Con Academy

by Joe Schreiber

  Andrea cocks her head just slightly. The shadowed pucker of a frown has become a truly agitated scowl. “I think you better leave right now, before you find yourself in an even worse situation than you already are.”

  “A poor scholarship student from a displaced village in the Balkans?” I say. “Really? Who forged your transcripts and tax records, Andrea Dufresne? And how did you really get into Connaughton?”

  “That’s it,” she says, and turns to walk away. “I’m calling security.”

  “Good,” I say. “That way they can drive us both to the bus station. You’ll be on your way back to Tuscaloosa by lunchtime.”

  That stops her cold, just like I’d hoped it would. When she finally turns around, all the remaining confidence in her face has drained away, and she stares at me for a long moment. I realize that I’m seeing her without makeup, and she’s actually much prettier this way—even though she looks like she’s going to haul off and take a swing at my head with her shampoo bucket.

  “So what do you want?” she whispers, and even her voice sounds different now, tinged with a Southern drawl. “A medal?”

  “No,” I say. “Just five minutes of your time.”

  Her gaze flicks right and left again, so quickly that I can barely track the movement of her eyes, and she grabs my wrist. “Come on,” she growls under her breath. “Before somebody sees us here.”

  Her room is immaculate, walls decorated with Klimt prints and framed antique maps and black-and-white Ansel Adams shots of the Grand Canyon. Hardcover leather-bound books with silver and gold titles embossed on the spines sit on bookshelves. It’s totally Crate & Barrel by way of Restoration Hardware. There’s a cello case in the corner, next to a metal stand with sheet music spread out on it, all of it very deliberately arranged and, to my newly enlightened sensibilities, totally fake. But at least the room smells like girl, like hair product and moisturizer and Yankee Candle, and when I sit down on the already-made bed, she gives me a grimace of distaste.

  “Don’t bother making yourself comfortable,” she says. “You’re not staying.”

  “Oh, you’re not going to kick me out,” I say.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because I’ve got your number and you know it.” I unzip my bag and pull out my laptop, powering it up. “First of all, admit to yourself that what you’re running here is a dead-end game.”

  Andrea blinks at me, then nonchalantly turns to the mirror to begin brushing her still-damp hair, combing it out in long black waves. “How do you figure that?”

  “Think about it,” I say. “What’s your real payoff here? You’re going to graduate this year, and then what? Your GPA isn’t exactly Ivy League.”

  “Excuse me?” She stops brushing her hair and turns to stare at me. “How do you know about my GPA?”

  “Let’s not kid each other,” I say, and turn the computer so that she can see the page I’m on. “I told you I’ve already hacked into the school’s mainframe. Security around here is strictly Chuck E. Cheese. I practically sneezed my way through their firewall.”

  “Let me see that,” she says, but I pull the MacBook away from her, beyond her reach. “You can’t just snoop through people’s transcripts.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “It’s dishonest. I feel so dirty.” I look around the room. “Got any coffee?”

  She glares at me, simmering in silence. “There’s Red Bull in the fridge,” she says finally. “You can get it yourself.”

  “Look.” I walk over to the little dorm refrigerator in the closet, pull out a can of Red Bull, and crack it open. “All I’m saying is, there’s no payoff. What happens after you graduate? You’re back at square one again, right?” I glance at the cello case in the corner. “Or were you planning on conning your way into Juilliard, too? I hear they’re a little more difficult to snooker.”

  “Who says I have to con my way in?”

  “So you’re really that good?” I stand up and start walking over to the instrument. “You want to play me something? Adagio for Scam Artists in B Major?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Andrea says, “because as soon as I tell Dr. Melville that you’re still here—”

  “I’ll tell him what I know about you,” I say, “and we’ll both end up doing our senior year in public school. So it looks like we’re stuck with each other.”

  “No.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said no.” She settles into her swivel chair, crosses her arms, and smiles. “Because you’re right about one thing, Will. There isn’t room at this school for both of us. And I was here first.”

  “Well, I’m not leaving,” I say. “Just because you’re scared of me—”

  “Please,” she says. “I’m scared of you why, exactly?”

  “It’s obvious that I’m far better at this than you are. I know how to hack into the computer system, and let’s face it: my backstory is way more pathetic than yours. I’ve got dead parents and a radioactive grandma. You’re old news around here, but I’m fresh and interesting, and you haven’t even seen me play lacrosse yet.” The truth is, I’ve never played lacrosse, but I’m not going to tell her that. “You’re terrified I’m going to steal all your action.”

  “Even if I agreed to let you stay,” she says, “what makes you think you can fix things with Dr. Melville?”

  “Well, for one thing, I know what Dr. Melville looks like”—I turn the computer around again so she can see the school website, featuring a picture of a jovial-looking man with a full gray beard—“and the guy that you sent to my room in the middle of the night definitely wasn’t him. Who was he? Just some local rube that you paid to throw on a Connaughton bathrobe and scare me?”

  Andrea gets quiet for a really long time. She scrunches her lips together and steeples her fingers, and now the frown across her forehead makes her look like she’s concentrating on something very intensely.

