An Education in Ruin Read online

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  For my mother, who only invests in lovely things

  AUGUST

  One

  I find him in the study hall entrance of the library, right where he’s supposed to be. He’s past the rows of long oak tables topped with dark metal lamps, leaning against a wooden column. Above us is a towering ceiling ignited by the outside light through stained-glass windows. My loafers shuffle against the floorboards as I approach him, passing a collection of students perched with their heads bowed over books, already at it even though classes don’t start for two days. It’s as beautiful as a cathedral, and this is how the students at the Rutherford Institute worship.

  His eyes scan the room, taking their time before they land on me as I make the journey to get to him. I can tell by the way his gaze flickers away before it returns to me, that I’m not what he was imagining.

  He looks exactly as he did in the photos. Tall, with a cascade of brown curls that seem chaotic in the way they lie against his head, but also purposeful in the way they stay out of his eyes. His maroon blazer is perfectly tailored to fit his narrow shoulders and lengthy figure, and he’s wearing a gray striped tie, even though a tie technically isn’t required since this isn’t an official school day.

  “Collins Pruitt?” he says as I approach, keeping his voice low.

  I nod. “You must be Jasper.”

  I notice a small red welt on his upper lip, like he must’ve nicked himself shaving, and I smile because there it is, a glaring imperfection. He’s a fourth year and a Rutherford Institute legacy, with three lacrosse championships under his belt, breaking the school’s twenty-year dry spell. He was accepted early to Dartmouth after being lauded into academic stardom last year when he won the national academic decathlon, setting some kind of record for the most right answers and the quickest time answering the final round. He spent last summer interning at Robames Inc., a world-popular company, because their founder is a twenty-year-old Yale dropout and a Rutherford graduate herself. Jasper was the only high school intern they’ve taken on in the two years since they’ve been in existence. All this to say—he’s an academic savant and a lacrosse god, but this cut on his face is proof of his humanity. He’s like everyone else. I don’t need to be so nervous.

  “This way.” He leads me past the archway and down a corridor lined with glass-paneled doors. He rotates the brass knob of the third door on the right and holds it open for me as I walk into the private study room he must’ve reserved for today. After he turns on the light, closes the door behind him, and we each take a seat across from the other at the table, he sets his books down so their spines are facing me, and I wonder if that’s on purpose, to make sure I can see that he’s studying molecular chemistry and theoretical physics and moral philosophy.

  “According to your entrance exam, you had trouble with limits and derivatives,” he says, barely looking at me. He makes no time for pleasantries; he’s all business, so very serious, and while I figured he would be like this, I’m still surprised by his intensity. “I thought today we would focus on limits, since they’ll be covered in the first few lessons of your calculus class, and that way you won’t have to play catch-up from the start. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I scramble to pull a notebook and pencil out of my bag, as Jasper flips the textbook open and starts writing down equations in his own notebook, explaining each step and pointing to the correlating lesson in the book as he continues.

  “Can you—hold on—slow down?”

  “Slow down?” he asks as though he doesn’t understand this combination of words.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Yes,” I amend, remembering it’s more proper than Yeah. “Can you go back—go back to this part?” I turn to the previous page.

  “Sure. If that’s what you need.” There’s judgment in his voice.

  I’m not sure why he’s being so uptight—borderline rude—when the whole point of this overview is to prepare me for my first year at Rutherford, coming in as a third year in a subject where I placed weak on the entrance exam.

  He flips to a fresh page of notebook paper and starts to rework the equations he already did, talking deliberately slower this time.

  “Wait—” I cut in, blocking his pencil with mine to get him to stop writing. He takes a deep, measured breath. “Sorry.” I tap my pencil at the part of the equation I don’t understand. “What’s the reason for this?”

  “It’s the same thing I did in the first equation. You see?”

  I don’t. But there is a time to argue and a time to observe, and this is the time for the latter. I keep my mouth shut the rest of the session.

  When the hour is up, I thank him. “I understand now,” I say. “I feel ready.”

  He nods as he repacks his things. “If you’re going to succeed here, you have to keep at a certain pace. And honestly, this is very basic stuff. You got into this school; you should have no trouble with it.”

  Jasper appears to not really have an opinion about my progress, if he feels any was made. He doesn’t look smug or relieved. Just bored. I might not have had all my precalculus questions answered, but I did learn something today. Jasper doesn’t care about being a hero, rescuing a girl from academic mediocrity. He has no patience for it. It doesn’t give him a deep sense of self-satisfaction. And he definitely has no soft spot for the underdog. I venture the underdog quite annoys him, actually.

  He doesn’t wait for me when we leave the library, and I don’t attempt to keep up with him, which would not be an easy feat given his legs are at least four inches longer than mine. I reach the main level and fall in line with the swarm of students on their way to the courtyard since we’re all on nearly the same schedule today.

