An Education in Ruin

by Alexis Bass

  My dad nods and rubs his eyes. I hope he believes me. I hope he doesn’t worry the entire time I’m here.

  “I’m going to miss you,” he says. I feel a tightening in my chest as I give him a hug and we say our final goodbye, knowing this really will be the last I’ll see of him until the winter holidays.

  “Don’t go easy on them, kid,” he says as we break away. Something he says to me every time I’m about to do something new.

  I answer the way I always do, with a promise. “Never.”

  “Wait,” he says when I’m about to get in the car. “You’ve never listened to Rosie before.” True. “Why now? For this place? You don’t have to believe what she says about adventure, you know. All that traveling she does—she’s searching for something, but she’s also running. It’s not any way to live.”

  “I know that,” I tell him. “That’s not why I wanted to come here. I just wanted something new. Something great.”

  He nods, and I make a silent wish that when I finally get in the car and drive away from him, I’ve quieted some of his fears. Even if I can already feel that heavy sadness of how much I’m going to miss him.

  The truth is, I never believed anything Rosie said about adventure and what it means to make the most of your life. But then I learned that Rosie was the only one in my family telling the truth. And that makes me look back on everything she said and consider what’s actually possible.

  Three

  When I return to Rutherford that evening, first and second years are gathered in the west wing, and third and fourth years are in the east, in a common room that’s full of tuft sofas made of brown leather, a few foosball and pool tables, and a couple of high-top tables where people are playing cards.

  Jasper is easy to spot. He’s sitting on the thick arm of one of the sofas reading a book. He has to bend slightly so light will hit the pages. The room is only lit up by lamps in a way that casts many shadows and gives the east wing common room the feel of a 1940s smoke room. Despite how antisocial he’s being, Jasper’s still surrounded by a group of guys. They laugh and talk around him like they don’t notice he’s ignoring them in favor of fiction. Or maybe they’re just used to it.

  Theo is at one of the tables playing cards. Anastasia is with him. They look like they might be having the most fun out of everyone, the way they’re laughing. And people flock to them like magnets, like their happiness and good time is contagious.

  I turn back to Jasper. How is a person supposed to get his attention when this is how he chooses to spend his time in an atmosphere intended for socializing? I watch as a girl wearing a bright purple sundress tries. She taps him on the shoulder. He hesitates to look up from his book, but when he does, he smiles at her in a way that makes him seem like someone who at least has the capacity to be warm. She says something, and he lets the book dangle by his knee like he’s forgotten about it. Something makes him laugh. Something makes her touch her hand to her cheek. Next, she puts a hand on his shoulder, and he proceeds to talk as though he hasn’t noticed. It embarrasses her a little, his lack of reaction, and she casually removes it. It’s hard to see the imperfections in Jasper now that he isn’t reading in the middle of a staff-orchestrated party. It’s easy to see why the girl in the purple is turning pink and why she keeps shifting from one foot to the other. He looks very handsome like this, with a smile that is more charming than I’d thought it would be, and a cool demeanor like nothing on earth could faze him.

  I can’t quite imagine what he’d be like in love with someone—realistically—and yet, it’s effortless to fantasize about it. The girl leaves him, and though he watches her walk away wearing an expression I would definitely want someone who’s watching me walk away to be wearing, he’s back to his book the moment she’s out of view. I should go up to him, I think. He was happy to talk to that other girl, and he’ll be fine to talk to you, I try to tell myself. But my feet stay grounded. He’s too attractive in this light, the shadows over his face. The way he’s focused on that book—the memory of the way he was fixated on the girl while she was leaving him. I stare at him, but I can’t think of him this way. I have to remember the boy who cut himself shaving and who was impatient during my overview. I have to remember what Rosie told me before I came here and the reason I know I can believe her.

  It was a year ago the first time she told me that I had the ability to make anyone fall in love with me. Rosie has always been a whirlwind, showing up at Mimi’s without calling whenever she’s run out of money or is in between traveling bouts. She stayed with us pretty regularly the entire year before I left for Rutherford.

