Privileged

by Zoey Dean

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Recent Yale graduate Megan Smith comes to Manhattan with big plans for a career in journalism and even bigger student loan debt: $75,000. When she flails at her trashy tabloid job, she's given an escape hatch: tutor seventeen-year-old identical twins Rose and Sage Baker--yes, the infamous Baker heiresses of Palm Beach, Florida, best known for their massive fortunes and their penchant for drunkenly flashing the paparazzi -- and get their SAT scores up enough to get into Duke. Impossible job -- yes. But if she succeeds, her student debts are history. Unfortunately for Megan, the Baker twins aren't about to curtail their busy social schedules for basic algebra. And they certainly aren't thrilled to have to sit down for a study session with dowdy Megan. Megan quickly discovers that if she's going to get her money, she'll have to learn her Pucci from her Prada. And if she can look the part, maybe, just maybe, she can teach the girls something along the way.

Release date: September 10, 2008

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 304

Sample

Choose the letter that would best fill in the blank spaces in the following sentence:

Exchanging family heirlooms and occasional sexual favors for _____________ financial security is ______________.

(a) marginal; justifiable

(b) complete; commonplace in Beverly Hills

(c) a promise of; so 1990, circa Pretty Woman

(d) reasonable; unforgivable

(e) concert tickets and; totally legit

Chapter One

Snatching my receipt from the bodega ATM, I already knew the bad news. I’d just withdrawn two hundred dollars, and my account balance was hovering a little over zero. So I stashed the cash and receipt in my battered backpack and asked what any recent Yale graduate whose student loans had left her seventy-five thousand bucks in debt would wonder:

“If I were to charge for sex, how much could I get?”

“Depends,” answered my best friend, Charma Abrams, flatly. Her nasal monotone had been influenced heavily by too many girlhood hours spent with MTV’s Daria. “Do you get to pick and choose your clientele?”

“Let’s say I’m going for maximum cash.”

“Hard to say. Let’s go find you a pimp in Tompkins Square Park.” Charma examined her reflection in the anti-shoplifting mirror above the limp-looking green vegetables. “Or we could ask your sister.”

My sister. Lily. As Charma well knew, Lily was playing a rich-girl-turned-hooker-turned-pimp in Streets, Doris Egan’s new off-Broadway play. Lily’s photo had graced the cover of last week’s Time Out: “The New Season’s Must-See Young Thesp.”

My sister had been must-see her whole life. Drop-dead gorgeous, talented singer and dancer, Brown University grad, Lily had been born to be stared at. As I took in my own reflection in the warped deli mirror—medium height and weight, size eight on the top and size ten on the bottom on a good day, long brown hair exceptionally prone to frizz, a heart-shaped face with nice enough hazel eyes, a thin nose, and lips like the “before” photo on a lip-plumper ad—I wondered for the zillionth time how Lily and I shared a gene pool.

The chief reason I’d chosen to attend Yale was so I could do one thing in my life that was more impressive than what she had.

The immaturity of this is not lost on me, by the way.

“Come on,” I told Charma. “I don’t want to miss him.”

We headed out of the bodega and crossed East Seventh, dodging a couple of joggers and a bag lady carrying on a one-sided conversation with the president: “You call that a foreign policy, you asshole?” It was one of those crystalline Indian summer days when nature puts on a last-ditch floor show—the stubborn final leaves of autumn danced on their branches as the low November sun bathed them in ocher light. I wore my usual no-name jeans, a white Hanes T-shirt, and an ancient navy cardigan that my favorite of our family’s three dogs, Galbraith, used to sleep on when he was a puppy.

“Where are you meeting this guy?” Charma asked.

“Southwest corner.” I scanned the crowded benches lining the walkway to the center of the park. Everyone was enjoying the mild weather that surely wouldn’t last longer than a day or two.

“Did he tell you what he looks like?”

“Tall, thin, dark hair cut short, soul patch, right ear pierced with a rhinestone stud,” I rattled off. “He’ll be wearing a red flannel shirt and Levi’s, loose-fit.”

“Boxers or briefs?” Charma asked.

I raised an eyebrow.

“I just wondered. Since you’ve got every other detail down.”

“When I told him I was twenty-two, he said he was twenty-nine, which probably means he’s mid-thirties and trying to pass. So I’d guess boxer-briefs.” I made a beeline for an empty bench to our right. Too late. Three old Polish ladies had spotted it first.

Charma shook her blond curls out of her eyes. “About the whole sex-for-money thing? Waste of your brain. And I don’t think your customers want to be remembered in that kind of detail. Stick with the magazine.”

“Oh, like that’s not killing my brain cells on a daily basis.”

