Con Academy Page 2

  “Not just the admissions board,” she says, and she’s still smiling. “I think you’ve got everybody fooled.” She pauses, and her eyes shimmer just a little, deep inside the pupils. “Well. Almost everyone.”

  “The people from my village . . .” I say, lowering my gaze. “They warned me that when I came here, there would be those who wouldn’t understand.”

  “Oh, please,” she says, “give it a rest, okay?”

  And she just stands there in front of me, arms crossed, not saying anything, just waiting, until I finally let out a deep breath. It feels like I’ve been holding it inside for a very long time, and once I’m completely deflated, I realize that I’ve sat down on the floor of the room.

  “Florida?” I say. “Seriously, you recognized that as Florida?”

  “Fort Lauderdale, I’m guessing,” Andrea says. “And that’s just the beginning.”

  Two

  SO I GET OUT MY REFURBISHED MACBOOK and tell her the truth.

  It takes twenty minutes for me to show her how I hacked into the admissions board’s system to fabricate my transcripts and transfer records. Another ten minutes to unzip the hidden lining of my backpack and pull out forged letters of recommendation and income tax forms with the fake notarization stamps and official seals that I hand-stained with Earl Grey tea bags to get the exact right shade of brown. Throughout it all she sits on the edge of my bed, holding the documents up to the light, inspecting the markings and signatures.

  “This . . . is . . . unbelievable,” she says, and looks at me with what I’d like to think is newfound fascination, although it’s probably just a species of shock that medical science hasn’t classified yet. “I mean, was any of what you told me true?”

  “Well . . .” I have to stop and think about it. “My first name really is William,” I say, pointing at one of the forms. “See?”

  “Anything else?”

  “I was telling the truth about never having been anywhere like this before,” I say. “We’re a long way from the South Ward of Trenton, New Jersey, that’s for sure. But everything else I told you”—I nod at the paperwork and the laptop—“was pretty much, you know . . . ”

  “A big fat lie,” she says, like she still can’t wrap her head around it.

  I shrug. “I was going to say easy, but yeah.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “This is the third school I’ve gone to.” The first two—Horace Mann and Exeter—ended badly, when some inconsistencies in my record were discovered by a sharp-eyed admissions officer, and I’ve since stepped up my game.

  “Why?” Andrea asks.

  “Why?” Now I’m confused. “As in, why would anyone want to attend a private academy with its own airstrip and private jet?”

  “It’s a helipad,” she says. “And that’s not the point.”

  “Okay, maybe you haven’t taken a look around you lately? This place is Valhalla. It’s the hall of the gods.”

  “I know what Valhalla is, thanks.”

  “My point is, even if you guys didn’t have a model stock-trading floor so students could learn about the commodity market, it’s totally obvious that this is where winners are born and bred. All I did was reinvent myself to fit in. It’s the American way.”

  “Lying about who you are?”

  “Semantics,” I tell her. “You mean to tell me your great-great-grandparents didn’t change their names at Ellis Island?” I hold up my hands. “Oh, wait, your great-great-grandparents probably owned Ellis Island . . .”

  “My ancestors . . .” she starts, and her voice trails away. “Again, that’s not the point. What you did is different.”

  “How?”

  Andrea changes her approach. “What about your parents? Your real parents, I mean. What do they think about all of this?”

  “Let’s just say . . .” I glance at the framed photo of the three of us on the desk. “When it comes to family, sometimes the myth is better.”

  And to my surprise, she nods as if that makes some kind of sense to her. “I’m assuming you’ve got some kind of long-range plan, at least?”

  “Absolutely,” I say. “As rich and ambitious as your fellow classmates are, some part of them is dying to help a poor, disenfranchised missionary kid from the Pacific Islands find his way in the big, scary world. Which is why, by winter break, one of them is going to invite me to spend the holidays with his family in Davos, or St. Barts, to show off to Mummy and Daddy how he’s learning to help those less fortunate than him. And by next summer, I’ll practically have been adopted into the family. I’ll do a summer internship at somebody’s law office, maybe a clerkship on Capitol Hill. A year from now I’ll be applying to Harvard with everybody else. After that, law school or business school, and a job at one of the white shoe firms in Manhattan. Hello, Fortune Five Hundred.”

