Con Academy
Page 11
I shut my eyes and open them again slowly.
I can’t afford to feel this way about her.
I’m not going to be here that long.
Outside the dining hall, horns are honking and people are calling out to one another with big fake cheerful hellos. Homecoming Weekend at Connaughton is like a combination of summer in the Hamptons and a royal wedding. The campus parking lot is packed with Mercedes and Rolls-Royces, high-end BMWs and the occasional Lamborghini, as parents, alumni, and families arrive. At least two private helicopters have already touched down, and I spot bodyguards with earpieces and mirrored sunglasses hovering outside the dining hall.
Later that morning I get “my” Hawthorne paper back with a big red A written across the top. Excellent work, Mr. Bodkins’s spiky handwriting enthuses. Very insightful writing. I look forward to reading more from you. Standing there with the essay in my hands, I feel a throb of guilt go through my chest followed by the sudden, self-destructive urge to go to him and confess that I didn’t write a word of it.
That afternoon I take the bus to town to rent a tuxedo. There’s a florist on Main Street, where I pick out a corsage and a dozen long-stemmed red roses. On the way back to the bus stop, I walk past an antique shop on the corner, and something in the window grabs my attention. Looking more closely I see that it’s an early printing of the first volume of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.
I go inside and ask the woman behind the counter about the book.
“You’ve got excellent taste,” she says, lifting it from the window display and handing it to me. “That’s a rare edition.”
“How much?”
“Three hundred.”
“Will you take a credit card?”
I hold my breath while she swipes the AmEx that Lupo Reilly gave me, but the authorization goes through without a problem. After signing the sales slip, I slide the book under my coat and head out the door. It’s getting colder, but I don’t even feel it.
By the time I get to the bus stop, I’m whistling.
Back at Connaughton, I realize that I don’t have any wrapping paper. My eyes settle on my tattered old map of the Pacific, the one with Ebeye on it. I wrap the map around the Hawthorne book and it fits perfectly. I don’t even have to trim the edges.
I grab an early dinner, take an extra-long scalding hot shower, and begin to get ready for the night. The tux looks great but my hair’s all wrong. It’s already too long, and it sticks out to the side like a crow’s broken wing in a way that no amount of gel is going to make better. In the end I just abandon it, gather up the flowers and Hawthorne book, and step outside.
The night is clear and cold, and the grounds are strung with lights for the evening. Far off in the distance, I can hear music and laughter coming from the Manse, which, for all intents and purposes, is the center of the universe tonight.
Besides being the single oldest building on campus, the Manse is also the home for all of Connaughton’s formal dances and assemblies, a combination of nineteenth-century ballroom and private castle. According to tradition, it’s the place where families gather before the Homecoming game each year, a chance for millionaire alumni to compare notes while their ungrateful kids ignore them entirely. It’s a little weird that parents are invited to the dance, but it also makes sense in a creepy, ultrarich, incestuous kind of way that probably dates back to Medieval Europe. As I step inside, I see designer dresses, hear the laughter and chatter floating out.
Gatsby’s nowhere to be seen.
“Hey, Will.”
Looking around, I see Andrea standing close by, smiling at me. For a second I almost don’t even recognize her. Her hair is pinned up in shimmering braids to expose her long slender throat, and she is wearing what might be charitably described as a black spider web connected by silver rings. It’s made out of some kind of expensive shimmery material that I think is officially known as “trying way too hard.” Still, she looks great, and she knows it. Even Brandt seems to be paying attention.
“Nice tux.” She reaches out to touch my lapel, then looks down at the roses and the book that I’m holding. “Where’s your date?”
“She’s on her way.”
“Of course she is,” Andrea says, turning. “By the way, have you met Brandt’s parents?”
I look behind her at the two people standing there in formalwear, and right away I feel the difference between them and everyone else in the room.
There’s rich, and then there’s rich—and then there’s Herbert and Victoria Rush.
