“If you hone the power and never stop using it, you can keep it for longer,” Rosie said.
Mimi walked away from the window, shaking her head.
Rosie and I sat in silence for a bit, staring out at the pastures as the sun went down, creating a shadow across the barn. When I was born, Mimi was living in a small apartment in Madison, and my father was living in a penthouse in Manhattan, where he still lives. He bought Mimi her dream house, a ranch-style home outside of town on twelve acres with a barn and a pond, before my first birthday. I used to think it was what they thought was best for me, growing up in the suburbs, lots of land for roaming, and that’s why she didn’t move to the city, to his mansion in the sky. But that wasn’t the case.
“Don’t you want to know how to do it?” Rosie asked me. She pushed her foot against my chair, making it spin toward her.
I’d recently turned sixteen. It felt the exact right age to learn about how to make someone fall in love with you. And I did have a boy in mind.
“It doesn’t seem possible,” I said.
“Ever the skeptic.” The same thing she’d said when I was nine and told her I’d never believed in Santa.
“Well, what if they don’t think you’re pretty? What if you aren’t their type?” Lucius Castle had never stared at me the way I’d seen him stare at the other girls—like Carly Gomez.
“You think you have a type—you’re wrong about that, believe me.”
I understood that she had a point, even if I liked to love with my eyes first.
“So how do you do it?” I asked. The sky was turning a bright pink with the setting sun. We could see it for miles from the vast, flat terrain of the property.
Rosie smiled. She had this wide grin that made her squint. She looked so beautiful in that moment. Excited and full of hope. “I’ll tell you exactly how.”
The sliding door creaked open and shut as Mimi came outside. She refilled Rosie’s glass of white wine. “This ought to be good,” she said.
“You find a way to bring out their best qualities.”
Mimi and I waited for the rest.
“That’s it?” Mimi said it before I could.
“It’s not as simple as you think. The trick is you have to be able to find the good in them.” She side-eyed her sister as she took a sip of wine. “That’s something you’ve never been skilled at.”
Mimi put up her hand, dismissing the comment as nothing. But her face turned stiff, and her eyes got sad. She drank wine to cover it and got up, pretending she had to check on the vegetables steaming in the kitchen.
“You could do it easily, Collins,” Rosie said to me. She waited until I’d taken my eyes off Mimi and was focused on her before she continued. “You get that, right?”
I answered her honestly. “Not really.”
“You should know that about yourself at the very least,” she said. “It’s in you, and no one can take that away.”
Tonight, in the east wing common room, I wonder what’s good about Jasper Mahoney. He’s dedicated and very intelligent. He’s handsome, athletic. That’s not going to be enough, though. Those are surface-level qualities only. Anyone could meet Jasper and see these things about him. Throughout the night, he takes breaks from his book to chat. But he is also the first one out of his group of friends to leave. He does it so quickly, without saying goodbyes, that I nearly miss it.
Theo and Anastasia stick together all night, migrating effortlessly around the room. Everyone seems to have something to say to them, including the group I’ve sat with, casually joining in on a foosball rotation. But they don’t stay long, wherever they go.
There’s a moment when I think they’ve left the party, when I can’t spot them anywhere in the room, but then a half an hour later, there they are. They seem like the type of people who would know places at this school where you can disappear, hide. Because from what I’ve learned about Theo, keeping private things hidden is something he’s very familiar with.
Four
The truth about Rutherford, now that I’ve been here a couple of weeks and am starting to catch on, is that it does feel worth the money. Life at Rutherford is very structured, very demanding. But it’s also like this: every day, I wake up and shower on clean white tiles, under a rainfall showerhead, the hot steam smelling like a field of lavender. I take courses like number theory, comparative religions, economics and post–Cold War Europe, and writing for contemporary media from some of the most prestigious teachers the world has to offer, in perfectly preserved, century-old brick-and-stained-glass buildings. I practice field hockey in state-of-the-art athletic facilities, eat a dinner prepared by a world-renowned chef, study in an ergonomic chair at my desk with a view of the deep forest, the roaring ocean, and a beach littered with driftwood. “Where the ocean meets the forest,” is how the small, isolated town of Cashmere, California, is described on the Rutherford Institute’s website. It’s as beautiful as was promised, I’ll give them that. And every night, I fall asleep on a mattress that feels like a cloud.
It does get to you eventually, the way everything here is exquisite and distinguished, and just for us. It somehow creeps in, that subtle thought: I deserve this.
This is the thing about Rutherford that the website doesn’t tell you: being here really is like having pretention pumped into your veins. It becomes very hard not to believe your own hype.
But I still hear Rosie’s voice in my head—You can’t lose focus. What I’m asking you to do isn’t easy, but you know why you have to do it, and it’s up to you to take these risks—and I get that they are huge risks, but that just means the reward will be great. It will be exactly what we want it to be. Maybe I shouldn’t have believed her. Throughout her life, Rosie had earned and lost a lot of money. She was a gambler, not at casinos but in what my dad would call putting all her eggs in one basket—spending all the money she’d earned working the VIP section at a nightclub in Tokyo on an initial public offering that sounded like a good idea but turned out to be a dud, or taking the money she’d gotten from selling her Parisian apartment into flipping houses in Sacramento with a guy she met in Sydney who claimed he knew what he was doing, only to lose it all to bad construction management and a failing market. Those get-rich-quick schemes were what she was searching for; they seemed to be the only investments she trusted. It was always all or nothing in terms of Rosie having money or a place to live. Mimi said it was irresponsible, but Rosie simply called it living. To her credit, a few of her gambles had worked out. Rosie’s lived in some of the most beautiful places in the world. Paris, Medellín, San Sebastián, Kyoto. To me, it did say something that she’d been in such high-risk scenarios, where she didn’t always reap big rewards, and yet she never hesitated to take the next big risk.
By now, I mostly know where to find Jasper at any given point in the day. He’s serious while school is in session, stopping only occasionally in between classes to chat with his friends. After school, he meets with his teachers during their open hours, then heads straight to the library even though he only has fifteen minutes before he’ll need to be at the soccer fields.