The Chosen

By Ray Corbitt

A great experiment: A prestigious group of schools around the country are training smart children from an early age to lead the country back to a country for all the people, not just the powerful, rich few. Some of the children come from good homes and some have been taken from abusive parents or kidnapped at an early age and trained to be the future leaders of the world. Will it work?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781532005589

Ray Corbitt

RAY CORBITT LIVES in LaBelle, Florida. She is the winner of the prestigious 2015 CBJ Playwright Award for Let’s Dance, and author of The Right Thing to Do and two children’s books. Ray Corbitt grew up as an Air Force brat traveling the world with her father. She has worked in the medical field as well as in law enforcement.

Book preview

Chapter 1

DAVID SAT NEXT to the man in the black Lexus, watching as children played basketball in the fenced-in park across the street. It was late afternoon in a rundown section of New York City. The rusted basketball hoop had no net, and the cracked cement below it was littered with empty beer cans in old paper bags, fast food wrappers, and discarded drug paraphilia. The two men were watching one small boy in particular. The child played in a small pile of dirt outside the rundown apartment building next door to the fenced-in park where the neighborhood basketball game was taking place. David had been watching the boy for over two weeks.

The boy was content to build a sand castle of dirt by himself, but he looked around often at any sound, like a wild animal would, ready to run. The other children in the park were older and ignored the small boy. When it started getting dark and all the other children started going home, the young boy left the dirt pile and went into the rundown apartment building alone.

What do you think? David asked.

I think so. The man answered.

* * * *

Jared was almost six years old, alone, and hungry. His mom was out working. He hadn’t started school yet, even though the school people had threatened his mother twice about it. He spent his days and nights mostly alone, watching television. During the day when his mother was sleeping, he watched the cars go by outside the apartment and drew pictures with paper and pens his mother gave him or played with his action figure of superman. She got pens and paper for him from the hotels she stayed in. He was very quiet so that he wouldn’t wake her up during the day.

Jared’s mother, who worked all night Tuesday through Sunday, had left for work a couple of hours ago. It was getting dark now, and he knew his mother probably wouldn’t be home until the next morning. Hopefully she wouldn’t come back during the night and bring home a friend. His mother’s friends were not always nice to Jared, and his mother said he put a damper on the mood when her friends saw him.

They had signals when she brought home a friend: she would knock five knocks and tell the friend it was to make sure her roommate wasn’t home yet. When Jared heard the five knocks he ran and hid in the closet and slept on the floor. When he heard the key in the door and her voice, he was usually hidden from sight with the door slightly cracked with an old paperback book of his mother’s so he wouldn’t get locked inside. They had a second signal in case he didn’t hear the first one and before the door opened completely: she always said, Don’t mind the mess; my roommate is a very messy person, and I haven’t had time to clean up the place. Jared was a light sleeper and always heard the signals. He would stay hidden in the closet until his mother gave him the all clear the next morning. She told him she pretended to have a roommate so her friends wouldn’t stay longer than the night.

There was nothing to eat in the small one room apartment. Jared had eaten the catsup and mayonnaise from the jars in the small refrigerator. He had rinsed them out with water and drank the liquid days ago. He had tried borrowing food from the neighbors, but they were poor too and tired of his constant begging. Lately they just refused to answer his knock. He was sad he couldn’t check out the garbage bin behind the deli down the street tonight. They threw out leftovers from the customers who didn’t finish all their dinner. A complete half of a double-decker ham on rye was a treat a couple days ago, once he scraped off the old coffee grounds that were on it. He was going to save part of it for the next day, but it was gone before he realized it. He was so hungry. He would have to lay low a couple of days before he checked it out again. Last night he had found a piece of a Ruben sandwich and started to eat it when the owner came out and caught him. The deli owner was a mean man and had run him off with a broom. He’d hit Jared with the broom handle very hard, and Jared had a bruised shoulder to show for it. He would have to stay away a couple of days and wait until the owner left for the night to try getting in the garbage there again.

His mother was off on Monday nights and if the weather was nice she would take him to a pizza stand down the road as it had beer or she would order in a pizza for him and do a line of cocaine for her supper. Last night was not a Monday. She had only brought home one peppermint breath mint and an individual serving of mustard from the night before. Jared had found them in the bottom of her purse and wiped the fuzzy stuff off the mint before putting it in his mouth. He’d slowly chewed it early that morning and saved the pack of mustard for later in the afternoon, sucking every bit he could from the tiny package He drank lots of water to help him feel not as hungry.

He knew better than to ask for her to bring food home. She would get mad and say he made her feel like a bad mother. She usually would go buy a loaf of bread and some peanut butter and then complain he was eating her out of house and home. He could make the loaf of bread and small jar of peanut butter last almost two weeks. She didn’t eat much food, as she spent most of her money on cocaine, and she forgot many times that he might be hungry.

