Текст книги "Luckiest Girl Alive"

Автор книги: Jessica Knoll

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“Ugh, I know.” Loretta loved to talk about the weather. In her country, the Dominican Republic, everyone danced in the streets when it rained. But not here, she said. Here the rain was filthy. “Loretta, this is Spencer.” I gestured toward my fresh kill, whose nose was already twitching. Not a strike against her necessarily, you can’t help how your body reacts when confronted with the stench of tragedy. I would know. “Spencer, Loretta.”

Loretta and Spencer exchanged pleasantries. These girls were always polite, it would never occur to them not to be, but there was usually something strained about their demeanor that tipped me off. Some didn’t even try to hide what assholes they were once it was just the two of us. “Ohmigod was that smell her?” one said to me, clamping her hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh and brushing her shoulder up against mine conspiratorially, as though we were girlfriends who’d just shoplifted a pile of Victoria’s Secret thongs.

“There’s coffee, there’s tea, take your pick.” I plucked a coffee cup from the stack and pumped a dark stream while Spencer stood behind me, considering.

“The peppermint tea is very good,” Loretta said, wisely.

“Is it?” Spencer asked.

“Yes,” Loretta said. “Very refreshing.”

“You know”—Spencer hiked her classic quilted purse higher on her shoulder—“I’m not really a tea person. But it’s so hot out, and that sounds really good.”

We-hel-hellll. Maybe the esteemed Bradley School was finally living up to its mission statement: “The Bradley School is committed to educational excellence and dedicated to developing compassion, creativity, and respect in each of its students.”

I paid for our drinks. Spencer offered, but I insisted, like I always do, even though I have this recurring vision that my card is declined, this meager $5.23 charge the thing that obliterates the whole dog and pony show: stylish, successful, engaged, and all by twenty-eight years old, no less. The Amex bill went straight to Luke, which I felt funny about but not funny enough to put a stop to it. I make seventy thousand dollars a year. If I lived in Kansas City I’d be Paris fucking Hilton. Money will never be a problem because of Luke, but even so, there is a childhood fear of the word “declined,” of Mom’s bumbling excuses offered up to the cashier, her disappointed hands shaking as she forced the card back into a wallet packed fat with its maxed-out accomplices.

Spencer took a sip of her drink. “This is delicious.”

Loretta sparkled. “What I tell you?”

We found a table in the empty cafeteria. Gray, rainy light crowned us from the skylights above, and I noticed that Spencer had three distinct lines across her tan forehead, so fine they could have been hairs.

“I really appreciate your meeting with me today,” she began.

“Of course.” I sipped my coffee. “I know how hard it can be to crack this industry.”

Spencer nodded ferociously. “It’s so hard. All my friends, they’re doing the finance thing. They’ve had jobs lined up since before we graduated.” She fiddled with her tea string. “I’ve been at this since April and I’m really starting to wonder if I should just try my hand somewhere else. Just so I have a job, it’s getting embarrassing.” She laughed. “And then I can actually move here and I can keep looking on the side.” She looked at me questioningly. “Do you think that’s a smart thing to do? I worry if my résumé shows I’m working in another industry I won’t be seriously considered in magazine publishing, but then I’m also worried that if I don’t get just any job, the job hunt could stretch on for so long that they’re going to be more concerned that I have zero real-life work experience.” Spencer sighed, frustrated by this imaginary dilemma. “What do you think?”

I was just shocked she didn’t already live in the city, in an apartment on Ninety-first and First, rent and utilities all taken care of by Daddy. “Where have you interned?” I asked.

Spencer glanced at her lap, sheepishly. “I haven’t. I mean, I have, but at a literary agency. I want to be a writer, which sounds so stupid and aspirational, like, ‘I want to be an astronaut!’ but I had no idea how to make that happen and a professor suggested I work on the business side of things to get a sense of the industry. I didn’t even realize like, hey, magazines, which I love, and I love The Women’s Magazine, I used to sneak my mom’s when I was little”—this is such a common anecdote, I never know if I should believe it or if it’s just become this thing people say. “Anyway, I never realized, someone is writing that stuff. Then I started researching the industry and this, what you do, is what I know I’m meant to do.” When she finished, she was breathing hard. So much passion, this one. But it had pleased me. Most girls just wanted a job that let them play with clothes and mingle with celebrities and stroll into the Boom Boom Room because their names were permanently on the list. Those were some nice perks of the job, but they had always been secondary to seeing “By Ani FaNelli” in print. To receiving my copy back with a note: “Hilarious” or “You have the perfect voice.” I’d brought that page home and Luke had hung it on the refrigerator like I’d gotten an A on a paper.

