The Unseemly Education of Anne Merchant (5 page)

He draws the shade.

In the dimness, he runs his stare over me again and again. Just as it seems he might be done looking me over, he drags his gaze up from my toes to my bare knees, all the way up, pausing where he likes and ultimately settling restlessly on the top of my head. Then his gaze drifts downward. For the first time, it occurs to me that these ultra-small uniforms are designed to give old men like Villicus something to feast their pervy eyes on.

I glance uneasily away, to an old framed map of Germany. Next to it, a cabinet holds what look like war medals, hundreds of them. Villicus’s broad desk is bare except for a pen with a huge black plume, a jumbo hourglass that counts away the days, and a complex-looking case encrusted with flame-shaped sapphires.

“Thanks for inviting me to meet you,” I begin, my voice cracking the excruciating quiet like a hammer on glass. “I have a few questions I’d love to get cleared up. For starters, I’ve been hearing a lot about Guardians and PTs, but I have no idea what those are.”

My implied question hangs in the air.

“Mizz Merchant,”
he coos at last, “did you ask me to come to your office?”

He slinks around his desk and sits on it, just opposite me. Our knees are close enough to touch. I adjust my leg away.

“No.”

“Then allow me to direct this conversation, dear.”

I fold my hands on my lap.

“You do realize that, at Cania Christy, we accept only the best of the best.”

“Okay,” I say cautiously.

“
Okay
? Hmm.”

Unsatisfied, he pushes off his desk and wanders behind my chair. There he stands, breathing heavily. With a short shudder, I stiffen as I feel his hands—his long, thick nails—brace my shoulders.

“Do you believe you are the best of the best?” he asks, still holding my shoulders.

I am frozen in his grip. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

“Of course you have. Certainly your first art show must have given you a distinct amount of confidence in your abilities.”

My pieces showed in an LA gallery when I was ten. “We didn’t sell much.”

“Not at that one, no,” he whispers. His breath catches in my hair. “But at others.”

I have no idea what he’s referring to—I haven’t had more than one art show. It occurs to me that my dad may have played up my successes to get me in here, so I say nothing and hope not to shatter Villicus’s illusion. Besides, right now, I’m not thinking about art. All I’m thinking about is the unseemly presence of this man’s hands on my shoulders. I try to slink out from under his hands, but his grip is unyielding. It’s not that his touch is some creepy sex thing. It’s worse. It’s the energy he emits, something oppressive that’s intensified the moment he nears me; it strikes something uncomfortable buried deep inside, an unplaceable but overpowering sensation, like a feverish nightmare exhumed.

At last, his hands slip from my shoulders, stripping away the sense of dread. He lurches toward his war medal case and stares through it while I try to shake off the memory of his touch.

“Let me be clear.” He turns back to me. “Our admissions criteria are intentionally exclusionary, designed to keep out people like you. It is only by the kindness of those better than you that you are here today.”

Don’t react to his insult,
I tell myself. After all, my housemother isn’t exactly raving about me. And I’m sure my reaction to Harper this morning didn’t put me in a great social position. Freaking out on the headmaster now could put a quick, ugly stop to this “fresh start.”

“How do you feel when I say such things?” he asks, looking at me as if he knows me.

Sarcasm is my best defense. “What things?”

He smirks. “Very well. We might have had a rather enlightening conversation, but you insist on being a child. I am compelled to tell you that you are here today because you have a benefactor.”

“A benefactor?”

“Senator Dave Stone—a friend of your father’s—has made it possible for you to be here.”

Villicus sits at his desk again and pensively temples his fingers under his chin while I put two and two together. Dave Stone is Pilot’s dad. A cold wave of embarrassment rolls over me as I think of Pilot’s dad telling him about the charity case he has to sponsor for this rich-bitch boarding school. To say nothing of how odd it is to learn that my dad, who spends all of his time in a dark funeral home, is connected to a senator. I know Atherton is filled with the country’s wealthiest and most powerful people, but I didn’t know my dad
knew
any of them.

“I’m sure you know that you ought to thank him.” He waits for me to nod, and I comply. “He put himself out there for you. Cania Christy accepts only people of a certain net worth and only on invitation. You meet neither criterion.”

Stiffly, I utter, “I’ll be sure to thank him.”

“And I’m sure I know
how
you’ll thank him.” Like perched black crows taking flight, Villicus’s eyes narrow in the cloud-like gray of his face. “You’ll thank him as all girls with your background thank men, especially men of affluence. And I do believe such appreciation will suit his tastes fine, nubile
fraulein
like you.”

Tongue-tied at the shock of his comment, I can only blink. I’ve never even properly kissed a guy, and he thinks I’m going to sleep with some old friend of my dad’s to thank him for sending me to this place?
In what world?!

“Now, for the reason I actually called you here today.”

“It wasn’t just to insult me?”

Villicus snaps his fingers twice. His door flies open.

And in waltzes this skinny beanpole of a guy—this tall, lanky thing with pockmarks on his cheeks and probing, miniscule, steel eyes. His frenetic leer lunges toward me.

“Miss Merchant,” Villicus says, “meet your Guardian.”

three

MY GUARDIAN

SINCE FIRST HEARING ABOUT THIS WHOLE GUARDIAN
idea, I’ve been naively filling in the blank after the word
Guardian
with the word
angel. Guardian Angel.
Part of me had expected that my Guardian would be ushering me through life here, helping me make decisions.

But this scrawny man-child is no guardian angel.

A mouth-breather no older than yours truly, he looks like someone you’d expect to crawl out from under the floorboards in a Wes Craven flick. Pale irises, greasy hair, and bumpy gray skin with little orange hairs poking out all over his jawline. I look from him to Villicus and back. A prerequisite to work at Cania must be that you be the ugliest son of a bitch alive.

