The Believer's Daugher - [A Treadwell Academy - 02]

by Caitlyn Duffy

  “James Santangello, 47, was arrested today after informing top executives at Santangello Investment Securities that the financial operation was a scam. For over ten years, the Wall Street hot shot reportedly paid returns to certain top tier investors out of principal received from lesser investors. Federal investigators are now exploring the extent of Santangello’s Ponzi scheme, suspecting it to be one of the largest in U.S. history. Santangello’s investors over the past decade have included Hollywood producers and movie stars, politicians and charitable organizations.”

  I held my breath as I read. I knew very little about what Juliette’s father did for a living but she had mentioned that he ran his own investment firm. All of Juliette’s older cousins interned there, and her father was very, very successful.

  This was major news. This was front-page-of-The-New-York-Times kind of news. And because my own father’s name sometimes made headlines – only never before for negative reasons – I could sympathize with Juliette’s shame and anger. Her dad was being accused of taking money from charities that operated orphanages and soup kitchens. The NY Post had printed a full list of all of his personal international properties and their values for the full disgusting impact of his greed, including the ten-million dollar mansion in which Juliette and her sister had grown up on Long Island. His acts were despicable and worst of all, he was not denying any of them. The article suggested that two lower-level secretaries who worked for Juliette’s father had uncovered the shady arithmetic and had contacted the SEC months ago; and a secret investigation had been conducted.

  The Colgate dining hall was buzzing with malicious gossip that night. I filled my tray with usual Sunday night dinner items, fried chicken and a buttery biscuit with gravy, and took my seat with Giovanna Pasquasi and Kate Callahan. Sophomores like me, Giovanna grew up in Long Island a few towns over from Juliette, and Kate’s father was a senator in South Carolina. I should probably disclose that Kate’s father was also an acquaintance of my father and had both pledged money to Daddy’s church during a number of charitable drives, and received campaign donations from my father in return. Giovanna, whose mother was an heiress to a vineyard fortune, was livid about Juliette’s father.

  “It’s disgusting, it really is. If Juliette were here I would spit in her eye,” Giovanna hissed, shaking a fried chicken drumstick at Kate and me while we lowered our heads. “I don’t understand how anyone can steal from other people. Especially other Italian Americans.”

  Kate and I exchanged loaded glances. Over the course of Giovanna’s rant, I gathered that Giovanna’s mother and stepfather had been clients of Juliette’s father, which presumably meant that their investments were gone, vanished, disappeared.

  “Seriously,” Giovanna rambled at a mile a minute, “it’s a good thing she already left campus because if she were here, I would demand that she give me her pink leather Marc by Marc Jacobs bag, since her father practically bought it with money he stole from my mother.”

  My blood was starting to boil. I hate gossip and especially hate when hurtful things are being said in my presence about my own friends, but I kept silent. I felt like I didn’t know enough about finance to really understand what Juliette’s father had done, and although I was better friends with Juliette than I was with Giovanna, I could understand Giovanna’s outrage, too.

  “I wonder if she’s coming back,” Kate murmured hopefully. I was the one who had informed the other girls that Juliette had left. She hadn’t said anything to anyone else on her way out, not even to our dormitory Resident Assistant, Lauren Glover, who sat a few tables away with the other scholarship seniors who served as RA’s in our dormitory.

  Treadwell is an extremely snobby school and money is the primary factor that determines popularity and defines friendships. There are a number of girls in attendance at Treadwell whose parents aren’t wealthy, but they’re few and far between, and they stick together because most of the rich girls avoid them like the plague, as if poverty was something that could be caught, like the flu. Lauren Glover was beautiful, tall, blonde and on the volleyball team, but her father was the principal of a high school in suburban Indiana and her mother sold cosmetics. Never mind that she was a dead ringer for Alyssa Ackerman, my track team adversary whose plastic surgeon father had celebrity clients (some of whose daughters also attended Treadwell). Lauren’s parents’ financial status relegated her to the table in the far left corner of the cafeteria. Neither beauty nor brains could rescue her from being poor by Treadwell standards.