“Well, you know that as you rise up the ranks as an editor, you will write less and edit more.” This is something an editor had told me once in an interview, and it had unnerved me. Who would want to write less and edit more? Now, after working in the industry for six years, I get it. The Women’s Magazine has limited opportunities in terms of real reported pieces and there were only so many times I could advise readers to broach a difficult topic with their boyfriend while sitting next to him, rather than across from him. “Experts say men are more receptive when they don’t feel as though they’re being challenged head-on . . . literally.” Still, there was something about telling people where you worked, their eyes lighting up in recognition, that I needed right now.

“But I see your byline all the time,” Spencer said.

“Well, when you stop seeing it you’ll know I’m running the place.”

Spencer rolled her teacup between her palms, shyly. “You know, when I first saw your name on the masthead, I wasn’t sure if that was you, you. Because of your name. But then I saw you on the Today show and even though your name is a little different and you look so different—not that you weren’t always pretty”—a deep flush began to crawl into her cheeks here—“I knew it was you.”

I didn’t say anything. She was going to have to ask.

“Did you do that because of what happened?” The question quieted her voice.

Here’s the little song and dance I give to anyone who asks this question: “Partly. A professor in college suggested I do that so that I would be judged on my own merits and not by what people may know of me.” Then I always shrug modestly. “Not like most people really remember my name; what they remember is Bradley.” Now, here’s the truth: I started to realize there was something wrong with my name on the first day of high school. Surrounded by Chaunceys and Griers, the many simple, elegant Kates, not a single last name that ended in a vowel, TifAni FaNelli stood out like the hillbilly relative who shows up at Thanksgiving and drinks all the expensive whiskey. I never would have realized this if I hadn’t gone to The Bradley School. Then again, if I had never gone to Bradley, if I had stayed on my side of the tracks in Pennsylvania, I can promise you right now I’d be parked outside of a kindergarten classroom in my leased BMW, drumming my French-manicured nails on the steering wheel. Bradley was like an abusive foster mother—she saved me from the system but only so she could have her twisted, meth-fueled way with me. No doubt my name raised some college administrators’ eyebrows when they saw it on my application. I’m sure they half-rose from their seats, calling out to their secretaries, “Sue, is this the TifAni FaNelli from the”—stopping abruptly when they saw I attended The Bradley School and answering their own question.

I didn’t dare push my luck and apply to any Ivy Leagues, but plenty of their hangers-on would have me, told me they wept as they read my essay, bursting with purple prose and histrionic declarations of all I had learned about this vicious life even though I had only just begun it. Oh, it was a tearjerker, I made sure of it. So in the end, my name and the school that taught me to hate it got me into Wesleyan, where I met my best friend, Nell, the most beautiful WASP whose stinger pierced everyone but me, and she was the one, not some sage professor, who suggested I drop the Tif and go by Ani, pronouncing it “Ahhh-nee,” because “Annie” was simply too pedestrian for someone as world-weary as I was. Changing my name had nothing to do with hiding my past, and everything to do with becoming the person no one ever thought I deserved to be: Ani Harrison.

Spencer scooted her chair closer to the table, taking advantage of this intimate moment. “I hate when people ask me where I went to high school.”

That wasn’t a sentiment I could agree with. There were times I loved saying where I went to high school, loved the opportunity to prove how far I’d come. So I shrugged, my face stone, letting her know we weren’t bound to be buddies just because we had an alma mater in common. “I don’t mind. I feel like it’s a part of what makes me me.”

Spencer suddenly realized she was leaning in too close, that this was a point on which we couldn’t see eye to eye, and it had been presumptuous of her to think we could. She drew back in her chair, giving me my space. “Of course. I would probably feel the same way if I were you.”

“I’m participating in the documentary,” I volunteered, to show her just how much I didn’t mind it.

Spencer nodded slowly. “I wanted to ask you. But of course they would want you.”

I checked the TAG Heuer on my wrist. Luke had been promising me the Cartier for the last year. “I will say that you should definitely try and get an internship, even if it doesn’t pay.”

“How would I afford rent?” Spencer asked.