The most disturbing thing about extremely wealthy white people is how they all look vaguely related, as if they were grown in the same lab, somewhere in the Connecticut suburbs.
For a moment the Rushes don’t speak, at least not to me. Standing there side by side like a pair of binary stars, they seem to exude their own private atmosphere, a weirdly selective gravitational field that sucks in the lucky few while flinging all the rest of us indiscriminately into the dreary void of middle-class hopelessness. Even this close, I get the strange feeling that they aren’t seeing me at all. I can’t help but wonder what I must look like through Rush vision—am I just some Vaseline-smeared blur, a black-and-white pixelation, like the faces of passersby whose identities are protected on reality TV? Or do I look like some visual annoyance, like one of those floaty things that just hover in the corner of your eye and won’t go away?
Either way, I’m clearly not part of their world.
“Mr. and Mrs. Rush,” Andrea says, “this is Will Shea. Will’s here from a tiny little island in the South Pacific. His parents were missionaries, right, Will?”
“Oh?” Victoria Rush gives me a tight smile. “How interesting.” After an appropriate amount of silence, she goes back to ignoring me. “My goodness, isn’t anyone going to dance?”
As if on cue, the music starts playing, some old song from the ’50s, and I watch as Brandt leads Andrea to the center of the dance floor. It’s pageantry, pure and simple—slow and easy and elegant. Brandt lifts Andrea’s arm and whirls her around, the look on his face never changing from the blank, phoned-in expression of a rich kid doing a job, playing a role, knowing that it’s all part of inheriting a fortune so great that even he can’t count it all. In the middle of everything, Andrea catches my eye and winks. I keep looking around for Gatsby, wondering where she is, if she’s coming, if something happened, as the weight in my stomach gets heavier and heavier.
When the song ends, Andrea makes her way to the punch bowl and then back over to me. “Well, that was fun.” She lifts her gaze to meet mine, and she looks again at the roses that I’m still carrying around, along with the gift-wrapped book and the corsage. “Still alone?” She checks her watch. “It’s getting late, isn’t it?”
“Thanks for your concern.”
“Poor Will.” She touches my arm. “Rejection doesn’t suit you.”
I turn and walk through the ballroom again, but I still can’t find Gatsby anywhere. I check my phone. No messages. When I call her, it goes straight to voice mail. After the beep, I start talking.
“Hey, Gatsby, it’s Will. I’m here at the dance. Just making sure everything’s—”
A fist thumps me on the shoulder. It’s Brandt, right behind me. “Yo, Willpower. We still on for tonight?”
Clicking off the phone, I turn around and look him in the eye.
“Sure.”
“Good.” He looks more alive now than he has all night. “Meet me out front by the statue in twenty minutes. Don’t be late.”
After he walks away, I make one more circle through the room, but now I know she’s not coming, and I can feel people starting to stare at me, hear them talking behind my back. I leave the dance and make my way across the almost empty campus to Gatsby’s dorm. There’s a light in her third-floor window. For a moment I just stand there, holding the roses and the corsage and the book, watching a shadow move across her curtains.
I call again.
Voice mail.
I stuff the
I’ve got work to do.
Twenty-One
THE PLAN IS SIMPLE. I’M SUPPOSED TO MEET BRANDT IN front of the statue of Lancelot Connaughton, where Uncle Roy will pick us up and drive us down to Lowell. With any luck, tonight’s trial run will pay off. By next week, Brandt will want to double his money, then go for the big payout with plenty of time before our deadline.
Like I said. Simple.
Except . . .
I can’t stop thinking about Gatsby. Right now I’ve got two thousand dollars of Uncle Roy’s cash in my back pocket, and the entire success or failure of the con depends on how I play things tonight. But my thoughts keep circling back to Gatsby. What she was thinking. Why she didn’t call. Why she stood me up.
This is obviously not the frame of mind that I need to be in right now.
I stand outside in my tuxedo, watching the breath steam out of my mouth in clouds, looking at the puritanical face of Lancelot Connaughton. If he has any insight into my situation, he’s not sharing it.