  The cafeteria at Colgate, which had been built during the Civil War as a hospital dormitory for Union soldiers (a year never passed that a girl didn’t claim to see a ghost roaming the dorm halls), is not your average high school cafeteria. The dining hall is exactly that, a grand hall with two crystal chandeliers and cream-colored carpeting that is vacuumed every night by the facilities staff. The tables at which we sit in Colgate are long maple antiques set in rows of two. Each table sits eight girls along both sides, so it is uncommon to ever sit at a table with only your own group of friends. In those days, Giovanna, Kate, Juliette and I usually sat in the middle of the room at a table we shared with Ameerah Thompson (daughter of Isaiah Thompson, hip hop mogul and owner of Black Diamond Records), Nala Gordon (whose mother was the last governor of New Jersey and sat on the board of a major investment firm), Stacy Davidson (whose father had invented some kind of cutting-edge video technology that was being used to produce 3D movies) and Renée Ricard, daughter of the editor of Jolie! fashion magazine in Paris.

  In the first four weeks of sophomore year, I had not uttered a single word to Ameerah, Nala, Stacy or Renée. They were less than two feet from my group of friends at every meal, but might as well have been an entire galaxy away. Daddy had led a campaign against Ameerah Thompson’s father’s record label on a popular talk show. Luckily that occurred when we were in second grade and it was rarely mentioned at Treadwell. But when the daughters of so many rich and famous parents all attend one boarding school, it’s easy to see how worlds collide. And oftentimes they do so in the dining hall.

  At Colgate we all eat beneath a portrait of Elizabeth Treadwell, the stern, frowning, white-haired matron of William Treadwell, the original headmaster of the Treadwell Academy when it first opened its doors in 1868. She cast a disapproving gaze on us while we ate that night, subtly suggesting that we should mind our manners, eat gracefully, and behave like ladies.

  My eyes lingered on Lauren’s back and I realized I should probably inform her after dinner that Juliette and her suitcases were gone. But thinking about Lauren and her seating arrangement in the cafeteria made me realize that if Juliette’s father had really done something financially gauche, Treadwell would not be a forgiving environment. Juliette would be wise to stay away for a long time. I had often wondered why my father, a man of the faith who strongly believed in charity and equality, had chosen to send me to a school where greed and excess were a way of life. I had always received the same cryptic response: When you have more than others, you can never be too safe.

  “She better not ever come back,” Giovanna raised her voice. “I swear to God, if I ever see that girl again I am going to break every bone in her body.”

  “Giovanna,” I finally said. “It was her father who committed the crime, not Juliette. And I really hate hearing you talk that way. Juliette is our friend.”

  Giovanna quieted down quickly, but gave me a searing stink eye until the end of dinner. I felt a little better after speaking my mind, because Daddy always told me it’s important to stick up for those who can’t stick up for themselves. But it certainly crossed my mind that Giovanna would turn her rage in my direction, so I was relieved when Kate slightly changed the topic to the celebrity clientele of Juliette’s father.

  All around us, Juliette’s father was the hot topic of conversation. Certainly gossip was ever-present at Treadwell. Renée Ricard’s parents had divorced the year prior when she and I both lived at Rutherford Hall, and her mother had
made headlines by dating a 24-year-old DJ from Argentina. Taylor Beauforte, a junior who lived in one of the upperclassmen cottage dorms on the outskirts of campus, had been in all of the gossip blogs all summer because she had been on tour with her father, the lead singer of the rock band, Pound, who very publicly checked himself into a rehab facility a few weeks before school started up. But gossip was most vicious when crime was suggested. Crime meant scandal, and scandal invited exaggeration.

  After dinner I gingerly knocked on Lauren Glover’s door. A long moment passed before she answered and I wondered if she was in the TV lounge instead of in her room. But when the door opened, her eyes were swollen and red as if she had been crying, and I immediately hoped I wasn’t disturbing her.

