DAD WAS SAYING SOMETHING TO ME from the front seat. I couldn’t hear him, because I had my headphones on, but I already knew it was something like, “You’ll make contacts that will last you the rest of your life, Jack,” which was something he’d said about eleven times since I’d gotten in to Oakhurst Hall.
I took the headphones off. The electro chords of Glitch Mob gave way to the sound of Dad’s lecture voice.
“. . . presidents.”
“Presidents what?” I said.
“Two presidents attended Oakhurst Hall, Jack. Two.”
Great. No pressure. “So you’ll be disappointed if I don’t become president?”
“Jack, sarcasm isn’t necessary,” Grace said. Grace wasn’t really that bad. She was sort of a fake, my stepmother, but you kind of had to like her because she tried so hard to be what she wasn’t. She was from a family in Jersey that sold tires until she got a job with my dad’s company. His job is to get the land to build these stadiums, even if there are people already living there in houses. He finds ways to force them to move. I wasn’t sure it was the kind of thing I’d want to get paid for. Not that I had a clue in that department.
I did know for sure, as he always reminded me, that he’d had to work eleven jobs or something to pay for the business-school degree after he went to Colgate on a hockey scholarship. This was something else he also liked to talk about a lot: his hockey days in college, when he had “limited talent” but “made the most of it.” Which I figured meant that he was the guy who did the fighting. The funny thing was, even with his Zegna suits and perfect haircuts, his nose still gave him away—broken a couple of times, a little off center, with a little bump halfway up. I think it helped him close deals: a guy’s guy who’d learned how to play with the big boys.
“The point is,” he was saying, over his shoulder, “we’re doing this for you. We want you to have all the best opportunities possible.”
“You mean so I can get the opportunity to buy a bottle of wine that costs what someone in Ghana makes in a year?”
I wasn’t always that snarky, but sometimes the stuff he said was just too easy a target.
The real point of all of this was that, without knowing it, he’d given me a chance to get out of New York City and figure out some way for life to not be so boring.
“No, to be happy,” he said. “Happiness and success go hand in hand.”
Another piece of wisdom from your friends at www.fortunecookie.com.
I hit the window button so I didn’t have to smell Grace’s perfume anymore. My own mom didn’t wear perfume—I didn’t think. It had been a while. Which probably explained a lot. About me, I mean.
She’d been living somewhere in Guatemala in a clay hut for the least eight years, teaching kids how to play the flute and love Jesus Christ. I guess if I’d been married to Dad, I’d have gone to a jungle, too. I didn’t actually blame her. At least, I didn’t on the day she decided she had “good work” to do a couple thousand miles away, because when you’re eight years old, you don’t really think about the work she hasn’t finished doing with you yet. She’s your mom. You trust her.
So Grace did her best, and time passed, but what didn’t stop sucking was that if one day your mother was there and the next day she wasn’t, well, you sort of started asking yourself, Who else is going to walk away for good? I figured if I backed away first, or put up some sort of video-game force field, then I was the one doing the leaving.
“I’ll settle for you being president of your class,” Dad said, with half a laugh—half because I knew he actually meant it. “But I doubt that Oakhurst Hall chooses its class leaders because they won the tenth-grade music prize. You better play the hell out of that piano. Since sports isn’t exactly your strong suit.”
That again. As if I’d ever had a chance on the Upper West Side of Manhattan? When the baseball field is caged in on the roof?
Nice vote of confidence.
“So if you don’t even think I’m gonna make it at this place,” I said, “why are we doing this?”
“Jack, I think you’ll do just great,” he said, “and finding the right friends is going to help. Remember, sometimes to make the right friends, you have to reach out more than halfway.”
This, of course, was about how I didn’t have any real friends other than Luke at home, which had to mean there was something wrong with me. The psychologist back at the U—“the University School”—as if—did some tests after a couple of teachers said I was “guarded” and “cautious.” One teacher said I was “dark,” which was pretty ridiculous, considering when I wasn’t in school I liked to mostly go to jam band concerts where everyone was grinning like a madman from the contact high and I ended up dancing with random girls and getting a contact madman grin of my own.
So the psychologist prescribed me three different drugs in one year. One made me puke, one made me feel like I was wearing a suit of armor, and the third kept me up all night with the same Zeppelin loop going around in my head. I stopped taking everything and started running around the Reservoir, which always turned in to the best high you can get.
“So,” I said, “I have to make the right friends so they can make me a success?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve always told you there’s only one way to the top: try harder than the people on each side of you, until you’re the only one at the top. Survival of the fittest.”
And, yeah, he always had said that, about once every six months. Me, I saw the point in trying hard. But harder? So I could be, what? Basically, thanks to music, at least I was afloat, although music wasn’t exactly something you made a living at, and if you did, it’d probably ruin the fun anyway.
Maybe here, three hundred miles away from Dad and my fake classmates like Ty, who was a die-hard Knicks fan—because his family had courtside season tickets—and Diggy, who liked to listen to hop-hop while he was on the beach in the Hamptons, in a place with some new girls I could find something else I was good at. Something that other people couldn’t ruin.