Page 83 of The Thing About My Prince
I pull out the rest of the items. There’s a tub of cucumber and tomato salad, a couple of bags of crisps—plain salted and pickled onion flavor—and my favorite homemade oatmeal raisin cookies. The ones from my local bakery in New York are great, but they’re not a patch on Marjorie’s baking.
“Anyway.” I set down two bottles of water. “Nowwill you tell me why you despise all rich people?”
She snorts, then slams her hand over her face and waves her sandwich at the pile of napkins.
I pass her one, and she turns away to delicately clear her nostrils.
“That brown stuff came right out my nose when you said that. And it’s spicy.” She unscrews the cap from a water bottle and takes a healthy drink. “That question came completely out of nowhere.”
“No, it didn’t. I asked you last night and you brushed it away. And, since I belong to a demographic you seem to loathe and I would prefer you not to loathe me, I figured I should get to the bottom of it. Is it a secret?”
She takes another bite of the sandwich, then rests her arms on her bent knees and gazes out across the pool and up to the top of the waterfall.
“Not really,” she says when she’s finished chewing. “But you’ll think it’s silly.”
“Given what you’ve already read about me and the stuff I’ve told you and the stories you don’t know about that are still to come, I don’t think you’re the one in this relationship who needs to worry about looking silly.”
Her head turns to me when I say relationship.
“I meanworkingrelationship. On the book. Not the being-naked thing. But I guess it applies to the being-naked thing too. Which I’d really like to do again, by the way—in case you thought I was a total arse who’d do that for kicks then pretend it never happened.” Fuck, Oliver. Shut your loserish mouth. “But we can talk about that another time. Right now, I just want to know why you automatically hate people like me.”
“You think I hate you?” she says.
“Tell me about it so I can try to figure that out.”
I grab one of the sandwiches and wait for her to finish hers so she can start talking.
“Okay.” She dusts crumbs from her fingers, then leans back on her hands, looks up at the blue sky, and sighs. “My dad is a teacher. He’s always taught at private high schools.And when I was a teenager, the one he worked at gave a full ride to the staffs’ kids. So my brother and I got to go there for free.”
Well, it’s already obvious what the issue is here. But also, “You have a brother?”
“Yup. Older. Works in Silicon Valley doing things I don’t understand or care about. We’re very different people.” She turns her head to look at me. “I don’t mean we don’t get along. It’s fine. It’s just that we’re not close and don’t have much in common.”
The sharpness of the cheddar stings my tongue while I wait for her to resume the story.
“Anyway, he slotted right in at the school. Played the game. Said all the right things to all the right people. Made friends with the rich kids. Went to their houses and played on their fancy computers.”
She picks up a single crisp and pops it in her mouth.
“And youdidn’tfit right in?” I honestly can’t imagine anyone less likely to tolerate a situation like that than the woman sitting before me.
She looks right at me and shakes her head dramatically from left to right. “There was this clique of girls who thought I was a loser because I didn’t do my hair and makeup for school and thought paying as much for a lipstick as would buy a family’s dinner was ridiculous. They mocked me because I would rather organize a food drive for the homeless shelter or study for a test than hang around watching the guys play football.”
“And they were all like that?”
“There was a handful of kids who thought the same way I did. They were super-rich like the others, of course. But they did believe in working hard and using their powers for good. Our group was definitely ostracized. No one sat with us at lunch. No one joined in with our projects. For the majority of the other kids, it was like their lack of caring andwork ethic was in their genes. Then after a while, I realized why.”
She grabs another crisp.
“Are you leaving me on a cliffhanger here? I’m really not sure where this story’s going.”
“I think you know the answer,” she says.
“Try me.”
“Because when you’re born into families like theirs and yours”—she raises her eyebrows—“you don’t have to put as much effort into anything. Unless you really want to. And some of them do have a drive and a passion and go full tilt for their ambitions, and all credit to them. But for the lazy or entitled ones, I realized that if their families have the money to send them to the right private school, then they get into the right college, which means they then get the right job at the right company. Or maybe their father has a friend whose uncle knows someone from his golf club who can put in a word for them at the place they want to work. And they can drift through life without ever really having to try or fight for anything. It gives them this inner confidence to step forward into a void and trust that a path will materialize under their feet. And they progress in life over the heads of better qualified, more talented people who don’t have the connections they have. I’ve seen it a thousand times.”
“And it’s happened to you?”
