They Wish They Were Us

by Jessica Goodman

  Maybe they’re right. It’s not worth rehashing the past.

  But there’s something I just can’t shake.

  I reach for my phone with an unsteady hand and pull up Rachel’s texts.

  Graham didn’t kill Shaila. He’s innocent.

  My phone feels heavy in my hand, too heavy to hold, and the sky begins to swirl above me.

  “Jill, you okay?” Henry returns and kneels down next to me. His hand slinks up the back of my shirt. It burns my bare skin.

  I muster a nod. “Just drank that too fast,” I say, pointing to my cup.

  “I’ll get you some water.”

  “Thanks,” I mumble.

  The ground is wet and hard under my hands and I push myself up to stand, taking one last look at what Rachel said.

  It’s all so fucked up. Can we talk?

  * * *

  —

  The first time I spoke to Rachel I thought it was unfair that she had to breathe the same air as me. She was striking, with cheekbones too high for someone who wore a high school uniform every day and eyes that were so dark you could barely see her pupils. She always wore her hair in soft waves that waterfalled down her back. When I got a haircut that year, I showed the stylist her class picture as inspiration. But my mane was never as smooth, always a little too unruly.

  She found me in the library one day in early October of freshman year, with The Odyssey open in front of me. I tapped my fist against the desk, hoping that by some miracle I would absorb the final two hundred pages in thirty minutes flat before our midterm. My GPA was about to take a nosedive and for the first time, I could feel my scholarship slipping away, everything spiraling out of my control.

  I had planned to stay up until 3 a.m. to cram, but I fell asleep with the thick book splayed out on my chest and all the lights still on. I woke up in a panic when my regular alarm sounded at 6:07. It took a Herculean effort on my part not to break into sobs right there in the stacks.

  “You look like shit,” Rachel said. She rested her hands on the book and leaned down low so I could see the top of her cleavage peeking out over a lacy black bra. “Beaumont?” she asked.

  I nodded. A ball sat in my throat. I swallowed hard.

  “You know Adam, right? You’re Shaila’s friend?”

  I nodded again.

  “Cool.” Rachel disappeared and my face grew hot, mortified that she would run to Adam to tell him how awkward and gross I was. What loser screwed up this epically? A minute passed and then another, and then Rachel was standing in front of me, holding out two pieces of paper. “Here,” she said. “It’s a pattern. First answer’s A. Second’s B. Third’s C. Rinse and repeat. You get the picture. He’s just using Mrs. Mullen’s test from last year. And the year before that. She never changes it.”

  “What?” I whispered, incredulous that she just had the answers.

  Rachel smiled. “Trust me. Look it over, then destroy this. If anyone catches you with it, we’re done for, got it?” I thought about how disappointed Mom and Dad would be if I got caught cheating, if I was suspended or worse. How would I be able to live with myself? But then I pictured failing the test, losing my ride to Gold Coast Prep and all the college connections and the status and . . . the most precious pieces of my life would be gone. My chest pounded as I grappled with what I was about to do. I took the papers in my shaking hands.

  “You owe me one,” Rachel said with a wink before she skipped away, her hips swinging with every step.

  The next week, when Mr. Beaumont dropped a graded paper back on my desk, he stabbed at the red numbers proclaiming 98. “Well done, Jill.” I had purposely messed up one answer to throw him off my trail. I should have been elated, but instead I couldn’t feel a thing. I stuffed the exam way down into my backpack and tried to forget about it, about what I had done.

  Rachel was right, though. I would pay her back throughout that year with various pops, like picking up her favorite donuts from Diane’s and researching her history term paper on the Vietnam War. I even steamed her prom dress so she could pose for perfect pictures with Adam.

  It would be months before I knew the full scope of the Player Files, how there were only straight-up answer keys for small tests like this one. It would be the only one I ever used.

