She glares at me, simmering in silence. “There’s Red Bull in the fridge,” she says finally. “You can get it yourself.”

“Look.” I walk over to the little dorm refrigerator in the closet, pull out a can of Red Bull, and crack it open. “All I’m saying is, there’s no payoff. What happens after you graduate? You’re back at square one again, right?” I glance at the cello case in the corner. “Or were you planning on conning your way into Juilliard, too? I hear they’re a little more difficult to snooker.”

“Who says I have to con my way in?”

“So you’re really that good?” I stand up and start walking over to the instrument. “You want to play me something? Adagio for Scam Artists in B Major?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Andrea says, “because as soon as I tell Dr. Melville that you’re still here—”

“I’ll tell him what I know about you,” I say, “and we’ll both end up doing our senior year in public school. So it looks like we’re stuck with each other.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said no.” She settles into her swivel chair, crosses her arms, and smiles. “Because you’re right about one thing, Will. There isn’t room at this school for both of us. And I was here first.”

“Well, I’m not leaving,” I say. “Just because you’re scared of me—”

“Please,” she says. “I’m scared of you why, exactly?”

“It’s obvious that I’m far better at this than you are. I know how to hack into the computer system, and let’s face it: my backstory is way more pathetic than yours. I’ve got dead parents and a radioactive grandma. You’re old news around here, but I’m fresh and interesting, and you haven’t even seen me play lacrosse yet.” The truth is, I’ve never played lacrosse, but I’m not going to tell her that. “You’re terrified I’m going to steal all your action.”

“Even if I agreed to let you stay,” she says, “what makes you think you can fix things with Dr. Melville?”

“Well, for one thing, I know what Dr. Melville looks like”—I turn the computer around again so she can see the school website, featuring a picture of a jovial-looking man with a full gray beard—“and the guy that you sent to my room in the middle of the night definitely wasn’t him. Who was he? Just some local rube that you paid to throw on a Connaughton bathrobe and scare me?”

Andrea gets quiet for a really long time. She scrunches her lips together and steeples her fingers, and now the frown across her forehead makes her look like she’s concentrating on something very intensely.

“What if . . .” she says, sitting down next to me, “we decide . . . to make it interesting?”

“How so?”

“We both want to stay here at Connaughton, correct? And we both have enough dirt to rat each other out. So what if we agree on a mark, a student here”—she pauses to think—“somebody who’s rich enough to make it worthwhile. The first one to get this individual to fork over, say, ten thousand dollars . . . gets to stay.”

I’m already smiling. “And the loser?”

“Packs it in,” she says. “Happy trails.”

“You’re serious?”

“One thing you’ll learn about me, Will. I never joke about money. Ever.” She looks at me. “So do we have a deal or not?”

“Oh, it’s on,” I say, barely resisting the urge to add the words like Donkey Kong, because I don’t want to blow the mood. “But how do we choose the mark?”

And just then, her door bursts open.

Five

THE GUY WHO STUMBLES INTO ANDREA’S ROOM IS WEARING candy-striped boxer shorts, a rumpled bathrobe, and cowboy boots. His gelled blond hair is sticking up sideways in the back, and he’s got a girl dangling off each arm. All three of them look as if they’ve been up all night, and they all start laughing hysterically when they see Andrea and me sitting on the bed staring at them.

“Huh,” he snorts, stumbling forward until the girl on his left has to catch him and hold him up. “I guess this isn’t the shower. Hey . . .” Leaning forward, he screws his face up into a squinting, cockeyed stare. “Wait a second. You’re that new kid from Bodkins’s class, right? The missionary kid?”

That’s when I recognize him—the loud snorer from English Lit. I’m still trying to remember his name when he lets go of the girls and flounders forward with outstretched arms, flinging himself across Andrea’s room. I’m not sure where he thinks he’s headed, but he ends up in the corner, wrestling with her cello case.

“I’ve always wanted to try one of these.” He grins, holding up the case and fumbling with the clasps. “It’s like a giant ukulele, right?”

“Leave it alone, Brandt,” Andrea says, reaching for him, but he shoves her away and pops open the case. The cello falls out and hits the floor with a twangy crash. Still grinning, the guy grabs it up off the floor. In the doorway, the two girls are shrieking with laughter like this is the funniest thing they’ve ever seen, as he starts plucking and strumming the strings with his fingers, belting out the Bill Withers classic “Ain’t No Sunshine” at the top of his lungs. Strings snap and break.

“Quit it!” Andrea lunges for the cello, but the guy moves at the last second, and—accidentally or on purpose—her hand makes contact with his face with a sharp whack.

All at once, the fun comes to a screeching halt. The guy glares at her, and I can see the red imprint of her hand on his cheek. He picks up the cello by the neck and slams it down onto the floor, then raises one foot and stomps on it with his cowboy boot. It splinters, pieces of polished wood flying in every direction.

“Hey, whoa,” I say, rising from the bed, but that’s as far as I get before Kid Boxer Shorts swings around and drives his elbow into my stomach, leaving me doubled over and sucking air into parts of my body that I didn’t realize even needed oxygen. Already I can tell that it’s going to be a while before I can speak in a normal voice. When I manage to straighten up, I see Andrea just standing there, staring at what he’s done. Even the girls in the doorway have stopped laughing.

“You like that?” he says. “Huh? Was that good for you?” He glowers at the broken pieces of the cello. “Maybe next time you’ll dial it down a little when somebody’s just having a laugh, right?”

“Mr. Rush?”

It’s a female voice coming from the doorway, and I look up to see that the two girls have vanished and been replaced by a tall, severe-looking house matron standing just outside the room. She’s dressed in a black suit and skirt, with iron-colored hair and a sharp, beaklike nose. She looks like she could kick all of our butts. Emily Dickinson meets Angie Dickinson, back in her Police Woman days, at least. I’ve caught the reruns on late-night TV.

“What exactly is going on?” she demands. “What on earth . . .” Her eyes flick to me, then to Andrea, and back to the cello smasher. “What are you doing here?”

“Just having some fun,” the guy mumbles, weaving his way to the door so that the woman has to step aside to keep him from crashing into her. Unbelievably, she does just that, allowing him to walk away.

“Mr. Rush,” she says again, this time to his back. “I’m sending you to Dr. Melville’s office for disciplinary action, right away. And you—” She points in my direction. “Male students are not permitted in the female dorms.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “I was just helping clean up, and I’ll leave.”

The matron looks at the mess on the floor, obviously created by Brandt, and I can feel her trying to decide whether to ask any more questions. Then, with a pinched-mouth grimace, she nods. “See that you do.”

After she leaves, I look back at Andrea. She’s bent over, gathering up the broken pieces of her instrument. I get down on my hands and knees to help her, but she pushes me away.

“Just leave it,” she says in a toneless voice. Her hair’s hanging in her face so I can’t see her expression. “Go. Get out of here. Leave me alone.”