Price of Admission

As I lay watching a movie, I heard a soft rap at my cabin door. I clicked the remote to pause it and flicked on the wall sconce lamps.

“Enter.”

Sam opened the door. “Hey, can we talk?”

I sat up in bed. “Yeah, of course. Come in.”

“Upstairs. We all want to talk to you.”

The look on her face, and the seriousness of her tone, made my neck flush with heat. “Sure. Give me a minute, okay?”

She nodded and closed the door behind her. As soon as she’d gone, I popped out of bed and logged into the security system.

I closed the laptop and leaned back in my chair. Whatever they wanted to talk about sure seemed important. I stood to check myself in the dressing mirror. Not bad. I combed my hair back with my fingers and smoothed down my polo. Then I opened the locker door behind the mirror and squatted to open the safe, from which I removed a small duffel and three small tincture bottles I’d stowed inside.

Upstairs, I dropped the duffel near the table, then went to the bar to fix a drink. “Evening, ladies. You wanted to talk?” I asked as I measured and mixed my Manhattan.

I glanced over my shoulder. Sam sat with her back straight and her fingers laced together, her hands resting on the binder of contracts, watching, and apparently waiting for me to finish making my drink. I removed a cigarette from the box and lit it, waving my hand.

“Please, go ahead,” I said with my back to her. I could sense her frustration. I’m sure she wanted me seated across from her so they could all look me in the eye. Well, tough shit.

“We have questions.”

I stirred the cocktail. “I’m all ears.”

“I don’t think you are who you say you are.”

I garnished the drink with a candied cherry and turned around, leaning against the bar. “That’s a statement, Sam, not a question.”

“You know what she meant, Dick,” Bianca spat.

Sam glared at her and she slumped down in her chair. “What I meant was, who are you really?”

I took a sip and smiled at her. “We’ve already had this discussion.”

“Would you mind sitting down, please, so we can talk?”

“I can hear you fine. Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind.”

This wasn’t going quite the way she’d planned. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “You said you signed these contracts, but that you’re not this Gregg Kincaid person. You said he doesn’t exist.” I took a drag on my cigarette. When I didn’t respond, she continued. “You also said that you were the one who interviewed all of us, posing as Mrs. Gastauer, who I assume also doesn’t exist.”

I tilted my head and lifted an eyebrow. “Did I miss a question in there somewhere?”

Sam stared at me, then looked at the other girls. She opened her mouth and coughed out a small laugh, appearing flustered. Then she steeled herself. “Okay, here’s a question: what the fuck is going on here, what the fuck is Gethsemane Academy, and who the fuck are you?”

“That’s three questions,” I said, then chuckled when her eyes bulged in frustration. I beckoned them all to the bar. “Alright, get up. Come on over. It’s time we had a talk about what’s really going on here. Sam, bring me the binder, please.”

Confused but intrigued, they slowly stood and made their way to the bar, forming a loose semicircle around me. Sam handed over the binder, which I tossed aside onto the bar top. Their faces became expectant when I cleared my throat and spread my arms.

“Gethsemane Academy ... is ... a fraud.”

Brows furrowed and mouths opened in shock. Ronky slowly nodded her head with an amused smile.

“I fucking knew it,” Bianca muttered.

Sam asked, “Are you saying that Gethsemane doesn’t exist either?”

I took a sip of my cocktail and shook my head. “Oh no, it definitely exists. It’s just not what your parents think it is.”

“Okay ... Well, if it’s not a Christian academy or whatever, then what is it?”

“It’s a vehicle. It’s a means to an end. It’s whatever I need it to be.”

Confused looks all around. A low murmur of hushed side conversations and overlapping questions began to build. Sam quieted them all down.

“What the hell are you? Some kind of conman or something?”

“No. Well, I don’t think so. Maybe to your parents, I am.”

Sam pushed her palms down toward the floor in an attempt to quell the conversations that flared up again, until she finally lost her temper. “Hey, do you mind?”

The discussions tapered off. Sam had gone from skeptical and cautiously intrigued to suddenly pissed off, but she fought to keep herself under control.

“I’ve read through every single one of those contracts. Our parents signed us over to you so that you could fucking torture us.” Despite her efforts, her anger rose steadily with every new sentence. “We have no fucking rights. And they knew about all of it. They knew every fucked up thing you were going to do to us, and they still handed us over to you!”

I nodded as she spoke. “That’s all very true.”