  Mimi was listening from the open kitchen window where she was pinching rosemary over the sink. Rosie and I were out on the patio watching the sunset.

  “Is this some sort of Olsen woman power that I’ve never been told about?” Mimi joked when she heard what Rosie was telling me.

  Rosie waved her hand, brushing away Mimi’s comment. “This is something that’s true for everyone,” she said. She pivoted in her chair to face the open window and speak directly to Mimi. “You’ve chosen to live a solitary life, Michelle. You could’ve had men lining up for you if you’d wanted.”

  “Well, darn.” Mimi put on a loud, sarcastic voice anytime she responded to Rosie’s Unsolicited Advice, as she called it sometimes. Other times she called it trivial nonsense.

  “It’s probably too late for you now. It’s strongest when you’re young.” And I knew that with that comment, Rosie was talking about me.

  “Then you’ve probably lost the power altogether,” Mimi called. Any chance to remind Rosie that she was the older sister, Mimi took it.

  “If you hone the power and never stop using it, you can keep it for longer,” Rosie said.

  Mimi walked away from the window, shaking her head.

  Rosie and I sat in silence for a bit, staring out at the pastures as the sun went down, creating a shadow across the barn. When I was born, Mimi was living in a small apartment in Madison, and my father was living in a penthouse in Manhattan, where he still lives. He bought Mimi her dream house, a ranch-style home outside of town on twelve acres with a barn and a pond, before my first birthday. I used to think it was what they thought was best for me, growing up in the suburbs, lots of land for roaming, and that’s why she didn’t move to the city, to his mansion in the sky. But that wasn’t the case.

  “Don’t you want to know how to do it?” Rosie asked me. She pushed her foot against my chair, making it spin toward her.

  I’d recently turned sixteen. It felt the exact right age to learn about how to make someone fall in love with you. And I did have a boy in mind.

  “It doesn’t seem possible,” I said.

  “Ever the skeptic.” The same thing she’d said when I was nine and told her I’d never believed in Santa.

  “Well, what if they don’t think you’re pretty? What if you aren’t their type?” Lucius Castle had never stared at me the way I’d seen him stare at the other girls—like Carly Gomez.

  “You think you have a type—you’re wrong about that, believe me.”

  I understood that she had a point, even if I liked to love with my eyes first.

  “So how do you do it?” I asked. The sky was turning a bright pink with the setting sun. We could see it for miles from the vast, flat terrain of the property.

  Rosie smiled. She had this wide grin that made her squint. She looked so beautiful in that moment. Excited and full of hope. “I’ll tell you exactly how.”

  The sliding door creaked open and shut as Mimi came outside. She refilled Rosie’s glass of white wine. “This ought to be good,” she said.

  “You find a way to bring out their best qualities.”

  Mimi and I waited for the rest.

  “That’s it?” Mimi said it before I could.

  “It’s not as simple as you think. The trick is you have to be able to find the good in them.” She side-eyed her sister as she took a sip of wine. “That’s something you’ve
never been skilled at.”

  Mimi put up her hand, dismissing the comment as nothing. But her face turned stiff, and her eyes got sad. She drank wine to cover it and got up, pretending she had to check on the vegetables steaming in the kitchen.

  “You could do it easily, Collins,” Rosie said to me. She waited until I’d taken my eyes off Mimi and was focused on her before she continued. “You get that, right?”

  I answered her honestly. “Not really.”

  “You should know that about yourself at the very least,” she said. “It’s in you, and no one can take that away.”

  Tonight, in the east wing common room, I wonder what’s good about Jasper Mahoney. He’s dedicated and very intelligent. He’s handsome, athletic. That’s not going to be enough, though. Those are surface-level qualities only. Anyone could meet Jasper and see these things about him. Throughout the night, he takes breaks from his book to chat. But he is also the first one out of his group of friends to leave. He does it so quickly, without saying goodbyes, that I nearly miss it.