I had a magna cum laude degree with a double major in English and American history and had been features editor of the Yale Daily News. So you can’t say I arrived in Manhattan with the wrong credentials. I thought I’d have no problem finding a job writing in-depth stories at an important but left leaning periodical like The New Yorker, or Rolling Stone, or hell, even Esquire—which only shows that a girl can be twenty-two years old, ridiculously well educated, and still as dumb as a bag of hair.

As it turned out, every other graduate from every other Ivy League school had come to New York the day after graduation, and we all wanted the exact same jobs. Many of them, however, had something that I lacked. Connections.

My dad is a professor in the economics department at the University of New Hampshire, and my mom is a nurse practitioner at campus health services. Lily and I had grown up in an old farmhouse filled with books, intelligent conversation, and excessive pet fur. My folks lived an ecological life. Theirs had been voted Best Compost Heap by Earth Lovers, the local greenie newspaper. It is a little-known fact that parents who win Best Compost Heap cannot help their daughter find a job at a hot-shit New York City magazine.

June morphed into July, which morphed into the hothouse of August, and I still was ridiculously unemployed. Then, right after Labor Day, I got my first and only job offer. Since I owed Charma the September rent and felt it would behoove me to sustain my body on something other than ramen noodles and canned tuna, it was either become an editorial assistant at Scoop or learn to intone “May I run through our specials this evening?” with a perky smile on my face. Walking gracefully while carrying hot food is not my strong suit. Nor is perkiness. The choice was made.

You know Scoop, though you may not admit to actually purchasing it. It’s one step up from Star and two steps down from People. A few of my highlights to date included captioning such photo spreads as “Did Jessica Get Implants?” and “Lindsay’s Wild Mexican Vacation!” Yes, I’d found it necessary to lower my journalistic aspirations a standard deviation. Or ten.

As Charma and I ambled along, a guy with short blond hair, a day’s worth of stubble, and a ratty Wolfmother T-shirt smiled at us. Well, her. Charma turned to watch him pass, letting out a low, appreciative whistle. She’s a much better flirt than I am.

I looked around, trying to find my mark. There was a junkie looking to score at ten o’clock. At high noon were two teenage schoolgirls with too much everything—makeup, hair, boobs, skin, stiletto boots—who apparently felt the need to shriek every other word at each other. Then I spotted a guy in jeans and a flannel shirt cutting through a stand of trees at two o’clock. Bingo. I waved.

“Megan?” He held out a hand with slightly dirty fingernails, but I was in no position to turn down a shake. He had something I really, really wanted.

“Yeah, hi, thanks for coming. Pete, right?”

“Yeah.”

A couple with a baby stroller vacated a bench to our left. I sat down and motioned for Pete to join me. Meanwhile, I noticed Charma chatting with Wolfmother, who’d circled back to make actual contact. Who could blame him? Charma had the kind of natural curves women pay a small fortune for and even then have to settle for saline.

“You got it?” Pete asked, drumming his fingers on his jeans impatiently.

“Right here.” My heart hammered as I unzipped my backpack, taking out the white T-shirt that had, until an hour before, hung inside a frame on the exposed brick wall of our living room (whose futon also doubled as my bed). The front of the shirt featured a bird sitting on the neck of a guitar and the inscription WOODSTOCK: THREE DAYS OF PEACE AND MUSIC. Not only was it the real deal from the greatest rock concert of all time, it was also signed by Jimi Hendrix. Two Cornell students, who would later become my parents, had stuck it out until Hendrix’s set on Monday morning. My father had managed to get the shirt signed by the guitar god himself and gave it to my mother as a sign of his love and devotion.

Now, as a sign of my love and devotion, I was passing it on. To what’s-his-name. Right. Pete.

“Like I said on Craigslist, it’s in mint condition,” I told him.

He held out a callused hand. “Let’s see.”

I hesitated. “I’d like to see the tickets first.”

Out came his wallet, and then there they were: two front-row seats to the Strokes at Webster Hall for that very night. The show had sold out within minutes last month. I’d tried everything to get tickets, but nada. Until now.

I should tell you, to be perfectly candid, the Strokes are not my favorite band. But my boyfriend, James, worships them. James—of the dazzling intellect and shining prose, a guy who considers Doris Lessing light reading—would blast “Heart in a Cage” and dance naked in his dorm room playing air guitar like a twelve-year-old. How can you not love a guy like that?

We’d met in a senior writing seminar where James quickly established himself as the most articulate student in the room, thinking nothing of arguing—and doing it well—with a professor who just happened to have written the preface to the latest edition of The Elements of Style.

I noticed James, of course. From my seat in the back, I was wowed both by his intellect and by his swagger as he walked to his rightful place in the front row. It was amazing what you could see when you weren’t worrying about people watching you.

