Con Academy

by Joe Schreiber

  “The point is,” Andrea says, “we can’t play Brandt Rush like some garden-variety sucker and then give him the brushoff. He gets away with murder at Connaughton precisely because his family has the whole administration in its pocket, and if he gets the slightest whiff of a scam, we’re dead before we start. Which means he can’t realize that he’s been conned—even after the con is over.”

  “What’s the second reason?” I ask.

  “He’s smart.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I got to witness him this morning in my Global Risk class. He seems to know what he’s doing.”

  “That’s putting it lightly,” Andrea says. “Did he talk to you?”

  “We’re practically best buds.”

  “Check his GPA,” Andrea says. “He sets the curve in all his classes. Daddy sits on the board of Wall Street’s oldest brokerage firms, and believe it or not, Brandt’s actually inherited his old man’s brains.” She glances up at Chuck and Donnie, then back at me. “Not that he would ever admit to it. He’s way too busy for academics.”

  “Doing what,” I ask, “training for the stringed-instrument demolition squad?”

  Andrea shakes her head. “On weekends, he runs a casino out of his dorm room. It’s invitation only, exclusively for upperclassmen. Occasionally he’ll allow freshman and sophomore girls”—her face tightens with distaste—“but only if they’re good-looking enough to meet his exacting standards.”

  “Have you been there?”

  Andrea doesn’t answer my question. “It’s strictly a Friday-through-Sunday shindig, and of course the administration lets him get away with it. He’s got a blackjack table, a roulette wheel, and poker.” She pauses. “And he cheats.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Trust me.”

  “Right,” I say. “So what’s the third reason?”

  Andrea takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “He’s mean, Will.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  She shakes her head. “I’m not just talking about what he did to my cello,” she says. “He’s the most vindictive guy I’ve ever met.” She lowers her voice and leans in close. “Last year, when he was a sophomore, there was a girl here, a senior named Moira McDonald, who turned him down for Homecoming. At the time Brandt just blew it off like it was no big thing, but then the following spring, he must have sneaked a hidden camera into her room. The next morning there were photos of her on Facebook . . .” She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “You can imagine what kind I’m talking about. Everybody saw them. Moira was going to be valedictorian. She left school two weeks before graduation in total humiliation.” Andrea’s staring straight at me now. “That’s how Brandt Rush treats people he doesn’t like.”

  “Okay.” I shake my head. “Now I’m definitely going after him.”

  “Bad call, Will. Take my word for it.”

  “So you’re backing out of our deal?”

  “Wow.” Andrea doesn’t move for a long time. Then I realize that she’s started to smile. “You seriously don’t have an ounce of self-preservation in your body, do you?”

  “Look.” I shrug. “You can do whatever you want, but as far as I’m concerned, a schmuck like that was born with a bull’s-eye painted on his back. I’m going to take him down on general principles.” I stand up. “And when I do, I’m expecting you to honor your end of the agreement—pull up stakes and leave.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Donnie puts in, and shoots a glance at Andrea, even though one of his eyes doesn’t quite go that way. “What are the terms?”

  “Hold on.” I turn to look at the two of them. “This is between me and Andrea.”

  “Andrea’s a friend,” Chuck says. “We owe her one.” He takes a step closer to me. “You got a problem with us helping her out?”

  After a second, I shake my head. We’re all professionals here, and anyway, it appears that the specifics of this arrangement are just one more aspect over which I have no control. But that’s fine. The first hints of an idea have already started to incubate in my mind, and I already know how I’m going to win.

  “First one to get him to pay out ten thousand dollars cash,” Andrea says.

  “That’s sucker money,” I say, shaking my head. “He’ll see through it. Make it fifty K, between now and Thanksgiving break.”

  “Fifty thousand?”

  “What, too rich for your blood?”

  She cocks her head. “Please.”

  “That gives us a month to make our play.” I extend my hand. “Are you in or out?”

  Andrea smiles a little. Her expression is somewhere between awe and pity. “You’re already in way over your head.”

  She’s so right. I am in over my head. At least it’s nothing new.

  I’m still holding out my hand, and Andrea’s still smiling as she shakes it.

  Nine

  IT TURNS OUT GETTING INVITED TO BRANDT RUSH’S ROOM FOR Casino Night isn’t nearly as difficult as I expected. All I have to do is act stupid, talk loud, and throw money around like water for the next couple days, and by Friday, my invitation comes looking for me.

  It happens when I’m hunched over in a study carrel in Connaughton’s McManus Library, trying to cram a week’s worth of microeconomics into my skull. Shelves of books line the walls up to the cathedral ceilings, with ladders on wheels running up to the higher fixtures, and long, narrow hallways lead to different alcoves. The smells of old paper, parchment, and leather bindings are everywhere.

  “Will Shea?”

  I look up. The girl standing in front of me is a bronzed Malibu blonde, with a handful of errant freckles and the attentive smile of someone who’s heard interesting things about me and wants to find out if they’re true. Her school uniform looks custom-tailored to fit her, as if it’s been run through a half-dozen of the most exclusive design houses in Paris and Tokyo while she’s still been wearing it. After a second I realize she’s one of the girls who was dangling off Brandt’s arm when he staggered into Andrea’s room the other morning.

