The Homecoming Masquerade

by Baum, Spencer

  “This new girl is here to defeat me,” Kim said. “Someone powerful is behind this. Someone who wants to take me down. But who?”

  “Yeah, who?” Andrea echoed.

  Who? was a silly question, practically rhetorical. Everybody in Washington wanted to take down the Renwicks. It came with the territory. They were the top of the pyramid, at least among the humans. That position made them a target, but it was nothing the family couldn’t handle. On the contrary, the reason the Renwicks were on top was because everyone knew not to mess with them.

  Kim’s parents began scouting out potential competitors fifteen years ago, when Kim and the other girls now standing in this ballroom attended the high-end preschools of the world. By the time Kim was in fifth grade, her parents had the names of twenty girls on a list. The prettiest, wealthiest little girls in the world, girls who might land a spot at Thorndike and think they were worthy of wearing black to Homecoming. They were girls who fit the profile. The Renwicks went down the list, one by one, and made sure anyone who had a real shot at beating Kim chose not to enter. They arranged ambassadorships, cabinet posts, and golden parachutes for the parents who agreed. For those who didn’t, they arranged for a knock on their door from the IRS, or a few pictures of naked children on their hard drive.

  “Word is there’s something going on with Nicky and Ryan,” said Amy.

  “Ryan Jenson?” said Kim.

  Amy nodded.

  “How come I didn’t know this?” said Kim.

  “Because until just now Nicky was the new girl who wore cotton slacks and denim shirts and nobody cared,” said Amy.

  “And Ryan ceased being somebody a long time ago,” Pauline added.

  Of course. Of course Ryan Jenson was involved. If anyone at the school had an axe to grind with Kim it was Ryan. Fortunately, he was a problem easily resolved. Kim had been holding the goods over Ryan’s head since freshman year. She’d have to make sure she got a dance with Ryan tonight so they could have a little chat.

  “What time is it?” Kim said, having neither a watch nor a cell phone to check. Dangling gold earrings and a matching pendant were the only accessories her stylist had allowed.

  Rosalyn’s outfit included a watch precisely so she could answer this question for Kim. “Eight fifty eight,” she said. “Dancing begins in two minutes,” she added, as if any of them needed a reminder of the night’s agenda.

  Kim’s mind was spinning now. Nicky Bloom, Ryan Jenson, the dance, the year ahead – she would have her dad get to work on Nicky’s whole family the minute the dance was over, but even that wasn’t soon enough. Nicky Bloom was already here. The Homecoming Masquerade had started. Sergio would come out later to dance with the girls wearing black. Somehow, she needed to ensure that Sergio’s first impression of Nicky Bloom was a poor one.

  “Rosalyn, you’re done drinking for awhile,” Kim said. “Your next glass of wine won’t be until ten o’clock.”

  “How come?” Rosalyn asked, or rather, whined.

  “I’ll explain later,” Kim said, now looking around the room at all the guys. The scheme brewing in her mind required help from a boy. It was too obvious a ploy to have Rosalyn act alone. Somehow, the incident she now imagined needed to look like it was Nicky’s fault.

  Who among the guys would be most eager to help?

  Her eyes stopped at Art Tremblay, the former pipsqueak who had turned into quite the little he-man. Art Tremblay, with his protein shakes and three-a-day workouts….the loser had always been desperate to break into the most popular tier at school. He would love the opportunity to do Kim a favor.

  “We don’t want to act too soon, but we’ll need to get moving before ten thirty to make sure we nail her before Sergio comes out,” Kim said.

  “What are we going to do?” Rosalyn asked.

  “We’re going to watch as Nicky Bloom accidently spills a glass of wine all over her vintage Francesco dress.”

  7

  The clock struck nine and the musicians on the stage raised their bows. A slow-moving, already drunken muddle of students began to form itself into two lines, one for guys and one for girls. Nicky took her place on the far end of the line, finding a table against the wall on which to set her wine goblet. When everyone was in place, the orchestra began the first notes of a Beethoven minuet. The two lines approached one another to break into couples and the formal dance began.

