Watch Me Destroy My Career in Real Time!

A Literal Literary Loser Risks It All

I received such positive feedback to my May 8 post, Should I Bite the Hand That Feeds Me, (and by positive response, I mean so many emails, texts and social media messages basically saying, “Yes, please, do this reckless and ill-advised thing. I believe I shall find it most entertaining.”), that — your wish is my command — I’ve decided to offer readers the chance to watch me destroy my career in real time.

Read about why the novel my agent is currently shopping around, Admit None: An NYC Schools Mystery, could ensure my never earning a living again, at this link. Then read the below, and tell me if I’ve gone too far (or not far enough):

“Admit None: An NYC Schools Mystery”

Chapter One

Jamie Perlow guessed it was not a good sign to see her place of employment wrapped in Police Line Do Not Cross yellow tape.

Arete Academy for the Gifted occupied four back-to-back and side-to-side brown- stones on the corner of East 74th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. On most days, the sidewalk in front of the main entrance was swarming with uniformed nannies and/or casually dressed au pairs, not to mention a mother or two in a power-suit, maybe even the rare dad texting with one hand while petting a freshly-scrubbed child on the shoulder with the other. The Kindergarten through 12th graders dutifully marched into the building to shake hands, present mandatory eye contact, and offer a vigorous, “Good-morning, ma’am!” to the Head standing at the door, before scattering up and down the eight floors - not counting a gymnasium on the mezzanine or a cafeteria in the basement - to their respective classes, prepared to, yet again, meet, if not exceed, the recommended daily requirement of giftedness.

On this third week of February, three days before students returned from their Presidents’ Week break, the sidewalk should have been mostly deserted, save for the custodian dragging out garbage, or the skeleton crew of administrators and teachers who’d come in during this official time off to catch up on work and delude themselves into thinking they’d even manage to skip a few steps ahead before classes resumed, sneaking out for a furtive smoke break. At seven in the morning, when the white, fluffy snow from three days earlier had melted into impossible to avoid gray, freezing puddles surrounding every single curb in the city, making the otherwise simple task of crossing from one block to the next an endless game of “do I cross in the middle of the street and risk getting hit by a car, or do I use the crosswalk and spend the rest of the day sloshing around in drenched socks,” Jamie had expected to be the first, if not the only, person on the job. It’s not that she was that devoted. It’s that she was that behind. Mostly because she wasn’t that devoted to begin with.

Instead, the sidewalk in front of Arete Academy for the Gifted (Aggie, they called it; but only if you went there, worked there, or had a child there; if not, it came off totes wannabe) was cordoned off with the aforementioned yellow tape, while a trio of police cars loomed in the space where, on normal days, Lexus RX SUVs and X Model Teslas would be idling, dropping off charges and, soon as they were done, honking their horn at the car in front, demanding they do the same; didn’t they realize it was rude to block the street in such a manner?

Jamie wasn’t sure if she should duck under or step over the tape. Was she even allowed to? She’d seen enough crime scenes on TV to know the police didn’t appreciate being disturbed while they were drawing chalk outlines and taking pictures and making cynical, pithy remarks prior to the fade to black. Jamie understood there were rules and procedures to be followed. Problem was, she really wanted to know….

“What’s going on?” Jamie ducked under, letting yellow tape brush the back of her coat rather than trying to lift a water-logged boot over the barrier. She barreled past the ajar front door as if she belonged there. Which she did. She had a branded lanyard with a monogrammed ID with her name and photo on it, and everything. 

Jamie expected to be met by a uniformed cop, notepad in one hand, pen in the other, maybe chomping a cigarette or smacking gum to quench those nicotine cravings. She encountered, instead, a woman dressed in black slacks and a matching blazer over a white turtleneck sweater, light brown hair pulled back into a bun, holding a cell phone. She might have been a mom applying her offspring to Aggie. Jamie wondered if that’s who she actually was. Could the crime which attracted police attention be a desperate parent breaking in to adjust their admission application after the deadline had closed?

A quick flash of a badge disabused Jamie of that notion. “Your name, please?”

“J-Jamie Perlow.” Why, in the face of authority, did Jamie fear she’d somehow managed to get that wrong?

“Hm,” the policewoman said. Now Jamie felt certain she’d gotten it wrong. “Come with me, please.”

Was she under arrest? Was it, in fact, illegal to cross when the police line said do not cross?

She wasn’t being led toward the police cars, though. She was being led towards her own office. Well, her own cubicle, anyway. Zelda Fecko, Head of Admissions had her own office. Jamie, as her assistant, had a corner outside the door. Jamie’s desk was across from the couch where the anxious parents sat, waiting for their darlings to come out of their assessments with Zelda. They tried engaging Jamie in conversation, hoping she might drop some hints about what was going on behind the wood-paneled veil of secrecy, or how their lovingly crafted personal statements had stacked up against other families this particular season. It was Jamie’s job to reveal nothing. While surreptitiously watching the moms and dads, noticing everything, then reporting back to Zelda. Parents presumed they were only being judged during formal occasions like their interview. They didn’t realize the observation and judgment included their behavior on the tour - whether led by Zelda, Jamie, or a perky PTA volunteer (everybody jotted down their impressions afterwards, including what questions the visitors had asked, the most quotidian being, “But what do you do for the truly, truly advanced child?” which was an automatic red flag and the shortest path to rejection), and even while they sat, waiting. Scrutinizing how one responded to pressure during the admissions process told you plenty about how they’d respond to pressure if they were admitted, according to Zelda. Yet another way to preemptively weed out those who might cause more trouble than they were worth.

The door to Zelda’s office stood open. Jamie could see a team of police, this time in the uniforms she’d expected earlier, moving about, picking up varied objects from her desk and putting them down again with gloved hands. She caught the flash of a phone camera. She’d watched enough Law & Order to know what that meant.

