“You’ve got to be kidding me.” She clicks a switch on a cord suspended along the wall. I cringe when my name appears lit up in white letters above her. How did I miss that?
“Holy shit. That’s obnoxious,” I say, my mouth agape.
Ashton slowly circles the room, trailing a finger over every surface. There’s something about the way she’s casually invading my space, picking up and examining everything, that reminds me of Nina. I’m either going to hate this girl or she’s about to become one of my best friends.
Ashton flops down on the fur covered beanbag. “So, what do you really want to know?”
I hesitate. “About what? The school?”
“Anything. I’ll tell you. You might as well know what you’re getting yourself into since they just abandoned you on the doorstep with a note attached to you.”
I shrug, because that’s pretty much what happened. “And what do you want in return?” Honesty always has a price, and that’s assuming she’ll tell me the entire truth.
Ashton lets out a small laugh like she thinks I’m funny. “Nothing.”
“Really?” I don’t believe her. She tilts her head innocently. I decide to ask only what I can afford to offer in return. “Where are you from?”
“New York. Manhattan. You?”
“A shitty town in central Massachusetts.” Naming it won’t mean anything to her. I choose a question that I doubt she’ll answer, just to see if she will. “Why don’t you like your parents?”
“You like yours?” she scoffs.
“It’s just my mother. And I can’t fault her for me being who I am.”
“That’s big of you. I can’t say the same. My father’s a musician in a rock band, and my mother’s a supermodel. I am absolutely who I am because of them.” She hesitates, silently contemplating. “You should probably know that almost everyone here is a spawn of a celebrity, politician, musician, well, basically anyone who’s anyone. We’re their embarrassments. They shipped us off to the middle of nowhere so we don’t disgrace them further, even though most of them do so much worse.”
“That’s why everyone keeps talking about security and privacy?” I conclude.
“You won’t find any cameras beyond the main gate. Our parents don’t want to be concerned about us making headlines at school like we do in the real world. Which is one of the reasons they chose Blackwood with its military security and high-tech tracking devices. But that doesn’t mean they can keep the drugs out of the addicts, the food in the anorexics, or secrets from being exploited.”
“So everyone’s fucked up?” Now I understand why I was sent here, except that I’m not newsworthy, and neither is my mother. I guess every private school has to have their token scholarship kids.
“Pretty much. I think it’s a requirement for admittance, honestly. And if we get kicked out, our parents financially cut us off. It’s in the agreement they make with the school. That way everyone has something to lose. And, trust me, no one here wants to give up their designer handbags or private jets. So, we’re forced to actually succeed. The rest of the world believes the school’s respectable, graduating top collegiate contenders. But it’s not like we have a choice.”
“I know about that,” I mutter.
“What?”
“Not being given a choice.”
“So they really didn’t tell you anything?” This seems to be a point of fascination for her, that I walked through the doors completely blind.
“Nope. Only that I was being sent somewhere better. But I don’t come from money.”
“So what do you have to lose?”
I stop to think about that for a minute. It’s either here or juvie, and if they think that juvie is “losing,” then they don’t know me very well. Granted, I don’t want to spend the next six months in a red jumpsuit, going to group sessions where we’re taught life skills, anger management or whatever bullshit the counselor reads from a workbook. But it could be worse.
“Nothing.”
“Then you’re going to be fun to have around,” Ashton says with her enigmatic Cheshire smile. She pulls her vape out of her pocket. “Want some?”
I smile back. “Desperately.”
Ashton walks over to the windows and slides them open all the way. “They have super sensitive smoke detectors.”
“Blackwood goes through all of this trouble to know where we are, how do they not know you left your room? Don’t they have sensors or something?”
“They used to have motion detectors in the halls and sensors on the doors and windows. But that was a nightmare because no one stays in their rooms and someone always has a window open. So, they decided to focus on keeping us in the buildings with security patrolling the outside. Without our phones, they can’t detect where we are, but that’s why they have Ms. See-er lurking the halls at all hours. It makes it harder to sneak around after curfew.” With a mischievous quirk of her eyebrow, she adds, “But not impossible.
Ashton inhales from the vape before offering it to me. I breathe in the contents and hold it in my lungs for a moment, craving the escape I’ve needed all day. We each blow out through the screen, our smoke drifting like a cloud into the dark.
“What else do you want to know?” she asks, leaning on her elbows. I take another hit.
“How long have you been here?”
“This is my third year. I’m supposed to graduate in June. Although I have no idea how.”
“Not into school?”
“Not into being who I’m not. And I’m an artist. I don’t give a shit about any of this.”
“I can help you, if you want.”
“With school?”
“Yeah. It doesn’t bother me, really. It’s not like I try, but it’s not that hard either. I did my best friend’s work for her all the time.”
“Thanks,” she says sincerely. “But they have tutors, life advisors, and other ways to make sure the work is ours. They’re not really grade driven here as much as choice driven.”
I shake my head, still trying to understand what the hell that means. “So you can fail a test, but as long as you made the choice not to cheat, you’re okay?”
Ashton laughs. “No. Failing is not an option. But they provide you with whatever help you need to pass. It’s not a huge school. There’s only like three hundred students here during the school year, and barely fifty during the summer. They have a ton of staff, and they get paid a shit-ton to make sure we understand what they teach us. Most of them live on campus during the school year so we have access to them whenever.”
“Explain this choice thing they keep preaching about.”
Ashton inhales from the vape, her eyes flicker as she tries to put words around her thoughts. “We’re here because our parents couldn’t be parents, and I guess we failed at being us.
“Blackwood’s life advisors customize a plan that forces us to make better choices, whether it’s random drug tests, therapy, meditation, or tracking our caloric intake at each meal.”
“That’s what that screen was for when we ordered dinner?” I ask. When I scanned my phone to order dinner earlier, a screen on the tablet displayed allergies, food restrictions and my macronutrient intake for the day. I didn’t think much of it at the time, other than it was weird.