Con Academy (2 page)

I nod, staring down at my meal. “My mom left the island to come to the States when she was a teenager, but she promised her mother she'd get medical training and go back—to help where she could. By the time she finished med school, her mom had passed away.” I glance up, just for a second. “I never knew her.”

“What about your parents?” Andrea asks. “Were they . . . ?”

I look back down at my plate. “There was an accident. A small plane—they were flying antibiotics to a children's orphanage on a nearby island, but the weather conditions weren't ideal. They knew the risks—”

My voice breaks off and I push my chair back and stand up.

“I'm sorry,” I say, and my voice sounds thick and awkward. “This is stupid. You don't even know me and here I am—”

“Will.” Andrea reaches out and takes my hand, holding on. Her fingers feel different from when we shook hands—warmer somehow, and soft. “Just chill, okay?”

“It's just . . .” I sink back down into my seat. “Everybody here has been so nice. And I've never been anywhere like this before.” I take in a breath. “It feels unreal. Like a dream.”

Andrea just watches me with that same quiet, inscrutable interest. “When you were in class today, you kept looking over your shoulder. Why?”

“I was looking for a map,” I say. “I just . . . I thought maybe I could at least show everybody where I came from. I mean”—I shake my head—“I know it was English Lit and not Geography, but I thought it would be cool if I could at least point out how far away Ebeye is from . . . all of this.”

Andrea is still holding on to my hand, and her voice is soft now too.

“I've got a map in my room,” she says.

My dorm is closer, so we end up walking over there instead. As a late transfer student, I've got my own little single at the end of the first floor of Cardiff Hall, one of the oldest dorms on campus. According to the housing brochure, it was built in the early 1900s in the Arts and Crafts style, all oak and dyed leather, with Prairie School bronze sconces on the walls and Gustav Stickley chairs in the lobby. Old money, and lots of it.

“They put you on the first floor?” Andrea asks.

“I don't like heights.”

We follow the hallway to my room, which I unlock with the heavy brass key that the housing officer gave me earlier today with an air of weighty solemnity.

“I haven't really had a chance to unpack,” I say apologetically as we step inside. The room still feels vacant, with just a few framed photos on the otherwise empty desk. Andrea stands there looking at them, picking up a faded beach photograph of a happy couple standing next to a palm tree with a two-year-old boy between them.

“Your folks?” she asks.

“Uh-huh.”

“Your mom's so young.” She holds on to the photo for a long moment before putting it back. “They look happy.”

“We were.”

“You must miss them.”

I turn and look out the window. It's dark out now, and I can hear the wind off the ocean, rustling through the leaves. A lonely, restless sound.

“I was going to show you this,” I say, opening my backpack and unzipping an inside pocket to pull out a battered old map so I can point to the tiny flyspeck of land in the middle of the Pacific. “Here—this is me.”

Andrea comes up behind where I'm standing and reaches around past me to the map, and all of a sudden I'm acutely aware of the closeness of her body heat as her red fingertip traces its way across all that endless blue.

“Here?” she says.

I nod.

“It's so tiny.”

“Just a speck on the map.”

“Like it's hardly there at all,” she says.

There's nothing to say to that, so I just stand with my head cocked slightly toward the window, waiting to see what's going to happen next.

“Will?”

I turn to glance at her. “Yeah?”

“Here's the thing.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Your whole life story . . . ?”

“Yes?”

“I don't buy a word of it.”

For a moment, my world goes pin-drop silent. Somewhere, a clock ticks. I stare at her, blinking. “What?”

“I don't think you've ever seen
South Pacific,
let alone actually lived there.” She's smiling widely now, grabbing hold of my hand as she glances back at the framed photo on my desk. “And if this picture was taken anywhere besides Florida, I'll tear it out of the frame and eat it.”

“Wait,” I say, frowning. “I don't understand.”

“Oh,” she says, “I'm pretty sure you do.”

“But—”

“I admit,” she says, “you had me going at first. It takes a lot of guts to stand at the front of the class wearing those clothes . . . and the whole atomic-testing thing was a nice touch. You've got the routine down, I'll give you that.”

“Hold on,” I say. “You actually think . . . I'm making all this up?” Now I'm drawing my hand away from hers, stepping back fast enough that the map falls to the floor between us, where it lands half underneath the radiator. “You think I somehow convinced the admissions board to let me into this school?”

“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.”

S
O
I
GET OUT MY REFURBISHED
M
AC
B
OOK
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.”

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?”

“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.