Con Academy

by Joe Schreiber

  Dr. Melville looks like he wants to say something, but his chin just twitches a little while his dog gives a growl.

  “What do you want?” he asks.

  “William Humbert is one of us,” the ski-masked figure in front says, and stares steadily at Dr. Melville. “You of all people should be able to appreciate what that means, Harold.”

  Dr. Melville flinches a little at the sound of his first name being spoken aloud. “This boy is a criminal and a fraud.” He raises his voice so that all the kids standing around can hear him. “He jeopardized the reputation and integrity of this school!”

  “You did what you had to do to get into this school, Harold,” the masked figure says, just loud enough for everyone to hear. “Would you like to tell everyone how you got accepted here?”

  The crowd stands completely silent and spellbound, waiting. Dr. Melville doesn’t say anything, but the expression of alarm on his face tells me everything I need to know. He gets the point. His shoulders sag. He lowers his gaze. The masked figure takes a step forward and holds out his hand.

  “We take care of our own,” the masked figure says. “Right?”

  After what feels like an eternity, Dr. Melville finally reaches out and takes the leader’s hand, and the two of them exchange a strange, ritualistic shake. Dr. Melville gives me one last look, then skulks up the path in the direction of his office with his dog padding along beside him. After a few moments, the group of spectators disperses, the students making their way to class.

  The ski-masked figure turns to me. “Welcome to the Sigils.”

  “But . . .” I shake my head. “I gave back the Gutenberg. I failed the assignment.”

  “There are other ways of proving yourself worthy,” he says, then turns and walks away. The others follow suit, silently fading into the trees like a squadron of prep-school ninjas.

  All but one.

  After I’ve followed her around the corner of the arts center, where we’ve got some privacy, Gatsby peels off her mask. Her hair tumbles down over her shoulders. We step back into the light—the midday sun catches her eyes, and she puts on her glasses.

  “Hey,” she says.

  “Hey, yourself.” I look around to make sure there aren’t any more surprises coming out of the woodwork. “So I guess I should thank you.”

  “You could,” she says. “It really wouldn’t be necessary.” She glances at her watch, then turns in the direction of the campus. “Walk a girl to work?”

  We start down the pathway toward the library, neither of us talking.

  “So I have to ask,” I begin.

  And Gatsby says, “Yes?”

  “Melville and his dad . . .”

  “What about them?”

  “They were con artists too? A father-and-son team? That’s the dirt that the Sigils have on him?”

  “Well, his father was,” she says. “Apparently Melville took the straight path once he arrived here.”

  “That’s . . . encouraging.”

  “I thought so.” Gatsby raises her eyebrows. “Speaking of reforming,” she says, “have you heard anything about what happened to Andrea?”

  “Well, based on everything I’ve seen, I can only assume that she took the hundred and twenty-five K and moved on.” I take out my phone and show Gatsby the photo that I received a few minutes ago. “This might be a clue. It just arrived on my phone, sender unknown.”

  “The beach?”

  “Looks like the Caribbean. Or Mexico.”

  “Sounds like her. And you?”

  There it is, the question I was not exactly looking forward to. I nod, squinting up at the sky as if maybe there’s some wisdom to be found there. “I’m heading out too.”

  “Where to?”

  I shrug. We’re standing right in front of the library now. Gatsby turns and puts her back to the door, then looks up at me.

  “You don’t want to stay?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t fit in here. I’m a con artist. I’ve spent half my life pretending to be someone I’m not.”

  “Come on, Will.” Gatsby gestures around the campus and laughs. “What do you think half of these kids are doing?”

  “Yeah, but in my case, it’s kind of literally true.”

  “People change.”

  “Sure they do.” I try to smile, but it feels all wrong and I give up. “I’ll see you around, okay?”

  “Will?”

  I turn around.

  “Everybody makes mistakes,” she says. “What matters is what you do afterward.” Then she smiles. “Thanks for the Hawthorne.”

  And she turns and goes into the library, leaving me out in the cold.

  I stick my hands in my pockets and start to walk away, heading up the path toward the lacrosse field, acutely aware of my surroundings. Students are on their way to class, talking and hurrying along. The bell tower rings, chiming out the hour. Squirrels scamper in the branches.

