When you’d first done it, your family didn't know you’d had applied to Ellingham at all.

For almost a century, the school had been home to creative geniuses, radical thinkers, and innovators.

Ellingham had no application, no list of requirements, no instructions other than; "If you would like to be considered for Ellingham Academy, please get in touch."

That was it.

One simple sentence that drove every overachieving student frantic. What did they want? What were they looking for?

This was like a riddle from a fantasy story or fairy tale-something the wizard makes you do before you are allowed into the Cave of Secrets. Applications were supposed to be rigid lists of requirements and test scores and essays and recommendations and maybe a blood sample and a few bars from a popular musical.

Not Ellingham. Just knock on the door. Just knock on the door in the special, correct way they would not describe.

You just had to get in touch with something. They looked for a spark. If they saw such a spark in you, you could be one of the fifty students they took each year. The program was only two years long, just the junior and senior years of high school. There were no tuition fees.

If you got in, it was free. You just had to get in.

The coach juddered as it turned off the highway, onto a rockier, smaller road dotted with stores and farms and signs for skiing, glassblowing, and maple syrup candy. Then there were fewer buildings and more stretches of farmland with nothing but old red trucks and the occasional horse.

The thick woods only get thicker as you travel from the interstate highway into the heart of the mountains.

The trees reached upwards like the walls of a fortress enclosing the road. Their crowns met in the middle and formed a dense green ceiling miles wide. Up and up into the woods. Out of nowhere, the coach made a sharp turn into an opening in the trees.

A small maroon sign with gold letters: the Ellingham Academy entrance.