The Academy's Entrance Exam

	Johnny’s pants ripped as he jumped the fence. He winced as the barbed wire scraped against his hamstring. Shit. He launched off the top of the fence, rolling as he hit the ground. The sounds of dogs barking came nearer and desert sand filled his mouth and nose. Wiping his brown face quickly on the inside of his overlarge t-shirt, the teenager looked up to see three large dogs pelting toward him from across the auto yard. 
	He sprinted forward, determined to reach the car he wanted before the mutts caught him. The dogs were only slowed by the chain they’d pulled up out of the desiccated ground. Johnny was slowed by a throbbing cut on his leg and drooping pant leg on his heel. It was a tie: as Johnny leaped up on the hood of the ‘69 Mustang Shelby Cobra GT-500, one of the dogs grabbed the pant leg with its large mouth and pulled. He pulled back instinctively, and the tear in his pants ran around to stop at the seams on either side. Finally, Johnny managed to free his leg from the dog, and as they leaped up and tried to bite at him, he crawled up the windshield onto the top of the car.
	The dogs circled him, barking on, and Johnny considered his predicament. He couldn’t reach down and open the door without the dogs either biting his arm or his Slim Jim. And if he did manage to do so, the dogs might jump into the car before he could. He looked around and saw someone watching him from the other side of the fence he’d just jumped. The man sat astride an idling motorcycle in a leather jacket, full-head helmet, and cargo pants. They looked at each other for a second. Neither made any kind of acknowledgement or greeting. The man also didn’t make a move for his phone, so he wasn’t calling the cops. Who was he? And hadn’t Johnny seen him prowling around the reservation before?
	The man was neither helping nor harming, but a much more pressing issue became suddenly clear.
	“HEY!”
	Someone was shouting at him from across the yard. The dogs broke ranks and tried to get around the car to get to their owner, one dog moving around the trunk of the car and two moving around the hood. Their stake scraped the side of the car, scratching the new paint. Johnny winced. That was a damn shame. But, with the dogs distracted, he took his chance to unlock the passenger side door, jump down, and climb in. He slammed the door behind him, re-locked it, and looked over at the slowly approaching, ginormous, chip-eating marshmallow trying in vain to save his precious vintage. 
	Grinning, Johnny slipped a wire cutter out of his pocket. He snipped and stripped the wires, and used them to start the car. 
	The sound of it was beautiful. The engine was in gorgeous condition, seeming to try to leap the car forward even before he’d taken off the parking brake. As the large man came within a few yards of the door, holding the keys, Johnny threw the car into reverse, released the clutch, and backed slowly toward the dog behind him. He heard the sound of metal scraping metal: the dog had figured out it needed to move. Unhurt, it ran toward its fellows, and as the man tried to grab the passenger side door handle, Johnny reversed in earnest.
	He swung the car around, facing the man still watching from his motorcycle. The man who owned the car yelled and the dogs barked, but Johnny paid no mind as, looking directly through the biker’s helmet, he threw the car into first gear and took off spinning his wheels. 
	The guy got the idea he needed to move pretty quickly. As he took off, Johnny approached the chainlink carefully. It wouldn’t do to slam straight into it and damage the hood. He slowed down as he approached and nudged the front bumper against the fence. Slowly, the chainlink gave. Supports popped on either side of him, and the fence began to move upward in response to the insistent pressure. As it raised high enough to admit him, he slammed on the accelerator. The fence scraped the hood and roof as he passed under it. Johnny winced again. Bummer.
	He was in second gear, and third, and fourth. The man on the motorcycle was nowhere to be seen as Johnny tore up the remote road toward the highway. But he wasn’t going to take that particular turn. That would be both predictable and boring. He was headed toward a plateau he knew to be free of boulders, covered in nothing but short scrub and hard-packed dirt. He was going to put this car through its paces.
	That old bum had purchased yet another vintage with the intention of only taking it out for the Fourth of July parade. For a car like this, that constituted unforgivable neglect. This baby is capable of so much more.
	Johnny crossed the highway, traveled for another couple of miles, and took a left on a remote dirt road. It would take the tribal police too long to answer the car owner’s phone call. They were slow and overworked due to lack of funding. Johnny had plenty of time.
	Once he reached his favorite area to do tricks, he turned off and began the best part of his joy ride. He pulled donuts, slides, and even jumps off of some of the turf that jutted out a little. This car ran and worked beautifully. It took him almost no time to understand all of her quirks and her individual way of communicating her limits. He spent about twenty minutes moving the car this way and that across the expanse of earth, losing himself in the sheer joy of the adrenaline rush.
	As he pulled to a stop, he looked over toward the dirt road and saw, once again, the man on the motorcycle sitting there, watching him. 