  “Hi Lauren,” I said. “Are you OK?”

  She blew her nose into a Kleenex and shrugged.

  “Fine,” she lied.

  I stood in her doorway awkwardly, wondering what could have possibly caused her so much distress, and decided not to pry. “I just wanted to let you know in case you hadn’t heard that my roommate packed up and left tonight. I don’t think she’s coming back any time soon.”

  “Oh,” Lauren said, surprised. “Juliette?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did she say why she was leaving or where she was going?”

  Was it really possible that Lauren hadn’t heard the rumors or turned on her television all day?

  “Uh,” I began, “She’s having some family problems. Her father was indicted on some charges this morning. I don’t think she’s coming back for a while.”

  Just then, Alyssa Ackerman and her sidekick (I won’t go so far as to say evil sidekick because that would be immature, but…) Jenny Northrup walked past.

  “… Even lost money that Greenpeace had invested. Can you even imagine that? Stealing from the environment?” Alyssa was saying.

  “My father says tomorrow the lawsuits are going to start up. All of the victims are going to start suing each other because there won’t be enough money left to cover everyone’s investments,” Jenny added.

  They both regarded me with a casual side eye to make sure that I heard them. If there is any area of education in which Treadwell specializes, it’s backstabbing.

  Back in my room later that night, I set my alarm clock for six the next morning. My call with Daddy was brief. It was our habit to chat at least for ten minutes every single night. No matter where my parents were in the world or how busy they were, I knew to expect my cell phone to ring at ten p.m.

  “How was your day, chickadee?” Daddy asked, using his pet name for me.

  I sighed, not wanting to sound dramatic, because I knew my father disapproved of hyperbole.

  “It was difficult, Daddy, quite honestly. Someone I care about is in a whole heap of trouble. Or rather, she isn’t, but her father is.”

  I gave my father the Cliff Notes’ version of Juliette’s situation and he listened patiently. I was expecting that, as usual, he would have comforting insights that would make me feel more confident that Juliette was going to be OK. However, when I trailed off about not knowing who would be taking Juliette’s place in my room, I heard my father hesitate before replying.

  “Grace, when you become a parent, it becomes a lot more difficult to hear God’s voice,” my father said, sounding tired. “There are certainly times when I have to listen more closely to hear His direction about matters relating to you and your brother… my point is that it would be all too easy to miss something important God was trying to communicate to me. It’s our job to believe in the best of people; that no one ever sets out with the intention of being evil.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. It was rare that my father spoke in riddles, but when he did, it was a safe bet that there was something else going on in his life that he wasn’t about to share with me. Usually my father’s more serious concerns were way beyond my level of understanding; like cable network negotiations or working with lobbyists to block a bill in Washington D.C. I had no idea what this rambling really had to do with Mr. Santangello.

  When I changed into my pink silk pajamas and climbed into bed, I wondered if I would ever see Juliette again. Her departure that evening suddenly seemed to have an element of finality to it. I wondered if I would get stuck with another roommate. That was a sickening thought. Juliette and I had entered the dorm lottery together the spring before with the hope of having an awesome sophomore year. We had gotten our first choice of rooms on the sixth floor of Colgate. I had spent my freshman year in a tiny double room at Rutherford with a girl named Skylar from Minnesota whose parents were atheists. She treated me as if I were dopey for being the daughter of a religious leader and told me very straightforwardly that she felt bad for me that I was Christian.

  An hour after I went to bed, I got up and went to my desk. I flipped open my laptop and wrote a short e-mail to my brother, Aaron. I just told him that I missed him and couldn’t wait to see him in two weeks back at home after mid-terms. Unlike most brothers and sisters in high school, fighting all the time, Aaron and I have always been close. Because we were home-schooled, we had no choice but to spend a lot of time together and be each other’s best friends. Aaron was a senior that year at The St. John Preparatory Academy for boys, two towns over from where my school was located. Unlike The Treadwell Academy, it was religious, only in a very broad and generic Christian manner. After an exhaustive search to find such a school for girls, my father had settled on Treadwell for me because for a man in his line of work, he considered it better to send his daughter to a non-religious school than one that subscribes to one form of Christianity and frowns on all others.