I eyed the Chanel bag hooked over the back of her chair. On second glance, I saw that the seams were starting to unravel. Old money, this one, tied up in trusts. Good family name, decent-size house in Wayne, and not a penny to spare the panhandler on the subway.

“Waitress or bartend at night. Or, commute in every day.”

“From Philly?” Not so much a question as a reminder of where she would have to come from, as though I was crazy to suggest it. My chest sizzled with irritation.

“We’ve had interns here who have commuted from DC,” I said. I took a slow sip of my coffee then cocked my head at her. “Isn’t it only two hours or so on the train?”

“I guess,” Spencer said, looking unconvinced. Her dismissal disappointed me. Things had been going fairly well up until this point.

Giving her the opportunity to redeem herself, I reached up to adjust the delicate gold chain around my neck. I couldn’t believe I’d left out the most important piece.

“Are you engaged?” Spencer’s eyes went cartoon character wide on my pride and joy: a fat, brilliant emerald planet, flanked by two winking diamonds, the band simple platinum. It had been Luke’s grandmother’s—pardon me, his Mammy’s—and when he gave it to me he’d offered me the option to reset the stones on a diamond band. “Mom’s jewelry guy said that’s the look a lot of girls go for now. It’s more modern I guess.”

And that’s exactly why I didn’t want to have it reset. No, I would wear it just the way dear sweet Mammy had worn it: at once restrained and ornate. A very clear message: This is an heirloom. We don’t just have money, we come from money.

I stretched my fingers out, taking in the hardware as if I’d forgotten it was there. “Ugh, I know. I’m officially old.”

“That is the most stunning ring I’ve ever seen,” Spencer declared. “When are you getting married?”

“October sixteenth!” I beamed at her. Had Eleanor been there to witness this blushing bride nonsense, she would have tilted her head and smiled her “Aren’t you cute?” smile. Then gone on to remind me that even though October wasn’t necessarily a rainy month, weather could be unpredictable. Did I have a backup plan in case it did rain? She’d had a tent on standby and even though she didn’t have to use it, the reservation cost her ten thousand dollars. Eleanor is bursting with neat little factoids like that.

I pushed my chair back. “I have to get back to work.”

Spencer was out of her chair in half a second. She stuck her hand out. “Thank you so much, TifAni, I mean”—she covered her mouth and her whole body tittered with a geisha giggle—“Ani. Sorry.”

Sometimes I feel like a windup doll, like I have to reach behind and turn my golden key to produce a greeting, a laugh, whatever the socially acceptable reaction should be. I managed a tight farewell smile for Spencer. She wouldn’t mistake my name again, not once the documentary aired, not once the camera narrowed in on my aching, honest face, gently dissolving any last confusion about who I am and what I did.

CHAPTER 2

I spent the summer between eighth and ninth grades listening to Mom rave about the Main Line. She said it was “very hoity-toity” and that I was really going to experience how the other half lives by going to high school there. I had never heard the word “hoity-toity” before but inferred what it meant based on the saucy dip in Mom’s voice. It was that same throaty purr that the Bloomingdale’s saleswoman used to convince her to buy a cashmere scarf she couldn’t afford: “It looks rich on you.” “Rich.” The magic word. Dad did not agree when she came home later and rubbed it against his face.

I’d attended an all-girls Catholic school since kindergarten, in a town that was devoid of any Main Line aristocracy on account of the fact that it was shy of the border by about fifteen miles. I didn’t grow up in the slums or anything, my surroundings were just morbidly middle class, with plenty of gaudy neighbors who mistakenly considered themselves upper. I had no idea that was the case at the time, had no idea money could show its age, and that old and worn was always superior. I thought wealth was shiny red BMWs (leased) and five-bedroom McMansions (mortgaged three times). Not that we were even fake rich enough to live in the five-bedroom travesties.

My real education started on the morning of September 2, 2001, my first day of freshman year at The Bradley School in Bryn Mawr, PA. I have marijuana (or “grass,” if you want to embarrass me like my father) to thank for landing me at the mouth of the old mansion that served as the English and Humanities wing of Bradley, swiping my sweaty palms on my orange Abercrombie & Fitch cargo pants. If I’d just said no to drugs, I’d have been storming the quad of Mt. St. Theresa’s upper school, my scratchy blue kilt catching between my thighs, tawny from a summer spent marinating in Hawaiian Tropic oil, day one of my mediocre young adult life that would never pan out to be anything more than a Facebook cliché. My existence defined in successive photo albums documenting my engagement weekend in Atlantic City, vanilla church wedding, and artfully arranged naked newborn.