  “Impressive,” she says. “You’ve really got us all figured out, don’t you?”

  I shrug. “If there’s one thing more reliable than greed, it’s pity.”

  “What is that, your family motto or something?”

  “Hey, I’m a realist.”

  “And how old are you, again? Forty?”

  “Look,” I say, “if I can help tomorrow’s captains of industry sleep soundly at night with their white liberal guilt, then I call it a win.”

  “Meanwhile, you’ve got no sense of guilt whatsoever . . . ?”

  “Why should I? I’m not hurting anybody.”

  She’s just looking at me, and I can’t read her expression anymore.

  “Okay.” I let out a sigh. “If you’re going to rat me out, I’d appreciate a little advance notice so I can pack my stuff. I mean, this is a great school and everything, but it’s not worth getting sent to juvenile detention over.”

  “Will?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Relax,” she says, and puts her hands on my shoulders. “You’re just about the most interesting thing that’s happened to this place in sixty years. I’m not going to rat you out.”

  I feel the way she’s holding on to my shoulders and realize she’s right. Things around here just got a lot more interesting. “So I hear there’s a Homecoming dance coming up in a couple of weeks?”

  Andrea doesn’t say anything at first, just slips me a smile in return as she turns and starts toward the door.

  “One step at a time,” she says. “Meanwhile”—she pauses to take one last look at the framed photo of the happy family on my desk—“your secret’s safe with me.”

  Three

  I’M TOTALLY ASLEEP, BURIED UNDER THREE LAYERS OF BLANKETS, when a fist pounding on the door shoots me fifty stories straight up into stark reality. It’s late, or really early—I can’t tell. The glowing blue numerals next to my head read 1:11.

  “Wake up, Mr. Humbert,” a harsh voice orders from out in the hall. “Open the door. Right now.”

  I sit up, kicking off the blankets, and swing my legs around, still half asleep and dreaming of room service at the Ritz-Carlton. The bare wooden floorboards are ice-cold beneath my feet. By the time I’m standing up, shoving my toes into my slippers, whoever’s knocking has already got a key rattling the lock, and the lights suddenly blaze on, making me squint at the blue-uniformed figure barging toward me.

  Things go from bad to horrible without so much as a detour in the direction of worse. The tall bald guy in front looks like a cop, but then I realize he’s campus security, followed by a distinguished man with a trimmed beard and a rich burgundy bathrobe with the Connaughton insignia emblazoned on the breast. Something about his pinched, sophisticated face makes him look more infuriated than the security guard, if that’s even possible.

  “Get up, Mr. Humbert,” the distinguished man snaps. “Pack your things. You’re leaving Connaughton. Tonight.”

  “Hold on,” I say. “What’s going on?” Maybe if I blink my eyes fast enough, I can blame this whole thing on a misdiagnosed seizure disorder. “Who’s Mr. Humbert, and who are you?”

&nb
sp; “I’m Dr. Melville,” he says. “I’m the head of the school here, which I thought you might have realized by now. And this is what’s going on.”

  He thrusts in my face a folder with a profile sheet clipped to the top, and I see just enough of it to recognize my own photograph staring back at me. The picture is two years old, the most recent one that the New Jersey Department of Human Services has access to—not my best angle. The backwards Yankees cap and surly you’re-not-the-boss-of-me smirk don’t help. “I assume this looks familiar?” Dr. Melville sneers.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I got an angry call from a headmaster down in New York, at the institution that you listed as your last school. Your transcript papers came back. Nobody has ever heard of Will Shea. But the State of New Jersey knows all about Billy Humbert.” Dr. Melville points beyond the window. “There’s a car waiting for you outside.”

  “Get packing,” the security guard orders. It’s his one line in this poor excuse for a crisis, and he delivers it with disgruntled gusto.

