Tom Perrotta - Nine Inches

I felt myself blushing and tried to will the blood away from my face. Despite my upperclassman status, I was not getting my dick sucked; as a matter of fact, I wasn’t getting much of anything except a bunch of frustratingly mixed signals from Sarabeth Coen-Brunner, this artsy junior on whom I was nursing a severe unrequited crush that kept me awake at night, not that that was the sort of update I was going to share with Kyle.

“I’m doing all right,” I assured him.

“That’s my boy.” He ruffled my hair like I was still in middle school. “You worked hard. Now it’s time to get paid, am I right?”

“Absolutely.”

That was it for the small talk. He stood on his tiptoes and retrieved a lumpy manila envelope from a shelf above the washing machine, otherwise occupied by a jug of detergent and a box of dryer sheets.

“Thanks for bailing me out,” he said as he pressed the envelope into my hand. “Things got a little complicated this time around. I had to do some big-time juggling to make it work.”

“No problem.”

“Get a good night’s sleep, yo.” He held out his fist and I gave it a bump. “And don’t forget to sharpen your pencils.”

I WAITED until I got home to open the envelope. It contained a stack of crisp twenties — my usual fee of five hundred dollars — along with an admission ticket for tomorrow’s test, a fake photo ID, and directions to the testing center. It was all pretty routine, except for the ID, which I couldn’t stop staring at.

I’d taken the SATs seven times so far, twice for myself, and five times for Kyle’s clients. Up to now, the kids I’d impersonated had all been strangers from nearby towns. Their names had meant nothing to me, and their bogus school IDs — accurate though they may have been — always struck me as cheap and phony, props in a half-assed game of make-believe.

This time, though, the ID came from my own school, Greenwood High. It looked totally official, a dead ringer for the one I carried in my backpack. It even had the same unflattering picture of me — a pudgy nerd with a pained smile and a touch of bedhead — plastered above the bar code. The only difference was the name beside the photo: Jacob T. Harlowe. That was the thing I couldn’t stop staring at.

Jake Harlowe was in my AP psych class. He was a junior jock, a football and lacrosse star, one of those popu­lar, good-looking kids everybody knows and likes. The Harlowes were Greenwood royalty; his older brother, Scott, had been an all-county quarterback a couple of years ago — Scott had since gone on to Amherst, where the family had some kind of crazy legacy, five generations or whatever — and Jake had stepped right into his shoes, another square-jawed scholar-athlete, humble and easygoing, varsity starter in his sophomore year.

For a couple of minutes, I thought about calling Kyle and trying to back out, maybe asking him to switch me with someone else, but I knew it was hopeless. He wouldn’t have had time to make the new IDs and wouldn’t have said yes even if he did. Kyle wasn’t that kind of boss. And besides, I wouldn’t have known what to tell him, how to articulate my misgivings about this particu­lar assignment.

It wasn’t that I was worried about getting caught. The test was being administered at a private school about a half hour away, where I didn’t expect to run into anyone I knew. I’d never tested there before — Kyle tried to avoid sending us to the same place twice — and I couldn’t imagine that the proctors would know Jake Harlowe or have any reason to suspect that I wasn’t him. All they ever did was glance at the ID and make sure it matched the name on the admission ticket.

And it wasn’t like I’d come down with a sudden attack of conscience, either. I honestly didn’t mind cheating for strangers. If somebody wanted to pay me to help them get into a good college, I didn’t see any problem with that. It wasn’t all that different from hiring an expensive tutor, or getting a doctor to diagnose a learning disability so you could buy yourself some extra time. That was just the way system worked. If you had the money, you got special treatment.

My only problem was the client. Jake Harlowe didn’t seem like the kind of kid who needed to cheat. I always figured that everything came easily to him, the grades as well as the girls and the games, and it troubled me to discover that this wasn’t true. I felt like I’d been peering through his bedroom window and seen something I shouldn’t have, a shameful secret I wished he’d kept to himself.

WHEN KYLE hired me, I’d agreed to follow a strict code of professional conduct. It made sense: people were paying us good money to provide a service, and we owed it to them to fulfill our mission with the highest level of competence and discretion.

You will be on time, Kyle had instructed me, reading straight from the rule book. You will have proper documentation on hand, along with an approved calculator and several sharpened Number Two pencils. You will dress appropriately and never behave in such a way as to draw unnecessary attention from the proctors or your fellow test-takers. Misconduct of any sort is punishable by fine and/or dismissal.

Kyle’s code extended beyond the test day into the rest of our lives. We were not to flash our cash or make extravagant purchases or say anything that might lead others to suspect that we had an illicit source of income. And we were never, ever, to mention Kyle’s name or the services he provided to anyone, under any circumstances. If someone we knew was struggling with the SATs, or thinking about hiring a tutor, our job was to pass this information up the chain to Kyle — nothing more, nothing less. He would investigate the lead, and if he determined that the individual was a potential client, he would reach out on his own terms. I had no idea how he contacted them or how he arranged the payment. There were other mysteries as well: I didn’t know how many other test-takers he employed, what he charged for his services, or even if there was a bigger boss above him, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking, because this sort of information was only dispensed on a need-to-know basis. These operational safeguards had been put in place for everyone’s benefit, employees and clients alike. The less any individual knew, the less risk of exposure there was for everybody else.

You just fill in the bubbles, he told me. I’ll take care of the rest.

Given the strictness of the code, it went without saying that partying on the eve of a test was totally prohibited, but Kyle said it anyway: You will not drink alcohol or take illegal drugs on the night before a test. You will be home in bed by eleven p.m. I’d never violated this rule before and didn’t plan on starting now.

After dinner, I put on my sweatpants, turned on my Xbox, and started campaign mode on Bioshock 2, doing my best not to think about the party I was missing, a party I’d been looking forward to all week. I would’ve gotten through the night just fine if not for the text I received around nine o’clock. It was from Sarabeth Coen-Brunner, the first one I’d ever received from her, and it put me in an awkward position.

Tequila is here!!! it said. Where the fuck r u???

I’D BEEN overweight as a kid, academically gifted but terrible at sports, and middle school had been a nightmare. As a result, I tended to be mumbly and apologetic around girls I liked, as if I had no business wasting their valuable time. With Kyle it was the other way around: he always acted like he was doing the girl a favor, honoring her with the blue ribbon of his attention, allowing her to tag along on his amazing adventures.