The Worst Best Luck (8 page)

“Good afternoon, Matt,” Jones said, holding the car door for him.

“Hey, Jones,” Matt said, flinging his fourteen-year-old body into the Town Car.  The driver shut the door, which nearly caught on the school tie hanging out of Matt’s back pocket.  Matt had torn it off his neck the moment he’d left his last class, ignoring the admonitions of the hall proctor about How Gentlemen Are Dressed Here.  There was something about closing that top button on his shirt, and tightening that knot, that made him want to pass out.  Maybe in his last life he’d been hanged by the neck until dead, because he felt as if that was happening every time he put on a tie.

Matt stared out the window, watched the kids walking home. He was jealous, angry.  Why did he have to ride in a stupid car for eight blocks?

“Your father is a very wealthy and powerful man,” his mother had said.  “You could be kidnapped!”  She paused.  “Or worse!”

“So could every other rich kid at Worthington,” Matt replied.  “They all walk home, or take the subway.”

“That’s because they have
bad parents
who don’t care like I do.”

Matt gave Jorge the doorman the secret handshake, walked through the lobby, and turned his key in the lock to the penthouse elevator. 

Upstairs, he took his shoes off in the marble-floored foyer before padding across the snow white carpet, the elevator closing silently behind him.

The apartment was spotless, as always.  The magazine he’d left on the coffee table last night was gone, the pillows he’d arranged on the couch in a comfortable pile were back in their precise diamond-pattern alignment.  The remotes were tucked away in the TV cabinet. 

They’d learned about entropy in school that day, how ever since the Big Bang, the universe tended to run down, as things fell apart. 
This house is like reverse entropy,
Matt thought. 
You’re always fighting against order to get some comfortable decay, but it never lasts – order always wins around here.

He stopped when he got to his room.  It had been “tidied up
.”
  Things he’d left where he wanted them, where they were handy, weren’t there anymore.  The books were all put back on shelves, the CDs stuck in the rack, and…

“What the hell?” he asked the air.  His desk was immaculate.  Swept clean.  He pulled out his phone and dialed his mom.

“You’re home, good, I need you to…”

“Mom, what happened to my Furby?”

“You mean the mess you made when you destroyed it?  I had to have Juanita throw it away.”

“It wasn’t broken…”

“Well, it certainly was!  It was in pieces everywhere!”

“I took it apart.  I was trying to see…”

“I don’t understand you, Matt.  We buy you these nice things, why do you have to break them?”

“That’s not…”

“What’s wrong with you!  There are poor kids who would love to have had that toy.”

“I was going to put it back together.”

“Right, like your DVD player, that you tore apart like some…meth head!”

He sighed.  It was true, he’d been a little too ambitious there.  He’d been curious about the way the five-disc DVD drawer worked, what was going on in there when it did all that whirring and clicking?  He hadn’t thought about how hard it might be to put it back together. 

“I just wanted to know how it works.”

She laughed.  “What, are you planning on being a
repairman
when you grow up?  You’d better spend that energy on your schoolwork, mister.  Now I’m going into a
very important meeting.
  Go see if Flora put the roast in.”  She hung up.

Matt snorted disdainfully. 
Very important meeting, right, you and the other Ladies Who Lunch –oh, excuse me, “community leaders” – are gonna have a cocktail or three while you talk about what you’ll wear to the next charity ball.

He looked at his desk and it…hurt.  He’d been careful this time, had made notes, drawings, of what went where.  This time he could have done it, could have put it back together! 

The notes were still there, he discovered – nobody had made the connection between the parts and the drawings, they had just assumed the paperwork was “schoolwork.” 
They didn’t trust me to do it
, he thought.  He didn’t realize that it never would have occurred to his mother that it
could be done
.

Repairman!
  Mom had invested all her dripping sarcasm and scorn into that word.  Matt thought about the men who came in to fix stuff, or, more often, perform the never-ending upgrades to the mood lighting, the home theater, the smart kitchen.  They were usually nice to Matt; they let him watch and even answered his questions about plumbing and cabling and wiring, but he knew when he looked in their eyes that they were thinking one of two things – either
humor the rich kid
, or, more kindly he supposed,
what’s the point in learning about this, kid, you’re going to work in an office when you grow up and pay someone to do this shit for you.

Yeah
, he thought,
maybe I am
.  Everyone told him it was too late for childish dreams about being a fireman or a plumber or any of the other happy, efficient animals in the Richard Scarry books that were “for babies.”  He’d been fascinated with Scarry’s book “What Do People Do All Day,” and had practically worn the print off the pages with his eyes.  The characters in that book did
stuff
, they fixed things and ran power plants and delivered packages – they didn’t sit still and make phone calls all day like his dad.  Or boss servants around and talk about “how exhausting it is to manage a household” like his mom did.

Matt checked the roast.  Of course it was in the oven; Juanita and Flora never forgot to do anything, but if Mom wasn’t always “checking on them,” what else did she have to do?  He went back to his room and shut the door.  He took out his guitar, his picks, his copy of “Pumping Nylon,” setting everything up, preparing himself. 

Music was the only class at school that was hands-on.  The school’s whole focus was “college prep.” He wished there was a class where he could touch stuff, but everything about college prep seemed to be about preparing you for a life where you never touched anything but a keyboard – a computer keyboard, that is.

There were some science classes and Matt had been enthusiastic about taking chemistry, hoping he’d get to make shit blow up or at least watch it fizz.  But he’d forgotten how thoroughly the helicopter parents at Worthington had bubble-wrapped their kids against danger.  So chemistry was about looking at pictures of molecules, and not having anything in the classroom that Might Aggravate Seymour’s Asthma.

