Nine Inches (24 page)

You poor thing. It’s a sin the way they treat you.

And now she’s doing it, not even thinking, just marching up the steps, feeling strong and purposeful, reaching for the doorknob. Pulling it open. Stepping inside.
Th
e warmth and the faces.
Oh my.

Rose has never seen anything quite like this.
Th
e
fl
oor is bare. No curtains on the windows.
Th
e Chosen are seated in folding chairs in a large, otherwise empty room, the men and boys in business suits on one side, the women and girls in kerchiefs and long skirts on the other, each one more drab-looking than the next.
Th
ere are more of them than Rose realized — the room is packed, the air a bit close — and all their faces are turned in her direction, their expressions welcoming, as if they’ve been expecting her. A tall, bearded man rises and relieves her of the bag.

“It’s for the girl,” Rose whispers. “So she won’t be cold.”

“
Th
ank you.”
Th
e man is wiry and hungry-looking, his suit jacket a little short in the sleeves.

Rose’s errand is done and she knows she should be going, but the bearded man is guiding her with one hand toward an empty chair on the women’s side, as though she’s an invited guest.

“Sit,” he tells her.

Rose obeys. She feels suddenly exhausted, incapable of arguing or facing the cold outside.
Th
e woman beside her, whom Rose recognizes from the Stop & Shop, greets her with a quiet nod.
Th
e Chosen girl and her sister are sitting two rows ahead, a little to the right.
Th
e girl glances at Rose, her eyes crinkling with worry. She looks a lot better than she did yesterday, her hair freshly washed, her kerchief bright and dry. Rose smiles back, clenching and unclenching her hands to speed their thawing.

As if a secret signal’s been given, the Chosen all turn to face forward, though there’s nothing in front of them but a blank white wall. A
ft
er a moment or two, a so
ft
murmur rises in the room, a strange melodic mumbling that
fi
lls the air like background noise at a party. It doesn’t grow louder, and it doesn’t die out; it just keeps winding around and around on itself, never resolving, repeating the same uncertain notes of praise and lament. Rose closes her eyes and listens closely. Hard as she tries, she can’t quite decide if it’s a prayer or a song she’s hearing, or just a lot of people muttering to themselves. All she really knows — and it comes to her as something of a surprise — is that her own lips are moving, too, her voice blending in with everyone else’s, the words tumbling out of her like she’s known them all her life.

TH
E TEST-TAKER

THE TEXT ARRIVED LATE ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AT
the last possible minute.

Tomorrow morning,
it said.

I cursed under my breath. I’d been planning on getting drunk that night, but work was work, and Kyle expected us to be available. You’d have to have a pretty good excuse for saying no, an infectious disease or a death in the immediate family. A potential hangover wasn’t going to cut it.

I stopped by his house around
fi
ve to
fi
nd out who I was and where I was going. Kyle was a junior at MIT, but he ran his business from home, while also doing his laundry.

He was down in his basement lair, playing Call of Duty on a humongous wide-screen with two ridiculously hot sorority girls — spray tans, frosted hair, glittery Greek letters on their tank tops —
fl
anking him on the couch, watching the video-game action like they actually gave a crap what happened. I had no idea where Kyle found these girls — they didn’t look like they went to MIT — but there seemed to be a never-ending supply of them at his disposal.

“Yo, bro,” he said, glancing away from the screen for a millisecond. “Nice pants.”

“
Th
anks, man.” I was rocking my bright red skinny jeans from BR; Kyle owned the exact same pair, but they looked better on him, sleeker and more natural, like they’d been designed speci
fi
cally for his body.

“Ladies,” he said, “this is my boy Josh. Josh, meet Emily and Elise.”

Th
e girls said,
Hi, Josh,
in these bored, superior voices. I was just a high school kid to them, a primitive life-form.
Th
ey probably
fi
gured I was there to buy some weed, or maybe score a few Adderall, both of which were among the many products and services o
ff
ered by Kyle, Incorporated.
Th
ey had no way of knowing that, far from being a customer, I was actually a valued, highly compensated employee, one of a small group of trusted insiders.

