Work Text:
THE PATRON SAINT OF LOST CAUSES
Within the most elite private school in New York City, a scholarship student attempts to scale the impenetrable walls of power.
Written by Dan Humphrey
When I was called into the meeting that ruined my life, my father was on the other side of the country.
Every day since, I’ve wondered if this was purposeful. The meeting, after all, was scheduled so quickly as to be dizzying, unusually expedient for a stodgy Upper East Side private high school known for its dedication to tradition and miles of red tape. My father is the most dedicated parent I’ve ever met. He is, and has always been, my fiercest advocate. If he had been there, I wonder, would they have done it?
Of course, the answer is yes. His words mean no more to them than mine.
I was called to the headmistress’ office before I even had time to sit down in homeroom. When I arrived, she waved me into her office impatiently. I sat across from her. The antique wooden desk between us was impeccably organized. She asked if my father would be available for a meeting regarding my conduct that afternoon.
“My conduct?” I asked.
She did not explain. “Will your father be able to come here at two-thirty for the meeting? We weren’t able to reach him on your home phone.”
I explained that my father was in California. He is not currently active as a musician—his band’s popularity peaked in the late eighties and early nineties—but he was playing a small reunion show as a favor to a friend.
“Well, could you call him and inform him that we will be having a disciplinary meeting for you this afternoon? It would be appreciated if he could attend.”
“He’s in California,” I said, as though she hadn’t heard me. “His flight’s not until Friday. And it’s, like, a six and a half hour flight.” Two-thirty was only seven and a half hours away.
“He couldn’t come home sooner?”
For a moment, I was tempted to explain the concept of travel time to the headmistress of my incredibly expensive private school. Instead, I simply answered, “No.”
“Well,” she replied, “Then we’ll see you at two-thirty for the meeting, Daniel. Now get back to class.”
So I went to class. I called my dad and allowed him to talk me down from a panic attack during lunch. I reported to the office at two-twenty.
I was told to wait in the reception area, and sat anxiously in a velvet-upholstered mahogany chair watching the minutes tick by. I had already told my sister that I’d be staying late at school, and I could almost feel it as she made her way home that afternoon without me, like a bungee cord stretching far past its limit to cross the distance between the Upper East Side and our cozy Brooklyn apartment.
My AP English Literature and Composition teacher entered the office. I greeted her—she was my favorite teacher, for all that’s worth when all of my teachers openly looked down their noses at me. She didn’t greet me in return. She knocked on the headmistress’ door; the headmistress emerged from her office, and ordered me to follow them into the conference room.
This meeting, apparently, was to be a group affair. Two more of my teachers were already seated along the side of the table. The headmistress sat at the head of the long table, my AP Literature teacher at her left, and an empty seat at her right. She gestured for me to take a seat on the empty end of the table, directly across from her.
“Now, our head of financial affairs will be joining us shortly,” the headmistress said, “But we can go ahead and get started.”
“Daniel,” my AP Literature teacher said, “We know that you cheated on your essay.”
Her words were so shocking that I laughed.
Of all things that “my conduct” may have referred to, plagiarism hadn’t even crossed my mind. Honestly, I’d thought that it was probably about my kissing my girlfriend in the courtyard—it was a Catholic institution, after all—or my tendency to leave my shirt untucked and tie crooked. Other students got away with those sorts of things all the time, but other students weren’t on scholarship. I’d grown accustomed to the increased scrutiny.
“You can’t be serious,” I said, which was probably a mistake.
“Dan,” my teacher said pityingly. “There’s no point in lying.” She lifted a leaflet of stapled pages from the table—my latest essay, I realized, as she began to read aloud.
She read a line that I had been quite proud of: The endurance of The Great Gatsby in the American consciousness speaks not, necessarily, to Fitzgerald’s skill with prose, or his insider’s depiction of the idle rich, but to its honesty. We all hate careless people; we all wish for the freedom to be, ourselves, careless.
For a moment, I didn’t understand. She looked at me, as though it spoke for itself. Glancing around at the other adults in the room, seeing the pity and condescension on their faces, I realized the implication.
“You… think I didn’t write that?”
“This entire essay is far beyond your ability,” she said, and it was then that the terror truly gripped my chest.
“I—I don’t,” I stammered, wondering how to defend myself against such a vague accusation. “I’m really just interested in literature, I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and—”
“Daniel,” someone attempted to interrupt, but I couldn’t stop myself from speaking.
“—even as a little kid, I was always writing, you can ask my dad! He read with me all the time, he was really insistent on it, and I—”
“Wasn’t your dad in one of those grunge bands?” my math teacher asked.
“They usually self-describe as alternative,” I said. “Yeah. He, uh, he’s a songwriter.”
A few of the adults in the room chuckled.
The rest of the meeting is somewhat of a blur. That wave of polite laughter seemed to switch some previously undiscovered switch in my brain. This, I realized, is how it really feels to hate.
I attempted to plead my case, of course. I offered to show them the work I’d completed in previous years, the things I’ve written on my own time, the piece I had published in the New Yorker last December. Nothing worked. All of these things, they claimed, could be plagiarism as well. There was no evidence which could prove my innocence.
When the meeting ended, the headmistress looked me in the eye, and said, “Daniel, we are being incredibly generous here. We aren’t expelling you. We’re simply going to rescind your scholarship for next semester.”
“Of course,” I recall saying. “Thank you for your generosity.”
Every person in that room knew that rescinding my scholarship was a functional expulsion. A single semester’s tuition at St. Jude’s costs roughly as much as my family earns in a year.
