David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

I imagined my triumphant return to school, looking slim and fit, snappy in the new clothes Andy would have to pay for since the old ones would be too big, were getting too big already. The bullies would now have to find someone else to pick on.

I never really believed it, nor should I have. That sort of transformation is the staple of Hollywood teen movies but never allowed in real life. In the movies, the ugly girl gets new clothes and a new haircut, removes her glasses, and- gasp! - she’s the most popular girl in school. In real life, when we bottom-feeders try to rise above our station, they pull us down, cut off our limbs, and stick us in a box. Even though I returned that September as fit as any healthy tenth grader, they still called me Lard Ass and continued to do so until I graduated.

But the fantasy was motivation enough. I started running laps while Andy was at work and my mother was off doing errands. I didn’t want them to know. Not until I could run five miles without stopping. Doing so turned out to be a lot easier than I would have thought, and six weeks after my first solitary jog, I told Andy I was ready to try out for track next year.

“Fine,” he said with an embarrassed shrug. It was clear that he regretted having offered me the money and now wanted to make it as difficult as possible for me to raise the subject.

As it turned out, I did fairly well at track. I made the team and acquitted myself reasonably well at matches. I didn’t excel at speed, but I was good at endurance, and in some of the longer races I could outlast some of my opponents well enough to score a third, and occasionally a second, place. It would be good enough to help me get into college, and I wasn’t even the slowest guy on the team.

The second good idea came a little more than half a year later, during the winter break of my sophomore year. I had been lying on my bed, reading, when the knock came at the door. It was a good two hours after dinner, and I could hear the TV going from the family room, where my mother would have nodded off on the couch, the still life with apples needlepoint pattern she’d been working on for the past nine months in her lap.

Andy didn’t wait for an answer. He opened the door and stuck his head inside. “What’s going on in here? Anything naughty?”

I sat up and folded the book open to my spot. Andy said nothing for a moment, just leaned against the doorjamb, grinning fiercely. His thick-framed rectangular glasses had slid down his ballooning nose.

“I think,” Andy announced, “you should set your sights on an Ivy League school. Harvard or Yale, preferably, but Princeton or Columbia will do in a pinch. I guess even Brown or Dartmouth, if you had to.” Andy had gone to the University of Florida himself, and to a local university of no national reputation for his law degree, but he seemed to feel he knew a lot about the intricacies of the Ivys.

“Of course,” he added, “we know we can’t rely on your father to help with the money.”

My father was living somewhere in Jamaica now, where he worked as a tourist scuba-diving guide and, if overheard conversations could be trusted, smoked prodigious quantities of marijuana. I imagined him sitting on a beach in a circle of glassy-eyed Rastafarians, puffing lazily on a cigar-thick joint. Some of my friends had discovered reggae, but I couldn’t stand the political yearnings of Bob Marley, the ganja-fueled rage of Peter Tosh, the self-aggrandizing toasts of Yellowman- not when my father was off living the life of a white rasta. Besides, he had entirely given up on paying child support, and I hadn’t heard from him in two years, when he’d placed a drunken call on a warm April afternoon to wish me a happy fifteenth birthday. I was thirteen at the time and had been so since January.

“So maybe it doesn’t make sense to go to a place like that,” I proposed. I was confused, and presenting a counterargument seemed like the best way to draw out Andy’s game. “I mean, if it’s so expensive.” Going to an Ivy League school had never occurred to me. I’d always believed them reserved for the movie-star handsome and privileged, charming boys and girls with trust funds and easy grins and ruddy complexions from effortless afternoons on the ski slopes.

“If you keep your grades up and you do well on your SATs,” Andy prophesied, “you should be able to get a decent financial aid package. Plus this business I set up for you with the track team should help. They’ll cut you a deal and you’ll take out some loans. And if all of that doesn’t cover everything,” he announced magnanimously, “we’ll work something out.”

The seed was planted. I’d always thought of myself as smart, had always thought of myself as capable of doing smart-person things- but going to Harvard or Yale, that was far out of reach, like becoming an astronaut or ambassador to France. Still, Andy had suggested it, and now I wanted it. I wanted the opportunities an Ivy League degree would provide. I could become an important historian or direct movies and go into politics. Once it was on the table, I knew it was the way out, the way to a genuinely non-Floridian future.

The next summer, while visiting my grandparents in New Jersey, I had made arrangements to take a look at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale over the course of three separate weekends. When I went to Columbia ’s Upper West Side campus, it was my first trip to New York City, despite the annual visit to my grandparents, who lived a light-traffic forty-five-minute drive away in Bergen County. I had been instantly seduced by the city and by the campus, and I left with no doubt that Columbia was where I wanted to go.

In fact, the moment the car crossed the George Washington Bridge, I knew that New York was the place that I must have always known about in the hidden recesses of my mind. Maybe I had already absorbed New York from television and movies. I must have seen the city depicted on the screen countless times, but it never signified much of anything but some kind of foreign and urban landscape. In reality, on the ground, with the noise and people and the gum-stained sidewalks littered with trash and teeming with the homeless, it seemed to me something else entirely. I had discovered the anti-Florida.

“ Columbia ’s all right,” Andy had assured me, “and if that’s the only place you can get in, fine. But it shouldn’t be your first choice. Harvard should be your first choice.” He folded his arms authoritatively, though the closest he’d ever been to Harvard was Logan Airport to change planes.

As it turned out, it didn’t much matter, since Yale, Harvard, and Princeton all said no. Columbia said yes, as had, improbably, Berkeley and my safety: the University of Florida. When I received the admission on a rainy Saturday afternoon, I ran to tell Andy, who was resting on his recliner in the family room, watching golf on television.

“ Columbia,” he observed. “At least that’s something after getting the thumbs-down from Harvard and Yale.”

“I just can’t believe it,” I said. I paced around, too excited to hold still, even for an instant. “Man, living in New York. It’s going to be so cool.”

Andy’s face went long, a sure sign things were about to turn sour. He shook his head as he geared himself up to piss on my cornflakes. “You might want to think twice about this. University of Florida is a good school. If you go to New York, you’ll probably get mugged.”

“There’s millions of people. They can’t all get mugged.”

“Some people will, but you won’t? Is that it? What, you think you’re exempt?”

“I don’t think it’s worth worrying about.”

“Well, I got a pretty good education at U of F,” Andy said. “What’s good enough for me isn’t good enough for you?”