Kyle handed the controller to Emily, the smaller and blonder of the pair.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “Don’t fucking get me killed.”

I followed him into the laundry room at the other end of the basement — it was where we always conducted our business — and waited while he emptied the dryer. It smelled good in there, fabric so
ft
ener and warm clean clothes. Kyle stood up and dangled a pair of panties in front of my face like a hypnotist trying to make you sleepy.
Th
ey were pink with little blue hearts.

“Elise,” he said, in answer to my unspoken question. “
Th
e ladies appreciate it when you do their laundry. It makes them feel loved and respected. Gratitude is an aphrodisiac, dude — remember that when you get to college.”

I told him I’d keep it in mind.
Th
at was how we rolled — Kyle gave me advice and I took it if I could or
fi
led it away for future reference. It had been like that ever since we’d met at the Pendleton School Summer Day Camp all those years ago, when I was a
fift
h-grader and he was a Future Leader, the most junior of the junior counselors. On the very
fi
rst day, he told me that I needed to get myself some acceptable swim trunks, because the ones I had were totally ridiculous, billowing around me like a bright green oil spill when I stepped into the water. In the years that followed, he’d contributed a steady stream of big-brotherly suggestions and helpful hints:
Dude, you need to start working out. . . . Ever think about getting yourself some contact lenses? . . . I hate to say it, bro, but your vocabulary is pitiful. . . . Don’t you think it’s time to start making some real money?

“How you doing?” Kyle tossed the panties into his mesh basket and eyeballed me up and down, the way my aunts and uncles sometimes did when they hadn’t seen me for a while. “Keeping outta trouble?”

“Pretty much. Just cruising until graduation.”

“Senior year.” He nodded with nostalgic approval, one eye partially obscured by his
fl
oppy hair. He had recently started wearing oversize hipster glasses that made his sharp, handsome features look even more delicate than usual. “I hope you’re getting your dick sucked.
Th
at’s what the sophomore bitches are for, right?”

I felt myself blushing and tried to will the blood away from my face. Despite my upperclassman status, I was not getting my dick sucked; as a matter of fact, I wasn’t getting much of anything except a bunch of frustratingly mixed signals from Sarabeth Coen-Brunner, this artsy junior on whom I was nursing a severe unrequited crush that kept me awake at night, not that that was the sort of update I was going to share with Kyle.

“I’m doing all right,” I assured him.

“
Th
at’s my boy.” He ru
ffl
ed my hair like I was still in middle school. “You worked hard. Now it’s time to get paid, am I right?”

“Absolutely.”

Th
at was it for the small talk. He stood on his tiptoes and retrieved a lumpy manila envelope from a shelf above the washing machine, otherwise occupied by a jug of detergent and a box of dryer sheets.

“
Th
anks for bailing me out,” he said as he pressed the envelope into my hand. “
Th
ings got a little complicated this time around. I had to do some big-time juggling to make it work.”

“No problem.”

“Get a good night’s sleep, yo.” He held out his
fi
st and I gave it a bump. “And don’t forget to sharpen your pencils.”

•••

I WAITED
until I got home to open the envelope. It contained a stack of crisp twenties — my usual fee of
fi
ve hundred dollars — along with an admission ticket for tomorrow’s test, a fake photo ID, and directions to the testing center. It was all pretty routine, except for the ID, which I couldn’t stop staring at.

I’d taken the SATs seven times so far, twice for myself, and
fi
ve times for Kyle’s clients. Up to now, the kids I’d impersonated had all been strangers from nearby towns.
Th
eir names had meant nothing to me, and their bogus school IDs — accurate though they may have been — always struck me as cheap and phony, props in a half-assed game of make-believe.

