He was down in his basement lair, playing Call of Duty on a humongous wide-screen with two ridiculously hot sorority girls — spray tans, frosted hair, glittery Greek letters on their tank tops — flanking him on the couch, watching the video-game action like they actually gave a crap what happened. I had no idea where Kyle found these girls — they didn’t look like they went to MIT — but there seemed to be a never-ending supply of them at his disposal.
“Yo, bro,” he said, glancing away from the screen for a millisecond. “Nice pants.”
“Thanks, man.” I was rocking my bright red skinny jeans from BR; Kyle owned the exact same pair, but they looked better on him, sleeker and more natural, like they’d been designed specifically for his body.
“Ladies,” he said, “this is my boy Josh. Josh, meet Emily and Elise.”
The girls said, Hi, Josh, in these bored, superior voices. I was just a high school kid to them, a primitive life-form. They probably figured I was there to buy some weed, or maybe score a few Adderall, both of which were among the many products and services offered by Kyle, Incorporated. They had no way of knowing that, far from being a customer, I was actually a valued, highly compensated employee, one of a small group of trusted insiders.
Kyle handed the controller to Emily, the smaller and blonder of the pair.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “Don’t fucking get me killed.”
I followed him into the laundry room at the other end of the basement — it was where we always conducted our business — and waited while he emptied the dryer. It smelled good in there, fabric softener and warm clean clothes. Kyle stood up and dangled a pair of panties in front of my face like a hypnotist trying to make you sleepy. They were pink with little blue hearts.
“Elise,” he said, in answer to my unspoken question. “The ladies appreciate it when you do their laundry. It makes them feel loved and respected. Gratitude is an aphrodisiac, dude — remember that when you get to college.”
I told him I’d keep it in mind. That was how we rolled — Kyle gave me advice and I took it if I could or filed it away for future reference. It had been like that ever since we’d met at the Pendleton School Summer Day Camp all those years ago, when I was a fifth-grader and he was a Future Leader, the most junior of the junior counselors. On the very first day, he told me that I needed to get myself some acceptable swim trunks, because the ones I had were totally ridiculous, billowing around me like a bright green oil spill when I stepped into the water. In the years that followed, he’d contributed a steady stream of big-brotherly suggestions and helpful hints: Dude, you need to start working out… . Ever think about getting yourself some contact lenses?… I hate to say it, bro, but your vocabulary is pitiful… . Don’t you think it’s time to start making some real money?
“How you doing?” Kyle tossed the panties into his mesh basket and eyeballed me up and down, the way my aunts and uncles sometimes did when they hadn’t seen me for a while. “Keeping outta trouble?”
“Pretty much. Just cruising until graduation.”
“Senior year.” He nodded with nostalgic approval, one eye partially obscured by his floppy hair. He had recently started wearing oversize hipster glasses that made his sharp, handsome features look even more delicate than usual. “I hope you’re getting your dick sucked. That’s what the sophomore bitches are for, right?”
I felt myself blushing and tried to will the blood away from my face. Despite my upperclassman status, I was not getting my dick sucked; as a matter of fact, I wasn’t getting much of anything except a bunch of frustratingly mixed signals from Sarabeth Coen-Brunner, this artsy junior on whom I was nursing a severe unrequited crush that kept me awake at night, not that that was the sort of update I was going to share with Kyle.
“I’m doing all right,” I assured him.
“That’s my boy.” He ruffled my hair like I was still in middle school. “You worked hard. Now it’s time to get paid, am I right?”
“Absolutely.”
That was it for the small talk. He stood on his tiptoes and retrieved a lumpy manila envelope from a shelf above the washing machine, otherwise occupied by a jug of detergent and a box of dryer sheets.
“Thanks for bailing me out,” he said as he pressed the envelope into my hand. “Things got a little complicated this time around. I had to do some big-time juggling to make it work.”
“No problem.”
“Get a good night’s sleep, yo.” He held out his fist and I gave it a bump. “And don’t forget to sharpen your pencils.”
I WAITED until I got home to open the envelope. It contained a stack of crisp twenties — my usual fee of five hundred dollars — along with an admission ticket for tomorrow’s test, a fake photo ID, and directions to the testing center. It was all pretty routine, except for the ID, which I couldn’t stop staring at.
I’d taken the SATs seven times so far, twice for myself, and five times for Kyle’s clients. Up to now, the kids I’d impersonated had all been strangers from nearby towns. Their names had meant nothing to me, and their bogus school IDs — accurate though they may have been — always struck me as cheap and phony, props in a half-assed game of make-believe.
This time, though, the ID came from my own school, Greenwood High. It looked totally official, a dead ringer for the one I carried in my backpack. It even had the same unflattering picture of me — a pudgy nerd with a pained smile and a touch of bedhead — plastered above the bar code. The only difference was the name beside the photo: Jacob T. Harlowe. That was the thing I couldn’t stop staring at.
Jake Harlowe was in my AP psych class. He was a junior jock, a football and lacrosse star, one of those popular, good-looking kids everybody knows and likes. The Harlowes were Greenwood royalty; his older brother, Scott, had been an all-county quarterback a couple of years ago — Scott had since gone on to Amherst, where the family had some kind of crazy legacy, five generations or whatever — and Jake had stepped right into his shoes, another square-jawed scholar-athlete, humble and easygoing, varsity starter in his sophomore year.
For a couple of minutes, I thought about calling Kyle and trying to back out, maybe asking him to switch me with someone else, but I knew it was hopeless. He wouldn’t have had time to make the new IDs and wouldn’t have said yes even if he did. Kyle wasn’t that kind of boss. And besides, I wouldn’t have known what to tell him, how to articulate my misgivings about this particular assignment.
It wasn’t that I was worried about getting caught. The test was being administered at a private school about a half hour away, where I didn’t expect to run into anyone I knew. I’d never tested there before — Kyle tried to avoid sending us to the same place twice — and I couldn’t imagine that the proctors would know Jake Harlowe or have any reason to suspect that I wasn’t him. All they ever did was glance at the ID and make sure it matched the name on the admission ticket.
And it wasn’t like I’d come down with a sudden attack of conscience, either. I honestly didn’t mind cheating for strangers. If somebody wanted to pay me to help them get into a good college, I didn’t see any problem with that. It wasn’t all that different from hiring an expensive tutor, or getting a doctor to diagnose a learning disability so you could buy yourself some extra time. That was just the way system worked. If you had the money, you got special treatment.
My only problem was the client. Jake Harlowe didn’t seem like the kind of kid who needed to cheat. I always figured that everything came easily to him, the grades as well as the girls and the games, and it troubled me to discover that this wasn’t true. I felt like I’d been peering through his bedroom window and seen something I shouldn’t have, a shameful secret I wished he’d kept to himself.