“I don’t know,” she says. “Hang a picture on it and disguise it as a wall?”

“No, seriously. What if security comes back through here with Bible-sniffing dogs or something?”

“You’ll figure it out.” She’s getting ready to climb out the window and it occurs to me that in a few seconds she’ll be gone, that all I’ll have is the smell of her shampoo in my room and the emptiness where she was standing. And I realize that, no matter what happens, I need to mark this moment somehow in my mind so that I can come back to it again.

“Hey,” I say.

“What?”

I take a deep breath in. “You know how Homecoming is on Friday?”

“It hasn’t escaped my attention,” she says.

“Are you going?”

“That’s tomorrow.” She narrows her eyes. “Are you seriously asking me to Homecoming?”

“It starts at seven.”

“Will—”

“Just say yes,” I tell her. “Before you have time to talk yourself out of it.”

Gatsby looks at me for a moment in silence.

“You’ll need a tuxedo,” she says.

“I’ll rent one in town.”

“Can you afford that?”

“I’ll figure it out.” I wait. “So is that a yes?”

She smiles. “Seven o’clock. I’ll meet you there,” she says.

And that’s how she leaves me, with a fake Gutenberg on my bed and the promise of something better, as she climbs back out the window and into the night.

Twenty

THE NEXT MORNING I’M OFF TO BREAKFAST WITH MY senses on high alert. I don’t know what I’m expecting—blaring headlines in the school paper, room-to-room searches, security guards doing random bag checks—but there’s no word about the missing Gutenberg Bible. It’s like nothing’s even happened. Everybody’s just going about his or her regular routine. Halfway to the dining hall it occurs to me that if Dr. Melville knows his Bible is a fake, then the last thing he’d want to do is draw attention to its disappearance. Maybe Gatsby’s actually done him a favor.

Meanwhile, the Bible itself is safely tucked up under my bed, stuffed inside a hole that I’ve cut in my box spring and then duct-taped shut. I have no idea how safe it really is there, or how stupid it is that I’m potentially jeopardizing the con by keeping the Bible in my room when I could’ve easily just refused the assignment. My motives don’t make sense, even to me. I’m a city kid from New Jersey. Why do I want to join the Sigils anyway?

We’re outsiders, Will. Like you.

The thought gives me chills. I keep thinking about how her hair tickled my neck when we were leaning over the glass case in the rare books collection. The tiny, almost imperceptible smile on her face when I asked her to Homecoming. Standing in line with my tray, I can remember exactly how she smells, the sound of her voice, her chalky little laugh, and I realize that my heart’s beating way too hard.

I shut my eyes and open them again slowly.

I can’t afford to feel this way about her.

I’m not going to be here that long.

Outside the dining hall, horns are honking and people are calling out to one another with big fake cheerful hellos. Homecoming Weekend at Connaughton is like a combination of summer in the Hamptons and a royal wedding. The campus parking lot is packed with Mercedes and Rolls-Royces, high-end BMWs and the occasional Lamborghini, as parents, alumni, and families arrive. At least two private helicopters have already touched down, and I spot bodyguards with earpieces and mirrored sunglasses hovering outside the dining hall.

Later that morning I get “my” Hawthorne paper back with a big red A written across the top. Excellent work, Mr. Bodkins’s spiky handwriting enthuses. Very insightful writing. I look forward to reading more from you. Standing there with the essay in my hands, I feel a throb of guilt go through my chest followed by the sudden, self-destructive urge to go to him and confess that I didn’t write a word of it.

That afternoon I take the bus to town to rent a tuxedo. There’s a florist on Main Street, where I pick out a corsage and a dozen long-stemmed red roses. On the way back to the bus stop, I walk past an antique shop on the corner, and something in the window grabs my attention. Looking more closely I see that it’s an early printing of the first volume of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.

I go inside and ask the woman behind the counter about the book.

“You’ve got excellent taste,” she says, lifting it from the window display and handing it to me. “That’s a rare edition.”

“How much?”

“Three hundred.”

“Will you take a credit card?”

I hold my breath while she swipes the AmEx that Lupo Reilly gave me, but the authorization goes through without a problem. After signing the sales slip, I slide the book under my coat and head out the door. It’s getting colder, but I don’t even feel it.

By the time I get to the bus stop, I’m whistling.

Back at Connaughton, I realize that I don’t have any wrapping paper. My eyes settle on my tattered old map of the Pacific, the one with Ebeye on it. I wrap the map around the Hawthorne book and it fits perfectly. I don’t even have to trim the edges.

I grab an early dinner, take an extra-long scalding hot shower, and begin to get ready for the night. The tux looks great but my hair’s all wrong. It’s already too long, and it sticks out to the side like a crow’s broken wing in a way that no amount of gel is going to make better. In the end I just abandon it, gather up the flowers and Hawthorne book, and step outside.

The night is clear and cold, and the grounds are strung with lights for the evening. Far off in the distance, I can hear music and laughter coming from the Manse, which, for all intents and purposes, is the center of the universe tonight.

Besides being the single oldest building on campus, the Manse is also the home for all of Connaughton’s formal dances and assemblies, a combination of nineteenth-century ballroom and private castle. According to tradition, it’s the place where families gather before the Homecoming game each year, a chance for millionaire alumni to compare notes while their ungrateful kids ignore them entirely. It’s a little weird that parents are invited to the dance, but it also makes sense in a creepy, ultrarich, incestuous kind of way that probably dates back to Medieval Europe. As I step inside, I see designer dresses, hear the laughter and chatter floating out.

Gatsby’s nowhere to be seen.

“Hey, Will.”

Looking around, I see Andrea standing close by, smiling at me. For a second I almost don’t even recognize her. Her hair is pinned up in shimmering braids to expose her long slender throat, and she is wearing what might be charitably described as a black spider web connected by silver rings. It’s made out of some kind of expensive shimmery material that I think is officially known as “trying way too hard.” Still, she looks great, and she knows it. Even Brandt seems to be paying attention.

“Nice tux.” She reaches out to touch my lapel, then looks down at the roses and the book that I’m holding. “Where’s your date?”

“She’s on her way.”

“Of course she is,” Andrea says, turning. “By the way, have you met Brandt’s parents?”

I look behind her at the two people standing there in formalwear, and right away I feel the difference between them and everyone else in the room.

There’s rich, and then there’s rich—and then there’s Herbert and Victoria Rush.

The most disturbing thing about extremely wealthy white people is how they all look vaguely related, as if they were grown in the same lab, somewhere in the Connecticut suburbs.

For a moment the Rushes don’t speak, at least not to me. Standing there side by side like a pair of binary stars, they seem to exude their own private atmosphere, a weirdly selective gravitational field that sucks in the lucky few while flinging all the rest of us indiscriminately into the dreary void of middle-class hopelessness. Even this close, I get the strange feeling that they aren’t seeing me at all. I can’t help but wonder what I must look like through Rush vision—am I just some Vaseline-smeared blur, a black-and-white pixelation, like the faces of passersby whose identities are protected on reality TV? Or do I look like some visual annoyance, like one of those floaty things that just hover in the corner of your eye and won’t go away?