  While I was stumbling through track practice and petty roommate drama all semester, Aaron had been filling out college applications left and right. The last time we had spoken in September, he was also trying to decide whether or not to complete a year of mission work in West Africa before continuing his education, something that Daddy thought was a great idea but that Mama was desperately trying to discourage. My brother really wanted more than anything to be a pediatrician. He hadn’t been much of a remarkable student after we switched from home-school to boarding school because the structure was such an adjustment, but after we went to Vietnam to tape a cable channel special about a children’s hospital in Hanoi that specialized in treating children with heart defects, he really buckled down and focused at school. Trying to get into a pre-med program was one of his favorite topics of conversation.

  With so many awful things being said about Juliette at Treadwell, I felt fortunate that my parents had stayed away from scandal and had never given my catty classmates inspiration for nasty whispers.

  Little did I know at the time… the rumor mill at Treadwell was only just getting started, and its next victim would be none other than me.

  Chapter 2

  A few days later, Juliette formally withdrew from Treadwell. I hadn’t even gotten so much as an e-mail from her.

  I was distraught, to say the least. Juliette was my best friend and my feelings were hugely hurt that she never called or e-mailed… or anything. I waffled between vowing to never speak to her again if she ever came back into my life, and begging for forgiveness. I was barely paying attention to our mid-term reviews in class because the scandal that Juliette’s dad had caused was consuming all of my energy. Several times, I held up my cell phone and my finger hovered over her name in my contacts list before I chickened out. I had never before had anyone of significance disappear from my life so completely, so abruptly.

  Margeurite, my mother’s personal assistant, called my cell phone on Thursday afternoon with my flight information to get home to Phoenix. “You’re on Flight 732 to Phoenix departing from Logan Airport at 10:45 a.m.,” Margeurite told me. “A car is picking you up at school at eight o’clock, so set your alarm clock. And then on Saturday you’re flying from Phoenix to Bogota on a direct flight.”

  “Wait, what?” I asked, startled. “Bogota, Colombia? Since
when am I going to Bogota?”

  “Your mother said she told you weeks ago. They’re taping a holiday special to raise awareness about poverty, and you and your mother are flying down with people from the cable network.”

  My stomach sank. For weeks, I had been looking forward to majorly relaxing on the ranch, restoring my fading summer tan, and spending as much time as possible riding my horses. I was certain my mother had never mentioned any cable network special for the holidays, or trip to South America. This wasn’t the first time that the layers of business people and paperwork that sometimes surrounded my parents muddled information from reaching me about my own life.

  “What about Aaron? Is he coming to Colombia?” I asked. Trips overseas for television specials usually involved waking up at insanely early hours, working in soup kitchens (sometimes only just long enough for the cameras to get some video footage) or reading to kids in orphanages, even though often times they couldn’t understand the English I was reading, and I couldn’t begin to read in Vietnamese or Spanish with an Ecuadorian accent so that they could understand. It really bothered me, this falsification of charity work for the cameras, but in my heart I knew my parents were doing good in those countries that the camera wouldn’t capture, so that made it a little more tolerable.

  “No, no,” Marguerite told me. “He’s staying in Massachusetts for the break. He volunteered at an animal shelter.”

  Even at the time, I thought this sounded a little fishy; Aaron was afraid of dogs because he had been bitten by a neighbor’s cocker spaniel as a baby, and he wasn’t very fond of cats, either. But I was too annoyed to find out that I was going to be traveling to South America with my mother on my own to question Aaron’s motives for passing up the trip. I sulked while I packed my suitcase. In the course of one five-minute conversation, all of my enthusiasm related to a week away from the Treadwell campus had evaporated, and left in its place was a gaping void.