Sam clenched her jaw. Her eyes blazed, and her voice became steely. “And you. Oh my god, those fucking interviews! You forced us to sit there with our dads and confess to all those things we’d done. All of our private thoughts. All of our secret fantasies.” She paused, and a dawning look of realization spread across her face. “You knew things about us you couldn’t possibly have known. Not unless ... you hacked us, didn’t you. You hacked our phones. Our computers. You fucking spied on us!”

I took a sip and nodded. “I did.”

The horrified looks on their faces gave me pause. Shit. I’d assumed they would have already worked that part out for themselves. It was abundantly clear to me now that they hadn’t. This was the first moment they truly understood the totality of what had been done to them. Slowly, their horror morphed into rage, and the room erupted with angry shouting.

I set my glass down and slammed my palm hard onto the bar top, causing the liquor bottles to rattle in their wire caddies, the sharp bang loud as a rifle report. “Alright, that’s enough! Calm the fuck down!” The room quieted in an instant. I picked up the binder and held it aloft.

“Yes, your parents agreed to all of these things. They paid me a shit ton of money to throw you into what I can only describe as a fundamentalist Christian prison camp in order to re-educate you.”

I pushed past them to the open portside sliding wall and chucked the binder overboard into the dark waters of the Caribbean Sea.

“Well, fuck all that,” I said when I returned to the bar, and, by their expressions, I could tell my dramatic little demonstration had been the last thing they had expected. “There’s nothing wrong with any of you, and none of you needs to change a fucking thing. So, instead of Christian prison camp, you’re all getting a four-month vacation, complements of mom and dad.”

Where, just moments before, there had been a sea of anger, I now saw six blank, incredulous faces staring back at me. I still had one more surprise for them. I patted the bar.

“Veronica, would you please grab that bag behind you and put it here?”

She bent to heft the small duffel bag, and set it down. I slapped my hand down on top of it.

“None of you is on this ship because you wanted to be here. Your parents threatened to cut you off from your trust funds and inheritances to force you to come. For that, I’m sorry. But your parents paid me two-hundred-thousand dollars each. That’s one-point-two million for the six of you. I spent most of it on this trip. What’s left is inside this bag, and, minus any unexpected future expenses,” I slid the bag across the bar toward them, “it’s all yours. Under one condition, that is. Consider it ... oh, I don’t know ... asshole tax from your parents. There should be around forty to fifty thousand dollars for each of you in there, which you’ll be able to take with you when you leave Ft. Lauderdale in four months. I know it’s not a lot, but at least it’s something.”

The girls were speechless. Ronky unzipped the bag and there were gasps and squeals when she pulled out two, ten-thousand dollar bundles of hundred dollar bills.

“Holy shit, we’re fucking millionaires, bitches!” Ronky screamed, eliciting amused laughter from the smarter girls and chittering excitement from the rest.

“Don’t get too excited yet. There’s nothing to spend it on out here. Everything you need will be provided for you. For the next four months, you are free to do literally anything and everything you want. All you have to do is relax and try to have fun.”

“What’s your condition?” Sam asked, her tone skeptical. She didn’t miss a thing.

“The only condition is that you all agree to follow my seven rules. That’s it.”

I drained my cocktail and refilled the glass with a measure of straight bourbon, then lit another cigarette. The girls gathered around the bag of money and talked excitedly among themselves. They all wanted to touch it. Everyone but Sam.

“And if we don’t?” she asked over the chatter of the others.

“If you don’t what?”

“If we don’t agree to follow your rules.” She ignored the harsh stares and muttered rebukes from some of the others, then shooshed them all to hear my response.

I was taken aback. It hadn’t occurred to me that they would say no. It had always been a possibility, of course, but not one I considered likely. I mulled it over.

“Well, then I guess this is where the fun ends. I’ll turn the boat around and take us all back to St. Croix. Should only take a few hours if I gun it the whole way. I’ll need to charter a flight to get you all home, which will probably use up most of what’s in that bag, and then that will be that. A fun little two day outing on a yacht. Is that what you want?”

The other five girls stood by, silently watching Sam, anxious to hear what she would say. Her eyes moved across the collection of teenaged girls. Her peers, and fellow unwitting participants in whatever scheme I’d cooked up for them. I could sense the pressure she felt under the weight of their expectant stares. She glanced at the bag of cash, then surveyed the yacht. Then she regarded me for a very long while.