  “What if . . .” she says, sitting down next to me, “we decide . . . to make it interesting?”

  “How so?”

  “We both want to stay here at Connaughton, correct? And we both have enough dirt to rat each other out. So what if we agree on a mark, a student here”—she pauses to think—“somebody who’s rich enough to make it worthwhile. The first one to get this individual to fork over, say, ten thousand dollars . . . gets to stay.”

  I’m already smiling. “And the loser?”

  “Packs it in,” she says. “Happy trails.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “One thing you’ll learn about me, Will. I never joke about money. Ever.” She looks at me. “So do we have a deal or not?”

  “Oh, it’s on,” I say, barely resisting the urge to add the words like Donkey Kong, because I don’t want to blow the mood. “But how do we choose the mark?”

  And just then, her door bursts open.

  Five

  THE GUY WHO STUMBLES INTO ANDREA’S ROOM IS WEARING candy-striped boxer shorts, a rumpled bathrobe, and cowboy boots. His gelled blond hair is sticking up sideways in the back, and he’s got a girl dangling off each arm. All three of them look as if they’ve been up all night, and they all start laughing hysterically when they see Andrea and me sitting on the bed staring at them.

  “Huh,” he snorts, stumbling forward until the girl on his left has to catch him and hold him up. “I guess this isn’t the shower. Hey . . .” Leaning forward, he screws his face up into a squinting, cockeyed stare. “Wait a second. You’re that new kid from Bodkins’s class, right? The missionary kid?”

  That’s when I recognize him—the loud snorer from English Lit. I’m still trying to remember his name when he lets go of the girls and flounders forward with outstretched arms, flinging himself across Andrea’s room. I’m not sure where he thinks he’s headed, but he ends up in the corner, wrestling with her cello case.

  “I’ve always wanted to try one of these.” He grins, holding up the case and fumbling with the clasps. “It’s like a giant ukule
le, right?”

  “Leave it alone, Brandt,” Andrea says, reaching for him, but he shoves her away and pops open the case. The cello falls out and hits the floor with a twangy crash. Still grinning, the guy grabs it up off the floor. In the doorway, the two girls are shrieking with laughter like this is the funniest thing they’ve ever seen, as he starts plucking and strumming the strings with his fingers, belting out the Bill Withers classic “Ain’t No Sunshine” at the top of his lungs. Strings snap and break.

  “Quit it!” Andrea lunges for the cello, but the guy moves at the last second, and—accidentally or on purpose—her hand makes contact with his face with a sharp whack.

  All at once, the fun comes to a screeching halt. The guy glares at her, and I can see the red imprint of her hand on his cheek. He picks up the cello by the neck and slams it down onto the floor, then raises one foot and stomps on it with his cowboy boot. It splinters, pieces of polished wood flying in every direction.

  “Hey, whoa,” I say, rising from the bed, but that’s as far as I get before Kid Boxer Shorts swings around and drives his elbow into my stomach, leaving me doubled over and sucking air into parts of my body that I didn’t realize even needed oxygen. Already I can tell that it’s going to be a while before I can speak in a normal voice. When I manage to straighten up, I see Andrea just standing there, staring at what he’s done. Even the girls in the doorway have stopped laughing.

  “You like that?” he says. “Huh? Was that good for you?” He glowers at the broken pieces of the cello. “Maybe next time you’ll dial it down a little when somebody’s just having a laugh, right?”

  “Mr. Rush?”

  It’s a female voice coming from the doorway, and I look up to see that the two girls have vanished and been replaced by a tall, severe-looking house matron standing just outside the room. She’s dressed in a black suit and skirt, with iron-colored hair and a sharp, beaklike nose. She looks like she could kick all of our butts. Emily Dickinson meets Angie Dickinson, back in her Police Woman days, at least. I’ve caught the reruns on late-night TV.

  “What exactly is going on?” she demands. “What on earth . . .” Her eyes flick to me, then to Andrea, and back to the cello smasher. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just having some fun,” the guy mumbles, weaving his way to the door so that the woman has to step aside to keep him from crashing into her. Unbelievably, she does just that, allowing him to walk away.

  “Mr. Rush,” she says again, this time to his back. “I’m sending you to Dr. Melville’s office for disciplinary action, right away. And you—” She points in my direction. “Male students are not permitted in the female dorms.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say. “I was just helping clean up, and I’ll leave.”

  The matron looks at the mess on the floor, obviously created by Brandt, and I can feel her trying to decide whether to ask any more questions. Then, with a pinched-mouth grimace, she nods. “See that you do.”

  After she leaves, I look back at Andrea. She’s bent over, gathering up the broken pieces of her instrument. I get down on my hands and knees to help her, but she pushes me away.

  “Just leave it,” she says in a toneless voice. Her hair’s hanging in her face so I can’t see her expression. “Go. Get out of here. Leave me alone.”

  “He’s the one,” I say. “It has to be him.”

  She stops and looks up at me, and I see that her eyes are red. “What?”

  “That jerk. He’s our mark.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Um . . . no?”

  “That’s Brandt Rush.” Andrea sits up, then slumps back against the wall with her chin on her knees, looking hopeless. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of him.”

