Their Vicious Games
Joelle Wellington
To Alyssa.
Every story, every sentence, every word
I have crafted is for you.
CHAPTER 1
WHEN MY MOM PULLS ME close in my cap and gown and whispers into my ear, “I’m so proud of you, Adina,” that’s when I know—I’ve lost.
The realization hits me so hard that my head goes hazy with it and the crushing stench of terror. But I push down the bile and wrap my arms around her.
“Thanks, Mom,” I whisper, burying my face in her neck.
She doesn’t sound like she’s lying, but I know she is.
I’m not Adina Walker, valedictorian, future Yale underclassman, destined for greatness. Not anymore.
I’m Adina Walker, college acceptance rescinded, unremarkable Edgewater graduate, destined for mediocrity.
Game over.
Life has never felt like a game to me, but I know that to everyone else, all my former classmates taking photos or filtering off the Green back to their drivers, that’s all it has ever been. That’s what makes losing it all hurt so bad—it meant nothing to them, but it meant everything to me.
I was six the first time I came to Edgewater, my tight curls tamed by bristle and grease into two puffs, dressed in a kilt and navy socks that slipped down my skinny, scab-laden legs. I stood on the Green, stuck between my mother and father as they rushed me past the blond and beautiful, toward the registration office. I asked my mother, “Are they royalty?”
My mother barely heard me, answering with a distracted, “Yes, of course,” then she adjusted my little bow and said, “Stand up straight, Adina-honey.” I did as she asked, all dressed up and shiny for my first day of first grade at the practically royal Edgewater Academy. I was precocious then, ready to make my mark.
But Edgewater Academy is a world of its own, unshifting and unmarkable, not changed by anything but the seasons in its two-hundred-plus years of existence. Positioned sixteen miles northwest of Lenox, Massachusetts, in the middle of nowhere, the only thing surrounding the campus’s edges are the cliques of stately Queen Anne and shingle houses, and the Colonial Revival country mansion at the top of the hill and the back of the woods, where the Remingtons live. The only exit and entrance to the school is a parking lot, stuffed to the brim with the blinding chrome of luxury cars—Porsches and Mercedes and one Tesla. And while it still looks as royal and stately as it did when I was just a little girl, I know now that there is no place for me here, and there never was. I know now that being welcomed amongst the crème de la crop doesn’t mean they’ll let you become one of them. It’s royal in a different way, an immortal superficial beauty, covering a fractured ugliness.
An ugliness that was intent on eating me up and shitting me out.
Now as I pull away, Mom stares at me, like she’s trying to read my mind, and I wonder if my pain is obvious. But before she can push me for more, I hear a sharp squeal and let go of her just in time to catch another person in my arms.
“We made it!” Toni cheers. She pulls back and flashes me a smile, all pearly whites and brown lipstick that’s somehow immovable even in the heat. She tosses her long black hair—100 percent Brazilian sew in, pin straight—over her shoulders and turns just in time to look into the lens of Mom’s phone.
I’m half a second late, so she only captures my profile while Toni beams in full.
“We made it,” I agree, exhaustion straining my words instead of the excitement that laced hers.
Toni’s smile falters just the tiniest bit and her arms tighten around me to the point of pain, but then she inhales shakily and forces the smile harder. Toni is dedicated to the fantasy of nothing being wrong, for both my sake and hers. She thinks it’s all her fault. It’s not.
I was the architect of my own failure. I lost my cool for just a second, and it cost me not just my acceptance to Yale but most of my friends and nearly my attendance at Edgewater Academy. Only my parents’ own strong standing as members of the faculty saved me from expulsion. After years of swallowing it all back, now it’s all over because of a single second of lost control.
“We’ll be by the car, sweetheart,” Dad says as he finally breaks away from the other school administrators. They cut me side glances, staring without really staring. It’s like they think I’ll crack again and attack like a wild animal.
Never again. No matter how much I want to.
My parents wave goodbye to the other faculty, finally leaving Toni and me alone.
I guide us from the center of it all to the very edge of the Green, under the shade. We watch everyone left pose for pictures, laughing loudly about how they’re going to summer in the South of France together, meet up to winter in Zermatt after first semester. Penthesilea Bonavich, freckled and redheaded sweet, off to Brown. Her perfect boyfriend, Pierce Maxwell Remington IV, going where all good Remington boys go. He’s a Harvard man. Even Toni’s twin brother, Charles, light-skinned so all the girls want him, is off to fuck the white girls of UPenn.
“Are you still going to the Remington luncheon?” I ask, turning away from all of them. That wasn’t always the plan. Our families were supposed to go together to lunch after graduation. We’d celebrated everything together—Toni’s pitch-perfect performances in the play, my academic awards—since we were kids, but after everything that happened, our parents are more… lukewarm to each other than they used to be.
“Um… yeah,” Toni says reluctantly. “You know Pierce and Charles can’t bear to be separated.”
She looks onto the Green at our former classmates, all off to their own ivy-covered walks of life, and I nearly choke on my envy.
“Do you want to go?” I hear Toni ask distantly.
“No,” I say, even though of course I do.
“Please, I don’t think they’d mind. And she won’t be there. It’ll be me, Charles, Pierce, his brother, and Penthesilea. They won’t mind three extra people, and you can ask Pierce about, you know, the…” Toni trails off.
But I know what she’s going to say.
The Finish. She wants me to beg a Remington for entrance to the Finish.
“I think the invitations were already sent out. I heard some people talking about it,” I say. We both know who the “some people” are, but we never clarify. “And I’m not the kind of girl that they’d invite anyway.”
Not rich. Not white. Not flawless.
“You don’t know that. All kinds of girls get invited,” Toni insists, her hands tightening around mine. “You heard what they did last year for that girl from Phillips Exeter? She’s at MIT and she’s flourishing. She wasn’t even accepted to MIT. She just, like, asked when she won. And then, the year before that, it was a scholarship girl from Taft, and now she goes to Cambridge. They’re paying for everything, even her living expenses. Come on, Adina. They’re the Remingtons. If they can do that, they can get you back into Yale, easy.”
I know she’s right. The Finish. Three tests. That’s all it would take to get back into one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. There is no application. There is no entrance fee. No one even really knows what the selection process is or how it all works. But the girls who compete are handpicked, the best of the best, the cream of the crop, going head-to-head for the support of the Remington Family, and all that entails. Tuition. Influence. Power. Admittance.