  “Okay. Just”—I glance around the room—“give me a second to get dressed, okay?”

  “You’ve got two minutes.”

  I nod and shut the door after them, turning back to the window.

  This is why I always get a room on the first floor.

  Ninety seconds later, I’m sprinting across campus in my bedroom slippers, making for the main gate at a dead run with all my earthly belongings in a backpack flapping against my shoulders. At least there’s a full moon to keep me from crashing into the trees.

  I don’t recommend running cross-country in slippers, especially not in the freezing cold of late October, when your toes go numb first. Twice I trip over tree roots and once almost collide with a giant statue of the founder of the school, Lancelot Connaughton himself, one hand extended boldly toward the future. By the time I get across the lacrosse field, reach the gate, and toss my backpack over, I’ve got so many twigs and branches stuck to my legs that I’m wearing my own forest camouflage, which actually proves handy when the sidelight of the campus security SUV waiting outside the gate swings around and hits the ground just in front of me.

  I lie there on my stomach with my heart pounding in my chest. My lungs feel as if a pair of cackling pyromaniac twins are setting off Roman candles inside them. Time has now officially stopped. Then, approximately one eternity later, the headlights finally drift away, and I pick myself up and brush myself off, slipping into the woods alongside the road that runs toward town.

  After I’m sure the coast is clear, I stumble out of the trees and onto the pavement, where the walking is easier, or at least doable. It’s a six-mile trek to town, but I can make it on adrenaline alone. I can probably scrape together the cash for the next bus back to Trenton, and by the time I arrive, I should have some kind of plan.

  I hope.

  I’ve been walking for a half hour when a sports car comes flying around a curve, barreling straight at me, tires screeching to a halt less than a foot away from my shins. It’s a foreign job, some kind of low-slung coupe with one headlight out, and the driver who stumbles out of it looks like he’s got only one functional headlight himself. For a second he just stands there in the middle of the road with his tie yanked down and his shirttails hanging below his sweater vest, blinking at me with the bleary, slack-jawed disbelief of a man whose ventricles are currently pumping more Glenfiddich than blood.

  “Who . . . ?” he manages, in a whiskey-fueled slur, and I realize who it is. “Shea?”

  “Mr. Bodkins?”

  “What . . .” My now former English teacher leans a little against the side of the car, peering at me through narrow eyes. “What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”

  “I was . . .” I realize that he doesn’t know anything about what happened and I’m free to extrapolate at will, as it were. Not that it matters now. “I was headed into town.”

  “Now?”

  “I need to get to the bus station. There’s been an accident back on the island, and I need to get home as soon as I can.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “The headmaster woke me up in the middle of the night.” In the midst of another massive lie, a little truth trickles through my system like a cool sip of water. “I had to leave right away.” More truth—this stuff could get addictive. “There wasn’t a moment to lose.”

  “So you’re walking?” Mr. Bodkins slides a little down the hood of the car, catches himself, and stands upright again. “You need a lift?”

  I hesitate, wondering if I should entrust my life to a man who looks like he’s spent the last four hours marinating himself in single-malt scotch in one of the town’s three taverns, and decide I don’t have much choice. It’s cold and my legs already feel like overcooked rotini.

  I climb in.

  Five minutes later we’re careening through the countryside, flying past maples and stone fences at eighty-five miles an hour like Robert Frost on speed. The inside of Mr. Bodkins’s car reeks of cigarettes and scotch, and there are great swollen drifts of uncorrected English themes piled on the back seat, where they spill and tilt with every twist and turn. Driving this fast seems to have sobered Mr. Bodkins up considerably, and he handles the vehicle with what used to be called aplomb, a Camel Light clamped between his teeth and both hands locked on the wheel. Somewhere inside the glowing dashboard, in stark defiance of all this automotive chaos, Miles Davis is finding his way, softly and mournfully, through “’Round Midnight.”