A hand lands on my shoulder.
“Yo, bro, you ready to rock?”
I turn around. Brandt is standing there with Carl beside him, silent and stoic. Like Brandt and me, Carl is still wearing a tux. Unlike Brandt and hopefully me, he still looks like a caveman on Oscar night. “Hey.” I look Carl up and down. “You forgot your lacrosse stick.”
“He doesn’t need it,” Brandt says.
“You were supposed to come alone.”
“Change of plans,” Brandt says. “That’s not a problem, is it, Will?”
I shake my head. The last-minute switch gets my adrenaline going and puts my head back in the game. I’m actually glad for it.
“Good,” Brandt says. “You bring the filthy lucre?”
I reach into my pocket and take out the roll, twenty one-hundred-dollar bills. “When we get to Mr. McDonald’s office, he’s going to show you the different online poker games and ask you how much you want to bet. Start small and let him convince you to go the full two grand.”
Brandt looks scornfully at the cash. “Thanks, but I think I can handle myself.”
“Just be careful with this,” I say, handing over the money. “It’s all I could get my hands on for now.”
“Just tell me how I’m gonna win.”
“My partner will be texting you messages throughout the hand,” I say, “telling you how much to bet. Just do exactly what the messages say. You’ll win.”
“You must be pretty sure of your system.”
“It’s foolproof.”
“It better be.”
That’s as far as he gets as a pair of headlights come streaming up the long drive heading toward the statue. At first I think it’s Uncle Roy, and then I realize I’m wrong. The lights belong to one of the campus-security vehicles taking a slow cruise around the service road, and it pulls up in front of us, stopping on the other side of the statue. I hear the door open, and I see George the Kant-reading security guard step out.
Brandt glances up at him breezily. “Hey, Georgie-boy. Nice night, huh?”
The guard walks over to us. “What are you doing out here? Why aren’t you at the dance?”
Nobody says anything, and I realize he’s talking to Carl—which isn’t a huge surprise when I suddenly realize how much the two of them look alike. George is basically an older version of Carl. The resemblance is uncanny.
“He’s hanging out with me, George,” Brandt says. “Thought I’d do him a favor.”
George doesn’t say anything.
“I mean, hey,” Brandt says, “maybe he’d be better off at public school. Finishing his senior year with a bunch of middlebrow losers. What do you think?”
George keeps quiet and just looks at Carl, who glares back at his father, nothing but eighteen inches of flash-frozen silence suspended between them. Face-to-face, their chiseled profiles look like one of those optical illusions where you start to see the outline of some mysterious third shape appearing between them.
“Are you going somewhere?” George asks.
Carl squares his shoulders. “Why do you care?”
“It’s a closed campus. There are rules.”
“Like you’ve ever cared about them,” Carl says, in a voice that’s half snarl, half whisper.
“Listen, son . . .” George draws in a breath. He looks like he wants to say something but has no idea where to begin.
“Better move along, George,” Brandt says. “Wouldn’t want to be late on your nightly routine. A guy in your position can’t afford too many more strikes against him, am I right?”
George sighs but gets back into his truck and drives away, leaving the three of us alone in the moonlight.
“Your guy is late,” Brandt says.
Before I can answer, I see a pair of headlights coming toward us.
“Here he is now,” I say.
Twenty-Two
WHEN UNCLE ROY’S CADILLAC PULLS UP, I OPEN THE back door and slide inside. Roy’s behind the wheel, but he doesn’t turn around or say anything until Carl starts to climb in next to Brandt.
“Hold on,” Roy growls, looking back over his shoulder. “Who’s the gorilla?”
“Carl’s with me,” Brandt says.
Roy shakes his head. “No deal.” He points to me with an index finger the size of a gun barrel. “Mr. McDonald said just your friend. Nobody else.” He turns to Carl. “Take a hike, Gargantua.”
Nobody says anything for a second, and Brandt shrugs. “Fine, whatever.” He points at Carl, still halfway on the sidewalk, like he’s a pet dog. “Stay.”
