RULING CLASS

by Huss, JA

  ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

  Local Girl Gets a Gallery Show

  The Fargo Free Weekly extends a huge congrats to Katie Hunter, a graduating senior at North Dakota State University in the visual arts department, for winning the annual Naturalists of North Dakota Award. Her prize includes acceptance into the MFA program, an assistantship, and a gallery show to display her work and celebrate her success at the Campus Art Co-op on August twenty-fifth. Festivities begin at seven-thirty. No RSVP necessary. Refreshments will be served.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - CADEE

  Isabella walks into the Campus Art Co-op at seven ten looking like a fashion model who just got off a plane from Paris. Because that’s basically what happened. She’s wearing a large sunhat, cream-colored wide-legged linen pants, and a pale yellow camisole that shows off her glowing tan.

  Her bright green eyes wander around the room—which is already filled with a few of my friends from school—and land on me.

  She sucks in a breath. Then steps into the crowd with open arms and a wide smile.

  We don’t hug—we fall into each other. Arms all the way around. Faces pressed into hair and necks. Long, deep breaths. And when we pull apart, we both have tears in our eyes.

  She shakes her head at me. “I’m so proud of you, Fugling.”

  I laugh and wipe my eyes. “You’re such a bitch.”

  She hooks her arm in mine. “Seriously, this is all so great! Look at all your shit hanging on the walls!” She places a hand over her heart. “I’m super impressed.”

  “It’s a university gallery. I expect about thirty-seven people to show up, and none of it is gonna sell.”

  “Hmm. We’ll see.”

  “What did you do?”

  She shoots me a look that says, Who, me?

  “Isabella. If you bought all my art, I’m gonna be pissed.”

  “Me? I hate art. You know that.” But then she steps aside and points to the door. “But those bitches are crazy for it.”

  I lose my breath, and my mind, and my sense of self when I see all the girls enter the gallery. “What on earth!”

  Mona, Sophie, Valentina, Selina, Maddie, Natalie, and Elexa all come through the door looking like their own versions of spectacular.

  They crowd me with their bodies and their words come out in rushed excitement.

  We stay like that for at least a full minute. A pack of bodies all entwined together. Enjoying the feeling being close again.

  I think that’s a feeling they have always had, so it’s not quite as special for them as it is for me. But I have learned to stop longing for the things I’ve missed in life and I now look for the things I didn’t instead.

  And even when they are far, far away, I have them.

  We all got out that night the FBI raided the tomb.

  We got out in teams.

  Sophie and Elexa.

  Maddie and Natalie.

  Selina and Valentina.

  Only Mona stayed behind with the boys to set the record straight and make sure the truth got out about what really happened at High Court College and Prep.

  But even though we all left, we didn’t all end up in North Dakota.

  The GPS in the car Cooper left for Isabella and me was programmed for a hotel in western Ohio. There was a room key, a hundred dollars in cash, and a bag of clothes in the backseat. There was an envelope but there was no information about my parents inside it. I hated Cooper for that lie. I hated him for the entire trip even though Isabella pointed out that the information the envelope did contain was still a lot of clues about who I was.

  It just wasn’t enough.

  The next day there was a new car, new GPS coordinates, new clothes, more petty cash, and another room key for a hotel in the middle of Michigan. There was also a key to unlock my collar.

  Was it weird that this key was not given to me in the first envelope?

  No.

  I needed to let that collar sink in.

  I needed to feel it around my neck.

  I needed to focus on the pain of the metal and worry about the sores that would eventually appear on my skin if I didn’t get it off.

  I needed a reminder of what I was truly leaving behind.

  Tough love works, I guess. Because I stopped my moping and began to focus on the future.

  We did this hotel stop one more time, and the final destination was my house. A little place in Fargo, North Dakota. Just like the Chairman told me about back on move-out day when he called me into his office to offer me a scholarship.

  It’s a two-bedroom house and there were clothes in the closet, a folder with some information about my school schedule and Isabella’s upcoming graduation, some flyers for local restaurants, and in my room there was a box filled with documents about my parents.

  I stopped hating Cooper when I found that box. Not just because it had the secrets I wanted so badly, but because I didn’t want to hate him.

  I wanted to miss him.

  My feelings about the truth inside that box were conflicted.

  Did I really need this information?

  Did I really want to know the truth?

  Was it going to make me a happier person?

  Or a sadder one?

  Nothing good was going to come from that box of truth. I never looked at those documents.

  I put it out of my mind and told myself that not knowing was easier.

  The path of least resistance.

  It was a familiar path. A comforting one.

  But I’ve been thinking about it more and more lately. There have been enough years between then and now for the hurt to fade.

  Just a little.

  Maybe enough.

  I don’t know how long the Chairman had been planning my escape. I don’t know if he meant for my mother to get away too, or just me. And I’m never going to know because he pled guilty to every single crime against him and now he’s locked away in the Colorado supermax prison.