Most of the time he managed with the garbage in the neighborhood and the deli down the street. Or sometimes borrowing from the neighbors.

His mother had given him a superman figure a few months ago. It wasn’t Christmas or his birthday, both of which she had forgotten this year but he was happy to have something to play with. It was Jared’s only companion while his mother was working or sleeping. Jared told the toy figurine that he was so hungry, his heart hurt, but he knew the superman figure couldn’t do anything about it.

He had just started to turn on the television when a knock came at the door. Jared became suddenly very alert. It wasn’t his mother’s knock. Jared and his mother had very few people come to the apartment. Salesmen trying to sell things they didn’t want, social workers and policemen were the only other visitors he could think of and none of them were good visitors and none were allowed into the apartment. The knock came again. He went to the door and quietly pulled a kitchen chair to the peephole. When he climbed up and looked out, he saw a man with a pizza box standing outside. Jared’s mouth watered and his arms got goose bumps. He could smell the cheese and the yeast bread smell of the thin-crust, New York–style pizza through the front door.

Who is it? Jared said in his lowest, gruffest five-year-old voice.

Pizza delivery, the man said. It’s already paid for, including my tip. Leeta Moore ordered it.

Leeta Moore was Jared’s mother. Jared’s eyes lit up, and he smiled. She must have made some real good money tonight, he thought. The pizza box opened and Jared saw a large cheese pizza inside.

Is this her address? the man who introduced himself as David asked.

She hasn’t forgotten me after all, Jared thought as he pulled the chair back and opened the door.

Chapter 2

JARED LISTENED TO the questions from his school advisor and thought long and hard before he answered.

This is my last quarter, and I want to take quantum physics II, political science III, accounting II, German III, and philosophy III, please. It was a heavy workload for the last quarter of his senior year in high school, as all these courses were college courses already. Jared knew it would further his goals in life and he could play all summer after he had finished high school. His private school went all year long, with one week at Thanksgiving, one at Christmas and Easter, and two weeks in the summer. They also had Veterans Day, Labor Day, Memorial Day, and Fourth of July days off. There were no snow days or teacher work days, as they lived on campus. It was a private school where classes started at eight o’clock sharp in the morning and went to four o’clock in the afternoon with a 30 minute lunch break. Six weeks a year they were out of school and Jared had been in this school for the last seven years.

On Saturdays and Sundays the students either went home for the weekend or to museums to study art, go to concerts, and plays the instructors felt they should see to make them more rounded adults, or they volunteered at the local food bank or soup kitchen. He loved The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables, as well as most of Shakespeare’s plays. He liked working in the food bank helping those in need and at the soup kitchen giving food to the poor. Many had the same look of hunger on their faces he remembered as a small child.

Jared also had to take dance classes and learn to play an instrument. He was not a fan of ballroom dancing, but he had mastered it. He learned to read music and play the piano fairly well also, but it was not his favorite thing to do by any stretch of the imagination. He knew this was all a part of the grooming for his future, and so far he mastered all they had put in front of him. This summer he would have two and a half months to play before starting college. He envisioned sleeping until noon and seeing sunsets, lying on every beach on the East Coast. He would eat whatever he wanted and even kiss a few girls.

Jared was one of ten students in his dormitory in a school with three other dormitories just like his. There were only forty students in his school. There were ten guys and ten girls in his age range of fourteen to sixteen. There were also two other dorms for eleven- to thirteen-year-olds. He was one of the oldest at almost sixteen years of age. It was a fairly new school and his class would be the first graduating class.

Jared was five foot eleven inches, with big, light blue eyes, slightly wavy dark blond hair, and skin the color of light brown sugar. He thought his parents were the best. They lived only a few hours away in a small town just outside Syracuse, New York.

The private school where Jared lived, except holidays and some weekends, was just outside of New York City. He knew his parents loved him, and he strived to be what he knew he was destined to be. These last five courses would further that goal. He was almost sixteen and would be going to college in the fall; this was something he and his parents planned carefully and were very proud and excited about. He would go to Harvard on a full academic scholarship in September.

Jared had been brought up learning about all religions. He realized all of the religions taught right from wrong, and there were always consequences for your actions. He understood the big bang theory but felt something bigger must have caused the big bang. He felt humans were put on the earth to take care of it. He believed he was a descendant of the Prophet Abraham. His parents raised him as a Muslim, but American style, where killing was not acceptable under any circumstances. He knew the history of the Bible, the Torah, the Koran and other Holy books from different religions, as he had read them in his studies in school. He had also taken a course on atheism. The school stressed tolerance of all religions and the non-religions as a way of uniting the country, through understanding and tolerance.

Jared’s parents were going to move with him to Boston to a condo near the school. They would live there for the first two years of his college classes. Having them around all the time might take some getting used to, after being in school and growing up mainly in a dormitory since the age of nine. He loved them and respected them and knew they were doing this to help him in his future and he would