Privileged (12 page)
“Right,” I agreed. I’d known a girl at Yale who used to moan all the time that she wouldn’t get her trust until she was thirty, which was, she used to say, like,
ancient.
“So if we could do a few study things so that I have something to show your grandmother . . . I mean, I can pretty much stay out of your hair. And at some point, if you decide the Hollywood thing isn’t working for you, well . . . at least we’ll have studied a little.”
I could practically see the blank thought bubbles coming from her head. She heaved a very irritated sigh. “Fine.”
Fine?
Hot damn.
“Thanks
so
much,” I gushed. “I really appreciate this.”
“Whatever. When do we start?”’
“This afternoon?” I asked tentatively.
“Okay,” she agreed with an eye roll that emphasized what a huge favor she was doing for me.
She had
no
idea.
Choose the analogy that best complements the following phrase:
YACHT : SOCIETY PRINCESS
(a) cardboard box : wino
(b) Chihuahua : rock starlet
(c) cocaine : supermodel
(d) Fendi Baguette : Sarah Jessica Parker
(e) drug arrests : Robert Downey, Jr.
A
fundamental truth came clear to me four days later, my seventh day in Palm Beach: There was a reason for all those stories of famous scholars surviving on bread and radishes, sleeping in a garret, using the same water to boil their eggs and wash their armpits—a life of luxury is not an atmosphere conducive to learning. When given the choice between mastering quadratic equations and watching a not-yet-released DVD in a home theater nicer than any multiplex, who wouldn’t opt for the distraction of hot popcorn and Orlando Bloom?
Despite the twins’ ostensible new commitment to studying, they spent a lot more time playing than working. If I’d been an actual tutor, I might have cared. But I wasn’t, so I didn’t. Instead, I did my best to bond with them under the pretext of teaching.
Rose was reasonably pleasant to me, because she was nicer by nature. Sage tolerated me, because with my new Marco wardrobe and look, I was, as he had predicted, an acceptable accessory. Teaching-cum-bonding-cum-research was exactly what I was doing this late afternoon out on Laurel’s hundred-and-fifty-foot yacht, the
Heavenly
.
As we motored out of the Palm Beach Yacht Club, the new deckhand, Thom, gave me a quick tour. He was skinny, with messy sun-streaked hair and a winning smile. The boat spread out over three levels: one down below that held staterooms; a main level with a huge open rear deck, living room, dining room, and kitchen; plus a helipad upstairs so that guests could be ferried to and from shore without having to contend with the waves.
Post-tour, I found my way to the rear deck, where the girls were already stretched out in their swimsuits. Sage’s tangerine bikini had shirring across the ass that made her backside look like a peach. Rose wore a white one-piece halter with a back so low, it displayed a peek of rear cleavage. I, on the other hand, was wearing Marc Jacobs white stretch cotton pants and a black T-shirt with a giant cross on the back. Marco had worn it during his Cher stage.
“Where’s your suit, Megan?” Rose asked. “Aren’t we going to take a hot tub before we get started?”
Marco could provide me with a lot of things, but a bathing suit wasn’t one of them. I pleaded cramps and enjoyed the ride while the twins lolled. A sauna followed their hot tub, and then they summoned Thom to bring food—caviar, water crackers, chocolate-covered raspberries, and a bottle of Taittinger, their favorite champagne. Since water crackers were actual carbs, they mostly stuck their fingers in the caviar and popped them in their mouths.
After that, they were ready to tackle some math. As they got out pencils, paper, and calculators, I tried to tailor the problems to their interests. “Karen was able to find a classic Chanel dress on sale for two thousand, six hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Who’s Karen?” Rose asked, flipping onto her stomach.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s just a name for the word problem. Just take down the main info.” I pulled my T-shirt sleeves off my shoulders so I could at least get a little sun.
Sage sighed with irritation. She’d been trying—without success—to find another manager to represent them. In the meantime, she had started participating in our study sessions.
Participating
can be defined very loosely. “Can you start again?”
“Karen was able to find—”
“Hold on,” Sage ordered. She grabbed some SPF 50 and slathered it on her opalescent chest, arms, and legs while Rose waited. “Start again.”
“Karen was able to find a Chanel dress on sale for twenty-six hundred and fifty dollars.”