What happened was this: My friends and I decided it was time to try pot at the beginning of eighth grade, the four of us climbing onto my best friend Leah’s roof from her bedroom window, passing a soggy joint between our Bonne Bell–slicked lips. The terrifying awareness it brought to every limb—even my toenails!—was so acute I started to hyperventilate and cry.

“Something isn’t right,” I half-gasped, half-laughed to Leah, who tried to calm me down but ultimately succumbed to a maniacal fit of laughter.

Leah’s mother came to investigate the commotion. She called Mom at midnight and said in a dramatic whisper, “The girls got into something.”

I’d had a Marilyn Monroe body since the fifth grade, and the parents had no problem believing I was the mastermind of our Catholic schoolgirl drug ring. I just looked like trouble. In one week, I went from being the queen bee of our small, forty-girl class to an annoying little fly trying to avoid being squashed. Even the girl who stuck French fries up her nose before eating them wouldn’t stoop so low as to sit with me at lunch.

Word traveled to the administration. Mom and Dad were called in for a meeting with the principal, an ogre of a woman named Sister John, who suggested I seek an alternative school to continue my education. Mom harrumphed the whole car ride home, finally arriving at the conclusion that she would send me to one of these exclusive private schools on the Main Line, which would give me a better shot of getting into an Ivy League, which would give me a better shot of marrying into some real money. “That’ll show them,” she announced triumphantly, her hands choking the steering wheel like it was Sister John’s wrestler’s neck. I’d waited a beat before daring to ask, “Are there boys on the Main Line?”

Later that week, Mom came and picked me up early from Mt. St. Theresa’s, driving us forty-five minutes to The Bradley School, a coed, private, nondenominational institution located in the bowels of the lush, ivied Main Line. The admissions director made sure to mention, twice, that J. D. Salinger’s first wife had attended The Bradley School in the early 1900s, back when it was an all-girls boarding school. I stored that fun fact away, trotted it out for interviews with prospective employers and parents-in-law. “Oh yes, I attended The Bradley School—did you know J. D. Salinger’s first wife went there?” It’s okay to be insufferable as long as you’re aware that you’re being insufferable. At least that’s how I justified it to myself.

After the tour, I had to take the entrance exam. I was seated at the head of a regal table in a formal, cavernous dining room located in a wing off the cafeteria. The bronze plate above the doorframe declared it THE BRENNER BAULKIN ROOM. I couldn’t understand how anyone in the English-speaking world could be named Brenner.

I don’t remember much of the exam, except the part where I had to write a description of an object without ever explicitly identifying the object. I went with my cat, and ended the passage with her diving off our back porch to her bloodied, mangled death. Bradley’s boner for J. D. Salinger made me think they had a thing for tortured writers, and I was right. A few weeks later, we got word that my financial aid was approved and that I would be matriculating with The Bradley Class of 2005.

“Are you nervous, sweetheart?” Mom asked.

“No,” I lied out the window. I didn’t understand why she had made such a fuss about the Main Line. To my fourteen-year-old eyes, the houses didn’t look nearly as impressive as the pink stucco monstrosity Leah lived in. Taste, I had yet to learn, was the delicate balance between expensive and unassuming.

“You’re going to do great.” Mom squeezed my knee, the goop on her lips catching white sunlight when she smiled.

A row of girls, four deep, marched by our BMW, their backpacks firmly secured to their slight shoulders with both straps, thick ponytails bobbing like blond plumes on Spartan helmets.

“Mom, I know.” I rolled my eyes, more for myself than at her. I was dangerously close to crying, to curling up in her arms while she ran her long pointy nails up and down my forearm until I had goose bumps. “Tickle my arm!” I used to beg when I was little, snuggling up to her on the couch.

“You’re going to be late!” She planted a kiss on my cheek that left a sticky coating of lip gloss. In return, she got a sullen, new teenager “Good-bye.” That morning, thirty-five steps from the front door of school, I was still only in rehearsals for the role.