  “Should I have?”

  “As in, Rush’s?”

  “What, you mean the retail empire?” I shrug. “So what? It doesn’t give him an excuse to act like a total jerk.”

  “Will . . .” Andrea just shakes her head. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

  “I’m new here, remember?”

  “Forget it.” She stands up. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Go. Now.”

  I get to my feet and head toward the door, brushing the shards of wood from the knees of my jeans, then stop and look back. “Who were those guys that you sent to my room, anyway? The ones who were supposed to be Melville and the security guard?”

  “Just a couple of friends from town.” Andrea’s still looking down at the remaining pieces of her cello. “They owed me a favor. Why does it matter?”

  “So as far as the administration knows, I’m still a student here?”

  “Yes,” she says, “but I already told you—”

  I hold up my hand, stopping her. “Andrea?”

  “What?”

  “Game on.”

  And I close the door before she has a chance to answer.

  Six

  WHEN I GET BACK TO MY ROOM, THERE’S A NEATLY wrapped bundle sitting outside my door. I pick it up and peel back the tape, peering down at a perfectly folded blazer and dress pants, white shirt, and tie. My uniform has arrived.

  I carry it inside along with my backpack. The room is still a mess from last night’s hurried departure—my bed is unmade and the half-finished orientation paperwork is scattered across the floor. It feels strange to be back after crawling out the window in the middle of the night, but I’m already starting to get used to the idea of being a student here.

  I sit on the bed and take a second to get my thoughts in order. From here, one of two things is going to happen. Either Andrea will rise to the challenge—which was really her idea anyway—or she’ll rat me out to the administration for real, in which case I’ll have no choice but to leave for good. But I really don’t think that’s going to happen, because Andrea knows she can’t do that without getting herself in trouble. Besides, I saw the look on her face when Brandt smashed her cello.

  She wants payback.

  While I’m sitting there contemplating the situation, I get a text message from Andrea117 on my phone.

  Meet me after English Lit outside the arts center.

  I read the text twice before deleting it and making sure it’s gone for good. The message means she’s either in or at least interested enough to talk through the details. Grabbing my towel, I head down the hall for a shower, mindful of my bruised stomach muscles where Brandt hammered his elbow. When I get back to my room, I try on my uniform for the first time.

  The jacket, shirt, and pants fit perfectly. I get the tie right on the first try, then rake my fingers through my hair until it looks halfway presentable. For the moment, the guy staring back at me from the mirror almost looks like he belongs here. I smile. If I can fool myself, then the rest of my classmates should be a breeze.

  Five minutes later, armed with my class schedule, I’m speed-walking down to the dining hall for an epic helping of gourmet huevos rancheros with a latte and fresh-squeezed orange juice. The eggs are delicious, light and fluffy, with roast tomato-serrano salsa, corn tortillas, black beans, and fresh cheese, and I manage to polish the whole thing off without getting any on my tie. Meanwhile, it’s almost nine o’clock, which means I’ve got World History 443: Twentieth-Century India and China starting in less than ten minutes. If I hurry, I can make the bell.

  I head out of the dining hall, riding on a river of well-dressed, bright-eyed baby billionaires on their way to various training seminars on how to rule the twenty-first-century world. I’m glancing down at the map to make sure I’m headed in the right direction when I see a big group of students up ahead gathered around the statue of Lancelot Connaughton.

  Except it’s not the statue they’re looking at.

  There’s a student perched on top of Connaughton’s shoulders. He’s wearing nothing but a ski mask and a pair of red swim trunks, and he’s trying to hold perfectly still, like he’s part of the statue, but it’s cold out here and I can see him shivering. Written across his bare chest in what
looks like black marker is a stylized letter S. As uncomfortable as it seems, it’s pretty obvious that he’s actually choosing to be up there.

  “What is this?” I look at the girl next to me, who’s snapping a photo with her iPhone. “What’s going on?”

  “Hazing ritual,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “The Sigils.”

  “Who?”

  She glances at me. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “The Sigils are a secret society on campus. Every year they invite two or three new students to join. Nobody knows who’s in it, but the members always make new recruits do something like this to get in.”

  For a second we both stand there looking up at the poor kid. “How long does he have to stay up there?”

  “Till his assignment’s over.” She shrugs, and then from behind us I hear a man’s voice shouting. “I guess his time’s up,” the girl says, and I glance around to see two security guards lumbering across the quad, making a beeline for the statue.

  “You!” one of them shouts. “Get down from there now!”

  The kid in the ski mask jumps off Connaughton’s shoulders and hits the ground running at top speed, with the two guards struggling to keep up. The crowd of students cheers him on. Before the guards can reach him, the kid ducks into a nearby building and disappears. A roar of approval goes up from the crowd.

  “Looks like he made it,” the girl next to me says, and the other students are already starting to disperse, heading to class.

  “So, this secret society,” I begin. “How long has it been around?”

  “Who knows? Some people say that Lancelot Connaughton himself started it as a kind of inner circle. Only the members know who the other members are, or why certain people get invited and others don’t. It’s all very Skull and Bones.”