The Unseemly Education of Anne Merchant by Joanna Wiebe Page A

I mean, I never asked to come here. He sent me here.”
    “So if no one wants to be here,” I ask, “why is it so hard to get in?”
    “Who said people don’t want to be here?”
    I stare at him. “You’re kidding, right? Everything I heard yesterday about why people are here, it was all brutal. Vague, but brutal. Even you were vague.”
    “Moi ? No way. I’m always straight up.”
    “Oh, really?” I say teasingly. “Because I seem to remember some crap about doing something your dad didn’t like?” As I shake my head, he laughs. “So, spill it. Because, honestly, that could mean running with scissors or playing with matches.”
    “All right, if you must know, it did have something to do with fire.” He drops his gaze. “There was a girl. In a house fire. I was driving by, and she was screaming so loudly, I could hear her over my engine—and we’re talking a serious AMG engine. Loud.”
    “What happened?”
    “I tried to save her, but I couldn’t.” He struggles to keep his emotions in check. “And the mental trauma that followed, knowing I could have helped her…it was too much to bear. I fell apart.”
    My jaw hits the table. “Pilot, that’s incredible! You’re, like, a hero. Why wouldn’t your dad be extremely proud of you for that?”
    “He thinks it was a stupid, reckless thing to do. And I guess he’s right. I mean, I didn’t save her. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is I don’t want the Big V,” Pilot continues. “ He wants me to do it. Forget it,” he grumbles. “When I fail, old pops’ll finally get a taste of his own medicine. The hell he put our family through.”
    “Hell? What’d he do?”
    As Pilot’s mood shifts, in saunters Harper and her trio of perfect plastic friends. I glimpse them out of the corner of my eye; it’s hard to look away. They’re sparkly, shiny, sexy—like a roadside collision of money and physical perfection.
    “I guess you wouldn’t know,” he says, and his voice chokes up. “The sex scandals.”
    My eyebrows hit the top of my head. “The what?”
    “Don’t make me repeat it.”
    I cringe but say nothing.
    “ The Enquirer called it ‘The Sexcapade of the Century’.”
    “Your dad was involved in…a sexcapade?” I’m sorry, but it’s hard to keep from laughing just a little. The word is ridiculous. The notion of such a thing is…come on.
    “Behind the fall of every politician is the other woman. Or, in my dad’s case, three other women. All caught on tape in the same bed.” He fiddles with his napkin. “It was on Nancy Grace every night for a month. Made me sick. Anderson Cooper had him on the show twice. When the truth was exposed, my dad had to quit campaigning. So embarrassing.”
    As Pilot twists his napkin into a hundred knots, Harper and her gang claim a table close to the stream. I can’t help but watch them, with their swaggers that belong in a red-light district. These girls. These devastatingly alluring girls. These inhumanly gorgeous girls.
    Pilot catches me watching them. “Okay, so you’re not interested in my dad’s sex scandal, but you care about those sex-scandals-in-training?”
    Underneath the table, he kicks my shin, but I barely react. I’m not superproud of my squirrel-like attraction to shiny things—their shiny hair, shiny lips, shiny eyelids, shiny cheekbones—but I can’t stop staring.
    “It’s not that I care ,”I explain, though I’m still watching them, which isn’t helping my argument. “They just look like walking magazine covers. Like celebrities .”
    “Like they have emaciated rat-dogs in their bags and tramp stamps on their butts?”
    “Like they’re made of glitter.”
    “I call them the Model UN from Hell.” He kicks my shin again to get my attention and points to a silvery stand across the room. “Dessert table. I need a sugar rush. Come. Walk and talk.”
    As Pilot picks over the untouched dessert table—crème brulees, éclairs, chocolate mousse, raspberry