  I watch from a window before I head outside with the rest of them, letting it sink in: the reality of what I’ve gotten myself into by coming here.

  The students flood the courtyard from one side, the parents from the other, floating over the grass and stone squares laid out in a diamond pattern, weaving through the statues and thick green hedges trimmed to look like domes, until they merge in the middle, spotting their families, comingling with friends. We’ve had separate orientations this morning. While the orientation for students was shorter to allow time to get unpacked and settled in our dorm rooms, plus free time for things like peer tutoring and academic overviews for those of us who didn’t do as well as expected on our entrance exams, the parents’ orientation was all day and consisted of a tour of the grounds and teacher meet and greets. I’d guess theirs was about reassurance—We’re the Rutherford Institute and worth the money. Ours was about all the reasons we should be proud of ourselves for being the chosen few to
attend, with a pep talk that hinged on fear: if we don’t have what it takes and can’t follow the rules, they won’t hesitate to kick us out, and there are even more ready to take our places. According to them, we are both extremely replaceable because they don’t have time for nonsense, and yet also exceptional and rare to be accepted in the first place.

  My father appears in the crowd, walking slowly with his hands in his pockets. His hair is combed back since he didn’t have time to get it cut at the only barber he trusts with his head in Manhattan. He’s insecure about the length; I can tell by the way he keeps running a hand over his left side. He told me on the drive from the airport that if I didn’t like it here, I was allowed to leave, that he wouldn’t care. But it’s apparent as I watch him meander through the courtyard, nodding and smiling at the other parents, that he is unequivocally impressed by this place. He’s good at hiding how he really feels and his true intentions in any given situation, a great business tactic for his successful career as an investor and a good life hack, but by now I can see through all his tells. His eyes linger on no one for too long, until he notices me finally emerging from the doors. Then they light up and he smiles, as if it were only me he was looking for all along and not them. As I walk to reach him, I spot the four of them to the left, so he must’ve clocked their location merely seconds ago, too.

  He greets me with a hug, then offers me his arm.

  “Well, this place seems nice, if you’re into rose gardens and historic architecture,” he jokes. He’s a good dad. Truly, the very best. Even living a thousand miles away, the man doesn’t miss a birthday, a holiday, a recital, a playoff game. Every year he takes the entire month of July off to spend time with me at the vacation spot of my choosing. Last year it was Cape Town. This year we went to Barcelona.

  My father and I ignore the family to the left until, by way of the shuffling crowd, we’ve moved too close to deny them any longer.

  “Jake!” Garret Mahoney says, seemingly surprised to find my father here. “This must be your pride and joy, Collins!” He extends his hand, and I shake it. Hidden inside his palm is a peppermint, which he passes to me when our hands meet. He winks at me, and I give him a bashful smile. Garret Mahoney has a wide grin that reaches his forehead and a sunglasses tan around his eyes—probably from the Mahoneys’ annual vacation to St. Barths. He has this clumsy genuine quality about him like maybe he really didn’t know that my dad had enrolled me at the Rutherford Institute or that the Mahoneys’ endorsement had anything to do with it. Of course, it wasn’t his endorsement that got me here. It was her endorsement.

  Marylyn Mahoney is wearing what I can now see is a grown-lady version of the Rutherford Institute uniform. Her slacks are the exact Rutherford heather gray, and her crisp white button-up is paired with a maroon sweater, a gray silk scarf, and a pin with four black pearls to signify the four years she spent here. A Rutherford Institute legacy. She has dark hair like her sons. When Mrs. Mahoney introduces them, Jasper gives me a tight smile and mumbles, “Nice to see you.” My father and Mr. and Mrs. Mahoney don’t pick up on the insinuation that we might have already met, but Jasper’s younger brother, Theodore, glances back and forth between Jasper and me, and I think I spy the slightest smirk on his face.

  “I’m Theo,” he says, revising to the name he prefers to be called versus what his mother introduced him as, nodding at me, still with that subtle grin. Theo is a third year like me. His hair is a shade lighter than Jasper’s and shorter, with tighter curls. His eyes are green. His whole demeanor is altogether friendlier. He’s probably easier to get to know and easier to impress, but he shares my sexual preference for men, so it’s next to impossible for him to desire me the way I need one of the Mahoney brothers to desire me in order for this to work. There’s more power in love and in want, is what I was told—what I was promised. And besides, Theo has a different weakness—an already-open wound. Not one I’ll have to create myself.

