Society of Lies by Lauren Ling Brown

Author:Lauren Ling Brown [Brown, Lauren Ling]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2024-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

I took the sat for Calum the following week and aced it.

It gave me a sick sense of pride, knowing that I belonged here more than a kid like Calum Fuller. That I, a girl from nowhere, with no parents, no money, could get into a place like this on my own, and Halo-playing-Tarantino-loving-pimple-popping Calum Fuller needed all the help he could get.

This wasn’t a meritocracy, not at all; it never had been. Life wasn’t fair. Unlike what my mother believed, hard work alone wouldn’t make me successful. Like my mother, I’d held the Ivy League schools up on a pedestal since I was a child, thinking only the best and brightest, only the hardest workers, were blessed with the opportunity to study here.

But boy was I wrong. This school, with all its prestige, was a system run on favors, big and small, like every major institution in this country, and, you know what? I could play this game too. I was a small, a very small, piece of the problem. I had my sister to take care of. My promise to her superseded everything else.

In the weeks after, I met with Calum twice weekly and filled out the rest of his application while he played Angry Birds on his phone. His mother had given me the content for it—Calum took care of her when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Though I saw no evidence of the cancer—in fact, Mrs. Fuller looked exceedingly healthy, her skin rosy as ever, as if she’d just come back from the spa—I convinced myself it was true and wrote the essay while thinking of my own mother.

Whenever I’d feel guilt creeping up my throat, I swallowed it, tamped it down. This was a job. That was it. I was doing this for my sister. If I didn’t do it, someone else would.

The week after I’d turned in Calum’s application, I got a call from Goldman Sachs and nearly leaped with excitement: Mrs. Fuller had gotten me an internship with her friend, a managing director. It paid well and would be essential training for a future analyst position.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.