  As was the case with everything at Thorndike, ritual and tradition dictated all facets of Homecoming. The dance always opened with a Beethoven Minuet. On this night, it was from his String Trio in E flat. For the first two dances, everyone was on the floor. It wasn’t until the third dance that people were allowed to sit out. When they did sit out, they were expected to congregate at the bar and give generously to the tip jar as they drank.

  Polite conversation with one’s partner was allowed, but Nicky’s first dance partner, a tall, burly fellow named Vince Weir, had nothing to say on their first tour of the ballroom. Nicky took advantage of his silence to get a good look at the place. She and Jill were the first Network operatives to get inside Renata’s mansion. Although a raid on the mansion was not planned anytime in the immediate future, the higher-ups in the Network would want a report on the place to keep on file. Nicky took careful mental notes of what she saw.

  The ballroom, like the outside of the mansion, had a Greco-Roman flair to it. Marble pillars on the edges matched the enormous columns of the front entrance. Large mahogany doors lined the walls, leading to who knew where. Maybe the mansion beyond those doors was a more livable space of human-sized proportions. Maybe there was an alternate entrance that allowed Renata to skip this massive ballroom every time she came home.

  Or maybe there wasn’t. Maybe Renata liked to come home every morning to visual proof that she was among the wealthiest people on earth. There certainly was enough opulence on display to remind her. The walls, the floor, the molding, the dual staircase in the back– all were made of shiny white marble. Nooks with life-sized statues filled the walls, their edges lined with gold. High on the walls sat a collection of paintings easily worth millions, and these weren’t even the most prized pieces in the collection. Somewhere behind one of those mahogany doors was a private art gallery, with Picassos, Rembrandts, Van Goghs and others, the greatest works of art in all human history, stolen away from humanity to be viewed only by those Renata deemed worthy to see them.

  Nicky’s dance partner mumbled something.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that,” Nicky said.

  “I said, wow, right out of the gate I get a girl wearing black.”

  Nicky smiled at him.

  “Nicky, right?” he said.

  She nodded. Pretending to know nothing about him, she asked for his name.

  “Vince,” he said.

  Vince Weir, only child of a Vegas real estate tycoon with the same name. The words from the briefing book rang in Nicky’s mind. She imagined them spoken in Jill’s quiet voice. Participated in junior football, basketball, and wrestling leagues growing up, now a member of Thorndike’s boxing club. Has a ‘friends with benefits’ sort of understanding with Mattie Dupree, even though she’d like something more.

  It was that last part that was of the most interest to Nicky. According to Jill, Mattie was desperate for Vince to treat her like a real girlfriend, rather than a makeout partner, and was known to follow Vince around like a little puppy. If they could get Vince to attend Nicky’s after-party, then Mattie would come along as well.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Vince,” Nicky said. “Tell me something about yourself.”

  “Tell you something? Like what?”

  “Whatever comes to mind.”

  “I’m in the boxing club,” he said, or rather, boasted.

  Nicky gave his bicep a friendly squeeze. “I’m not surprised,” she said.

  Despite his enormous stature, Vince was graceful on his feet, and when they changed direction and spun at the end of a stanza, Nicky sensed
him suck in his stomach and flex his chest muscles.

  “I didn’t expect you to be wearing black tonight,” Vince said.

  “I didn’t want anyone to expect it,” said Nicky.

  “You’re pretty bold for someone who squeezed into a spot left behind by a dead girl.”

  There was a phony bravado in Vince’s voice. Behind his mask, Nicky saw his eyes darting around, as if scared to look at her face.

  “Some things are just meant to be,” Nicky said. “I was meant to be here tonight, wearing black. Maybe you were meant to dance with me.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” said Vince. “Did you know anything about your competitors before you just showed up in black? Do you know how connected Kim’s father is?”

  “I know how much everyone in town hates him, just like we all hate his daughter.”

  Vince raised his eyebrows.

  “You know it’s true,” Nicky said. “Kim has everyone so scared that they won’t say a mean word about her, but I know you hate her. I know you’d love to see someone else win. That’s why I entered.”

