Con Academy (3 page)

“Where did you get this?”

“I got an angry call from a headmaster down in New York, at the institution that you listed as your last school. Your transcript papers came back. Nobody has ever heard of Will Shea. But the State of New Jersey knows all about Billy Humbert.” Dr. Melville points beyond the window. “There's a car waiting for you outside.”

“Get packing,” the security guard orders. It's his one line in this poor excuse for a crisis, and he delivers it with disgruntled gusto.

“Okay. Just”—I glance around the room—“give me a second to get dressed, okay?”

“You've got two minutes.”

I nod and shut the door after them, turning back to the window.

This is why I always get a room on the first floor.

Ninety seconds later, I'm sprinting across campus in my bedroom slippers, making for the main gate at a dead run with all my earthly belongings in a backpack flapping against my shoulders. At least there's a full moon to keep me from crashing into the trees.

I don't recommend running cross-country in slippers, especially not in the freezing cold of late October, when your toes go numb first. Twice I trip over tree roots and once almost collide with a giant statue of the founder of the school, Lancelot Connaughton himself, one hand extended boldly toward the future. By the time I get across the lacrosse field, reach the gate, and toss my backpack over, I've got so many twigs and branches stuck to my legs that I'm wearing my own forest camouflage, which actually proves handy when the sidelight of the campus security SUV waiting outside the gate swings around and hits the ground just in front of me.

I lie there on my stomach with my heart pounding in my chest. My lungs feel as if a pair of cackling pyromaniac twins are setting off Roman candles inside them. Time has now officially stopped. Then, approximately one eternity later, the headlights finally drift away, and I pick myself up and brush myself off, slipping into the woods alongside the road that runs toward town.

After I'm sure the coast is clear, I stumble out of the trees and onto the pavement, where the walking is easier, or at least doable. It's a six-mile trek to town, but I can make it on adrenaline alone. I can probably scrape together the cash for the next bus back to Trenton, and by the time I arrive, I should have some kind of plan.

I hope.

I've been walking for a half hour when a sports car comes flying around a curve, barreling straight at me, tires screeching to a halt less than a foot away from my shins. It's a foreign job, some kind of low-slung coupe with one headlight out, and the driver who stumbles out of it looks like he's got only one functional headlight himself. For a second he just stands there in the middle of the road with his tie yanked down and his shirttails hanging below his sweater vest, blinking at me with the bleary, slack-jawed disbelief of a man whose ventricles are currently pumping more Glenfiddich than blood.

“Who . . . ?” he manages, in a whiskey-fueled slur, and I realize who it is.
“Shea?”

“Mr. Bodkins?”

“What . . .” My now former English teacher leans a little against the side of the car, peering at me through narrow eyes. “What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”

“I was . . .” I realize that he doesn't know anything about what happened and I'm free to extrapolate at will, as it were. Not that it matters now. “I was headed into town.”

“Now?”

“I need to get to the bus station. There's been an accident back on the island, and I need to get home as soon as I can.”

“Is everything all right?”

“I'm not sure,” I say. “The headmaster woke me up in the middle of the night.” In the midst of another massive lie, a little truth trickles through my system like a cool sip of water. “I had to leave right away.” More truth—this stuff could get addictive. “There wasn't a moment to lose.”

“So you're
walking?
” Mr. Bodkins slides a little down the hood of the car, catches himself, and stands upright again. “You need a lift?”

I hesitate, wondering if I should entrust my life to a man who looks like he's spent the last four hours marinating himself in single-malt scotch in one of the town's three taverns, and decide I don't have much choice. It's cold and my legs already feel like overcooked rotini.

I climb in.