  The real power lay in the gray areas, where former Players passed down access to an elite and explicit network of tips, like which local doctors would write you a note proving you needed extra time on standardized tests (Robert and Marla employed that one), and which college departments were partial to Players (a grad from the early aughts now works at Yale’s art program; Quentin has been emailing with him regularly for months). There was even a script on how to ace a case study given by the dean of admissions at Wharton (Henry freaked when he found it).

  If Gold Coast Prep’s whole schtick was to set you up for life, the Player Files took it one step further. They made you untouchable.

  We didn’t get the password to the app that housed them all until we were fully initiated, but throughout freshman year, we got flashes of its muscle, like when a senior felt pity toward us.

  Shaila never touched the app. She didn’t need it.

  When I got that English exam back, Shaila craned her neck to see my score. She smirked in approval. “Next time maybe you’ll get 100.” She gritted her teeth and pulled at a stray cuticle between her thumb and her forefinger. “Just don’t go beating me,” she said. “First in class is my shit.”

  I managed a smile and waited for her to break into giggles, but she held my gaze in a frigid standoff before turning away completely.

  It was obvious that Shay was smart. She’d been in honors classes since middle school, and the homework packets that took me days took her just a few hours. English was her favorite. She often skipped study hall to go to Mr. Beaumont’s office hours, though she called him “Beau” for short. He was assigning her Shakespeare on the side to prepare for the SAT Subject Test, she said. She’d emerge from his classroom with weathered, worn copies of The Tempest and King Lear and a small, secret smile.

  After a particularly grueling pop where we had to stand in the ocean in November, wearing only bikinis, while singing Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” for an hour, I asked Shay why she wanted to be a Player, why go through with all the hard stuff if she wasn’t going to reap the real rewards. She wrapped a terry towel around her body and looked at me with a baffled expression and quivering lips that had turned a pale shade of blue.

  “It’s the most fun we’ll ever have,” she said.

  She died with a perfect GPA.

  Shaila was destined for Harvard. It was basically in her blood. Mrs. and Mr. Arnold had met right there on Harvard Yard. I’d heard the story just once from Mrs. Arnold after she downed a few martinis on Shaila’s fourteenth birthday.

  Shaila’s mom, formerly known as Emily Araskog, was a sweet girl who had moved to Cambridge to attend Harvard from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where she had lived her entire life in a penthouse that overlooked Central Park. She’d grown up with an elevator operator who wore white gloves and a smart gray uniform, complete with a little hat that he tipped to her when she walked through the ornate wrought-iron doors.

  Old money, Mom had whispered to Dad when she met Mrs. Arnold. A grade-A WASP. And it was true. The Araskogs’ lineage dated back to the Liberty Bell, Mrs. Arnold said.

  One day, Emily was sitting on a bench in Harvard’s leafy quad when a football hit her square in the face, knocking her onto the ground. When she looked up in shock, a blond man in a crimson sweatshirt was standing over her.

  “Gil Arnold,” he said after apologizing profusely.

  He took Emily out for a drink, and then dinner, and then the rest is history. They married the week after graduation and the Krokodiloes, Harvard’s oldest a cappella group, performed at the reception. Within just a few years, Gil built
a multibillion-dollar hedge fund in Manhattan and the Arnolds decided to plant roots in Gil’s hometown, Gold Coast.

  Emily was hesitant to leave Manhattan and her and Gil’s close friends, the Sullivans, whose daughter Kara had started crawling around with baby Shaila. But Gil’s other childhood friend, Winslow Calloway, had just moved back home and snagged a plot on the beach. Wouldn’t it be so nice to join them and be near the ocean with all that space? The fact that their kids could go to the best private school on the East Coast, which would only be a few miles away from their home, sealed the deal for Emily.

  And so, Shaila was indoctrinated with Crimson pride from the moment she emerged from Emily Arnold née Araskog’s womb. Swaddled in a ruby red blanket, little baby Shaila was told it would be her destiny to follow in her parents’ footsteps.