  Cooper never testified against him.

  The Chairman made sure he didn’t have to by pleading guilty the first day of his trial.

  Of Cooper, I have no idea what happened to him. I watched the trial, like everyone else. Cooper was on the TV quite a bit, and I was glued to the live stream, but it wasn’t enough. Every time I saw him my heart ached. And then, after his father pled guilty, he got up and walked out of the courtroom while the judge was still talking.

  None of us, aside from Mona, ever heard from the boys again. And Mona has a strict rule about the past. We do not mention it. Ever. She and Dante are remaking High Court College and Prep into something new these days. I guess Dante got his crown after all—even if it was through marriage.

  The rest of us got new names. Mine is practically the same. Katie with a K instead of Cadee with a C. New birth certificates. New passports. New college records. We freshmen had to start over and all of us agreed that was for the best. No one wanted to list High Court on their new college applications.

  Not that we had to apply. The Feds set everything up for us. The Chairman cut a deal with them and this was part of it. Sophie and Elexa ended up in Idaho. Maddie and Natalie ended up in Texas. Selina and Valentina got real college degrees from Ohio State University in their declared majors.

  Isabella’s degree came from North Dakota State even though she didn’t attend a single class at this school and she wasn’t even in town for graduation. They mailed her degree to Paris.

  When she and I first arrived, she stayed with me in the house and got a waitressing job in one of the campus coffee shops. She saved up just enough to buy herself a ticket to France and then she kissed me on the cheek and said goodbye.

  I didn’t hear from her again for almost eighteen months. Then she sent me a glossy European magazine in the mail with her face on the cover.

  Way to lie low, Isabella.

  But by that time, all the people from High Court, with the exception of the Chairman, were dead. And he was on his way to prison.


  All the girls make themselves at home in the small gallery, keeping each other company, drinking box wine and eating cheap cheese and crackers, while I play hostess and woman of the hour to the faculty members in the art department. The award I won that landed me this gallery show came with a scholarship and assistantship in the MFA program.

  I don’t know if I want to stay though.

  I like it here. I like my house, and my friends, and my life.

  But part of the reason I stayed put was because I had hoped… that one day…

  One day. Maybe. He’d come back.

  But he didn’t.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - COOPER

  He really liked my tie.

  Those were my father’s last words to me that night Monrovian Estates burned down.

  I couldn’t get to my car because of all the police and firemen. So I walked across the frozen lake and I had every intention of sleeping at the inn that night—but then I remembered it was crawling with FBI.

  So I went to my dorm room. I stood out there on the bridge over the interior courtyard and watched my home go up in flames.

  Eventually, I went inside, took the tie off, and held it in my hands, trying to figure out where the message was. Because there had to be a message.

  There was. I ripped the seams out and opened up the folded fabric to reveal a long list of numbers written on the inside.

  Banks and account numbers for every single Fang and Feather member. I spent the next several hours making phone calls and by noon the next day the fires were out and I had moved more than ten billion dollars into new offshore accounts.

  I ended up sleeping in the dorm for three days before Lars finally found me and dragged me into the city to stay with him.

  I never told him about the money.

  I never told anyone about the money.

  I tried to convince myself there was no money.

  Then I stopped being a dick and started giving it all away. Anonymously. It won’t make up for the past, but it’s not a bad way to move forward into the future.

  Ax went missing for a while. Probably afraid he was gonna be busted for killing his father, but there were so many dead bodies in those woods, literally… no one fucking cared.

  Eventually, he showed up at our apartment and we just settled in to this weird new life where Lars became a day trader and started an elite investment firm, Ax started writing a book about what it was like to be an offering for the High Court Cult, and I started working on a master’s degree in geological engineering.

  Unlike the girls—Lars, Ax, and I didn’t get new names and we did graduate from High Court College.

  Being a part of that sick place was something we needed to remember.

  It was something we needed to live with.

  It was something we needed to regret.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT - CADEE

  The gallery show turned into a nice night out with the girls, but it didn’t last.

  None of them—not even Isabella—stayed in Fargo for the weekend. They didn’t even stay for the night. They had people waiting for them—real people who are part of their real lives.

  Elexa is engaged to a cowboy she met in school last year and she spent the whole night talking about the sheep they entered in the State Fair.

  Sophie, a music major, started a hip-hop band and was in the middle of moving to LA to start her club career. I was like… what?

  Natalie started using her marketing degree last year and is now a major influencer on the hottest new app for teens. She talks about make-up and pushes products for three major cosmetics companies.

  Maddie had turned into a travel blogger and was on her way to some fancy tropical island to document good times for the benefit of the internet.

  Valentina and Selina had joined Isabella in France three years ago. Valentina was selling luxury real estate in Monaco and Selina was Isabella’s booking agent. Their story is kinda sweet. BFF’s to the very end.