When I first applied to St. Jude’s, I was twelve years old and determined to make something of myself. My father, of course, was the one who found the school. He began looking into private, charter, and specialized high schools when I was around ten years old. I made straight A’s, and constantly complained of being bored in class. In my free time, I worked my way through the works of Fitzgerald, Eliot, the Brontës, and as many of the Romantics as I could. While other children played, I wrote frankly atrocious poetry and fantasized about someday owning a typewriter. I say this not to brag about my incredibly antisocial childhood reading habits, but to emphasize that my father’s motivation for sending me down this path was entirely pure. He felt that I had potential, and wanted to do whatever he could to foster it.
So, alongside a bevy of other schools, I applied to St. Jude’s. It was the long shot. Being admitted wouldn’t mean anything if it didn’t come along with a scholarship, and it was the most exclusive school in the city.
St. Jude’s is the sort of place that billionaires send their children, promising quite literally the best education that money can buy. My admission came as a shock to me, but my dad seemed unsurprised, only proud and excited. Now, I know that the scholarship offer wasn’t quite the panacea that I assumed it to be at the time. It did not cover full tuition, leaving my dad to make up the rest of my tuition himself. The uniform is ludicrously expensive, as are lunches, extracurriculars, and tickets to school events such as dances and games. I couldn’t possibly afford any of the field trips my classmates took. Still, I recall entering St. Jude’s for the first time as one might enter the Notre Dame or Versailles, so astounded by my surroundings that I momentarily forgot about my own body. I bashed my knee on a bench that, according to the plaque, had been purchased with funds donated by a member of the Hearst family.
This majesty wore away slowly. I never really made friends; most students had known each other all their lives, or their parents were business partners, or they knew each other by reputation at the very least. I had never been one to have many friends, however, so this did not surprise me. I needed to work far harder to earn my A’s, but I had expected this as well; that was the entire point of attending a private school, after all.
My life became consumed by school. If I was not doing homework, I was studying. If I was not studying, I was working on a project for student government, or researching Ivies, or writing. I understood that this school was elite; it would take far more work to succeed here.
What took me far longer to understand was that St. Jude’s was not so rigorous for my classmates.
In my junior year, I began dating a girl who attends St. Jude’s sister school, the Constance Billard School for Girls. She actually belongs. Her family is well-known, well-respected, and ludicrously wealthy. Over the course of our relationship, I realized how little work she and some of her friends appeared to do, though their grades were frequently on par with my own. She and I frequently received different punishments for the exact same behavior; I was once threatened with expulsion over an infraction for which she served only a few hours of community service.
There are students at St. Jude's who openly and proudly discuss how they pay others to take exams for them, write essays for them, and complete their homework. These students are, of course, among the favorites of Ivy League admissions representatives. I can't even really blame said representatives. Their job is to admit the future lawyers, judges, senators, businesspeople, and presidents of the country. Speaking to me, then, serves them no purpose; my academics and my intentions don't matter. What matters is that Chuck Bass will one day run his father's company, not that he hasn't done his own homework since sixth grade. What matters is that Nate Archibald is a van der Bilt, not that he has zero interest in attending any of the Ivies clamoring for him to grace them with his presence. Students featured in the society pages fare better than those who spend their weekends studying, even among the elite.
Not all of my wealthy classmates attempt to skate by doing as little work as possible. Those students who dedicate themselves to their studies, however, will never be half as valuable to Harvard or Yale as those who are photographed next to power players in the New York Times.
After my scholarship was rescinded, once my dad was home, we did what we could to contest the decision, which turned out to not be very much at all. The school, as it turns out, does not need justification to rescind a scholarship the way they need justification to expel someone. My scholarship is a gift, as they’ve reminded me many times. A kindness funded by my classmates’ parents, which they are within their rights to withhold at any point, for any reason they see fit.
In my time at St. Jude’s, I have done all I can to make the most of my opportunities. I have tried to make connections. I treat the kids who occasionally vandalize my locker and treat me as a leper with kindness, though they will certainly take this article as proof that I never belonged in the first place. I have managed to contact accomplished writers, most of whom dismissed my work and some of whom encouraged me to write exposés on my classmates’ families. The famous writer and infamous alcoholic that I interned for all summer refused to write me a letter of recommendation for my college applications. My teachers all believe me to have somehow cheated my way into St. Jude’s, assume I am not intelligent enough to have completed my own work, and will not provide any letters of recommendation.
At this point, I don’t know where I’ll be after winter break. Enrolling in a new school for the final semester of one’s senior year is quite possibly the most miserable endeavor known to (high school) man. My dad wants to keep fighting. My girlfriend wants to take up a collection. My sister wants to organize a walk-out. For my part, I am leaning toward homeschooling. My dreams of Yale have been quite thoroughly dashed, and I am setting my sights on schools in-state. Depending on whether I can get another scholarship, I may end up taking a few years off to work and save up money for tuition.
I’ve read Gatsby many times, and thought about it often in my tenure at St. Jude’s School for Boys. I always used to find it deeply sad that Nick Carraway ultimately returns to the Midwest. This, of course, may just be the native New Yorker in me; I am biologically wired to believe that this is the greatest city in the world, and to bemoan either the weakness or stupidity of anyone that leaves.
Now, though, it appears painfully obvious that I had seen myself in Carraway. An observer, an understanding soul, someone capable of moving amongst the elite and, if not blending in, then at the very least not standing out. Now, facing down a blank slate of a future, I realize that I am a Gatz. Leaving, for me, is not a choice. Unlike the object of Carraway’s fixation, I can no longer see the green light that once beckoned me onward. The sea is dark; I have no clear destination.
Still, I beat on, boat against the current. What else is there?
Dan Humphrey is seventeen years old, a native of Brooklyn, and proud to be the son of alternative singer-songwriter Rufus Humphrey.