Really, why did they care? The boys were too childish to fight over. What dared to call itself fashion was hopelessly generic—no one had the guts to wear anything original in this boring, suburban quagmire. And what passed for ‘intelligent debate’ was just the parroted drivel of the previous generation, passed down from father to son and mother to daughter without any genuine reflection or even a token attempt at independent thought.
How had Sam arrived at this rather pessimistic view of the world? It had all started when she was only five years old. Her father had taken her to a ballet class, not because he had any desire to see his daughter grow into a debutante, but because she had very few friends her own age, and in the absurdly wealthy neighborhood they called home, a ballet class seemed the most logical place to find five-year-old girls.
Sam, however, had taken one look at the room full of leotard-and-tutu-clad miniature divas, twirling their pink-ribboned wands through the air in clumsy, frenetic swirls, turned to her father with her hands on her hips and announced, “Oh, hell no.”
Michael Prescott had swept the girl up in his arms immediately, making a beeline for the door and spluttering apologies to the town’s most prominent mothers as they stared in open disdain—any furtive, wistful hints of complicit defiance that might have stirred in one ladylike heart or another, yearning toward the sun with grasping tendrils of insurrection, all forlornly renounced under each other’s silent, disapproving gazes.
Then again, it might be traced back even farther still.
When Sam was only two, she had asked her mother to teach her how to read. Armed with safety scissors, construction paper, child-proof paste, a bouquet of markers, and more women’s magazines than any modern woman could reasonably be expected to consult in a lifetime, Sam’s mother had crafted stacks upon stacks of homemade flashcards under the child’s precise direction, every chosen phrase reflecting her daughter’s already eclectic interests, ranging from the somewhat predictable ‘good dog’ to the far more improbable ‘periwinkle raincoat.’
If Jennifer Prescott had expected her two-year-old daughter to ignore the mystical pull of the written alphabet and merely pore over the colorful illustrations for half of an afternoon before losing interest in the entire enterprise, she turned out to be sorely mistaken.
By the time young Samantha encountered the infamous troupe of kindergarten ballerinas, she was already reading The Wall Street Journal aloud every morning, perched on her father’s adoring (if all-too-transitory) knee. What she took from this exercise, among other things, was that the world seemed to be in serious danger a depressingly large part of the time and that she clearly had better things to do than learn to spin a pink-ribboned baton in ever more elegant circles.
As one might imagine, any hope she might have had of finding even an inkling of common ground with her own kind was doomed from the get-go.
And so it came to pass that although she was now sixteen years old, her general opinion of her peers had changed very little. It bothered her, feeling so alone within the swell of humanity that ebbed and flowed around her, but she tried not to dwell on it. She knew something important was coming down the road eventually—that her life was destined to be of greater significance than even she herself could possibly imagine—and she felt that somehow, deep in her gut, she would recognize this pivotal turn of events when it finally began to unfold.
She just didn’t know whether she would be eighteen or twenty-eight or eighty by the time it happened, and in the meantime, nothing she did felt as though it mattered.
She didn’t care about school. She certainly didn’t care about fitting in with the popular crowd. She didn’t even care much about other people’s feelings if she was being honest. But she did well in school anyway, because it was easy, and she tried not to provoke her classmates too badly—not because it seemed important in the grand scheme of things, but because it made her life that much less difficult at home.
Although both her parents had paid considerable attention to her pre-school education, everything changed once they shipped her off to the first grade, where they were not the least bit worried about her academic success. Ever since that fateful day, Sam’s parents had been unlikely to summon the time and energy to ‘deal with her’ unless they were upset about something.
Her father was a high-priced lawyer, commuting every day from their ocean-view mansion in New Jersey into ‘the city,’ by which Michael Prescott meant New York City, and more particularly Manhattan. He converted time into money for a living, and his daughter was not immune to these financial calculations. Her requests for his time were invariably weighed against the loss of potential income they represented, leading sadly to the conclusion that the family simply could not afford for him to pay her any significant attention.
This was why Sam tried to make do with what she had, rather than asking for anything special. She wore inexpensive jeans and even cheaper T-shirts to school. She had one pair of black motorcycle boots that she wore every single day. She did the two blue streaks near the front of her otherwise jet black hair herself, which she had learned to do from an online video—the Internet being, in her opinion, mankind’s greatest invention.
She certainly didn’t ask for a membership to the country club, or the yacht club, or the tennis club, or the beach club, or any other exclusive institution that the girls in her school district expected to attend as a matter of course.
She didn’t ask for these things because she didn’t want to wonder whether her father’s unwillingness to spend weekends at home might have anything to do with the added expense of raising a child. The only exceptions she made to this personal rule were a high-end laptop, a tablet, and a cell phone with a good data plan. If her father wasn’t going to spend time with her, he could at least provide her with something to do in all the spare hours he refused to fill with his company.
Not that her mother was any better.
Thanks to Michael Prescott’s significant income, Jennifer Prescott had no responsibilities in life beyond raising their only child, who at the age of sixteen was no longer, in Jennifer’s opinion, in need of her maternal services. Instead of asking Sam about her friends—of which she had none—or about her classes or her interests or her hopes and dreams and views of the world, Jennifer Prescott spent her time helping the ‘less fortunate,’ leaving Sam to her own devices as long as her grades were good and she stayed out of trouble.
In fact, it seemed to Sam as though she only ran into her mother by chance these days, as she had just now, both of them standing in their impossibly clean, uber-modern kitchen, which was, as usual, utterly devoid of any sign that anyone had ever cooked in it.
“I have an emergency meeting tonight at the women’s shelter.” Jennifer spoke these words to her daughter without looking up from the black calfskin handbag she was digging through with her perfectly manicured hands. “Where are my keys?”