BLACKJACK
THERE WERE THREE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT Elkhollow Preparatory Academy before choosing to attend its hallowed halls.
One: It was very old. Red-brick and white gabled roofs, so Revolutionary War it made you want to pick up a musket and die on a hill. They didn’t advertise the draft that came from the old windows in the pamphlet.
Two: It was very expensive. Tuition that looked like a zip code kind of expensive. If Elkhollow could have found a way to keep their lawn green through the Massachusetts winter by raising the tuition to six digits, they would have done so already. And plenty of senators, Wall Street suits, and old-money widows would’ve paid it.
Three: Like many very old and very expensive institutions, it carried a proud history of secret societies. A lot of them. At some point, they started to lose their meaning, if you asked me, but no one was really asking me anything. In fact, in the three years I’d attended Elkhollow Preparatory Academy, no one had invited me to join a secret society at all.
So I did what any enterprising young Elkhollow student would do: I founded my own.
Well. Sort of. I liked to think of it as an underground service. Filling a niche. Because as much as every secret society, group, and club on the unwritten roster liked to chant and force one another to run naked through the forest, a part of them wanted more. They wanted to pretend to be their mothers and fathers: sophisticated, powerful, and rich enough to afford to send their spawn to Elkhollow Prep.
They wanted to spend large sums of money, and they wanted to feel clever doing it.
That was where I came in.
The Beginner’s Blackjack Club was an official club, though not one that Elkhollow advertised very well. It had a (bored) faculty adviser, met in a (cramped) classroom off the library, and received a (paltry) stipend every year. As far as the school administration knew, it boasted a small, rotating cast of nervous freshmen fumbling with cards and not much else.
The truth was a little more exciting.
The truth was a room in the back of the library’s basement, the lights just yellowed and dim enough to cast the kind of ambiance that made people think they were in a mob movie. Unlike a mob movie, there was no smoking, no drinking, and no fighting. They could do that somewhere else, I didn’t care, but I wasn’t going to risk taking heat for extraneous crimes. I didn’t bother with chips either, no matter how many people asked. There was no betting anything but simple, anonymous cash. It was a good system. It worked.
Blackjack Club wasn’t the problem.
Tuesday night found me leaning against the wall, arms folded across my chest as I watched one of the tables. It was the last week of the semester, that hazy period post exams but pre summer, so the crowd was pushing at the seams of the little room. The mood was buoyant, the thwap of shuffling cards punctuated by laughter and groans of despair. By next week, half of them would be gone, jetting off to vacations in Greece and internships at their grandfather’s company.
And I would be there, like I was every summer, probably training incoming sophomores how to deal correctly so there would be someone left to take over the club when I graduated next year. No rest for the wicked.
Speaking of. I pushed myself off the wall and sauntered toward the closest table. There were five players considering their cards. A girl leaning forward on her elbows, a busted hand on the table in front of her. I scanned the cards without even thinking. A king, a five, and a nine. Two lacrosse players sat next to her, a graduating senior with a hand of three fives beside them, and a junior from my English class at the end. A king and an ace sat in front of him. Blackjack.
“Bryan,” I said, coming up next to the dealer. “Why don’t you tell me what went wrong here?”
Bryan twitched, sweat beading his forehead. He wasn’t one of my better dealers, but I’d been hoping he might improve. So much for that.
“Um,” he said eloquently. “The house lost.”
Two cards sat in front of him, a ten and a seven. Enough to beat the senior girl’s fifteen and the bigger lacrosse player’s twelve but not the junior’s hand. Each king was worth ten, the ace either a one or an eleven. The only way to beat a twenty-one was to match it.
I shook my head. “Sometimes the house loses. That’s the game.” What we were betting, what every casino bet, was that the house would win more than it lost. Considering Bryan collected cash from four out of five players at the table, it wasn’t a bad bet. “But not when you cheat.”
“Card counting isn’t cheating,” the junior with blackjack blurted out, which was a very good way to sound guilty. He clutched his cash like he was considering making a run for it. Also not a great strategy. One of the lacrosse players met my eyes and gave his chin a little jerk. I always made sure the team had a little better luck than average, with the understanding that their luck depended on mine. The junior wouldn’t be getting far if he did make a bad decision.
I gave my head an infinitesimal shake. I didn’t think it would come to that.
“It’s not,” I agreed. Not technically, though technicality wouldn’t keep you from getting kicked out if you got caught. I swept the cards from the table and rejoined them with the deck, my hands falling into the familiar pattern of shuffling. The decks we used were comfortable and well-worn, like old friends. “There’s a reason we play blackjack here. And not because it’s simple.”
Which it was anyway, luckily. At least for our purposes. A real dealer’s shoe could have up to eight decks in it at a time when you got to the big leagues. I kept it simple. One deck, fifty-two cards, one number in each suit. Numbered cards were worth their numerical value while face cards were worth ten. An ace could be either an eleven or a one. You got two cards in a hand and could take a hit from the dealer until you got to twenty-one, or close enough that you were confident that your hand would be higher than the dealer’s. Or you could go over twenty-one and bust.