Take, for example, Cassie Crockett. She had a Maxim body and fabulous blond hair. But on the first day of class, I noticed two fingers sneak under what I quickly realized was a fantastic wig. Her fingers reemerged holding a few strands of dung-brown hair, which she covertly dropped to the ground. Then she did it again. And again. Trichotillomania—the obsessive-compulsive need to pull out your own hair. I spent whole seminars wondering what it was like for Cassie to go out with one of the guys constantly circling her. Maybe she never had sex. Maybe she had a No Above the Neck rule, instead of a Below the Waist one.

This is the kind of thing that goes around in my brain.

Anyway, back to James. A few weeks into the semester, I wrote a five-thousand-word piece for the Daily News about a New Haven intersection where businessmen pick up transvestite hookers. I’d spend an entire week blending in at a nearby coffee shop, observing the girls and their customers, memorizing every detail. Our writing professor read aloud a section of my article to illustrate the kind of specificity he sought from us. Then he nodded in my direction.

Every head craned around to look at me. I could see their reaction all over their faces: Her? Really?

James corralled me after class. I was too shocked to be nervous, and then I was too at ease to remember why I would have been nervous. We went for coffee and agreed on everything and everyone from Jonathan Safran Foer (loved Everything Is Illuminated) to Donna Tartt (loathed The Secret History). Lily, oracle of all romantic wisdom, had cautioned me to never, ever, ever have sex on dates one through three. I suppose you could say that I took her advice, in that my first meeting with James wasn’t really a date. I was in his loft bed within five hours of “Want to grab a cup of coffee?”

We’d come to New York together after graduation, though not so together that we shared an apartment. His parents owned an excruciatingly chic white-on-white pied-à-terre in a Donald Trump Upper West Side development, though their three-million-dollar mansion in Tenafly, New Jersey, was actually home. Dr. and Mrs. Ladeen—he was an intensely anxious but gifted cardiologist, she was a senior editor at the New York Review of Books—offered James the condo rent-free while he began what would surely be his meteoric rise to literary fame. Their expectation was based not only on the fact that he was truly talented, but also on the fact that his mother had used her connections to snag James a junior editor job at East Coast. East Coast is kind of like The New Yorker, except with even more of a focus on fiction.

Alas, James’s parents had never warmed up to me. I’d tried, I really had, but there was no question they harbored hope James would get back together with his former girlfriend, Heather van der Meer, the youngest daughter of their longtime family friends. And thus the offer of lodging did not extend to me.

That was okay. There was plenty of time. James and I were happy. And tonight was his twenty-third birthday. I wanted it to be memorable, which was why I’d cut my bank account in half: first, dinner and a fabulous bottle of wine at the restaurant Prune. During dessert, I would casually break out the concert tickets, which would cause him to whoop with delight and lavish upon me the kind of public display of affection to which he was normally allergic. After the concert, we’d go back to his place for the best part of the evening. And morning.

To finalize my plan, all I had to do was trade my dad’s Woodstock T-shirt for the tickets.

“We doing this or not?” Pete tapped his coffee-colored loafer against the sidewalk.

I bit my lower lip. My parents would understand. Of course they would. Or at least that was what I told myself. We made the swap. God, James was going to be so surprised.

I stuck the tickets in my backpack and then rose to wish Pete a pleasant life. A kid with a shaved head—he couldn’t have been older than fourteen—wheeled toward us on one of those delivery-boy bicycles. He was swerving from side to side, taking pleasure in scaring the little old Polish ladies nearby.

“Thanks,” I told Pete. “Take good care of my—Hey!”

The kid on the bicycle sped past me, snatching my backpack before I could sling it over my shoulder.

“Stop! Stop that kid!” I bellowed.

I gave chase, Pete gave chase, and a lot of other people did, too. But the kid cut off the path and through the trees, pumping for all he was worth. A few seconds later, he was speeding down Avenue A with my backpack swaying from a handlebar.

It was almost as if the concert tickets and my two hundred dollars were waving goodbye.

Choose the analogy that best expresses the relationship of the words in the following example:

EAST VILLAGE WALK-UP : SCOOP

(a) classic six on the Upper West Side : The New Yorker

(b) condo in Panama City : USA Today

(c) Hollywood Hills bungalow : Daily Variety

(d) flat in Camden, London : Blender

(e) SoHo loft : Us Weekly

Chapter Two

Askinny white kid with a shaved head, combat boots, baggy green shorts, black sweatshirt, and a tattoo on the knuckles of his right hand,” I reported, forking the larger of the two filet mignons I’d just broiled in my apartment’s ancient stove onto James’s plate. “Also, one of his handlebars was dented. So I told all that to the cop.”

“Wow, that smells amazing.” James inhaled appreciatively. He tucked his dark hair behind his ears and blinked his gorgeous gray eyes at me. “So what did the cop say?”

I slid the second steak onto my plate and headed back to the counter where I’d left the side dishes. “He said it was the most detailed description of a perp he’d ever heard and that I should consider a career in law enforcement.”