“I thought you said two thousand, six hundred and fifty dollars?” Rose asked.
I smiled and filed that one away. “Same difference. When that dress was designed and sewn in the forties, it cost eighty percent less. What did it cost back when it was made?”
Rose propped herself up on her elbows and began scribbling on a piece of scrap paper. Sage stared at me blankly.
“Did you need me to repeat the question?” I asked.
“Are we talking actual cost or cost as adjusted by inflation?” she asked coolly.
Huh. Score one for Sage.
“Actual cost,” I said.
“Does Karen have a trust fund or an allowance?” Sage asked.
“Karen doesn’t exist,” I said carefully, thinking that maybe we ought to move on to geometry. “It’s just a made-up problem to—”
“Hold it,” Sage decreed, raising a finger and cupping a hand to her left ear. Then she pointed to the western sky. “Yep, that’s them.”
I could barely make out an approaching helicopter. “That’s who?”
“Suzanne turned eighteen yesterday,” Sage explained. “We’re celebrating tonight. If you’re not into it, you can go hang in my grandmother’s
library
.”
I was fine with the surprise. A party was a lot more likely to result in Palm Beach dish than Karen and her fucking Chanel dress.
The noise was deafening as the chopper approached and then hovered a hundred feet above the rear deck. I watched helplessly as the workbooks and papers we’d been using were blown out to sea by the backwash from the blades.
The chopper touched down, the doors opened, and three of the twins’ friends hopped out. I recognized Ari and Suzanne, and there was a tall athletic guy I’d never seen before. Next came an orgy of hugging, kissing, and shouting of “Happy birthday!”
As the helicopter went airborne again, I considered how the twins could so blithely risk their fortune by being so unfocused—unless they had the misguided notion that what they were doing with me
was
being focused. In just over six weeks, they were going to find out how wrong that assessment was.
Sage immediately flounced off with the tall guy to good-natured catcalls from the others. I got an actual hug from Suzanne, who then called for a beer and headed for the hot tub, shedding clothes as she went.
“How goes the work?” Ari asked, offering me a fist bump. He was wearing cutoff Brooks Brothers khakis and an old CBGB T-shirt. He looked like he could have been in my East Village neighborhood instead of on a multimillion-dollar yacht in the middle of the bay.
“They’re . . . making progress. How about you, Ari? What are your plans for next year?”
“MIT. I’ve got better than a four-point GPA and 2400 SATs, so I’m pretty confident.”
I nearly choked on my own spit. One of the twins’ friends was . . .
smart
?
“I wish you could take the SAT for me, Ari,” Rose said with a helpless sigh.
“What your grandmother did was so—” Ari began, but I didn’t hear the rest, because yet another helicopter was approaching. No.
Three
helicopters, making the yacht the center of their airborne isosceles triangle. Then I spotted a few powerboats motoring our way, and Thom lowering a ladder that would allow their passengers to climb aboard.
Thirty minutes later, I was in the midst of a full-fledged birthday bash. All the twins’ friends I’d met so far were there, as well as forty or fifty other kids. The only person missing was Will Phillips, whom I hadn’t seen since he’d blown me off on Worth Avenue. Not that I cared.
Really.
As the sun went down to the west, most of the kids were in seriously altered states. The new Gwen Stefani album wailed over the boat’s sound system. Girls were dancing with guys, girls were dancing with girls, girls were kissing guys, and a couple were kissing each other, too, much to the enjoyment of the guys. Everyone had drink or drug in hand. It made a Yale frat party seem like a Quaker meeting, so when Pembroke told me not to look so stressed—we were the requisite twelve miles off the coast that put us in international waters, i.e., beyond the threat of the Coast Guard—I actually did breathe a sigh of relief.
As the music switched to an old Smashing Pumpkins song, Pembroke pulled me close—well, as close as I could get with his stomach in the way. His eyes were glassy.
“You’re so
hot
,” he whispered in my ear, and I felt a bit of spittle hit my earlobe. Oh,
ick
. “The whole teacher thing is fucking, like,
wow
.”
Fucking, like, wow
was right.