  “That’s me,” I say, nodding. “And you are?”

  “Mackenzie Osborne?” she says, like it’s a question.

  I’ve heard of her. Her dad’s a big producer out in L.A. whose movies have made about a billion dollars worldwide. “Are you a friend of Brandt’s?”

  “You could say that.” And she actually giggles. “He sent me by with this.” She holds out her hand and I see a single red poker chip, bright and heavy, embossed with the initials btr.

  “Monogrammed poker chips,” I say. “Pretty swanky invite.”

  “I know, right?” She lowers her voice to a whisper, because either she’s confiding in me or she’s just heard that’s what you’re supposed to do in a library. “Come by tonight: Crowley House, room two forty-four. The tables open at eleven. And you’ll want to bring that chip with you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “It opens doors.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Good.” She looks around at the shelves, sniffing the air, and makes a sour face. “Ugh—how can you stand it in here?”

  “What?”

  “The smell of all these books. It smells like—”

  “Knowledge?”

  “Yuck,” she says, and tosses her hair. “You know, Brandt doesn’t invite over many new students like this. Especially scholarship cases.” And then, cocking her head a little: “You must have really done something to impress him.”

  I seriously doubt that, but I don’t say anything. Up until now, impressing Brandt Rush has been a simple matter of mailing myself what looked like an enormous envelope of cash—really just a roll of cut-up blank paper with a hundred-dollar bill wrapped around it—and then talking loudly to everybody within earshot about what a stud I am at the blackjack table. Inquiring minds took care of the rest. Introducing a rumor into the Connaughton student body is roughly as difficult as introducing a flu bug into a class of sniffling kindergartners�
��one sneeze and it’s all over. Throughout the past three days, Andrea has kept her distance from me, but I could always sense her presence nearby, eavesdropping while I bragged to whoever would listen about the awesome fake ID that I’d used in Atlantic City last summer, teaching myself to count cards and saving up for my next epic success at the tables.

  “Well,” Mackenzie says, “hope to see you soon.” And with that, she sashays off, no doubt vowing never to darken the door of this terrible place again.

  Once she’s gone, I try to get back to studying, but I’m too distracted to concentrate, thinking about tonight and how I’m going to play it. After five minutes of futility, I gather up my books and carry them to the student behind the circulation desk, waiting while she checks them out and slides them across the counter to me.

  “Due back in two weeks,” she says.

  “Thanks.”

  “Not that it’s any of my business,” she says, still looking at the screen in front of her, “but you might want to sit this one out.”

  I look at her closely for the first time. She’s wearing black-framed glasses with lenses that reflect the screen in front of her, and her dark brown hair is pulled back into a ponytail. Her lips are full and coral-pink, and her eyes gleam bluish gray, slanting just a little. Is she smiling? From this angle I can’t tell.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t know you”—she looks up at me, and I feel the intensity of her gaze—“but you really don’t want to get involved with Casino Night. From what I hear, Brandt only invites people he knows he can fleece at the tables.”

  I glance back at the carrel where I’d been sitting, halfway across the stacks. “You heard all of that?”

  “What can I say?” She points to the sign reading quiet please. “Some people don’t know how to whisper.”

  “I’m sorry.” I take a step toward the desk, trying to catch her eye. “Have we met?”

  “Not yet.” At last she glances up from the monitor and extends one hand across the desk, her chipped black fingernails looking like they might have been painted with a Magic Marker. “Gatsby Haverford.”

  “Gatsby.” It takes me less than a second to muse over what kind of parents would name their daughter after one of American literature’s most elegant train wrecks, and then decide I’d rather not ask. “Nice to meet you.”

  “You too.” She nods at her computer, where my information is still up on the screen. “Will Shea. You’re the transfer student from the Marshall Islands.”

  “Is that why you work at the library, so you can blackmail the students with their personal information?”

  “I guess I just couldn’t resist the glamour of the job.”

  “You’re a student here?”

  “A junior,” she says. “We’re in the same English Lit class. But listen, Will. You seem like a decent-enough guy, so take my advice.” She leans across her desk and lowers her voice. “If you’re so determined to throw your money away, you should just flush it down the toilet. That way there’s at least a chance some of it might come back up.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I say, “but we don’t even know each other. Why are you so concerned about me?”

  “Maybe I just don’t like seeing anyone get taken advantage of.”

  “It hasn’t occurred to you that maybe I’ll win?”

  “No offense,” she says, looking me up and down, “but that seems highly unlikely.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Let’s just say that when Brandt’s running the tables, the odds are forever in his favor.”

  “Well,” I say, “I appreciate the heads-up, but I’m going to take my chances.”

  “I figured.” Gatsby looks at me from between towers of books with a combination of fascination and pity. “But when you walk back in here tomorrow wearing nothing but a barrel and suspenders, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Well, my barrel’s out for dry cleaning, so . . .”