  Good for them.

  And of course, Mona and Dante got married and are now running the new High Court College.

  We all got a brand-new life. And I guess that satisfies my friends, but it never felt like enough for me.

  Something is missing.

  Something has always been missing with me.

  I don’t think any of my old friends were in love with their partners back at High Court. Maybe Sophie is the exception, and even that is questionable because she walked away from Michael. These boys were always a business arrangement to those girls.

  Cooper and I were not a business arrangement.

  I still believe that, even though, when I look back on that semester I spent as a real High Court student, it feels both fake and real at the same time.

  The whole thing was an act.

  It was all spelled out in the envelope I found in the back seat of that first getaway car Cooper put us in. And it all started with the North Dakota lie that one day up in Chairman Valcourt’s office.

  Who am I to him? Anyone?

  Surely I must be someone.

  Everyone on that campus was someone. I was not the exception. I just grew up on the edge of things instead of in the middle.

  Dante was more of a nobody than I was. His family had a lot of money but not a lot of respect. They fought for that, from what I can tell.

  His parents are dead now. Everyone’s parents are dead now. A whole bunch of murder suicides in the woods during the raid at the tomb.

  Jack and Leela were found in the woods too. He shot her in the back of the head and then killed himself. Every single husband in the Estates killed his wife, and then himself, that night.

  It’s sick, really. The way they tried to keep those secrets right up until the very end.

  I don’t know what really happened that night since Isabella and I were driving west. But I imagine it was mass hysteria.

  Dante knew the Chairman had a project out at the tomb for Cooper because his aunt was Laurie, the Chairman’s assistant. He didn’t know exactly what the project was or what it meant, he just knew it was secret and, of course, everything runs on secrets. He bet everything on that project, and even though his plan went off the rails pretty much immediately, and we were truly on our own the moment we walked into the Fang and Feather welcome brunch, it worked out in the end.

  Divide and conquer.

  Split up and take them down from all directions.

  Fang and Feather has been exposed.

  High Court was shut down and then reopened under the direction of Mona and Dante.

  Everyone involved—with the exception of the Chairman, who is in prison, and the underage children of the Monrovian Lake Estates, who were shipped off to estranged relatives—is dead. Even the ones who didn’t go down in the raid.

  The whole experience taught me a lot of lessons.

  One. There are people out there who are very fucking sick.

  Two. Sick people don’t always look like monsters. They are often beautiful, and rich, and educated, and adored.

  Three. It’s a lot easier to buy into evil than you think.

  I learned this first hand—I knew it was fake.

  I knew we were setting them up.

  I knew it was temporary.

  And still… I was buying in to it.

  It was all planned and everything I did was all part of that plan.

  I could lie to myself and live with that.

  I didn’t do anything too out of character.

  I always remembered who I was and what we were doing.

  But if it had gone on much longer. If, for instance, I had made it to the end of my freshman year, then I can’t say for sure that it would’ve still been fake.

  And the really sick thing about that is… I wasn’t really getting anything out of it. They didn’t give me millions of dollars. They didn’t give me a house, or a husband—or even the promise of either.

  They told me, to my face, that I was there to serve them.

  And I just
nodded my head and went along.

  The path of least resistance.

  This is the real reason why I didn’t look at the stuff about my parents in that box.

  I know they were part of it.

  I feel it in my heart.

  They bred me for Fang and Feather and I didn’t want to see the proof.

  I didn’t need to see proof.

  Because I knew.

  And there is nothing in this world—no explanation, no excuse, no justification—that could ever absolve them from this sin.

  They were evil.

  I was nothing to them.

  And I have learned to live with that.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE - COOPER

  After he left me standing there in the driveway in front of our burning house, I didn’t see my father again for almost a year.

  I was coming out of our apartment and noticed a limo parked in the alley. I didn’t think much of it. The building we lived in was nice, so it wasn’t uncommon to have limos parked in the alley waiting for people.

  But the window rolled down and my father poked his head out.

  He said, in a very calm voice, “Can I speak to you for a moment, Cooper?”

  What was I gonna do? Say no?

  I got in and we had a short conversation. Half of it was about why he was in this limo and not in like… jail, since that’s was where he was supposed to be. The other half was about… well… the future, I guess.

  I learned two new things about my father during that conversation.

  One. He is far more powerful than I ever realized.

  And two. He has more integrity than I could’ve ever imagined.

  When I asked him how he got out of jail he simply said, “I can do anything I want. And I wanted to have a talk with you today, so here I am.”

  “Then why not just leave? Don’t go back.”

  “Because someone needs to pay for what we did. And I was in charge so… it’s just the right thing to do. You have always known right from wrong, Cooper. Not only that, you are strong too. Strong enough to say no when Jack gave you that ultimatum.”