Identify the error in the following sentence:
Elitism breeds (a)
elitism
, and (b)
braking
(c) the
cycle
requires courage, (d)
conviction
, and grace. (e) No error
W
hen I’d agreed to spend Thanksgiving with James at his parents’ beach house, I’d known the holiday would not be the over-the-river-and-through-the-woods experience I was used to at home in New Hampshire. I would miss the early snow and the crackling fire in the fireplace and my father doing an acoustic run through Bob Dylan’s greatest hits as my grandma made her world—okay, family—famous cranberry sauce (secret ingredient: orange peel).
I’d spoken to my parents the day before. Lily was going up to New Hampshire by limousine so she wouldn’t miss her Wednesday-night and Friday-night shows. I felt a pang of homesickness made worse by the knowledge of what lay ahead. Turkey Day in Florida with the quasi-in-laws who hated me.
On Thanksgiving morning, I put the Macy’s parade on the plasma TV and flatironed my hair, a skill that I’d nearly mastered. I was still a walking disaster with makeup, so I ran to Marco’s cottage and let him do me. For clothes, I chose an Oscar de la Renta sleeveless cashmere sweater from Marco’s Ann-Margret phase and a camel-colored Burberry skirt. As I got into one of the spare BMWs for the hour-long drive down to Gulf Stream, I thought I looked pretty good for a girl who was going into battle.
James’s parents’ place was right on the beach in a town that would be considered extremely wealthy compared to anywhere but Palm Beach. As I pulled in to the driveway, James stepped out the door. The next thing I knew, I was in his arms.
“Hey,” he murmured into my hair. “I missed you.” Then he held me at arm’s length. “Holy shit, what . . .
happened
to you?”
Ouch. And here I thought I’d been looking kind of—you know—cute.
“Oh, I just changed a few—”
“You look
beautiful
.”
I grinned. “Really?”
“Spin,” he commanded, managing to make the instruction sound as ungay as possible. “The hair, the clothes . . . Wait till my parents see you.”
I chafed a little. Had I not been good enough before? But since I knew he meant it in a nice way—that he was proud of me—I gave him a soft kiss and kept my mouth shut. He slung an arm around my shoulders and led me inside.
If you’ve ever seen Stanley Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange
, you have a pretty good sense of the Ladeen beach house. Starkly modern, all surfaces bled of color, furniture in straight lines. A glass and chrome table in the living room held the only signs of life: the morning
New York Times
neatly laid out in overlapping sections and an abandoned cup of coffee.
There were also a half-dozen chrome-framed family photos on the table—the usual portraits and vacation scenes, and one of James from Yale graduation. There was a portrait of the Ladeens laughing on a ski slope: James and his parents bundled in sweaters and parkas, their ruddy-cheeked faces smiling at the camera. All good. But James had his arm around something else as well.
Someone
else. Heather.
True confession: It happened after James and I had been together about a month. The morning after a great night, he’d left me in his bed at his apartment to go buy us some breakfast. I was crazy about him but unsure if he was equally crazy about me. Coming right out and asking him seemed way too needy, so I did the only thing a halfway normal girl can do when left alone in a new boyfriend’s apartment: I snooped.
I don’t know what I was looking for, exactly. Another girl’s undies? Lipstick in his medicine cabinet? My perusing took me to his desk, and in the bottom drawer of that desk, I found a cigar box. Inside were old love letters signed from Heather, and in one envelope was a photo. A naked photo taken in that very apartment . . . in the bed I’d just been sleeping in. It was then that I gave her the nickname by which I’d thought of her ever since: Heather the Perfect. Heather’s body was . . .
perfect
. When I’d finally met her at one of James’s family’s parties last year, she’d been wearing a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress that clung to her every enviable curve. Suffice to say, my theory had been more than confirmed.
And now I was gazing at her photograph again, this time with my boyfriend. At least they had clothes on in this one.
“Oh, that.” James gave me a little hug when he saw what I was looking at. “My parents must have forgotten about it.”
“Have a handy flamethrower?” I quipped.
“Come on.” He took my arm and led me to an exterior patio that opened directly onto the beach.
“Megan!” Dr. Ladeen greeted me warmly, setting down the grilling tongs he’d been flipping turkey breasts with. “Wow, don’t you look fantastic. Veronica, doesn’t Megan look fantastic?”
