Atta Boy by Cally Fiedorek

Author:Cally Fiedorek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

NOELLE STARTED SCREAMING her head off in computer lab. At first Marley thought that something terrible had happened, like her mom had died—she skied a lot—but then Noelle said how she’d just gotten into Exeter and started jumping up and down and screaming and all her friends started jumping with her, hugging her and screaming too, and Annabel Wyckoff started crying ’cause she said she was so happy for Noelle but she’d miss her so, so much.

“Well obviously you’re gonna come visit me, like, all the time,” Noelle said.

“I mean, I’m literally gonna live there,” Annabel said.

It was almost obscene, being that pretty, and having that many friends, who liked you that much, and the thought of Exeter, of boarding schools in general . . . ivied gates and bells in towers, and coxswains napping shirtless just across the quad. It was meant to be the best school in the country or something. A conveyor belt to Harvard. Marley couldn’t even tell if she was jealous of Noelle or what, her future sounded so unreal.

She was definitely jealous of the going somewhere else for high school part. That she knew. Though not to Exeter, just to anyplace. Though they didn’t even seem to make any normal high schools in Manhattan. The only ones you heard about had either squash courts and spring break trips to Crete for your archaeology elective, or there were knife fights in the locker rooms and kids all getting headaches from the lead-based paint, and if she even suggested public school Daddy’d be all, well, maybe Stuyvesant, but there’s no way she could get in. The test to go for ninth grade was already over, and even if she could try for tenth she’d need about ten thousand dollars’ worth of tutoring to get her math in shape, which would kind of undermine the whole pretense of a meritocracy, and then of course she’d be taking the place of some totally deserving kid whose whole life and whole family’s destiny might actually be transformed to go there, so maybe it was the right thing to keep sucking down her parents’ money (she’d worked it out once, about two hundred bucks per hour of schooling once you accounted for the closures for the Jewish holidays) to be kept in squash courts that she didn’t use, with well-bred friends she didn’t have. It was hard to think of an alternative. . . . Daddy always said how it was so expensive being rich, but guys like him controlled things, didn’t they? Rich dads? So why not make not being rich less shitty? For their own sake, if nobody else’s.

One of the perks—so far it was the only perk—of eighth grade spring semester was you got to leave the building by yourself on Thursdays during morning break. Most of the time she went to the deli on 82nd and Madison with Noor Shawaf to get a VitaminWater or an egg-and-cheese if she’d slept too late to eat at home, but today—miracle—Dimitri texted her and asked her if she wanted to meet up in the park.

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