For the Love of Money by Sam Polk Page B

always been a reader, that gave me the best chance of graduating. I swore off drugs, off fighting, off crime. I promised myself I’d stop getting in trouble.
    As soon as I arrived in New York, I went to my favorite bar, The West End. I’d planned to return a conquering hero.Instead, I returned in ignominy. I walked through the front door directly to the bar and ordered a Rolling Rock. I looked around to see if there was anyone I knew. No one. No free tables, either. Standing alone, I felt a rush of embarrassment. I walked into the other room. A few tables stopped their conversation to look at me and then turned back toward each other.
    I was about to walk back to the bar when I heard a shriek. It came from a table in the back, a table full of girls. They were all staring at me. Sloane Taylor leapt to her feet, ran toward me, and launched herself into my arms.
    â€œSam Polk,” she practically screamed. “What are you doing here?”
    I looked around the room. Everyone was staring at me. I smiled, stood up taller.
    â€œSurprise,” I said. “I’m back.”
    Sloane told me she had to return to her table—it was a team dinner—but that I should call her. While everyone watched, I punched her number into my phone.
    I invited Sloane over to study at my place, a room I’d rented on the sixth floor of a frat house. I was in such a state of disbelief that she might be interested in me that it wasn’t until several hours later when Sloane was squeezing by me—the room was tiny—that I made a move. I pulled her into my lap and kissed her. She pulled back, laughed, and said, “Whoa, tiger.” Then she leaned in to kiss me again.
    When she agreed to stay for the night, I felt like I’d won the lottery. The next morning we both woke up with hacking coughs: bronchitis. We spent the next few days holed up in my room, with Sloane regularly lighting cigarettes, then looking at me and saying, “What? Am I a quitter?” Her eyes would slit and her whole body would shake when she laughed.
    Sloane was everything I’d ever wanted in a woman. She wasn’t just hot. She was popular . She’d been arguably the mostpopular girl at her elite Los Angeles private school, one that sends multiple kids a year to each Ivy League school. When I’d tell other kids from her school that I was dating Sloane Taylor, their eyes would widen. Other women would come up to me and say, “Your girlfriend is breathtaking.”
    But Sloane was no cheerleader. She was a killer, captain of her state championship tennis team in high school, and a starter for Columbia. She got straight As. When I first heard her Valley girl talk, peppered with like and dude ,I thought I was smarter than her. Soon she was editing my papers.
    There was one thing about Sloane that gave me pause. She was taking a few months off drinking and drugs at the suggestion of her spiritual counselor. I’d never met anyone with a spiritual counselor before. She called hers Linda. They spoke on the phone every week. Sloane said that they were dealing with some particularly tough issues, and that Linda had recommended she stop drinking and drugs for the duration. Sloane said she didn’t mind if I drank or smoked the occasional joint, so I didn’t mind that she didn’t.
    I began to understand why Sloane liked me when she introduced me to her father. She invited me to stay with her parents in Los Angeles over Christmas break. She picked me up from the airport and drove me to their stately two-story house in Bel-Air, an affluent neighborhood on the west side of LA .
    The house was empty when we arrived. Soon her dad returned from golfing at one of the two country clubs he belonged to. Jack was a short, barrel-chested man with silver hair. Within a minute of our first conversation, he mentioned that he’d gone to Dartmouth undergrad and Stanford Law School, shook my hand harder than he needed to, and