

  “Helen Keller,” said the voice. “I was quoting her.” An extremely tall woman in a pale yellow tunic appeared before her. Her face was surprisingly delicate, with small features framed by long, wavy blond locks. She looked like she was carved from butter.

  “Um, hi?” Skye stuck her hand out in greeting, not because she was formal like that, but because she needed to know if it would go right through the woman.

  It didn’t.

  Butter shook so firmly, Skye’s fingers felt like they were being stuffed into a pointy-toe boot.

  “I’m Thalia, the house muse. I will provide inspiration guidance to you and”—Thalia homed in on something behind Skye—“Allie J, our alpha poet laureate! Welcome.”

  Allie J, the reclusive yet beyond-successful songwriter!? Skye whiplashed around. It was!

  She’d always assumed Allie J’s reclusiveness was due to some kind of unseemly skin condition, like hairy-mole disease. But it wasn’t. Her mole had total Crawford appeal, and her hair was black, shiny, and on her head. Even her bare feet seemed somewhat maintained and remarkably clean. How could someone pay so much attention to her in-person image and absolutely none to her Web presence? After all, beauty fades, but JPEGs are forever.

  Skye reached for her ankle and pulled it toward her butt. A fiery sensation coursed through her quad, relaxing her instantly.

  “So you’re one of those.” Allie J focused her emerald eyes on Skye. Skye released her ankle curiously. How did Allie J know Skye was a nervous stretcher?

  “One of what?”

  “A dancer. You can just tell. Dancers have the best posture.” Allie J bent over and rubbed Purell between her toes.

  “Oh.” Skye giggled. “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Her mother is Natasha Flailenkoff,” offered the muse, while sprinkling eucalyptus on the floor by their beds.

  “And you’re a writer?” Skye feigned ignorance. She had, of course, heard of Allie J’s little book of poetry, Greenhouse with Envy, her chart-climbing songwriting, and her incessant eco-blogging. But she wasn’t about to gush over someone who was one J away from being a single-namer.

  Allie J lifted her head. Her cheeks were bright red. “Did you actually read it?” she asked, as though she had no clue everyone had read i
t.

  “We kind of had to in English class. We were studying American poets and—”

  “Cool, yeah, well, don’t worry if you didn’t finish it,” Allie J interrupted. “I’m so over talking about it anyway. Just wait for the movie musical. It’s pretty much the same thing, only with music.”

  “Don’t give up,” Thalia cooed, sprinkling one last handful of eucalyptus on the floor. The bedroom smelled like a Junior Mint. “To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first. William Shakespeare.”

  Skye and Allie J exchanged a side-glance and giggled.

  “How about some refreshments while we wait for the others?” the muse offered, heading to the stairs before they could answer.

  “What’s the story with the fortune cookie?” Skye whispered, claiming the bed in the center of the semicircle.

  Allie J giggle-sat beside her. “Basketball player. Injured. Turned psychology major. She couldn’t live her own dream, so now she’s dedicated to helping other people find theirs. She’s like a Lifetime movie.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I scanned her.” Allie J wiggled her aPod. She pressed a button labeled ALPHA ID and a series of stats scrolled over the LCD display. “Point and click at anyone on campus and it gives you their profile.”

  “Really?” Skye fished around the inside of her bag for her new digital best friend.

  “Really.” Thalia called from downstairs. “You can try it out on Andrea. I hear her coming up the walk right now.”

  “Oh, and she has exceptional hearing,” Allie J added. “It’s been documented in science journals.”

  Before Skye could figure out how to activate her new DBF, the girl appeared at the top of the stairs, bearing a certain resemblance to an ex-supermodel–turned–talk show host, only her eyes were light brown and her monster lashes were real. “Girls, meet Andr—”

  “Call me Triple Threat,” the Tyra look-alike corrected.

  Skye blinked, waiting for a punch line that didn’t come.