  Theo and Anastasia stick together all night, migrating effortlessly around the room. Everyone seems to have something to say to them, including the group I’ve sat with, casually joining in on a foosball rotation. But they don’t stay long, wherever they go.

  There’s a moment when I think they’ve left the party, when I can’t spot them anywhere in the room, but then a half an hour later, there they are. They seem like the type of people who would know places at this school where you can disappear, hide. Because from what I’ve learned about Theo, keeping private things hidden is something he’s very familiar with.

  Four

  The truth about Rutherford, now that I’ve been here a couple of weeks and am starting to catch on, is that it does feel worth the money. Life at Rutherford is very structured, very demanding. But it’s also like this: every day, I wake up and shower on clean white tiles, under a rainfall showerhead, the hot steam smelling like a field of lavender. I take courses like number theory, comparative religions, economics and post–Cold War Europe, and writing for contemporary media from some of the most prestigious teachers the world has to offer, in perfectly preserved, century-old brick-and-stained-glass buildings. I practice field hockey in state-of-the-art athletic facilities, eat a dinner prepared by a world-renowned chef, study in an ergonomic chair at my desk with a view of the deep forest, the roaring ocean, and a beach littered with driftwood. “Where the ocean meets the forest,” is how the small, isolated town of Cashmere, California, is described on the Rutherford Institute’s website. It’s as beautiful as was promised, I’ll give them that. And every night, I fall asleep on a mattress that feels like a cloud.

  It does get to you eventually, the way everything here is exquisite and distinguished, and just for us. It somehow creeps in, that subtle thought: I deserve this.

  This is the thing about Rutherford that the website doesn’t tell you: being here really is like having pretention pumped into your veins. It becomes very hard not to believe your own hype.

  But I still hear Rosie’s voice in my head—You can’t lose focus. What I’m asking you to do isn’t easy, but you know why you have to do it, and it’s up to you to take these risks—and I get that they are huge risks, but that just means the reward will be great. It will be exactly what we want it to be. Maybe I shouldn’t have believed her. Throughout her life, Rosie had earned and lost a lot of money. She was a gambler, not at casinos but in what my dad would call putting all her eggs in one basket—spending all the money she’d earned working the VIP section at a nightclub in Tokyo on an initial public offering that sounded like a good idea but turned out to be a dud, or taking the money she’d gotten from selling her Parisian apartment into flipping houses in Sacramento with a guy she met in Sydney who claimed he knew what he was doing, only to lose it all to bad construction management and a failing market. Those get-rich-quick schemes were what she was searching for; they seemed to be the only investments she trusted. It was always all or nothing in terms of Rosie having money or a place to live. Mimi said it was irresponsible, but Rosie simply called it living. To her credit, a few of her gambles had worked out. Rosie’s lived in some of the most beautiful places in the world. Paris, Medellín, San Sebastián, Kyoto. To me, it did say something that she’d been in such high-risk scenarios, where she didn’t always reap big rewards, and yet she never hesitated to take the next big risk.

  By now, I mostly know where to find Jasper at any given point in the day. He’s serious while school is in session, stopping only occasionally in between classes to chat with his friends. After school, he meets with his teachers during their open hours, then heads straight to the library even though he only has fifteen minutes before he’ll need to be at the soccer fields.

  While he’s at practice, I take water breaks from running drills for field hockey and watch him through the chain-link fence. He’s intense, playing like there is a scout observing, hanging his head and cursing to himself whenever he makes a mistake as if he could still be cut from the team, even though soccer isn’t even his main sport, just what he plays because it’s not lacrosse season.

  At dinner, he joins his friends at the long table at the far end of the cafeteria. He stays only the ten minutes that it takes him to eat his entrée before he leaves, rushing out the side doors, barely saying goodbye and not looking back.

  Theo is a different story. He’s impossible to track. He changes his route to class, the group he eats dinner with, even the times he arrives and leaves from water polo practice, always veering early or late. The only constant in his everyday ongoings is his best friend, Anastasia, who is never far from him.