  Gatsby taps a few keys on the computer, scribbles a note on a scrap of paper, then stands up and comes around from behind the desk. “Stay here.” And before I can say anything, she disappears into the stacks, moving through the deep jungle of the Dewey decimal system with all the confidence and authority of a lioness.

  While I wait, I find myself looking down at her workspace, at the half-finished cup of coffee and the cracked first-generation iPhone abandoned so trustingly next to the keyboard. I can hear music playing through the ear buds—it sounds like either punk or techno, with some twangy guitar mixed in—and for a moment I’m tempted to pick them up, just to see what she’s been listening to. But I’m glad I don’t, because when I turn around, Gatsby’s already back with an armload of books.

  “What’s all this?” I look down at the one on top, an old hardcover that looks like nobody’s checked it out in decades, and read the title stamped in gold across the spine: Tips for Winning Poker. It’s resting on two even dustier tomes—The Mental Game of Poker and How to Win at Cards.

  “Look, I appreciate all this, but—”

  “Here.” She’s already checking out the three books, sweeping them under the bar-code reader along with A Beginner’s Guide to Self-Defense.

  “What’s this one for?”

  “Just take it,” she says, and checks out the last title, which I realize is an ancient edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

  “And this one?”

  “Transcendental logic.” She smiles. “You never know when you’ll need it.”

  “Thanks,” I say, shoving all the books into my backpack. “But I think what I really need is a bigger bag.”

  “Happy reading,” she says, then goes back around to the other side of the desk, placing the buds in her ears and checking in books again.

  Ten

  BY THE TIME I GET BACK TO MY DORM ROOM, I’VE ALREADY forgotten about the books that Gatsby gave me. Mentally, I’m prepping for tonight, and my mind is so preoccupied that when the dinner hour comes, I have to force myself to eat. Voices around me are excited and laughing, discussing weekend plans. I don’t talk to anybody. I keep my head down.

  After dinner I go back to my room alone, where I sit on the edge of my bed and stare at the wall, running through hypotheticals in my mind, trying to think of everything that could go wrong tonight and how I’d respond. Making sure I’m ready. Figuring the angles. This is the hardest time for me: the waiting.

  Outside in the darkness, the hours drag by, doled out by the occasional distant chime of the bell tower. Sometime around ten o’clock, I remember the library books and get them out. Gatsby’s choice of the self-defense book and the Kant don’t make any sense at all, but I glance over the poker books, more to satisfy my own curiosity than anything else. As I expected, the strategies are fundamental, most of them so simple and outmoded that they’re totally useless. Opening the third book, I find a yellow Post-it stuck inside the front cover. It reads:

  Will:

  If you’re reading this, it means you haven’t written me off as a total whack job. If you still decide to go tonight, good luck. And be careful around Brandt. If you haven’t figured it out yet, he cheats.

  —G

  I peel the note off and stick it up on the corner of my empty bookshelf, then look at it for a second. Sometime later, the bell tower chimes again.

  It’s time to go.

  Students at Connaughton have a strict eleven o’clock curfew on Fridays, so I check to make sure the coast is clear before slipping out the window with my jacket buttoned up to my chin. The temperature’s already plunged to what feels like single digits, and late-October starlight is so sharp that it feels like I could snap off whole chunks of it and suck on them like icicles. My breath smokes out behind me as I duck below the eaves of my building, keeping to the shadows.

  Crowley House is only three buildings away, but it still takes me ten minutes of island hopping to get there, since I’m trying to avoid stepping out into the open. When I reach the dorm
, I stop outside the door and look in at the tall, red-haired campus security guard shooting me a look of dead-eyed indifference.

  I hold up the poker chip and tap it against the glass, and he opens the door without a word.

  “Thanks.” Stepping in, I can’t help but notice the guard has a dog-eared paperback propped up next to his stool, along with a styrofoam cup of coffee. The book is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The guard sees me looking at it and scowls.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “That book,” I say. “It’s funny.”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong author.”

  “No, I mean, somebody just recommended it to me.”

  “Yeah?”

  I nod. “How is it?”

  He takes a sip of coffee and glances down at the cover. “Well, I can’t say I’m crazy about his implicit assertion of transcendental idealism denying the reality of external objects.” He flicks his eyes up at me. “I mean, I suppose that you could argue that he refutes it in his discussion that self-consciousness presupposes external objects in space, but I’m not totally convinced.” Turning, he sits back down on the stool and regards me coolly. “Now, did you want to keep talking about philosophy, or are you ready to go lose all your money to that joker upstairs?”

  “Tough call, but I think I’m ready.” For the first time I get a look at his laminated ID badge, which reads murphy, george. “Hey, George?”

  His expression turns curious. “What?”

  “You know much about him?”

  “Kant?”

  “Brandt.”

  At the mention of that name, George’s whole face goes sour. “Put it this way,” he says. “I’ve sat here on this stool long enough to watch punks like you throwing your trust funds into his bank account in exchange for a few minutes of feeling like you’re some kind of postpubescent jet set.”

  “So then how come you help him out like this? Serving as his personal doorman?”

  “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

  “My first week.”