I ran my thumb over the edge of the cards. “Because it can be beaten. Count all you want.” If only. I had yet to meet a decent card counter in the halls of Elkhollow Prep, but I was still holding out hope that there might be a real challenge out there somewhere. Sometimes running the club felt more like playing solitaire. Or herding cats. “Actually, let’s count them together.”
The rest of the table shifted uncomfortably as I spread the cards across the table, letting them slide in a neat row. The girl on the end leaned forward a little farther, her chin resting on her hands.
“
One.” I slid the ace of diamonds out of line with one finger.
“Two.” Ace of hearts.
“Three.” Ace of spades.
“Four.” Ace of clubs.
And…
“My grandfather used to have a saying,” I said. “Anyone can get lucky. But sometimes—” I pulled a second ace of hearts from the deck and held it up between two fingers with a smirk. I couldn’t help it. I liked to win. “You need five aces to win.” I showed it to Bryan, who had gone pale and tight-lipped. The smirk grew teeth. “You’re in the Magic Club, Bryan. I know you can do sleight of hand.”
Someone was always watching. Better they learned that now, before they tried it at a real casino. That was how you got blacklisted. If you were lucky.
I struck Bryan’s name from my list of dealers and let the junior leave with his money, but I made a note to keep an eye on him in the future. Contrary to what Bryan might have thought, I wasn’t mad—the winnings from the rest of the table more than made up for whatever the junior took home, and this venture was never really about money. This was Elkhollow. We all had money.
It was about the game.
“Jack Shannon?” The girl from the table, the one who’d been so interested in my little show, stood behind me. She didn’t look like someone who frequented the library basement, but I’d learned to stop trying to pigeonhole my clientele. There were even teachers down there from time to time, which was a little concerning. No way Elkhollow paid well enough to support a gambling habit. “Aileen Shannon’s son, right?”
I eyed her warily. At Elkhollow, everyone sold themselves like trading cards—this senator’s son, this pharmaceutical CEO’s daughter. It was practically in every introduction. Jack Shannon: son of Aileen Shannon, CEO of the Golden Age Hotel and Casino. Have you heard of it? It had been easy to start the club, even as a freshman. It was what they expected out of me anyway.
“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”
Did she want to replace Bryan as a dealer? I already had a waiting list, but I was willing to shuffle it around for someone who showed promise. Plenty of people wanted to deal for me—the thrill of the game but with the house edge—but not all had the confidence to pull it off. Or, like Magic Bryan, they had a little too much.
“
I was just wondering if I could get a statement for the school paper.” The girl’s smile slid a little wider. “About your mother.”
I started to refuse—the wannabe journalists at the school paper tried to crack open the story about a secret, underage, definitely illegal gambling ring in the library basement every couple of months, usually when someone new joined the staff. They never got far, thanks to the lacrosse team. So no, I wasn’t interested in talking to the paper. I was interested in finding Lacrosse Benjy and dropping some hints that he might need to revisit their offices.
But I stopped, my mouth still hanging open. This wasn’t the usual line of questioning. Mom? Their interest in her usually began and ended at her name and occupation. A casino mogul really wasn’t that interesting at a place like Elkhollow. Even the (alleged) mob ties weren’t really remarkable when there were members of the student body who came from mobsters themselves.
“What about her?”
The girl’s eyebrows climbed upward. “You haven’t heard?”
My hand flew to my pocket. I kept my phone off during blackjack nights, or else I’d be on it instead of watching the tables. Bad habits, bad business. Mom liked to say that.
The girl was faster. She unlocked her phone with a swipe and pulled up CNN. She flipped it around with a gleeful flourish so I could see the screen.
I knew I shouldn’t look. I should have told her to leave. I should have closed early for the night, paid the dealers and packed up the cash in the lockbox to let the old basement rest for the night. At least then I might have gone to bed and left my life to fall apart in the morning.
But as you might imagine, that was the first of what would amount to many questionable decisions. I leaned forward and read the headline splashed over the familiar red-and-white website.
CASINO MOGUL AILEEN SHANNON BROUGHT IN ON MULTIPLE COUNTS OF FRAUD, TIES TO ORGANIZED CRIME. Underneath it was a picture of my mom, her blond hair perfectly swept into place and her white suit jacket unbuttoned so that I could see the gold-satin lining. She looked like she just stepped out of a board meeting, except for the pair of FBI agents leading her out of the Golden Age Hotel and Casino in handcuffs.
“Oh,” I said as the first hairline crack raced down my heart. The first tremor, the first warning that my life was about to fall apart, and it very well might take me with it.
The girl leaned in. “Can I get that on the record?”
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
