They Wish They Were Us(24)
“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.
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