Zach wiped his brow with the cuff on his sweatshirt. Exasperated, he groaned at Jaxon, “You owe Nate a buck fifty. At least.”
Jaxon opened his wallet and pulled out two ratty bills. “Nice reflexes, Nate. All those driving games and that quick karate shit you do all the time came in handy.” He dropped them in the cup holder on top of the wig. “Keep the change.”
Sweat trickled down the sides of my face as I pulled into the one open spot in the Clyde Hill lot, between a Lexus SUV and Tesla sedan. “Okay, assholes. Get out.”
“Thanks for the ride.” Jaxon fussed with his hair in the window’s reflection while I locked the car.
Zach mumbled something, maybe a “thank you.” Not much of a talker, that guy. I gave him a head nod in return.
The parking lot on the south side of campus was closest to the senior hallway. The brand-new “coming soon” STEM building was also nearby. Sometime after the holidays, the headmaster would cut the ribbon to unveil state-of-the-art computer labs and science facilities, the best in the nation, thanks to the generous corporate endowment from Digitools, Inc., the largest, evilest tech behemoth in the world that happened to be headquartered in downtown Bellevue. Half of the kids at my school had parents who worked there.
At the school’s side entrance, Peter Haskill the Fourth and his preppy gang of other Clyde Hill legacy bros leaned on the brick wall, chatting about how some guy from an opposing soccer team “deserved that punch to the face.”
Pete Haskill. The Fourth. Clyde Hill Academy legacy. Captain of every varsity team sport offered. And the guy at school who frequently asked me how my karate skills were coming along and would then do some fake-ass karate chop on my neck, yelling, “Bruce Lee, ha-yaaa!” He’d done it for so many years I didn’t even flinch anymore, and lately he’d ended it with a friendly hair muss. Back in junior high, he used to ask me to teach him Korean curse words, but my third-grade Hangul vocabulary couldn’t offer him much on that front. I stopped going to the weekly half-day Saturday language classes because I had too many other activities. Something had to go. That something was Korean.
He also joked a lot about my skid status, meaning he did all the laughing, and I took the brunt of his “jokes.” Other than this infrequent, ignorant, slapstick racism, he never targeted me, and his friends left me alone too. He wasn’t a horrible guy to me, all things considered. He could be worse for sure—I’d seen him do worse—but that didn’t mean he was a good guy to any of us scholarship kids. On a ten-point asshole scale, he was pretty up there. Pushing above the seven or higher range, into real assholedom.
Pete’s boys moved toward the door, creating a bro barrier. Jaxon and Zach squeezed through the body fortress with no altercations.
But Pete stepped into my path when I tried to pass. “Hey, Nate. How’s it going?” Most guys at our school called other guys by their last names. But my last name was Kim, and that made me sound like a girl. Thanks to bro courtesy, guys just called me Nate.
I stopped and gave him a half wave. “Hey, Haskill, good I guess?” My voice cracked.
Jaxon and Zach turned around to see if I needed any help. I waved them off. They went ahead to class but kept looking back as they walked down the hallway.
Pete used his massive hand to sweep his tousled Tom Holland hair out of his steely blue eyes. “Serious question for you, Nate.” Apparently, we were getting right to business. Enough chitchatting.
“Okay.”
“You’re probably already done with college applications, right? You were doing early action?” He pulled his phone out of his front pants pocket to check the time.
“Yeah, I’m almost done. I still need to get the regular-decision ones ready just in case, but they’re basically finished.”
I racked my brain to anticipate his next comment, to get ahead of this line of questioning. Was he going to ask me for college application help? To write his college essays? I wouldn’t put it past him.
“Good, good.” He forced a smile, and I forced one back in return. Panic inched up my chest, wriggling like a worm.
“A bunch of us friends of yours at school have a favor to ask you. No pressure.”
Yes, pressure. Enough with this Tony Soprano shit already.
“Since your early applications will be in soon, and schools are going to make their decisions on last year’s transcript, we were wondering if we could pay you to, um”—he shrugged as he spoke—“throw your GPA? So like, some of us doing regular decision have a better chance at getting into college if you do that. It’s like in sports, when the top-ranked team gets knocked out of the competition.”
“Wait, what?” I balled my fists to stop their shaking. “What do you mean, throw my GPA? Are you talking making B’s?” I paused. “Or C’s? Or are you talking…F’s? And how would this even work?”
He chuckled, the way villains did in movies before murdering someone. “Nothing that would get you in trouble or alert Headmaster Jacobson. A few of us could say we made honor roll and headmaster’s list our first semester senior year if you and some other nerds bumped down a few spots. We were thinking a few B’s is all, your excuse being getting senioritis. We’d be willing to pay more for C’s, though, obviously.”
Obviously? Earning money this way hadn’t even crossed my mind, though, knowing Pete, maybe it should have. This was shady as shit. He’d found some weird loophole that made this all technically possible. The bulk of the college scholarships I’d applied for would not be compromised because the high GPA requirement was through end of junior year, and not many of them took into account my fall and spring senior semesters. I’d maybe be blowing my shot at valedictorian. But could I live with myself knowing I’d whored myself out for some cash?
“You asking Sanchez too?” She was the other person in our class with the highest GPA. But she wasn’t on scholarship—her dad was some hotshot executive at Amazon. She didn’t need the money.
“I wanted to talk to you first. Seemed like we could come up with a mutually beneficial arrangement. You help us out. We help a skid.”
I cringed. In other words, I was poor and needed money, and he and his friends were rich and had lots of money. See? We could help each other, in Pete’s simple view of demand-side capitalism.
I went ahead and asked what I wanted to know. “How much money are we talking here?”
“We can talk price later, but the gist of it is, we’d make it worth your time.” His gaze traveled up and down my body. “I like you, bro, so I’d like this to work out in your favor. It’d probably be enough to get your mom a new car, one of those that self-park. Depending on how extreme you’d want to go, though, maybe we could get you a self-driving car, like mine.”