  I walk a little farther, thinking it through. If it’s really true that what matters is what you do afterward, then I still have a choice, an opportunity to stop running and start living. Okay, maybe I still can’t write a coherent essay on Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but I studied harder for that exam than I’ve done for anything else in my life, and I actually liked it. My mind goes back to the guy in the ski mask saying, “Welcome to the Sigils.” And I think about Gatsby. If Connaughton really is the second chance I’ve been looking for, maybe I don’t need to con anybody anymore, least of all myself.

  Maybe I’ll even learn to play lacrosse.

  I stop and turn around, looking back in the direction that I came. Before I know it, my feet start moving, carrying me back to the library, and I open the door, stepping into the warmth and the smell of books and the soft lighting.

  Gatsby’s sitting behind her desk, checking in books. I walk over to her, and she looks up from behind a stack of dusty old hardcovers.

  “Listen,” I say, “I was thinking, you know, since I’m already a Sigil and everything, maybe it would be for the best if I hung out here for a while.” A few students are looking up at me from their carrels, giving me annoyed looks, but Gatsby’s just smiling. “Plus I heard there’s a secret library hidden within the library, and I was thinking maybe we could find the hidden journals of Lancelot Connaughton. Who knows, maybe the old guy was something of a swindler himself, you know, before he—”

  “Will?” Gatsby says.

  “Yeah?”

  She points to the sign that says quiet, please and puts her finger to her lips. And when she stands up and comes around the desk to kiss me, it’s exactly as warm and soft as I’d always hoped it would be, and I realize that I’d be perfectly fine standing here with her for the rest of our natural lives, surrounded by the smell of old books. I think about what Roy told me on the phone.

  In life, as in the big con, sometimes there is no angle.

  Sometimes you just have to play it as it lays.

  Prologue

  Describe a significant experience or achievement and the effect that it had on you. (Harvard)

  “You shot me,” I said.

  I was lying on my stomach, wondering if I was going to pass out from the pain. Twenty feet away, she stood with the machine pistol in one hand and the sawed-off shotgun in the other, wiping the blood out of her eyes. It was three a.m. We were in my father’s law office on the forty-seventh floor of 855 Third Avenue, or what was left of it. The cops were taking cover behind the couch.

  She was talking but I couldn’t hear anything. The gunfire had left me temporarily deaf

  I thought about my father.

  I took a breath and watched the room wobble at the edges. I was going into shock. The pain wasn’t getting any better, and I thought that I would probably black out before I found out how this was going to end. Just as well—I was never particularly good at finishing things.

  She walked over, knelt down, and wrapped her arms around me. She pr

essed her lips to my ear, close enough that I could make out the words.

  “Perry,” she said, “I had a very nice time tonight. ”

  1

  Explain how your experiences as a teenager significantly differ from those of your friends. Include comparisons. (University of Puget Sound)

  Gobi was my mom’s idea.

  Not that I blamed her. What happened wasn’t anybody’s fault. I’m not exactly religious, but there is something sort of Catholic about the way guilt gets handed out when blood starts spilling—some for you, some for me, pass it on. Don’t forget that guy in the corner—did he get his share?

  I guess you could hold Gobi herself responsible, but that’s like blaming God for making it rain, or the earthquake in some third world country where half the buildings are still made out of clay. It happened, that’s all. Human beings are like the screwed-up children of alcoholic parents in that way, picking up the pieces afterward and trying to make up reasons why. You could argue that’s what makes us interesting, and maybe it is to some alien race studying us from a million miles away. From where I sit it just seems pathetic and sad.

  Anyway, it all started because my mom’s family once hosted a foreign exchange student from Germany back when she was my age. They’d all gotten along famously and Mom still kept in touch with this woman, who was now a family therapist living outside of Berlin. Mom and Dad visited them whenever they went to Europe, and my understanding is that they all had a high old time together, laughing and joking and rehashing the good old days. Just before my senior year of high school Mom thought it would be culturally enriching if our family hosted someone. Dad went along with it in his usual autopilot way—I’m not even sure he was listening to her, to be honest with you.

  That’s how we got Gobi.

  Gobija Zaksauskas.

  Mom made me and Annie write her name down twenty times each and we looked up the phonetic pronunciation on a Lithuanian website to make sure we were saying it right. I don’t think she would’ve corrected us anyway. From the moment we picked her up outside the International Terminal at JFK, the most I ever heard her say about it was “Call me Gobi,” so we did, and that was all.