  Mrs. Mahoney is rattling on about Jasper’s early acceptance into Dartmouth—just like his father—and telling us that Theo’s a Princeton hopeful—just like she was. Jasper keeps that polite smile on his face that isn’t exactly friendly but does make him appear more pleasant. Theo has stopped listening and is waving at someone across the courtyard. A girl with long auburn hair waves back. I recognize her; I met her earlier while I was moving into the girls’ dormitory. She’s a third year named Anastasia Bowditch. But as she prances over to him with her family trailing behind her, she doesn’t acknowledge me. She reaches Theo and grabs his arm, and he gladly lets her steer him toward her family. Anastasia’s very young sister jumps into his arms. And so the Mahoneys are forced by social graces to migrate toward the Bowditches, effectively leaving my father and me on our own. Mrs. Mahoney glances back once more to smile, and to anyone watching, it would appear she’s simply ensuring the abrupt exit wasn’t rude, the way her husband gives us one final wave, saying, “We’ll have to catch up later this year when I return from Munich.”

  Jasper doesn’t look back at all. Theo does, wearing a peculiar expression, as though maybe he can feel it coming already, the curse of what’s about to happen to them.

  Two

  “This is what you really want?” my father asks as we sit on the brick patio of Bello Italiano having dinner. We’re beyond the wrought iron gate and brick walls of the Rutherford Institute, in the Cashmere, California hot spot of Guthridge Square, where an assortment of shops and restaurants surround a courtyard and a fountain.

  The Mahoneys are eating at the burger place across the square, next to the gift shop. My father and I pretend we haven’t noticed.

  “Of course,” I say. It’s not the first time he’s asked me this.

  He’s always suspicious of my answer, as if his instincts are telling him that something is off. His instincts are usually not wrong. But he also has no reason to assume I would lie to him about something so big.

  We used to tell each other everything—or most things anyway. Now he sits there eating carbonara and sipping red wine, pretending he isn’t about to ruin our lives because of the woman wearing a black pearl pin across the square.

  I pretend I’m at Rutherford for the higher learning, for the prestige, for the opportunity.

  He pretends he doesn’t still have his doubts about leaving me here.

  Convincing him wasn’t easy. He didn’t understand what was so wrong with the private school I was currently attending. He didn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to live at home with Mimi—which is what I said instead of Mommy when I was learning to speak and so it stuck—or why I’d want to leave my lifelong friends, Cadence and Meghan.

  I’d prepared a whole argument about needing to be challenged, about wanting independence, about all the additional opportunities attending a school like Rutherford would provide for my future, and I’d done it in a way that he would understand. My father made his fortune at twenty-five by investing his entire meager savings into a company that manufactured a contraption that made underwater communication seamless. His best friend from Penn State had invented it. His friend got the patent but didn’t have the funds to make his invention until my father stepped in. This turned out not only to be a very, very profitable business venture but also allowed my dad to uncover his true passion and hidden talent, which was that he was good at analyzing potential business ideas and savvy at investing in and building great rewards off said potential. So I spoke his language and broke things down into a cost-benefit analysis, an approach I knew he’d have a very hard time arguing with. And I was right.

  After a few months of my insistence, he finally caved. “I happen to know someone who would be able to put in a good word for you and help you get in even as a third year,” he’d told me—something I already knew and was counting on.

  “Have you called your Mimi and Rosie yet?” he says. “I’m sure Rosie would love to hear all about it.” He takes a long sip of wine.

  Probably the hardest part about letting me come here was t
hat it had been Rosie’s idea.

  “Rosie and Mimi are probably somewhere over the Atlantic right now.”

  “That’s true.” He smiles. He likes picturing Mimi on an adventure. “Leave them a message anyway.”

  Rosie is my aunt Rose, who only lets me—and no one else—call her Rosie. My father and Mimi only ever use Rosie when in reference to me. My dad has many reasons to be wary of her, and in this case, he’s right to be.

  “I’ll try them before bed.” Another lie. But my father doesn’t know that I’m not speaking to Mimi. Coming here was about getting space from her, and as she jets off with her sister, she’s getting space from me, too. But I don’t feel entirely guilty about not telling him this. He’s the one who started keeping secrets first.

  We leave the restaurant, and the sky turns fuzzy as the night creeps in. The other families are slowly disappearing from the square too. The Mahoneys were gone over an hour ago. We reach the curb where a car service is waiting to take me back to Rutherford, and my dad looks devastated.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” He’s stalling; he doesn’t want to say goodbye yet. “I hate leaving you here, all by yourself. Practically on your own.”

  “I’m not all by myself or on my own. Not in the way you were.” Secretly, his worst fear is that I should ever feel unloved or neglected, the way he felt growing up with parents who instilled in him a great work ethic but only by example. He told me once that he still felt to this day like he never truly knew his parents. Mimi and Rosie had the opposite problem. Parents they couldn’t wait to escape—parents who were alcoholics in that functioning way that kept food on the table but turned every day into a juggle of their mood swings complete with hiding behind locked doors and walking on eggshells. They did escape them eventually, when cancer took their mother and a car accident took their father.