The Ethical Assassin

As it turned out, I did fairly well at track. I made the team and acquitted myself reasonably well at matches. I didn’t excel at speed, but I was good at endurance, and in some of the longer races I could outlast some of my opponents well enough to score a third, and occasionally a second, place. It would be good enough to help me get into college, and I wasn’t even the slowest guy on the team.

The second good idea came a little more than half a year later, during the winter break of my sophomore year. I had been lying on my bed, reading, when the knock came at the door. It was a good two hours after di

Andy didn’t wait for an answer. He opened the door and stuck his head inside. “What’s going on in here? Anything naughty?”

I sat up and folded the book open to my spot. Andy said nothing for a moment, just leaned against the doorjamb, gri

“I think,” Andy a

“Of course,” he added, “we know we can’t rely on your father to help with the money.”

My father was living somewhere in Jamaica now, where he worked as a tourist scuba-diving guide and, if overheard conversations could be trusted, smoked prodigious quantities of marijuana. I imagined him sitting on a beach in a circle of glassy-eyed Rastafarians, puffing lazily on a cigar-thick joint. Some of my friends had discovered reggae, but I couldn’t stand the political yearnings of Bob Marley, the ganja-fueled rage of Peter Tosh, the self-aggrandizing toasts of Yellowman- not when my father was off living the life of a white rasta. Besides, he had entirely given up on paying child support, and I hadn’t heard from him in two years, when he’d placed a drunken call on a warm April afternoon to wish me a happy fifteenth birthday. I was thirteen at the time and had been so since January.

“So maybe it doesn’t make sense to go to a place like that,” I proposed. I was confused, and presenting a counterargument seemed like the best way to draw out Andy’s game. “I mean, if it’s so expensive.” Going to an Ivy League school had never occurred to me. I’d always believed them reserved for the movie-star handsome and privileged, charming boys and girls with trust funds and easy grins and ruddy complexions from effortless afternoons on the ski slopes.

“If you keep your grades up and you do well on your SATs,” Andy prophesied, “you should be able to get a decent financial aid package. Plus this business I set up for you with the track team should help. They’ll cut you a deal and you’ll take out some loans. And if all of that doesn’t cover everything,” he a

The seed was planted. I’d always thought of myself as smart, had always thought of myself as capable of doing smart-person things- but going to Harvard or Yale, that was far out of reach, like becoming an astronaut or ambassador to France. Still, Andy had suggested it, and now I wanted it. I wanted the opportunities an Ivy League degree would provide. I could become an important historian or direct movies and go into politics. Once it was on the table, I knew it was the way out, the way to a genuinely non-Floridian future.

The next summer, while visiting my grandparents in New Jersey, I had made arrangements to take a look at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale over the course of three separate weekends. When I went to Columbia ’s Upper West Side campus, it was my first trip to New York City, despite the a

In fact, the moment the car crossed the George Washington Bridge, I knew that New York was the place that I must have always known about in the hidden recesses of my mind. Maybe I had already absorbed New York from television and movies. I must have seen the city depicted on the screen countless times, but it never signified much of anything but some kind of foreign and urban landscape. In reality, on the ground, with the noise and people and the gum-stained sidewalks littered with trash and teeming with the homeless, it seemed to me something else entirely. I had discovered the anti-Florida.

“ Columbia ’s all right,” Andy had assured me, “and if that’s the only place you can get in, fine. But it shouldn’t be your first choice. Harvard should be your first choice.” He folded his arms authoritatively, though the closest he’d ever been to Harvard was Logan Airport to change planes.

As it turned out, it didn’t much matter, since Yale, Harvard, and Princeton all said no. Columbia said yes, as had, improbably, Berkeley and my safety: the University of Florida. When I received the admission on a rainy Saturday afternoon, I ran to tell Andy, who was resting on his recliner in the family room, watching golf on television.

“ Columbia,” he observed. “At least that’s something after getting the thumbs-down from Harvard and Yale.”

“I just can’t believe it,” I said. I paced around, too excited to hold still, even for an instant. “Man, living in New York. It’s going to be so cool.”

Andy’s face went long, a sure sign things were about to turn sour. He shook his head as he geared himself up to piss on my cornflakes. “You might want to think twice about this. University of Florida is a good school. If you go to New York, you’ll probably get mugged.”

“There’s millions of people. They can’t all get mugged.”

“Some people will, but you won’t? Is that it? What, you think you’re exempt?”

“I don’t think it’s worth worrying about.”

“Well, I got a pretty good education at U of F,” Andy said. “What’s good enough for me isn’t good enough for you?”

“I don’t want to go to Florida. I want to go to Columbia. You’re the one who told me I should go to an Ivy.”

Andy shrugged and looked over my shoulder to watch someone miss a three-foot putt. “And it was a fine idea. And you did try. I’m just saying that you may not want to go to Columbia. Harvard or Yale, sure. But they already said no. Maybe they saw something in your application and they realized you’re not Ivy material. Isn’t it kind of beneath your dignity to let Columbia have you as sloppy seconds?”

“That is so far beyond stupid that I don’t even know the word for it.”

“If you had a better vocabulary, maybe Harvard would have let you in. I think a state school education is much better. You don’t want to become an Ivy League snob, do you?”

There was no way I was going to let him talk me out of it. The thing about Columbia was that no one would know me there. Unlike the University of Florida, Columbia would not have anyone from my high school or my neighborhood. Most people, when I told them where I was applying, thought I meant South Carolina. When I got there, I would no longer be the loser who had once been fat- I would be whoever I said I was. It was not only an escape from Florida, it was a clean break, maybe the cleanest break I would ever get, could ever hope for. And I knew I wasn’t going to squander it.

The day of graduation, while I’d been drinking orange soda with relatives at my house before going out with friends, one of whose cousins was having a party, Andy took me aside.