	“What the hell, who is this guy?” Johnny muttered to himself. In a split second, feeling cocky and high on the rush of his ride, he started towards the guy again.
	The guy knew by now to move immediately. Johnny pursued, thrusting the car out onto the road, tailing the guy all the way back to the country road.
	But this was no normal motorcyclist. Instead of turning on the road, the biker launched himself right over it, onto the bumpy, dangerous land beyond.
	So he wanted to play. Johnny grinned dangerously. Fearlessly, he pounded on after the guy, who led him on a chase over the desert land, up over drifts, around boulders, launching over small valleys where water trickled in the springtime. 
	“Mad skills!” Johnny exclaimed as he chased the motorcycle over the terrain.
	And suddenly, around a bend concealed behind some brush, Johnny lost him.
	He stopped and looked around. Where was he? Weird. He looked over at the brush he’d just gone around, but the ground was too hard to show tracks, and he couldn’t see beyond the dense, dry twigs. He must be hiding in there, Johnny thought, and he drove up, down, and around the patch of brush, trying to find the motorcyclist. He even opened his car window, trying to hear the engine, but there was nothing. Not a trace from any angle.
	“I guess he’s done with me,” Johnny muttered, wheeling the window back up and heading back toward the highway. Covered in sweat, pumped full of adrenaline, he decided there was one more thing he wanted to do before ditching the car.
	As he hit the country road and headed still further from the highway he’d just crossed, he called the number on his flip phone.
	“Hey baby,” she answered after one ring.
	“Hey, meet me at the park in ten minutes?”
	“You got it babe.”
	They hung up. Ashley called herself his girlfriend. He wasn’t sure how he felt about all the hand-holding, but he supposed that as long as she continued fucking him he didn’t care very much either way.
	In eight minutes, Ashley had climbed into the passenger side of the Mustang wearing a mini skirt and low-cut tank top. “Nice,” she commented, pointedly not asking where the car had come from. Johnny took off for a location they’d fucked before. He wanted to break this baby in properly before leaving it.
	She’d known what he was after. She wasn’t wearing panties. The car rocked back and forth and the windows filled with steam. They dripped sweat onto the back seat, Ashley’s bare feet pressed against the side window, both of them panting and groaning. Just as they were reaching the height of their activity, there was a rude rap on the window.
	He turned around and Ashley lifted herself up on her elbows, trying to look over his shoulder.
	“Shit!” they shouted at the same time.
	“Please step out of the car with your hands up,” said the New Mexico state officer. 
	As they exited the car, holding their hands obediently above their heads, the officer cuffed them both as a tribal officer stood by watching solemnly. They were searched, and they took his Slim Jim and wire cutter from his pockets. Ashley only had a pack of cigarettes on her. After answering a few questions, Ashley was hauled off by the tribal officer and Johnny was thrown into the back seat of the state patrol car. 
	At the police station, they identified Johnny using his ID and took his fingerprints before throwing him into a jail cell with a bunch of other, older men, a mix of white and Navajo. Johnny eyed them warily and kept his gaze down. Several of them were glaring at him aggressively, and he didn’t want to pick any fights – not when he was already in so much trouble.
	Later that night, after dinner had been served on cold metal trays and other people had come and gone from the cell, an officer approached, calling him by name.
	“That’s me,” Johnny said.
	“You get a phone call. Come on, you’ll have to call collect,” she said briskly.
	He was ushered by her and a second officer down the hall, through a door, and into a small, private area separate from both the cells and the offices. He told the Collect machine his name, and began dialing his home phone number for it. Quickly, he stopped, hung up, and tried again, this time dialing the hone phone of his best friend.
	“Johnny?” asked Janice, his friend’s mother.
	“Hi Mrs. Cole,” he said sheepishly. “Is Mike there?”
	“Yes, but…Johnny are you in jail? What’s happened?”
	“Um…I’m in some trouble. I don’t know if there’s bail or something, but if you could just send Mike to come and talk to someone-,”
	“Johnny, why didn’t…?” she sighed. He thought she’d been about to ask why he hadn’t called his own parents and then reconsidered. “I’ll come with Mike, okay?” she said finally. 
	“Thank you so much, Mrs. Cole, I swear I can pay you back-,” 
	“We’ll figure something out, okay? Hang on, I’ll get Mike and hopefully we’ll see you there.” He’d been crossing his fingers anyway. They both knew he didn’t have the money to pay her back.
	They let Johnny out on bail, and Janice drove him to the trailer park where both families lived. He walked home from their trailer after thanking them and walked into the trailer where his younger brother and parents lived.
	It was quiet. They were watching the tiny TV propped up on the counter. They didn’t ask him where he’d been. His mother and brother kept their eyes down; his father finished what must have been his sixth beer of the night. Johnny went directly to bed without a word.
