Being able to spot things up there, little miracles that have been around forever and ever, puts me at ease. It makes the nightmares go away, the darkness easier to deal with. Well, sometimes.
Duh, I responded to Henry.
Sunset ride on the boat?
I waited a beat before typing back. Henry doubled down.
I have a telescope we can bring.
Henry had been chasing me like this since school let out, dropping by the house, offering to give me rides to parties, sending me bizarre news clips that he thought would make me laugh. I was sick of saying no, sick of waiting on someone else. So I said screw it and agreed.
I’m there. But I’ve got the hookup. No scope needed.
The travel-size Celestron Dad got me for Hanukkah last year sat tall on my nightstand.
A few hours later, we were halfway to the Connecticut shoreline, aboard his small runabout, Olly Golucky, named for Henry’s twelve-year-old golden retriever. The sun had gone down and the heat was finally starting to let up. A breeze puckered, and the first little stars began to break through the clouds. I breathed in the salty air and lay down on the damp deck. Waves crashed around us as Henry delighted me with surprisingly funny stories about his first week as a summer intern at CNN. His face grew flushed when talking about seeing his idols in the halls. It was totally adorable. Then he grabbed a bottle of rosé and a tin of Russian caviar he found in the little hideaway fridge. He presented them to me with the question, his eyes wide and hopeful. “So, do you want to do this? Us?”
The answer was obvious. He was the captain of the lacrosse team and anchor on the school news channel. More eloquent than most of our teachers. Sweet when he was drunk, that awful time when most of the other guys became monsters. It didn’t hurt that he was also beautiful in a totally obvious Nantucket J. Crew model kind of way. Thick blond hair. Green eyes. Nearly perfect skin. He was bound for greatness. He was a Player. Being with him would make everything so easy.
Plus, the person I really wanted to be with, the guy who had inadvertently led me to this exact place, was hundreds of miles away. It was a no-brainer. Henry was here and willing. Adam Miller was not.
“Of course,” I said. Henry dropped the tin and wrapped his sticky hands around my waist. Fish eggs clung to my bare back. He never could have known that while his tongue was in my mouth I was willing Adam to see me, to know what he had let go.
The bell rings and Robert kicks Henry under the table. “C’mon, man. We’ve got Spanish.”
“English,” I say, turning to Nikki. She throws her head back in despair but links her arm in mine and pulls me out the double doors and into the quad. The sun shifts as we walk, and if I squint, I can see past the staff parking lot behind the theater, and all the way to the oyster stalls pulling down their canvas curtains and packing up crates, closing up shop for the day.
Nikki and I make it across campus just as the bell rings and slump into our side-by-side desks. I pull out my copy of The Great Gatsby, a classic, Mr. Beaumont promised in his summer reading assignment.
“Hi, girls,” Mr. Beaumont says as he walks by our desks. “Good summer?”
Nikki cocks her head and looks up mischievously. “Great summer.”
“Excellent.” Mr. Beaumont smiles and pushes his thick-rimmed glasses up his nose. He looks more bronzed than last year, like he spent the entire summer swimming in the Hamptons, like he’s a grown-up version of one of us, which, I guess in some ways, he is.
He came to Gold Coast three years ago, starting just after Thanksgiving when Mrs. Mullen left on maternity leave. He had Nikki, Shaila, and me for freshman English, right when we learned about the Players. On the first day of class, he won us over with a dare.
“Don’t screw with me and I won’t screw with you.” He said it with a smile. A joke. He said screw so he must be cool. He must get it. My phone buzzed with a text from Shaila right in the middle of class. OBSESSED, she wrote with a few red hearts. I looked up and caught her eye.
“Dreams,” I mouthed.
After he arrived, it only took a few days before we all found out he grew up in Gold Coast. Graduated ten years ago now. He’s goofy as hell on his yearbook page, with a wild mop of dark hair and a dirt-stained lacrosse jersey. Henry thinks he used to be a Player. There were even rumors that he started the whole thing. I never quite believed them, though.
Headmaster Weingarten was so pleased with his work that year that he hired Beaumont full-time and gave him the AP English Lit class, reserved only for seniors. Now he calls our class his “firstborn.”
As he launches into a monologue about East Egg and West Egg, I scribble furiously trying to take down everything he says. “I don’t know why you do that,” Nikki whispers, pointing at my notebook with a ballpoint pen. “It’s not like you need notes.”
She’s right, obviously. There’s a fat stash of Gatsby info in the Player Files, alongside hundreds of insanely thorough study guides for Gold Coast midterms and finals. There’s also a slew of past SATs, copies of AP exams, and off-the-record college essay advice from the deans of admissions at Harvard and Princeton. I saw those little manuals last spring sandwiched between a bunch of college-level organic chemistry finals, sent back from a Player whose name I didn’t even recognize.
They never change the questions! he had written. Get that fucking A!
The Files are our entry into the elite within the elite. A way for us to excel, even if we could have on our own. They are passed down as a reward for our loyalty, a way for us to enjoy everything that comes with being a Player. The parties. The fun. The privilege. They alleviate some of the stress, the pressure. The Files make everything easy. Golden. Never mind the crushing guilt and shame that creeps into my stomach whenever I open the app that houses them. The Files are our insurance.
Especially for those of us whose parents can’t afford the fancy private tutors and the private college counseling that cost nearly as much as Gold Coast Prep tuition. Or who have to maintain a 93 average to keep our scholarships. The others don’t need to know that little detail, though.
“Miss Wu,” Mr. Beaumont calls out to Nikki. “What is Miss Newman writing about that is so interesting to you? I’m surprised to see you looking at something other than your phone.”
Nikki sits up in her seat, her straight dark hair falling over her shoulders. “Mr. Beaumont, you know I loved this book so much, I was just seeing what Jill thought about it.”
“And Miss Newman, what do you think about Gatsby?” He asks me like he really wants to know.
“Well—”
The bell sounds.
“Another time, Miss Newman. Have a good weekend, everyone. Be safe.” He says it to everyone, but I feel his eyes on me, like he knows our secrets, like he knows what happens to the Players. Everything we had to sacrifice. Everything we had to do to survive. Especially the girls.