  At dinner that night, Theo and Anastasia are nowhere to be found. Jasper is doing his usual: eating quickly and readying his things to leave.

  “Where do you think he’s going?” I ask Elena, nodding in Jasper’s direction. Elena Garcia is my roommate. She’s from Ann Arbor and is pleasant in a way that’s made the transition from only child to sharing a room quite seamless. So far, my lone complaint is that each morning I’m startled awake by her alarm blasting “Walking on Sunshine.” Elena will then proceed to bat at it absentmindedly until she manages to hit the snooze button.

  I’ve been eating with Elena and her friends since classes began, and they’ve graciously accepted me and didn’t even question why I was tagging along or accuse me of not having appropriate roommate boundaries. Elena is the only person who knows I have a specific interest in Jasper, though she thinks it’s only a crush.

  “Where who’s going?” Ruthie asks. Ruthie is Elena’s best friend.

  “Jasper Mahoney,” I say, deciding it’s okay to tell them, my closest, if also my newest, friends. Maybe they’ll surprise me by having the answer.

  “Oh,” Ruthie says.

  “That’s who you like?” Elena’s friend Matt moves his eyebrows up and down.

  “I find him…” Careful, careful. “Mysterious.”

  “Jasper’s not mysterious,” Elena says. “He’s aloof.”

  “Aloof isn’t so bad, is it?”

  They all laugh—all six of them at the table. I’m not sure that’s the reaction I’d expected, but that’s part of the fun being here. Nothing is quite what I’d anticipated.

  I generally like being with Elena and her friends. But they aren’t going to help me much. None of them play sports with Jasper; none of them have classes with him. None of them really know him or care to. And even as Theo seems to be friends with everyone, he doesn’t spend much time with them. None of his extracurriculars line up with theirs either. They are heavy into theater, and Theo’s life is already a stage.

  We hear an eruption of laughter across the cafeteria. I know before I turn my head to look that Theo is the cause of such commotion. Theo has what Mimi would call the gift of charm, that ability to make people feel like they’re standing in the sun whenever they’re around you. The students flock to him, they really do. I haven’t quite gotten to experience him f
irsthand—yet—but it’s the kind of thing you can observe from afar. And he’s nondiscriminatory with this charisma, spreading it everywhere and to anyone. No one seems to mind sharing either, even if it’s crystal clear that Anastasia Bowditch is indeed his favorite.

  “Should we start?” Ruthie says, glancing at her watch. “Are you ready?” For this question, they all turn to look at me.

  “I’m ready.” Hopefully, this is the truth.

  Elena and her friends like to play games at dinner. Sometimes card games, sometimes word games. Today, they want to play the game of bouncing quarters off the table and into a cup. Like all their games, the fun isn’t in the playing; it’s in the betting, and today, whoever loses has to drink from one of the truly disgusting concoctions that Matt mixed up during lunch. Things like French onion soup with chocolate milk and iced tea, or blue cheese dressing combined with fish sauce and mayonnaise.

  I know. It sounds really juvenile and ridiculous, but after studying things like computer science and cryptography and organic chemistry for the past eight hours, this is a good way to unwind.

  As the game picks up, I laugh so hard my eyes leak tears. They’re all laughing, too.

  “What in the world is going on over here?” I feel someone touch my shoulder and turn to see Theo standing over us, one hand on my shoulder, one hand on Matt’s. We both slide over so he can join us at the table—welcoming him gladly into our already blissful conversation.

  He edges a knee into the empty space instead of sitting down—an uncommitted way to join in. We tell him about the game, and he laughs, starts shaking the mystery cups like this will tell him something. He knows better than to smell them.

  Across the room, where Jasper usually sits, I see a flash of him—messy curls, lean shoulders hunched under a maroon jacket. He’s back? His friends greet him, but he doesn’t stay long; it would seem he’d forgotten a book and had to return for it. As quickly as he was here, he’s leaving again. But to where?