  “But none of us even know who you are. What do your parents do?”

  “My dad’s good at investing,” Nicky said, following her script. “And I’m tired of talking about myself. I want to hear more about your boxing club.”

  “Don’t you know about the boxing club?” Vince asked, in the tone of voice one might use when speaking with a child. This was a guy who grew up being a bully and didn’t know how to interact with people any other way.

  “I know a few things,” Nicky said, “but I want to hear an actual boxer tell me all about it.”

  Not one to let an invitation to brag go to waste, Vince spent the remainder of the dance telling Nicky about the history of the boxing club at Thorndike, how it had become a way for the athletes at the school to participate in Coronation through their “Brawl in the Fall” fundraiser, how Vince had earned the right to be one of the fighters in the brawl.

  Nicky listened intently to every word, all the while pulling herself closer to Vince, acting the part of the girl infatuated with the jock.

  “If you were smart, you’d bet on me at Brawl in the Fall,” he added. “A lot of people are picking Brian to win, just because he’s big. But I’ll tell you something. Brian’s slow and kind of soft. I expect to win that event.”

  The Network already had a plan for that event, and it didn’t involve Vince at all. But Vince didn’t need to know that.

  “Maybe I already know this about you, and I expect you to win too,” Nicky said, quietly. He was too tall for her to whisper in his ear, so she pulled in close and allowed her breath to tickle his neck. “Maybe I positioned myself in line so I would have the first dance with you. Maybe I thought you were someone I should get to know.”

  As they continued the dance, Nicky pressed her body right up to Vince’s. She allowed her right hand to roam up and down his back, climbing as high as his neck where her fingers toyed with his hair. When the music began to slow, Nicky slid her hand all the way down Vince’s back. On the final note, she pressed her body right up against his, and gave his butt a friendly squeeze.

  The music stopped. Vince had a goofy grin on his face.

  “Aren’t you supposed to bow at me?” Nicky said.

  “Oh…yeah,” said Vince.

  Totally flustered, he leaned forward in a clumsy, awkward motion.

  Nicky knew why he was having trouble with a simple bow. She had felt it when they squeezed close together.

  And she checked the next item off her to-do list. Vince Weir was now officially curious about Nicky Bloom.

  The musicians went straight into the Viennese Waltz and Nicky turned to her new partner, a broad-chested boy with thick brown hair and dark, penetrating eyes. With those eyes, he looked at Nicky like a connoisseur checking out a work of art. The edges of his mask hid under the curtain of his hair, as if lost in the shadows, and this effect only heightened the beauty of his eyes.

  “Hello, Ryan,” she said.

  “Hello, Nicky. Shall we dance?”

  8

  Jill’s first dance was with Terry Reese who, in the larger scheme of things, wasn’t that important.

  The Network had classified the students of Thorndike’s senior class by the estimated wealth of their families. In that classification, Terry Reese ended up in the bottom tier, the families whose net worth was measured in ten million dollar increments. Terry’s father, an investment banker, was worth twenty million at the most, making him wealthy enough to hang with the uber-rich, but below the poverty line at Thorndike.

  Sitting in that bottom tier with Terry were about twenty other non-players, people who got the invite to Thorndike because their families were legacy graduates, or because the admissions committee saw potential in the kids even if the parents weren’t terribly rich.

  The next tier up was the hundred millionaires, where the children of politicians and corporate bigwigs resided. This tier included all the people who served as Kim Renwick’s lackeys, like Pauline Wabash, Rosalyn Smith, Andrea Peterson, and Brian Kingsbury. It also included most of the people the Network had identified as possible targets for Jill and Nicky’s subterfuge. Vince Weir, Mattie Dupree, Jenny Young, Lonnie Best, Sam Featherstone, and most importantly, Annika Fleming—these were people whose net worth was large enough to be relevant, but not so large that the Renwicks were all over them.

