WHEN KYLE hired me, I’d agreed to follow a strict code of professional conduct. It made sense: people were paying us good money to provide a service, and we owed it to them to fulfill our mission with the highest level of competence and discretion.
You will be on time, Kyle had instructed me, reading straight from the rule book. You will have proper documentation on hand, along with an approved calculator and several sharpened Number Two pencils. You will dress appropriately and never behave in such a way as to draw unnecessary attention from the proctors or your fellow test-takers. Misconduct of any sort is punishable by fine and/or dismissal.
Kyle’s code extended beyond the test day into the rest of our lives. We were not to flash our cash or make extravagant purchases or say anything that might lead others to suspect that we had an illicit source of income. And we were never, ever, to mention Kyle’s name or the services he provided to anyone, under any circumstances. If someone we knew was struggling with the SATs, or thinking about hiring a tutor, our job was to pass this information up the chain to Kyle — nothing more, nothing less. He would investigate the lead, and if he determined that the individual was a potential client, he would reach out on his own terms. I had no idea how he contacted them or how he arranged the payment. There were other mysteries as welclass="underline" I didn’t know how many other test-takers he employed, what he charged for his services, or even if there was a bigger boss above him, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking, because this sort of information was only dispensed on a need-to-know basis. These operational safeguards had been put in place for everyone’s benefit, employees and clients alike. The less any individual knew, the less risk of exposure there was for everybody else.
You just fill in the bubbles, he told me. I’ll take care of the rest.
Given the strictness of the code, it went without saying that partying on the eve of a test was totally prohibited, but Kyle said it anyway: You will not drink alcohol or take illegal drugs on the night before a test. You will be home in bed by eleven p.m. I’d never violated this rule before and didn’t plan on starting now.
After dinner, I put on my sweatpants, turned on my Xbox, and started campaign mode on Bioshock 2, doing my best not to think about the party I was missing, a party I’d been looking forward to all week. I would’ve gotten through the night just fine if not for the text I received around nine o’clock. It was from Sarabeth Coen-Brunner, the first one I’d ever received from her, and it put me in an awkward position.
Tequila is here!!! it said. Where the fuck r u???
I’D BEEN overweight as a kid, academically gifted but terrible at sports, and middle school had been a nightmare. As a result, I tended to be mumbly and apologetic around girls I liked, as if I had no business wasting their valuable time. With Kyle it was the other way around: he always acted like he was doing the girl a favor, honoring her with the blue ribbon of his attention, allowing her to tag along on his amazing adventures.
But I don’t want to make myself sound too pathetic. Things had definitely gotten better in the past year. I’d been working out pretty regularly and was finally starting to show some definition in my arms and chest. I’d acquired a new wardrobe, closely modeled on Kyle’s, and had started driving to school in my mom’s Toyota Matrix.
I wasn’t even a virgin anymore. I’d had my first girlfriend in the fall, or at least my first semiregular hookup. It was all on the down-low, just a once-or-twice-a-week, after-school sex break with Iris Leggett — my former lab partner in AP bio — who had the biggest breasts in all of Greenwood High. This wasn’t as sexy as it sounds: Iris was short and stocky, but her breasts were enormous, way out of proportion to the rest of her, and they caused her a lot of discomfort, both physical and emotional. The first time we took our clothes off, I said, Holy shit, and she started to cry.
I look like a cow, she told me. I used to love playing soccer, but then I got these and had to stop. And forget about the beach. I can’t go anywhere near it.
We only hooked up five or six times before she called it quits, but it was fun and informative while it lasted and definitely boosted my confidence. If it hadn’t been for Iris, I would never have dreamed of talking to Sarabeth Coen-Brunner, let alone flirting with her. She was totally out of my league — a freakishly limber, cheerfully bisexual dancer with eyes like Mila Kunis’s — definitely one of the Top Five Hottest Girls in the Junior Class. But one day in the Art Room, I just walked over to her easel and told her how much I liked her painting, this nocturnal scene of a girl in a black cocktail dress standing beneath a streetlight in the rain.
“She just looks so vulnerable,” I said. “Like there’s nothing to protect her from the elements.”
“Tell that to him,” she muttered, nodding at Mr. Coyle, who was sitting at his desk, reading a graphic novel with his usual expression of scowling concentration. “He hates it.”
Mr. Coyle wasn’t wrong; the painting definitely had problems. The girl didn’t have much of a face, and the raindrops looked like golf balls, but I chose to focus on the positive.
“I like what you did with the streetlight. And the busted umbrella’s a great detail.”
“Thanks.” I could see how pleased she was. “I worked really hard on that.”
We got to be pretty good friends over the spring semester. On Monday mornings she liked to tell me all about her wild weekends: Oh my God, Josh, I’ve got to stay away from the tequila. I always end up making out with the wrong person. Sometimes the wrong person was a guy in our school, sometimes another girl, and sometimes a man in his twenties or early thirties she met at a club (she had a fake ID that never failed her; I wondered if it was one of Kyle’s). It would have been pretty excruciating for me, listening to these confessions, except that she always stood really close when she made them, so close that her breasts would sometimes brush against my arm. It was hard to feel jealous when all I could think about was the way my arm seemed to glow where she grazed me.
We’d never spent any time together outside of art class, so it had been a pretty big deal when we realized that we were going to Casey Amandola’s party. We’d been joking about it all week — I said I wanted to drink tequila with her, to find out if the rumors of her bad behavior were true, and she said she’d trade me shot for shot until I was a puddle on the floor — but I wasn’t sure it was for real until she sent me that text.
Where the fuck r u???
I knew I’d never be her boyfriend, never take her to the movies or walk down the hall with my arm around her shoulder, and I was okay with that. I just wanted to be the wrong person she made out with at a party, a mistake she could confess to her friends on Monday morning, and I had a feeling this was the best chance I’d ever get.
I’ll be right there, I texted back. Don’t start without me.
WHEN I’D imagined getting drunk with Sarabeth, I pictured an intimate, romantic scene, just the two of us off by ourselves, someplace dark and quiet. In front of a roaring fireplace, say, with a big bed nearby and a door that locked from the inside. I certainly hadn’t pictured us crowded into a bright kitchen, surrounded by a pack of drunken jocks, with hip-hop blasting in from the living room. In my fantasy, Sarabeth was giving me her undivided attention, laughing at my tragic tequila faces, closely monitoring my slide toward intoxication. In real life, though, she was all the way across the room, standing by the sink, too busy checking her phone and talking to Casey to notice the faces I made when the shots went down.