“I’m Ted Rier,” my Guardian says. He’s got a German accent, just like Villicus. “You may call me Teddy.”

“Ted is my newest assistant and the ideal Guardian for you,” Villicus adds, just as my pathetic excuse for a Guardian shuts the door and scurries to take the seat next to me.

Trying to catch my gaze, Teddy lifts my hand and kisses it. It is impossible not to notice the white flecks in the corners of his mouth. It is nearly impossible not to cringe—yet I manage—knowing my hand is so close to
that
or not to pull away too quickly when he smoothly says he’s charmed to make my acquaintance.

“It would be great,” I say as Villicus sits and Teddy opens his cheap-looking briefcase, “if someone could explain what exactly a Guardian is supposed to do. I assume there’s a connection between a Guardian and a PT, but I’m fuzzy on both.”

“If I may?” Teddy asks Villicus, who nods, allowing Teddy to field my questions. “Miss Merchant, first things first. I understand you attended a school prior to this one, and at that school you earned top grades.”

“Top of my class and top of the Dean’s List each year,” I admit.

Teddy smirks. “I didn’t know they had ‘deans’ at public schools.”

“Which is supposed to mean what?”

Neither Teddy nor Villicus seems to appreciate my tone much. As if they’re allowed to imply insults, but I’m not allowed a defense.

“You and I are on the same team,” Teddy tells me. “If I have offended you, forgive me. But the fact is that you are familiar with and comfortable in an academic environment that breeds much lower expectations than Headmaster Villicus demands here at Cania Christy. You were a top performer in California. You excelled among the uninspired. But now you’re among a new class of people. And you are competing for a title that, I give you my word, every student here wants more than you want to go to Brown on full scholarship.”

I’m about to ask how on earth he could know that when I realize that my dad must have put that info on my application form. So I skip to my second question: “I’m competing to be valedictorian, you mean?”

Teddy drops a leaflet in the hand he kissed, which still feels icky. I read its headline.

“The Race to Be Valedictorian: Only the Supreme Survive.” Dropping the sheet momentarily, I look from Teddy to Villicus, who is watching me with a small smile tipping the corners of his lips skyward. “Like ‘only the strong survive’?”

Teddy glowers at me, and I immediately realize that this may be the one school on earth where “stupid questions” actually do exist.

“What I mean is,” I backtrack, “if evolution—perhaps the most complex process in the universe, a process requiring unimaginable patience and rewarding natural talents—is all about the
strong
surviving, attaining the Big V must be an incredible challenge if only the
supreme
survive?”

Villicus stands and stoops behind his desk like a bird of prey, beady eyes glowing. He begins to speak—slowly, like one of those dictators you see in black-and-white films from the Second World War:

“I see that you have already adopted the vernacular of Cania students,” he says. “The Big V, as the valedictorian title has become fondly known here, is the highest mark of academic honor one can receive in school if not in all of life’s endeavors. Alas, who among this student body does not seek with full desperation the gift of the title valedictorian and all that it brings?”

I recall Pilot’s teary declaration but dare not mention it now, not with Villicus knee-deep in a speech he has surely given a thousand or more times. Truly, my key consideration in coming here was that the prestige of being the valedictorian of a school of this caliber would seal my future. I am as desperate as any for the Big V. Maybe more.

“The stakes are high—higher than anywhere. Valedictorians at schools like Taft, Exeter, and Eton go on to Oxford, the Sorbonne, Columbia.” Villicus’s eyebrow arches up his long, turtle-like head. “But an Ivy acceptance is just the beginning for the Cania valedictorian. No student here has a parent who doesn’t wholly wish him or her to graduate as the Big V. You recently saw Mr. Pilot Stone turn his back on the race, and I assure you: he is the only in the student body to do so. The Big V is, to be sure, a title that is
beyond
prestigious.”

With the grandeur of an old actor, Villicus sweeps back his shapeless garment and takes his seat again. Teddy licks the tip of his pen, and I notice he’s started filling in a form on a clipboard. My name is at the top of it.

“Miss Merchant,” Teddy says, “do you wish to be considered for the title of valedictorian at the end of your senior year?”

He and Villicus wait for my answer.

This is a no-brainer. Memories of my father rush at me, images of him whispering to me that I need to try as hard as I can to become valedictorian. Even Ben, who had so little to say to me, had that to share.

“Of course,” I say firmly.

Teddy ticks a box on the form. “Next,” he says, “I will inform you of the three rules for becoming valedictorian.”

“You would be wise to heed—verily, to
meditate on
—these rules,” Villicus adds.

I listen closely. As uncomfortable as I feel with these two kooks, as frustrating as it is to feel controlled by them, and as much as I wish I could bolt from this insanely hot room, this actually is important. The Big V is becoming more important to me as each moment passes, especially as I realize that this is an intense competition—and what Type A doesn’t perk up at the idea of competing?

The first rule is standard: I must have an outstanding GPA.
Obv.
Rule number two: I must follow Cania’s communication guidelines to a tee. These are both table stakes; you cannot be considered for valedictorian if you fail to meet these two baseline expectations.

“What are the communication guidelines?” I ask.

“To begin, there is absolutely no fraternizing with the villagers,” Teddy says. “No unsupervised phone calls. No Internet. No personal computers, mobile phones, tablets, or other such technical nonsense.”

“Sorry,” I interrupt to their vexation, “but how am I supposed to research my papers without Internet access?”

“All papers are handwritten, and research is conducted in our library.”

“Where there are computers?”

“Where there are
books.
Now, the third and final rule,” Teddy continues, bypassing my obvious concern, “is the critical one. The deal breaker. The game changer. The one thing that will set the superior apart. And it is this: you must sufficiently define and excellently live by your
prosperitas thema.”