First period was homeroom, and like a huge dork I was excited by this. My middle school didn’t have bells or different teachers for different classes. There were forty girls per grade, divided into two classrooms, and in that classroom you were taught math, social studies, science, religion, and English by the same teacher all year long, and if you were lucky, you got the one who wasn’t the nun (I was never lucky). The idea of a school where a bell rang every forty-one minutes, prompting you on to the next classroom, with a new teacher, and a new concentration of students, made me feel like I was a guest star on Saved by the Bell or something.

But the most exciting part of that first morning was English. Honors English, another distinction my old school never made, in which I had secured a spot thanks to that brilliant 150-word description of my cat’s tragic demise. I couldn’t wait to take notes in the bright green pen I’d bought at the school store. Mt. St. Theresa’s made us write in pencil like babies, but Bradley didn’t care what you wrote in. Didn’t care if you took notes at all as long as you kept your grades up. Bradley’s school colors were green and white, and I bought a pen the same shade as the basketball jerseys to display my new allegiance.

Honors English was a small class, only twelve students, and instead of desks, we got to sit at three long tables, pushed together to form the shape of a bracket. The teacher, Mr. Larson, was someone Mom would dismiss as “hefty,” but those twenty extra pounds had resulted in a kind, full face: squinty eyes, a slight arch to his upper lip that made him look like he was remembering some hilarious crack one of his buddies had made to him the night before over lukewarm Bud Lights. He wore faded pastel button-downs and had the kind of floppy, light brown hair that assured us it wasn’t too long ago that he was a prep school kid just like us and he, like, totally got it. My fourteen-year-old loins approved. All the fourteen-year-old loins approved.

Mr. Larson sat a lot, usually with his legs stretched out in front of him, frequently reaching one hand behind his head and resting his skull against it, while asking, “And why do you think Holden identifies with the catcher in the rye?”

That first day Mr. Larson made us all go around the room and say one cool thing that we’d done that summer. I felt confident Mr. Larson had designed this exercise for my benefit—most of the other kids, “Lifers,” had been funneled from the Bradley middle school, and had probably spent the summer hanging out together. But no one knew what the new kid had been up to, and even though it just tanning on my back porch, watching soap operas through the window like a sweaty, friendless loser, they didn’t need to know that. When it was my turn, I told everyone I’d gone to the Pearl Jam concert on August 23, which hadn’t happened but also wasn’t a fabrication I’d created out of thin air. Leah’s mom had reserved tickets for us back before the whole pot fiasco, before she finally had definitive proof that I was the bad influence she’d long suspected I was. But there was an ocean between Leah and these new people, and I had some new friends to impress, so I lied and I’m glad I did. My one cool thing I did that summer invited several approving nods and even an actual “Cool” from some guy named Tanner, which I was surprised to learn was not just a goal I set for my skin that summer but also a name.

After that game was over, Mr. Larson wanted to talk about The Catcher in the Rye, which had been assigned summer reading. I sat up straighter in my seat. I’d torn through the book in two days on my back porch, my thumbs leaving humid half-moon imprints on every page. Mom asked me what I thought about it, and when I told her I thought it was hilarious, she cocked her head at me and said, “Tif, he has a serious mental breakdown.” This revelation shocked me so much that I reread the book, deeply concerned that this crucial element of the story had escaped me. For a moment I worried that I wasn’t the literary whiz I fancied myself, but then I reminded myself how Mt. St. Theresa’s eschewed literature in favor of grammar (less sex and sin in grammar), and so it wasn’t really my fault that my observations weren’t as sharp as they could be. I’d get there.

The boy closest to the marker board groaned. His name was Arthur, and that summer the coolest thing he did was take a tour of the New York Times office, which, based on the reactions of the classroom, wasn’t as cool as seeing Pearl Jam in concert but also not as bad as seeing The Phantom of the Opera at the Kimmel Center. Even I understood it’s not impressive unless it’s on Broadway.

“You enjoyed it that much, did you?” Mr. Larson quipped, and the classroom tittered.

Arthur was close to three hundred pounds, and acne framed his face like parentheses. His hair was so greasy that when he pushed his hands through it, it stayed, an oily arc from his hairline to the crown of his head. “Could Holden be any less self-aware? Here he is, calling everyone a phony, when he’s the biggest phony of them all.”

“You bring up an interesting point,” Mr. Larson said encouragingly. “Is Holden a reliable narrator?”