Five minutes later we're careening through the countryside, flying past maples and stone fences at eighty-five miles an hour like Robert Frost on speed. The inside of Mr. Bodkins's car reeks of cigarettes and scotch, and there are great swollen drifts of uncorrected English themes piled on the back seat, where they spill and tilt with every twist and turn. Driving this fast seems to have sobered Mr. Bodkins up considerably, and he handles the vehicle with what used to be called aplomb, a Camel Light clamped between his teeth and both hands locked on the wheel. Somewhere inside the glowing dashboard, in stark defiance of all this automotive chaos, Miles Davis is finding his way, softly and mournfully, through “'Round Midnight.”

“Too bad you have to leave so soon,” Mr. Bodkins says, the cigarette twitching between his teeth, and he turns to glance at me. “You
are
coming back, aren't you, Mr. Shea?”

“I don't know.” Right now I'm just hoping to survive the trip to town. I'm gripping my seat belt with my backpack tucked between my knees and praying that the road stays straight in front of us, or at least unobstructed by wildlife. If Bambi wanders out in front of the car while we're driving at this velocity, there won't be much left of him but a venison-flavored grease spot.

“We don't get many scholarship students,” Mr. Bodkins says. “Besides Andrea, you might be our only one.”

I sit up and look over at him. “What did you just say?”

“Andrea Dufresne—you remember her from English Lit.” His hand fumbles in the dark for a bottle, and then, realizing that I'm watching, he takes the stick shift instead and changes gears. “Dark-haired girl? Kind of pasty? Looks like she sleeps in a coffin?”

“What about her?”

“She came here on a scholarship too, just like you.”

I'm still looking at him. Suddenly I have forgotten all about my seat belt and my backpack and the road in front of us. “Really.”

“Oh yeah. Kind of a similar story to yours, actually. She's an orphan, technically a ward of the state. Her parents were U.S. foreign aid workers in some poor country in the Balkans, killed by friendly fire, I think . . .” Mr. Bodkins shakes his head, as if there are a couple loose facts rattling around inside his skull like Legos and he is trying to get them to attach together. “I can't remember the name of the country now. She wrote a whole paper about it last year. Gave her a B-plus on it. Solid work.”

“And how long has she been here?”

“Came in as a sophomore. Made a lot of friends already, though.”

“I bet she has,” I say.

Mr. Bodkins must have noticed the slight change in my tone, because he turns to look at me. “Are you all right, Will?”

“Can we turn around?” I say. “Back to Connaughton?”

“I thought you had to fly home as soon as possible.”

“I do.” I just nod, staring out the windshield into the night. “But there's something back there that I need to take care of first.”

W
HEN
A
NDREA STEPS OUT OF THE BATHROOM AT
seven a.m. in a pink fluffy bathrobe and flip-flops with her bucket of toiletries in hand, I'm standing there, leaning against the opposite wall. For a guy who has been up all night and is still wearing the same clothes, I'm feeling surprisingly composed. Spiffy, even.

“How was your shower?” I ask. “I hear the water pressure here is amazing.”

“Will?”
To her credit, she doesn't show more than a flicker of surprise. It's there, and just like that, it's gone, a magic trick of perfect self-control. She even manages a crooked little smile. “What are you doing here?”

“What, you mean as opposed to being driven away in the back seat of a campus security vehicle?” I shake my head. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Bravo,” I say, giving her a polite little golf clap, keeping it as quiet as possible. It's early, and most of her fellow residents haven't emerged from their rooms yet. We've got the hallway to ourselves, which was how I'd hoped it would be. “And here I thought
I
was a pro.”

She makes a little show of glancing up and down the hall. “You know,” she says, lowering her voice to the range of hushed confidentiality, “you really shouldn't be here. This is an all-female dorm. It's locked for a reason.”

“Yeah, well. I found an open window in the laundry room.”

“You could get in trouble just for being here.”

“So now all of a sudden you're a stickler for rules?” I take a step toward her, just to see if she'll retreat, but she stands her ground. “That's really fascinating, considering you've been breaking them yourself for the past year.”