  The tier above them belonged to the billionaires. This was a smaller tier, and the one in which Jill’s family resided. Thorndike ensured that no child of a billionaire was left behind, but even still, there were only so many billionaires in the world, and this tier was always an exclusive club. Occupying this space with Jill were Mary Torrance, Montgomery Oppenheimer, Veronica Gregg, and Richard Nguyen. In this tier, you were either committed to a Coronation candidate or you were one. Veronica and Richard were supporters of Kim. Mary had her own candidacy. Montgomery came from a family that owed the Renwicks a favor.

  And then there was Jill.

  Kim Renwick had taken Jill’s support as a given until tonight. Jill’s father had lunch with Galen Renwick from time to time, and Jill’s family was the sort that didn’t make waves. The little lie Jill had told her friends about her parents being part of a consortium that supported Nicky Bloom was certain to cause major waves in DC by tomorrow.

  If you blab, I’ll deny everything I’ve just told you.

  That line from Jill’s story about the consortium was crucial, and served as fair warning to her friends. Even as she admonished them all not to say a word, she was counting on at least a couple of them spilling their guts before the night was over. There was simply too much excitement and too much wine for people like Mattie Dupree and Jenny Young to keep quiet.

  And by tomorrow, when all of Washington was abuzz about Nicky Bloom and the “secret consortium” behind her entry, a consortium whose only known members were the Wentworths, Jill would have to deal with the fallout. She’d have to deny she ever said anything about a secret consortium, even as she insisted with Annika and the rest that the consortium was real. She’d have to tell her father that she never said a word, that someone was playing with them. She might even have to speak with the Renwicks.

  It was about to get very interesting.

  She and Terry made the turn on the far wall as they rounded the dance floor. She was glad that Terry didn’t want to talk. She had a lot to work through in her mind. Just thinking about the can of worms she had opened was making her shiver, and she had to remind herself that this was what she wanted. Adventure, intrigue, and the knowledge that she was fighting the good fight.

  When Jill enrolled at Thorndike as a new freshman, she knew that something wasn’t right with the world, and that her parents might be a part of it, but she never imagined that two short years later she would be an agent of the Network, actively working to overthrow the established order.

  The Wentworth family fortune started in the 19th century in the tobacco business, a
nd then exploded in the 20th when Jill’s great, great grandfather bought a ranch in Western Virginia that was dripping in oil.

  By the time Jill’s father was of age to receive his inheritance, the fortune was large enough that no one in the family had to work. But Jill’s father, Walter, worked anyway. He started a software company, and asked his new wife to be the first employee.

  His new wife, Carolyn, was only nineteen when they met and got married, twenty when she started writing computer code for her husband’s company, and twenty-one when she became pregnant with Jill.

  The Wentworth family company was called Black Dart Enterprises. It provided “classified software and security solutions.” It sold a single product: a software suite called Clean Street. It had a single customer: the United States government. It made Walter Wentworth a billionaire, and it bought Walter Wentworth a close friendship with Daciana Samarin, the most powerful immortal on earth.

  Rich, well-mannered, talented, useful: this was how the immortals viewed the Wentworths. Carolyn Wentworth was widely viewed as the most talented programmer in the world, and her Clean Street software allowed the immortals to stay ahead of their enemies. Clean Street had become ubiquitous, its code freely flowing throughout the entire digital realm. The software read every word that was written on the Internet. It listened to every phone call. It was embedded in satellite signals, bank transactions, text messages—it was in the full-body scanners at the airport and the x-ray machines at customs. It connected together all the many surveillance devices the government put in offices and homes, it made sense of millions of hours of conversation, and reported it all to the government. Clean Street identified enemies of the state so they could be found and removed. It was Walter’s favorite child, and Carolyn’s obsession.

  Their daughter Jill was just an afterthought.

  Her mother obsessed with work, her father obsessed with being fabulous, Jill grew up not really knowing either of her parents. Not that she didn’t try, especially with her mother. When she was little, Jill sat in the second story office of their mansion in Brandywine, Virginia while her mother worked. She wasn’t allowed to talk, but she stayed in the room anyway, listening to her mother’s fingers clatter on the keyboard. She drew pictures while her mother typed. She looked out the window while her mother thought.