	In the end, as he was seventeen, Johnny was sentenced to time in the McKinley County Juvenile Detention Center. Ashley had refused to allow the nurse at the hospital to examine her or swab for a rape kit, and her parents had refused to press statutory charges. He supposed this was only because they were too methed out to care, but took what he could get. 
	The owner of the car wasn’t so understanding. He wanted Johnny to pay for repairs to his car and fence, and he wanted maximum jail time. Johnny had admitted his guilt, considering he’d been caught red-handed, so the judge was inclined to be slightly more lenient on jail-time. However, Johnny didn’t have the money or any collateral to use to repair the damage, which the judge deemed to be a fair request, so she increased the jail-time instead. This seemed to placate the chip-eating marshmallow. As Johnny was carted off in cuffs, he took one last sweeping glance at the courtroom. Ashley and Mike were there, Ashley tearful. His family wasn’t there at all. He wasn’t sure why he’d even looked. Perhaps some small part of him was hoping to at least see his mother. He held his friends’ gazes for a few seconds longer before turning and walking with purpose through the courtroom door.
	His cell mate was Oscar, a Chinese-American boy from Albuquerque. Oscar had been involved in a gang there, so they’d chosen not to jail him with his fellows and instead had moved him out to Gallup. As time went on, Johnny told him about Navajo culture, and Oscar began teaching him Mandarin. They both continued their schooling at the jail. They couldn’t graduate normally here, but they could earn their GEDs. Johnny wasn’t very interested, and barely scraped by with C’s and D’s in his education, until the day the man on the motorcycle appeared.
	After lunch that day, Johnny got a notice that he had a meeting with a mentor that afternoon. Curious, Johnny anticipated the meeting for the next couple of hours. It was the only thing that had broken the monotony in weeks (other than two letters from Ashley, to which he’d never responded, though he kept them under his mattress).
	Johnny waited alone in a room which had one of those two-way mirrors. He was wondering whether someone was on the other side or whether he was being recorded when a man entered and took the seat across from him. As Johnny wasn’t a violent criminal, he wasn’t cuffed, but the man didn’t seem at all concerned about this.
	“You drive well, Johnny.”
	He blinked. “I’m sorry?”
	“You drive well. I take it you only meant to joy ride? Did I waste your time with our desert game?”
	After a few seconds, Johnny realized who this man must be. It was the man on the motorcycle from his joy ride.
	“You!” he exclaimed, standing up and pointing. The man remained in his chair, looking perfectly calm and collected. Johnny’s eyes flickered to the mirror.
	“They’re not listening, but they’re watching,” he said. “Our conversation is private. Sit back down though before someone gets nervous and interrupts us.”
	Johnny sat back down slowly, breathing hard. “Who are you?” he asked. “How did you find me?”
	“My name is Joe. I’m from the academy.”
	“What academy?” Johnny could smell bullshit from something the guy was saying.
	“I’m here to offer you an educational opportunity.” Joe slid a manila envelope across the steel table.
	Johnny took it and, flicking his black eyes up to Joe occasionally to keep tabs on him, flipped through the pages. It was an offer from some special academy for troubled but gifted teens. In the process of taking this designer course, Johnny would earn his GED while also learning to perform “special tasks,” all at the cost of this academy. 
	“I’m not gifted,” Johnny said, sliding the envelope back to Joe, who didn’t make a move to take it. “I never did well in school.”
	“That’s not the kind of ‘gifted’ we’re referring to. I told you…you drive well, Johnny. We stopped by your house and saw the cars you’ve been putting together. You’re a regular mechanical Frankenstein. And, if we could only direct your talents into something constructive, you could be brilliant.”
	Johnny listened intently but suspiciously, his arms crossed, looking down his long, slightly crooked nose at the guy. Something still didn’t sit right. No one in the world was this generous. There was always a trade-off. “If I agree to go through this program of yours, what do you get in return?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.
	Joe regarded him seriously for a long moment. He was thinking hard about something. Finally, he said, “We become a job placement service once you graduate and are released from the detention center.”
	Ah, there it was: the exchange. Johnny nodded slowly. They must get paid for placing professionals in jobs. He glanced back down at the manila folder. He would turn eighteen in eight months, and he’d be released shortly afterward if he showed good behavior. He was going to need a job. And wouldn’t it be preferable to be placed straight into skilled labor which was prepared to accept his criminal record than to try and find a job at a fast food restaurant in a town that knew he’d been delinquent?
	“I’ll think about it,” Johnny said, taking the manila folder back. He knew he was going to accept the offer, but he didn’t want to seem too eager.
	A small smile crossed Joe’s face. He seemed to know the game Johnny was playing and, like the desert joy ride, he was prepared to play along. “I’ll give you a week to consider your options.” 

 

Tags: humor, depressing, confused, scary, hate,