  * * *

  —

  Twenty-four hours after the news about Graham broke, I’m lying in bed staring at my phone. I scroll through the texts, past Adam’s adios message before heading back to school and past Henry’s night, babe note, until I find Rachel’s unfamiliar number.

  I wonder if she’s thinking about me as much as I’m thinking about her. She had to know that we would see the article in the Gazette, but did she know that no one would want to deal with it?

  I type out what I want to say and stare at the letters dancing on the screen. I picture Shaila on the morning of initiation, sipping from a mug of coffee while she laughed, nervous energy coursing through her limbs. I can see her so clearly when I close my eyes. Her sunny face and long, thick lashes, daring me to betray her by responding to Rachel. But I also see the Players, and all of us promising just last night that we wouldn’t get involved. I hear Adam’s comforting voice. “Rachel is nuts,” he’d said at Diane’s.

  But what if she’s not?

  I bite my lip and close my eyes, shoving Shaila, my friends, and even Adam from my mind. I make a decision. I turn my back on them.

  Let’s talk.

  I hit send.

  SEVEN

  “I CALL THIS meeting of the Players to order!” Nikki announces, smacking a plastic gavel on the coffee table. The six of us are sprawled around Nikki’s living room for the first official tribunal of the year. Piles of bagels and schmear, courtesy of Nikki’s parents’ credit card, are stacked on the table. But no one’s ready to start just yet.

  Henry sits between my legs on the floor and furiously scrolls through Twitter, reading some thread by his favorite New Yorker reporter, who just published a new investigation.

  “Man, this dude is a legend,” Henry murmurs. “I’d kill to interview him about sourcing.”

  I pat his head like a puppy.

  “Dude, I can probably hook it up,” Robert says. “My dad knows all those writers.”

  “Your dad knows all the writers at The New Yorker?” Quentin asks, skeptical.

  “Uh, yeah. I grew up in the city, you know.”

  “No! Really?” Nikki says, feigning shock. “None of us knew that!”

  “Just remember who got you fakes this summer,” Robert says. “I’m the one with that connect.”

  We all grumble and roll our eyes, shoving each other with elbows and pillows. I check my phone, more out of hope than necessity, but there’s nothing there. Waiting for Rachel to respond has been torture.

  No one brings up Graham or the article in the Gazette. Instead we’re pretending like nothing happened, like we could still go about our normal Players’ rituals as usual. Glossing over things is a Gold Coast tradition and I am happy to follow suit. No one needs to know I texted the enemy.

  I avert my attention to Marla, who stares intently at the screen in her lap, the Dartmouth admissions portal open in front of her. She applied there early with hopes of walking on the field hockey team.

  “You know we won’t hear for a few months, right?” I whisper. Acceptances were still so far off, I had to force myself not to think about them.

  Marla throws her head back against the couch. “Ugh, I know. I’m obsessive.”

  Quentin grumbles next to us. “Don’t I know it.” He’s submitted his portfolio to Yale’s art program and is dying to hear back, too. “Cannot believe we have to wait eons for this.”

  I rest my head on Quentin’s soft shoulder and try to push thoughts of being at Brown with Adam out of my head, of crushing that Women in Science and Engineering scholarship exam I’d only get to take if I got in. It’s too much to wrap my brain around. “Uh, hello!” Nikki yells before banging her gavel again. “The Toastmaster is talking here.” As president of the student council and Toastmaster of the Players, I think it’s safe to say the power has gone to her head just a little.

  Quentin groans and tosses a pillow at her.

  “It’s time. We gotta pick freshmen,” she continues.

  Marla drops her phone and sits up straight.

  Robert claps, throwing a fist in the air. “Fresh meat! Let’s do it!”

  Nikki opens a frayed green binder and pulls out a stack of papers containing photos and bios of all the potential freshmen. The binder had been handed down from Toastmaster to Toastmaster for who knows how long. Hell, maybe Mr. Beaumont even saw it. It holds all the official Players rules—how to nominate freshmen, specific songs and chants we had to learn, guidelines for creating pops, and, of course, the initiation rules. Only seniors are allowed to see the binder, and when last year’s Toastmaster, Derek Garry, passed it to Nikki before he left for Yale, we spent hours poring over its contents. When we reached the initiation section, we scanned it desperately, seeking answers for what had happened, but there was nothing.

