“Uh-huh.”

“Your mom’s so young.” She holds on to the photo for a long moment before putting it back. “They look happy.”

“We were.”

“You must miss them.”

I turn and look out the window. It’s dark out now, and I can hear the wind off the ocean, rustling through the leaves. A lonely, restless sound.

“I was going to show you this,” I say, opening my backpack and unzipping an inside pocket to pull out a battered old map so I can point to the tiny flyspeck of land in the middle of the Pacific. “Here—this is me.”

Andrea comes up behind where I’m standing and reaches around past me to the map, and all of a sudden I’m acutely aware of the closeness of her body heat as her red fingertip traces its way across all that endless blue.

“Here?” she says.

I nod.

“It’s so tiny.”

“Just a speck on the map.”

“Like it’s hardly there at all,” she says.

There’s nothing to say to that, so I just stand with my head cocked slightly toward the window, waiting to see what’s going to happen next.

“Will?”

I turn to glance at her. “Yeah?”

“Here’s the thing.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Your whole life story . . . ?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t buy a word of it.”

For a moment, my world goes pin-drop silent. Somewhere, a clock ticks. I stare at her, blinking. “What?”

“I don’t think you’ve ever seen South Pacific, let alone actually lived there.” She’s smiling widely now, grabbing hold of my hand as she glances back at the framed photo on my desk. “And if this picture was taken anywhere besides Florida, I’ll tear it out of the frame and eat it.”

“Wait,” I say, frowning. “I don’t understand.”

“Oh,” she says, “I’m pretty sure you do.”

“But—”

“I admit,” she says, “you had me going at first. It takes a lot of guts to stand at the front of the class wearing those clothes . . . and the whole atomic-testing thing was a nice touch. You’ve got the routine down, I’ll give you that.”

“Hold on,” I say. “You actually think . . . I’m making all this up?” Now I’m drawing my hand away from hers, stepping back fast enough that the map falls to the floor between us, where it lands half underneath the radiator. “You think I somehow convinced the admissions board to let me into this school?”

“Not just the admissions board,” she says, and she’s still smiling. “I think you’ve got everybody fooled.” She pauses, and her eyes shimmer just a little, deep inside the pupils. “Well. Almost everyone.”

“The people from my village . . .” I say, lowering my gaze. “They warned me that when I came here, there would be those who wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh, please,” she says, “give it a rest, okay?”

And she just stands there in front of me, arms crossed, not saying anything, just waiting, until I finally let out a deep breath. It feels like I’ve been holding it inside for a very long time, and once I’m completely deflated, I realize that I’ve sat down on the floor of the room.

“Florida?” I say. “Seriously, you recognized that as Florida?”

“Fort Lauderdale, I’m guessing,” Andrea says. “And that’s just the beginning.”

Two

SO I GET OUT MY REFURBISHED MACBOOK and tell her the truth.

It takes twenty minutes for me to show her how I hacked into the admissions board’s system to fabricate my transcripts and transfer records. Another ten minutes to unzip the hidden lining of my backpack and pull out forged letters of recommendation and income tax forms with the fake notarization stamps and official seals that I hand-stained with Earl Grey tea bags to get the exact right shade of brown. Throughout it all she sits on the edge of my bed, holding the documents up to the light, inspecting the markings and signatures.

“This . . . is . . . unbelievable,” she says, and looks at me with what I’d like to think is newfound fascination, although it’s probably just a species of shock that medical science hasn’t classified yet. “I mean, was any of what you told me true?”

“Well . . .” I have to stop and think about it. “My first name really is William,” I say, pointing at one of the forms. “See?”

“Anything else?”

“I was telling the truth about never having been anywhere like this before,” I say. “We’re a long way from the South Ward of Trenton, New Jersey, that’s for sure. But everything else I told you”—I nod at the paperwork and the laptop—“was pretty much, you know . . . ”

“A big fat lie,” she says, like she still can’t wrap her head around it.

I shrug. “I was going to say easy, but yeah.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“This is the third school I’ve gone to.” The first two—Horace Mann and Exeter—ended badly, when some inconsistencies in my record were discovered by a sharp-eyed admissions officer, and I’ve since stepped up my game.

“Why?” Andrea asks.

“Why?” Now I’m confused. “As in, why would anyone want to attend a private academy with its own airstrip and private jet?”

“It’s a helipad,” she says. “And that’s not the point.”

“Okay, maybe you haven’t taken a look around you lately? This place is Valhalla. It’s the hall of the gods.”

“I know what Valhalla is, thanks.”

“My point is, even if you guys didn’t have a model stock-trading floor so students could learn about the commodity market, it’s totally obvious that this is where winners are born and bred. All I did was reinvent myself to fit in. It’s the American way.”

“Lying about who you are?”

“Semantics,” I tell her. “You mean to tell me your great-great-grandparents didn’t change their names at Ellis Island?” I hold up my hands. “Oh, wait, your great-great-grandparents probably owned Ellis Island . . .”

“My ancestors . . .” she starts, and her voice trails away. “Again, that’s not the point. What you did is different.”

“How?”

Andrea changes her approach. “What about your parents? Your real parents, I mean. What do they think about all of this?”

“Let’s just say . . .” I glance at the framed photo of the three of us on the desk. “When it comes to family, sometimes the myth is better.”

And to my surprise, she nods as if that makes some kind of sense to her. “I’m assuming you’ve got some kind of long-range plan, at least?”

“Absolutely,” I say. “As rich and ambitious as your fellow classmates are, some part of them is dying to help a poor, disenfranchised missionary kid from the Pacific Islands find his way in the big, scary world. Which is why, by winter break, one of them is going to invite me to spend the holidays with his family in Davos, or St. Barts, to show off to Mummy and Daddy how he’s learning to help those less fortunate than him. And by next summer, I’ll practically have been adopted into the family. I’ll do a summer internship at somebody’s law office, maybe a clerkship on Capitol Hill. A year from now I’ll be applying to Harvard with everybody else. After that, law school or business school, and a job at one of the white shoe firms in Manhattan. Hello, Fortune Five Hundred.”

“Impressive,” she says. “You’ve really got us all figured out, don’t you?”

I shrug. “If there’s one thing more reliable than greed, it’s pity.”

“What is that, your family motto or something?”

“Hey, I’m a realist.”

“And how old are you, again? Forty?”

“Look,” I say, “if I can help tomorrow’s captains of industry sleep soundly at night with their white liberal guilt, then I call it a win.”

“Meanwhile, you’ve got no sense of guilt whatsoever . . . ?”

“Why should I? I’m not hurting anybody.”

She’s just looking at me, and I can’t read her expression anymore.

“Okay.” I let out a sigh. “If you’re going to rat me out, I’d appreciate a little advance notice so I can pack my stuff. I mean, this is a great school and everything, but it’s not worth getting sent to juvenile detention over.”