Th
is time, though, the ID came from my own school, Greenwood High. It looked totally o
ffi
cial, a dead ringer for the one I carried in my backpack. It even had the same un
fl
attering picture of me — a pudgy nerd with a pained smile and a touch of bedhead — plastered above the bar code.
Th
e only di
ff
erence was the name beside the photo:
Jacob T. Harlowe.
Th
at was the thing I couldn’t stop staring at.

Jake Harlowe was in my AP psych class. He was a junior jock, a football and lacrosse star, one of those popular, good-looking kids everybody knows and likes.
Th
e Harlowes were Greenwood royalty; his older brother, Scott, had been an all-county quarterback a couple of years ago — Scott had since gone on to Amherst, where the family had some kind of crazy legacy,
fi
ve generations or whatever — and Jake had stepped right into his shoes, another square-jawed scholar-athlete, humble and easygoing, varsity starter in his sophomore year.

For a couple of minutes, I thought about calling Kyle and trying to back out, maybe asking him to switch me with someone else, but I knew it was hopeless. He wouldn’t have had time to make the new IDs and wouldn’t have said yes even if he did. Kyle wasn’t that kind of boss. And besides, I wouldn’t have known what to tell him, how to articulate my misgivings about this particular assignment.

It wasn’t that I was worried about getting caught.
Th
e test was being administered at a private school about a half hour away, where I didn’t expect to run into anyone I knew. I’d never tested there before — Kyle tried to avoid sending us to the same place twice — and I couldn’t imagine that the proctors would know Jake Harlowe or have any reason to suspect that I wasn’t him. All they ever did was glance at the ID and make sure it matched the name on the admission ticket.

And it wasn’t like I’d come down with a sudden attack of conscience, either. I honestly didn’t mind cheating for strangers. If somebody wanted to pay me to help them get into a good college, I didn’t see any problem with that. It wasn’t all that di
ff
erent from hiring an expensive tutor, or getting a doctor to diagnose a learning disability so you could buy yourself some extra time.
Th
at was just the way system worked. If you had the money, you got special treatment.

My only problem was the client. Jake Harlowe didn’t seem like the kind of kid who needed to cheat. I always
fi
gured that everything came easily to him, the grades as well as the girls and the games, and it troubled me to discover that this wasn’t true. I felt like I’d been peering through his bedroom window and seen something I shouldn’t have, a shameful secret I wished he’d kept to himself.

•••

WHEN KYLE
hired me, I’d agreed to follow a strict code of professional conduct. It made sense: people were paying us good money to provide a service, and we owed it to them to ful
fi
ll our mission with the highest level of competence and discretion.

You will be on time,
Kyle had instructed me, reading straight from the rule book.
You will have proper documentation on hand, along with an approved calculator and several sharpened Number Two pencils. You will dress appropriately and never behave in such a way as to draw unnecessary attention from the proctors or your fellow test-takers. Misconduct of any sort is punishable by
fi
ne and/or dismissal.

Kyle’s code extended beyond the test day into the rest of our lives. We were not to
fl
ash our cash or make extravagant purchases or say anything that might lead others to suspect that we had an illicit source of income. And we were never,
ever,
to mention Kyle’s name or the services he provided to anyone, under any circumstances. If someone we knew was struggling with the SATs, or thinking about hiring a tutor, our job was to pass this information up the chain to Kyle — nothing more, nothing less. He would investigate the lead, and if he determined that the individual was a potential client, he would reach out on his own terms. I had no idea how he contacted them or how he arranged the payment.
Th
ere were other mysteries as well: I didn’t know how many other test-takers he employed, what he charged for his services, or even if there was a bigger boss above him, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking, because this sort of information was only dispensed on a need-to-know basis.
Th
ese operational safeguards had been put in place for everyone’s bene
fi
t, employees and clients alike.
Th
e less any individual knew, the less risk of exposure there was for everybody else.