  Today, we’re stuck on the nominations chapter. We’d heard the whole stupid process could take hours. I remember Adam told me it took them the entire weekend and they pulled two all-nighters in a row to pick our squad. But Derek used the same line last year.

  “You guys ready for this?” Nikki says, a grin spreading across her face. She’d been memorizing the binder all summer, preparing to lead us into a new year. She was ready to finally control the Players. This year will be different.

  “First up, Sierra McKinley. Quentin, she’s your nom. What’s her deal?”

  “Sierra’s in my AP drawing class—as a freshman, which is amazing—and she’s actually super talented. I told her so last week and she didn’t get all nervous the way the other freshmen do when I talk to them. She just said thanks and drew this insane-looking bird and I was like, damn, that is very cool. Plus, she’s got that sick house up near the tollbooth and has like three acres of beach access. Mom went there for Fourth of July last year and they set off their own fireworks. Very good party house.”

  Nikki smiles. “Anyone dissent?”

  “She won’t put out!” Robert yells.

  “How do you even know that, asshole?” I ask.

  He smirks. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  “You wish, Robert.” Nikki straightens her back and flips her hair over her shoulder. This was a bad week between them. “Next up, Bryce Miller.” She points to me. “Your pick?”

  “Adam’s brother,” I say as a way of explanation. Heads around the room nod, but Henry looks down and starts thumbing through Twitter again. “I thought at first he was a little shit but he’s been super cool to Jared, bringing him around for band practice and stuff. I’m into it.”

  Nikki nods in absolute seriousness. “Thoughts?” Her eyebrows shoot up to the group.

  “It’s a no-brainer,” Marla says, and I thank her silently for having my back. “Legendary is in his blood.”

  “All right then,” Nikki says. “Moving on.” For the next three hours, Nikki runs through a dozen more names. We debate Gina Lopez’s suspicious gluten allergy, Carl Franklin’s excessive sneaker collection, Aditi Kosuri’s actually-pretty-good attempts at being a style influencer, and Larry Kramer’s wild growth spurt that landed him ne
ar the seven-foot mark this spring. The boys demand a thirty-minute break to shoot around a basketball, while Marla, Nikki, and I laze next to the pool with a bag of Cheetos and a box of Pocky.

  “We’re almost at Jared, Jill,” Nikki says, wiping cheese dust off her fingers. “What do you want to do?”

  Marla nods. “Like I said, he is kind of cute.” She giggles.

  “Mar, I swear,” I say, and swat at her arm. I try to think. “We decided that things would be different. We would be different. Nikki, you’re Toastmaster now, the first girl ever. So we’re in charge.”

  They nod. “I want him here, if we’re still in on that promise,” I say. “Nothing bad can happen to him or any of the others. We can change everything. We can make this fun, the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “Hell yeah,” Nikki says. “I’ll make sure of it.”

  “If that’s the case, if that’s really the case, I’m all in,” I say.

  Everything is going to be different.

  Jared is voted in, obviously, along with Sierra, Bryce, and a few others.

  I let Adam know the good news.

  Fuck yeah, he responds in an instant.

  Keep it cool, tho. We want it to be a surprise.

  Obvi, Newman. I got this . . . wish I was there to celebrate with you.

  My heart flutters.

  Same.

  Have the most fun possible. Ever. Period. All the time.

  You know it.

  We end the day with pizza and garlic knots, eaten on paper plates in Nikki’s living room. She puts on an old Adam Sandler movie and we lie like sloths until varsity running back Eli Jaffe group texts like sixty people saying he’s throwing a last-minute beer pong tournament. Henry, Robert, and Marla jump up to go, but Quentin, Nikki, and I stay behind and settle in for a Real Housewives marathon.