“Either that or you’ve been watching too much CSI.”

James was sitting on a folding chair at the wooden table in my apartment’s pathetic excuse for a kitchen. Charma had salvaged it from the street, found furniture being one of New York City’s greatest shopping perks for the salary-challenged. It had various profanities carved into its surface—EAT SHIT AND DIE was my favorite. I liked to think the former owner had Tourette’s and a fetish for sharp objects.

The rest of the kitchen was similarly déclassé: warped black and white linoleum, appliances from the middle of a former century, a sink permanently stained by antibiotic-resistant life forms. It was a long, long way from Prune.

Still, when I brought the mashed potatoes and braised asparagus to the table, James gave me a huge smile. I had remembered his all-time favorite meal. It was still a piss-poor excuse for a surprise, but what choice did I have? After the cop had complimented me on my powers of observation, he’d cheerfully added that the odds of finding the kid who had ripped me off weren’t great, and even if they did find him, my backpack and its contents would be long gone. Meanwhile, Craigslist Pete insisted that a deal was a deal, refused to return my T-shirt, and took off before I gave the cop my statement.

I’d decided not to tell James that I’d lost both the money for dinner at Prune and the front-row tickets to the Strokes. Why make him feel guilty? Instead, I withdrew forty more bucks from my calamitously low bank account and bought the makings of a great dinner. As birthday surprises went, it pretty much sucked, but I figured I could liven things up with dessert.

“Oh, man, that’s perfect.” James closed his eyes in rapture as he chewed the medium-rare steak. “You canceled your credit cards, all that?” he asked.

“Credit card, singular,” I reminded him. Not that the kid could have used it anyway—my Visa had a two-thousand-dollar limit that I was already over. I tasted my steak. Delish. It was one of the few things I could cook well. “What did your parents give you?”

The night before, his parents had taken him to Bouley. I hadn’t been invited, despite the fact that last year Heather the Perfect had joined them at Five Hundred Blake Street, arguably the best restaurant in New Haven.

Truthfully, I didn’t know Heather very well, but I had of course looked her up on Facebook. She was the youngest daughter of a rich Rhode Island family that traced its roots back to Roger Williams, and she was currently a first-year law student at Harvard. Not only did Heather have a brain, she had straight blond hair, a swanlike neck, and the kind of pouty lips I longed to have. A mere mortal who writes photo captions for a living and is a size larger on the bottom than on the top could not possibly compete.

“My present?” James’s voice pulled me out of my musings. “My mom got John Updike to sign first editions of all the Rabbit novels for me.”

I took a bite of steak and tried to smile. The only collectible I used to have was the Woodstock T-shirt.

For the next few minutes, I ate while James regaled me with tales from East Coast. He’d been assigned to edit the short stories of a half-dozen well-known young singer-songwriters. According to James, they all sucked, and he’d had to rewrite every word while they got the credit.

“I hate it when that happens,” I teased, refilling our glasses with an Australian Shiraz that I’d found in the bargain bin. “Like, why don’t I get credit for what I rewrote about Jessica and Ashley’s dueling lip injections?”

He reached across the table for my hand. “You won’t be stuck there for long.”

Easy for a guy working at East Coast to say. I made little circles with my fork in what was left of my mashed potatoes. “If I could just pitch one really great idea that Debra would like . . .”

Debra Wurtzel was my editor in chief. She knew pop culture the way James knew Salinger. Editorial meetings were Monday mornings, and assistants like me attended only at the mercurial behest of an immediate boss—in my case, Latoya Lincoln, who’d invited me exactly twice. The first time Debra hadn’t even glanced in my direction. But the second time she’d fixed her gaze on me and asked, “Megan? Your ideas?”

When Debra looked at me, everyone else did, too. I think I’ve already established that the center of attention is not my favorite place to be. For one thing, I blush. Seriously. The conference room fell silent as my face turned the color of an overripe tomato. Finally, I pitched a piece about a new study correlating celebrities’ weights with dips and spikes in the average weight of sixteen-to-twenty-year-old women.

Debra’s assistant, Jemma Lithgow, a recent Oxford grad in size-nothing Seven jeans, reminded the room that we had recently done a cover story on diet secrets of the stars, so we couldn’t very well turn around and rip that which we had just lauded. She didn’t need to add “you size-ten asshole” because, really, her look said it all.

Ever since that meeting, I’d been relegated to Scoop purgatory. Ambitious peers no longer sat with me for lunch in the fourth-floor commissary, clearly afraid of being tainted by my loser status. At least the risk of being asked back to the Monday editorial meeting was slim. I was okay avoiding further public humiliation for a while, thanks very much.

When James and I had finished eating, I piled the dishes in the sink, put in the stopper, and added water and dish soap. My prewar—meani. . .