  Back at the house she got the guest room at the end of the hallway with a private bathroom and her own laptop so she could Skype her family back home. My room was next to hers and at night as I’d sit there memorizing SAT words or banging my head against a college application, I’d hear her voice through the wall, talking in low bursts of consonant-heavy syllables I didn’t understand, communicating with family members half a world away.

  At least, that’s what I thought.

  Say “female foreign exchange student” to any group of high school guys and you’ll get the exact same look. It’s like every single one of the dogs playing poker simultaneously catching wind of the same exotic new Milk-Bone. I’d certainly joked with Chow and the other guys enough about it beforehand, all of us picturing some chic Mediterranean lioness with half-lidded eyes, fully upholstered lips, curves like a European sports car, and legs of a swimsuit model who would tutor me with her feminine wiles before I went off to college.

  That’s not even funny to me now.

  Gobi wasn’t much taller than my kid sister, with oily dark hair that she always tucked back in a fat bun behind her head, where it usually escaped to stick stubbornly out, shiny and angular on either side, like flippers on a penguin. Her face all but disappeared behind the massive industrial-grade black horn-rims, their lenses so thick that her eyes looked swimmy and colorless, like two amoebas at the other end of a microscope. She had pasty, instant-mashed-potato skin that could make the smallest single pimple or blemish stand out angrily. Once, and only once, my twelve-year-old sister, Annie, offered her makeup tips, and Gobi’s reaction was so awkward that we all pretended that it never happened.

  Her one facial expression—a startled combination of hesitation and uneasy befuddlement—might have made her a target for bullying in some high schools, but in the halls of Upper Thayer it made her literally invisible, a shadow always hovering somewhere near the lockers with an armload of books clutched against her chest. Her wardrobe tended toward heavy wool sweaters, smocklike shirts, and dense brown skirts that tumbled down below the knee, avalanching over whatever shape of body might have been hiding under there. The only jewelry she ever wore was a plain silver chain with half a heart dangling from it, halfway down the slope of her chest. In the evenings she sat down to dinner with us, silverware clinking, politely participating in the conversation in her low, formal English, answering Mom’s questions about sports or current events until we could all reasonably find an excuse to escape to our separate lives.

  One day, six weeks into her visit, she collapsed in the lunch room, passed out in a tray of Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes. I was on the other side of the cafeteria when I heard the screams—Susan Monahan was sure she was dead—and by the time Gobi woke up in the school nurse’s office, she’d managed to explain her condition.

  “I have spells sometimes,” she said. “Is nothing serious.” When my parents asked her later why she’d never told us about it, Gobi only shrugged. “Is under control” was all she said.

  Except that it wasn’t, not really, and from that point she had at least a dozen similar “spells”—they seemed to come in clusters, stress-related—and we were never sure when the next one would come. Eventually we found the technical term was temporal lobe epilepsy—basically a short circuit in the brain’s electrical activity, either genetic or brought on by some form of head trauma. Dostoyevsky had it, and Van Gogh, and maybe Saint Paul, too, when he got knocked off his donkey on the road to Damascus, if you believe that sort of thing. All I know is that she wasn’t allowed to drive. Once I found her sitting straight up at the dining room table with her eyes half open, staring at nothing. When I touched her shoulder, she didn’t even look at me.

  In spite of all this, or maybe because of it, I always smiled and said hi to her in the halls. I helped her with her English Lit homework and practically did her PowerPoint presentation on the New York Stock Exchange on the morning that it was due. Even so, whenever she saw me coming, she always looked away, like she knew how much crap people gave me about it—not my real friends; I’m talking about world-class losers like Dean Whittaker and Shep Monroe, rich jerks whose Fortune 500 dads swam the icy seas of international finance looking for their next meal. None of that bothered me. The guys that I hung out with and played music with, the guys in Inchworm and one or two friends who hadn’t abandoned me when Dad made me quit the swim team to join the debate team, they seemed to understand, or at least commiserate. Tough luck, Stormaire, you caught a raw deal there.

  Yeah, well, I’d say, it’s not so bad.

  And it wasn’t, until my mom asked me to take Gobi to the prom.

  Buy the Book

  Visit www.hmhco.com or your favorite retailer to purchase the book in its entirety.

  About the Author

  JOE SCHREIBER is the author of Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick; Perry’s Killer Playlist; Lenny Cyrus, School Virus; and Game Over, Pete Watson, as well as several New York Times best-selling adult novels. He lives in Palmyra, Pennsylvania. He never went to prep school.

  Visit Joe’s website at joeschreiber.com.

 

 

 

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