Andrea just looks at me. She's not smiling anymore. In fact, I think I see a slight crease of a frown on her forehead. “Will, are you okay? Maybe you hit your head crawling through that window or something.”

“You know,” I say, “it's no wonder you were able to pick up on my game so quickly. You've been running one of your own for the past year. That's why you couldn't wait to get me out of here, so I wouldn't horn in on your action.” I shake my head, and the smile on my face is one of genuine admiration. “What a colossal idiot I was, thinking that I could somehow con
you.
”

Andrea cocks her head just slightly. The shadowed pucker of a frown has become a truly agitated scowl. “I think you better leave right now, before you find yourself in an even worse situation than you already are.”

“A poor scholarship student from a displaced village in the Balkans?” I say. “Really? Who forged
your
transcripts and tax records, Andrea Dufresne? And how did you really get into Connaughton?”

“That's it,” she says, and turns to walk away. “I'm calling security.”

“Good,” I say. “That way they can drive us
both
to the bus station. You'll be on your way back to Tuscaloosa by lunchtime.”

That stops her cold, just like I'd hoped it would. When she finally turns around, all the remaining confidence in her face has drained away, and she stares at me for a long moment. I realize that I'm seeing her without makeup, and she's actually much prettier this way—even though she looks like she's going to haul off and take a swing at my head with her shampoo bucket.

“So what do you want?” she whispers, and even her voice sounds different now, tinged with a Southern drawl. “A medal?”

“No,” I say. “Just five minutes of your time.”

Her gaze flicks right and left again, so quickly that I can barely track the movement of her eyes, and she grabs my wrist. “Come on,” she growls under her breath. “Before somebody sees us here.”

Her room is immaculate, walls decorated with Klimt prints and framed antique maps and black-and-white Ansel Adams shots of the Grand Canyon. Hardcover leather-bound books with silver and gold titles embossed on the spines sit on bookshelves. It's totally Crate & Barrel by way of Restoration Hardware. There's a cello case in the corner, next to a metal stand with sheet music spread out on it, all of it very deliberately arranged and, to my newly enlightened sensibilities, totally fake. But at least the room smells like girl, like hair product and moisturizer and Yankee Candle, and when I sit down on the already-made bed, she gives me a grimace of distaste.

“Don't bother making yourself comfortable,” she says. “You're not staying.”

“Oh, you're not going to kick me out,” I say.

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because I've got your number and you know it.” I unzip my bag and pull out my laptop, powering it up. “First of all, admit to yourself that what you're running here is a dead-end game.”

Andrea blinks at me, then nonchalantly turns to the mirror to begin brushing her still-damp hair, combing it out in long black waves. “How do you figure that?”

“Think about it,” I say. “What's your real payoff here? You're going to graduate this year, and then what? Your GPA isn't exactly Ivy League.”

“Excuse me?” She stops brushing her hair and turns to stare at me. “How do you know about my GPA?”

“Let's not kid each other,” I say, and turn the computer so that she can see the page I'm on. “I told you I've already hacked into
the school's mainframe. Security around here is strictly Chuck E. Cheese. I practically sneezed my way through their firewall.”

“Let me see that,” she says, but I pull the MacBook away from her, beyond her reach. “You can't just snoop through people's transcripts.”

“You're right,” I say. “It's
dishonest.
I feel so dirty.” I look around the room. “Got any coffee?”

She glares at me, simmering in silence. “There's Red Bull in the fridge,” she says finally. “You can get it yourself.”

“Look.” I walk over to the little dorm refrigerator in the closet, pull out a can of Red Bull, and crack it open. “All I'm saying is, there's no payoff. What happens after you graduate? You're back at square one again, right?” I glance at the cello case in the corner. “Or were you planning on conning your way into Juilliard, too? I hear they're a little more difficult to snooker.”

“Who says I have to con my way in?”

“So you're really that good?” I stand up and start walking over to the instrument. “You want to play me something? Adagio for Scam Artists in B Major?”