The bell rang before anyone could answer, and over Mr. Larson’s instructions to read the first two chapters of Into Thin Air, which we would discuss later in the week, everyone swept notebooks and pencils into their book bags before storming out in a rush of Steve Madden clogs and peach-fuzz-covered legs. I didn’t understand how everyone got out the door so quickly. It was the first time I noticed it, but once I did, I noticed it for the rest of my life: I was slow. What comes effortlessly to others doesn’t for me.

When I realized I was alone with Mr. Larson my cheeks blushed underneath the Cover Girl Mom said I needed and I assumed the other girls would be wearing. They weren’t.

“You’re joining us from St. Theresa’s, am I right?” Mr. Larson hunched over his desk, shuffled through some papers.

“Mt. St. Theresa’s.” I finally managed to zip my book bag.

Mr. Larson looked up from his desk, and the crease in his lip deepened. “Right. Well, the book report you did was very good. Very thorough.”

Even though I would lie in bed later, replaying this moment over and over until I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists to keep from spontaneously combusting, all I wanted to do was get out of there. I’ve never known the right thing to say, and my face probably looked like my Irish aunt’s when she has too much red wine and starts stroking my hair and telling me how much she wishes she had a daughter. “Thanks.”

Mr. Larson smiled and his eyes disappeared. “Happy to have you in my class.”

“Uh-huh, see you tomorrow!” I started to give a wave and changed my mind halfway through. I probably looked like I had some kind of Tourette’s tic. I’d learned about Tourette’s on a sick day, watching an episode of the Sally Jessy Raphael show.

Mr. Larson gave me a small wave back.

There was a broken desk a few steps outside of Mr. Larson’s classroom, and Arthur had his book bag propped up on it. He was rummaging around in there but looked up as I approached.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi.”

“My glasses,” he said by way of explanation.

“Oh.” I slid my hands underneath the straps of my book bag and gripped tightly.

“Do you have lunch now?” he asked.

I nodded. But I’d planned on spending it in the library. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than that moment after paying for my food, looking around the room at the expanse of nameless faces and being forced to sit down where I wasn’t wanted because you weren’t allowed to bring food outside the cafeteria. There was so much to talk about on the first day of school, no one wanted to waste that precious gossip time by taking on the responsibility of making the new girl feel included. I got it, I would have been just as disinterested. I knew things would shift to the familiar eventually, that the curly redhead with soft blue veins in her forehead would become the girl with the highest IQ in class, who would apply early decision to Harvard and have the distinction of being the first Bradley student from the class of 2005 to be accepted. (Out of a class of seventy-one students, there would be nine overall. Main Line Magazine hadn’t determined Bradley an “exemplary” college preparatory option for nothing.) That the short, stocky soccer player with actual pecs would become the guy who had gotten a blow job from Lindsay “Biz” Hanes in his best friend’s basement last summer while his best friend watched. These faces and identities would eventually come together for me, and I would eventually become someone to everyone else too, with anecdotal lore to explain why I sat with who I sat with, why my allegiances resided where they did. But until then, I preferred to maintain my dignity by getting a head start on my Spanish homework in the library.

“I’ll walk with you,” Arthur offered.

He slung his lumpy backpack over one shoulder and led the way, his swollen, pale calves brushing against each other as he plodded down the stairs. I knew what it was like to have your body betray you—I was only fourteen and I already looked like a college student who needed to lose the freshman fifteen. Teenage boys were stupid though, and because I had relatively skinny arms and legs and a chest that looked pornographic in V-neck tees, they thought I had the perfect body. This despite the fact that underneath the clothes was a genetic mess that not even a prom dress–induced bout of anorexia could fix—a stomach that was rippled with fat, a belly button that winked like an Asian eye. It was the summer the tankini came into style, and never had I been more grateful for a piece of clothing in my life.

“Are you, like, in love with Mr. Larson like every other girl here?” Arthur grinned and pushed his glasses, which he’d found, higher on his shiny nose.

“My teachers were nuns before this. Can you blame me?”

“A Catholic girl,” Arthur said, solemnly. They didn’t get a whole lot of my kind around here. “Where?”

“Mt. St. Theresa Academy? I waited for his reaction, which I didn’t anticipate would be favorable. When his expression remained blank I added, “In Malvern?” Malvern was technically considered the start of the Main Line, but it was like the lowest tier of troops, shielding the generals and the captains in the cushy heart of the camp. The plebeians toeing its border prickled most storied Main Liners—Malvern wasn’t really a member of their dynasty.