Matt struggled with higher-level math, tried to chase that X around the Y, but it always got away.  He knew that if he really truly wanted to know how stuff worked, he should become an engineer, but he just didn’t have a head for the abstractions of calculus and beyond. 

Somehow or another, though, music had accessed the mathematical part of his brain.  Bach spoke to him in a way that linear algebra never would.  But music
existed
; a guitar was a machine you used to make music, and music was real in a way that math…wasn’t.  You added math to math and it made more math.  But music made sense, he could follow it, you could
hear it
.

He’d been in love with classical guitar since he’d first walked into a café with some other kids one night, and a man was playing Bach on an acoustic guitar.  Matt was hypnotized by the cascade of perfect notes, the blazingly apparent difficulty of the piece, and the way the dude made it look easy.  He’d talked to the guy during his break – grilled him, really – on what he needed to do if he wanted to learn to play.  He had a credit card “for emergencies” and used it the next day to buy his first instrument.

That had started a war with Mom – not because he’d spent unauthorized money, but because he’d made a decision that could Impact His Career without consulting her.

“I hear the new admissions officer at Harvard just
loves
the cello,” Mom said to Lydia, the admissions counselor at Worthington, as the two of them planned Matt’s future as if he wasn’t even sitting there.  The whole idea of a
junior high school
with a college admissions counselor was so crazy to Matt that he didn’t know what he’d say anyway. 

“So this whole guitar thing, you know…” She flailed her hands as if Matt had chosen a life of juvenile delinquency.

“Well,” Lydia said hesitantly, “that’s true, she does love the cello.  But, you know, there has to be one thing on his resume that stands out…”

“What do you mean ‘stands out’?” Mom said, her ire rising.  “Matt IS outstanding!”

“Of course,” Lydia said quickly, knowing all too well how outstandingly outstanding every little genius was at Worthington, even kids like Matt who clearly didn’t have their hearts in the fast track.  “I just mean there should be something on his application that…you know.  Makes him stand out from the crowd.”

Matt looked up from his Gameboy, made eye contact with Lydia. 
I’m trying
, she pled with her eyes.

I know
, Matt’s eyes replied.

“Just something that…shows his individuality.  That he’s not just…checking off boxes, doing what’s expected.”

Matt knew what she meant.  All the kids around him were eagerly reshaping themselves.  They had no desire to break the mold when fitting into it was what would get them into a
good school
, the golden ticket to the meritocracy.  And so every day all of these racially, ethnically, sexually diverse kids were shedding their
real
diversity, their internal diversity, to become the same cookies from the same cookie cutter, only with a different colored frosting on top.  They all spoke three languages and invented a great website and saved sixty homeless people last week.  And most of them would get in to the school of their choice. 

“Oh, individuality!  He’s got
that!”
Mom said scornfully.  “This guitar thing could have got him into Mayer Academy, but no, he had to express his
individuality!
”

Matt knew it was true.  He’d met with the elite private high school’s admissions guy, who’d looked up with delight after seeing that Matt played, or at least was learning to play.

“Who’s your favorite performer?  I
love
Segovia,” the little man sighed.

“He’s good,” Matt said.  “My favorite is Paul Galbraith.”

The man’s smile faded.  “Really,” he said coldly.  “Why do you think he’s better than Segovia?”

“I didn’t say better.  I said he’s my favorite.  Segovia’s really emotional, but Galbraith is more…” he shrugged.  Fuck, he was fourteen!  He didn’t know why Galbraith was better!  He just was!  Years later he’d put his finger on the appeal – Galbraith was more…yeah, ironically, more
mathematical,
intellectual, less romantic and yet still more emotional because of it.  In Matt’s opinion, anyway.

“I just like him better.”

“Hmm,” the little man said, frowning, making a little mark on a piece of paper, the thing Matt had been raised to believe was the most awful thing anyone could do to him ever.

Worst of all, when Mom had been thoroughly baffled by the rejection letter, he’d told her the story.  He’d wanted to make it better, to tell her it hadn’t been his fault – but of course, in her eyes, it had been.  That had shocked him more than anything – that she thought he should have
lied.

Lydia tried not to sigh.  Matt knew that she did this for the kids.  Or tried to.  It seemed more each day that doing it for the kids meant doing it against the adults, and around here, the adults always won.

“Look,” she said, ready to say what she never would have, if it hadn’t been late, and she was tired, and she liked Matt, and most of all, because Mrs. Kensington got on her nerves.  “Admissions people let in tons of kids who do exactly what they’re supposed to do, to the letter.  But that means that every now and then, they need to let in a kid who didn’t, a kid who’s not the same as all the other kids.  Who actually
is
special.”

Mom blinked.  “We have a lot of money.  Matt is going to Harvard if I have to buy them a new fucking building.”

“Take a number,” Lydia snapped.  “Harvard doesn’t have enough real estate for all the buildings they’ve been promised now.  Believe it or not, Mrs. Kensington, and yes I know your husband is the world’s biggest real estate developer, but there are people far richer and more powerful than you who also have kids they want in Harvard, and who will elbow you aside if you play the game the same way they do.”

What really surprised Matt was that at this outburst, Mom was silent.  She nodded.  This was the kind of cold, harsh realism she could work with.  He’d forgotten that about her.  She’d grown up hard in Texas, and was working as a waitress when she met Dad.  He’d been sitting at one of her tables in the greasy diner, back when he was just a middle manager, always on the road.  And when he’d come back on his next trip and offered to take her home with him, well, she never looked back.