Carl takes a step back, leaving me and Brandt in the back seat while Uncle Roy guns it through the main gates and back down the country road that leads us to the highway, heading south. There’s not a lot of small talk. Brandt stretches his legs and gets out his phone, checking his messages, looking at something on Twitter, sending a few texts. He seems totally relaxed and in charge of the situation. Without glancing up from his phone, he says, “So the library freak stood you up, huh?”
I swallow hard. “We’re just friends.”
“Dude, that’s pathetic.”
“What?”
“I can’t decide what’s worse, you crushing on some troll who paints her nails with black Sharpie, or the fact that you couldn’t even get her to show up at the dance.” Brandt turns to me, apparently serious. “You can’t let yourself get humiliated like this. You’re supposed to be a player.” He pronounces it “playa” in true white-boy hip-hop fashion. “You know what I mean?”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“Trust me, it’s for the best,” Brandt says, and leans forward to Uncle Roy. “Hey, driver. How much longer is this going to take?”
“We’re almost there,” Uncle Roy says.
“Next time we’re taking my helicopter.” Brandt cranes his head forward again. “How long have you been working for this guy McDonald, anyway?”
Uncle Roy doesn’t answer.
“You know about his daughter?”
“I know she’s a very nice girl,” Uncle Roy says. “And if you got anything more to say about it, you can feel free to hop out of this car anytime.” His eyes flash in the rearview mirror. “Or I can toss you out on your ear—it’s all the same to me.”
Brandt smirks but doesn’t say anything.
It’s silent all the rest of the way to Lowell.
When Uncle Roy stops the car in the lot of the industrial park, Brandt sits in the back like he’s waiting for somebody to jump out and open the door for him. When nobody does, he opens it himself, extends one lanky leg, and steps out, then follows Uncle Roy and me toward the rundown office building.
“This is his base of operations?” Brandt shakes his head. “What a dump.”
Uncle Roy doesn’t say anything as we walk up the steps and into the second-floor lobby. I walk past the reception desk and enter the main workspace. Everything is in place, looking better than I could’ve hoped.
The guys that Uncle Roy brought up from Boston—Iron Mike, the Righteous Brothers, Lupo Reilly, Southie McLaren, Rudy Morales—are all sitting in front of computer workstations, guzzling energy drinks and talking on their phones. None of them even looks up at us as we walk by. Glancing down, I see lines and columns of code scrolling up the screens. Dad’s girlfriend, Rhonda, walks by with a pot of coffee in one hand and a cell phone in the other. In other words, everything looks perfect.
“Where’s Mr. McDonald?” Roy asks.
“In his office,” she says without breaking stride, and cocks her head at the closed door on the far side of the room before throwing a glance my way. “He’s already pissed at you for not showing up earlier.”
I frown. “Who, me? I told him where I was going.”
Brandt snickers. “Sounds like you’ve got some brown nosing to do, Will. Good thing you’ve had a lot of practice.”
“Come on,” Roy says, waving us to the back of the room. “Let’s hope he’s in a good mood.”
The back office is brightly lit and cleaner than the rest of the property, with a halogen lamp in the corner and fresh paint on the walls. Dad’s pacing behind the desk, talking on the phone. Next to an open laptop there’s a framed picture of Moira McDonald—a nice touch that I thought of myself.
Dad sees us step in, scowls, and holds up one finger. Brandt gives him an eye roll that is the exclusive province of American entitlement, but he still manages to stand there while Dad finishes talking.
“Yeah, well, you tell him I said we need to shave the extra one-point-one by tomorrow morning, or he’s cut off. Those exact words—that’s right.” He clicks off and jabs a finger at me. “Where the hell were you?”
“Mr. McDonald—” I start.
“Valerie tells me that you’ve been out of the office all day.” Dad turns to Roy. “And nobody says a word to me about it?” Finally he pivots to unleash his glare on Brandt. “Who’s this idiot?”
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