  “Too bad you have to leave so soon,” Mr. Bodkins says, the cigarette twitching between his teeth, and he turns to glance at me. “You are coming back, aren’t you, Mr. Shea?”

  “I don’t know.” Right now I’m just hoping to survive the trip to town. I’m gripping my seat belt with my backpack tucked between my knees and praying that the road stays straight in front of us, or at least unobstructed by wildlife. If Bambi wanders out in front of the car while we’re driving at this velocity, there won’t be much left of him but a venison-flavored grease spot.

  “We don’t get many scholarship students,” Mr. Bodkins says. “Besides Andrea, you might be our only one.”

  I sit up and look over at him. “What did you just say?”

  “Andrea Dufresne—you remember her from English Lit.” His hand fumbles in the dark for a bottle, and then, realizing that I’m watching, he takes the stick shift instead and changes gears. “Dark-haired girl? Kind of pasty? Looks like she sleeps in a coffin?”

  “What about her?”

  “She came here on a scholarship too, just like you.”

  I’m still looking at him. Suddenly I have forgotten all about my seat belt and my backpack and the road in front of us. “Really.”

  “Oh yeah. Kind of a similar story to yours, actually. She’s an orphan, technically a ward of the state. Her parents were U.S. foreign aid workers in some poor country in the Balkans, killed by friendly fire, I think . . .” Mr. Bodkins shakes his head, as if there are a couple loose facts rattling around inside his skull like Legos and he is trying to get them to attach together. “I can’t remember the name of the country now. She wrote a whole paper about it last year. Gave her a B-plus on it. Solid work.”

  “And how long has she been here?”

  “Came in as a sophomore. Made a lot of friends already, though.”

  “I bet she has,” I say.

  Mr. Bodkins must have noticed the slight change in my tone, because he turns to look at me. “Are you all right, Will?”

  “Can we turn around?” I say. “Back to Connaughton?”

  “I thought you had to fly home as soon as possible.”

  “I do.” I just nod, staring out the windshield into the night. “But there’s something back there that I need to take care of first.”

  Four

  WHEN ANDREA STEPS OUT OF THE BATHROOM AT seven a.m. in a pink fluffy bathrobe and flip-flops with her bucket of toiletries in hand, I
’m standing there, leaning against the opposite wall. For a guy who has been up all night and is still wearing the same clothes, I’m feeling surprisingly composed. Spiffy, even.

  “How was your shower?” I ask. “I hear the water pressure here is amazing.”

  “Will?” To her credit, she doesn’t show more than a flicker of surprise. It’s there, and just like that, it’s gone, a magic trick of perfect self-control. She even manages a crooked little smile. “What are you doing here?”

  “What, you mean as opposed to being driven away in the back seat of a campus security vehicle?” I shake my head. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Bravo,” I say, giving her a polite little golf clap, keeping it as quiet as possible. It’s early, and most of her fellow residents haven’t emerged from their rooms yet. We’ve got the hallway to ourselves, which was how I’d hoped it would be. “And here I thought I was a pro.”

  She makes a little show of glancing up and down the hall. “You know,” she says, lowering her voice to the range of hushed confidentiality, “you really shouldn’t be here. This is an all-female dorm. It’s locked for a reason.”

  “Yeah, well. I found an open window in the laundry room.”

  “You could get in trouble just for being here.”

  “So now all of a sudden you’re a stickler for rules?” I take a step toward her, just to see if she’ll retreat, but she stands her ground. “That’s really fascinating, considering you’ve been breaking them yourself for the past year.”

  Andrea just looks at me. She’s not smiling anymore. In fact, I think I see a slight crease of a frown on her forehead. “Will, are you okay? Maybe you hit your head crawling through that window or something.”

  “You know,” I say, “it’s no wonder you were able to pick up on my game so quickly. You’ve been running one of your own for the past year. That’s why you couldn’t wait to get me out of here, so I wouldn’t horn in on your action.” I shake my head, and the smile on my face is one of genuine admiration. “What a colossal idiot I was, thinking that I could somehow con you.”