“Zelda is… was…?” Her copious viewing had taught Jamie that referring to the deceased in the past tense before you were officially advised of their status was a key giveaway that you were the killer. But Jamie had also studied English and Drama at Yale, and “is” felt more grammatically correct in conjunction with “dead,” while “was” felt more appropriate to “murdered.” She wished she were a bit less educated. A sentiment she doubted had ever previously been verbalized within Aggie’s hallowed halls.

“Mrs. Fecko is dead,” the policewoman confirmed. “She was murdered.”

Jamie felt grammatically vindicated, but what instinctively came out of her mouth was the ingrained, “Ms. I – Zelda preferred Ms. Fecko. She resented that there wasn’t a way to tell a man’s marital status from his honorific, like there was for women.”

Something else Jamie learned from her TV watching was that you should never answer a question you hadn’t been asked. For someone who’d graduated summa cum laude, she sure was proving deficient at applying her knowledge to real-life situations. 

“Ms. Fecko was murdered,” came the agreeable adjustment. “Sometime between 10 PM and midnight yesterday. Your principal, Ms. Garcia, found her when she arrived this morning.”

“Miss Garcia is the Head of School.” What the hell was wrong with Jamie? Did she think this was a standardized test where you were tasked with sussing out all the errors in a given paragraph? Granted, she’d been particularly good at those, but who cared now? Nonetheless, since she’d already blurted as much, Jamie felt compelled to elaborate, “Talcot prefers Miss. She’s against the erasure of women and their perfectly legitimate choice not to marry. And Head of School is what all the previous men who held the position were called, so Talcot insists on the same.”

Jamie imagined that, in her line of work, this NYPD detective had heard anything and everything from suspects and witnesses alike. Yet she appeared stymied regarding how to respond to Jamie. That happened a lot. Jamie kept meaning to work on it.

“Are you aware of anybody with a grudge towards Ms. Fecko? Who might want to do her harm? As her assistant, do you have access to her correspondence? Email? Letters? Deliveries? Has she received any threats recently?”

“There’s an Admissions email account that we both use. Zelda has her personal one, I don’t go into there. And I open most of the mail that comes in. All our applications are on-line now, but some people still like to send handwritten thank you notes after the parent and child interviews. They think it comes off as more sincere. We don’t care. And we do receive deliveries sometimes. Families send gifts to try and get into Zelda’s good graces. But unless it’s something like flowers or candy, which we share with the entire school, in the Teachers’ Lounge, usually; if it’s something extravagant like a silk scarf or a designer purse, or Broadway show tickets, we send those right back. We can’t risk the accusation of bribery.” 

“People send gifts like scarves and purses and theater tickets so they can… get into school?”

“So that their children can get into school, yes. But, you’re right, the way some moms and dads act, it’s like they’re the ones applying. Zelda has a saying: Remember, we’re not rejecting your child, we’re rejecting you.” Hearing how that axiom might sound to someone not drowning daily in essays describing a five year old’s achievements as including “Mandarin, violin, chess, triathlon, botany (i.e. He likes to sweep up piles of leaves in Central Park) and paleontology (i.e. She loves her plastic dinosaur figurines),” Jamie rushed to amend, “She doesn’t say it to the parents. Too often.”

“But the ones she does say it to, they might get angry enough to kill?”

“We get about eight hundred applications every year for our Kindergarten class, about six hundred for middle school, and close to one thousand for high school, not to mention a handful at every other, non-traditional entry year grade level that isn’t K, 6th or 9th. We can only take fifty, twenty-five boys and twenty-five girls, and some of those spaces are already spoken for. Siblings get priority, and so do legacies - children whose parents attended Aggie previously. Many more people get rejected than get accepted. I suppose most of them are angry about it.”

“Have any of them made credible threats? Recently?”

“Well, we’re in the middle of the season. Towards the end, actually. Applications were due in December, and we finished up all the child interviews in January. We’re pretty set by now on who’s getting in. There’s a definite yes pile, and a definite no pile, and a couple of people still on the bubble. We don’t just balance for gender. We try to balance for race and ethnicity and religion. Oh, and for birth-dates – you know, so that the class isn’t too full of older kids or younger kids. And for socio-economics. Aggie is very proud that twenty-two percent of each grade, Kindergarten through twelfth, is made up of students on financial aid. We’re in the home-stretch now. Notification letters go out a week from this Friday; nearly all private schools send them on the same day. We have to if we’re members of ISAAGNY, that’s the Independent School Admissions Association of Greater NY. We’re pretty sure we know who we’re accepting, but if we hear at the last minute that someone sent a first-choice letter to another school - you’re not supposed to anymore, we’re not allowed to ask and they’re not allowed to tell us, but people still do, they think it ups their chances of getting in, so the admissions officers at all the schools keep each other updated, nobody wants to waste acceptance on a kid who’s definitely not coming, it hurts our yield - so then we take them out of our yes pile, and we replace them with someone who matches their demographics.”

The detective was looking at Jamie with the same expression that her boyfriend, Logan, had whenever Jamie tried to share about her day at work. Any day. Every day. Logan may have gone to Aggie. He may have been the one who arranged for Jamie to get the job assisting Zelda almost two years ago, but that didn’t mean he wanted to hear about how the process worked. As far as Logan recalled, one day his mom brought him to visit a lady in an office who asked Logan to skip while clapping or tapping his head, look at pictures and arrange them in chronological order, copy a pattern using building blocks with colorful shapes, draw a self-portrait, then tell some stories with puppets and, next thing Logan knew, he was being stuffed into a blue blazer, khaki pants and a cap with a logo on it, and being dropped off at Aggie’s front door. So how hard could it be?

Jamie realized she hadn’t answered the question she’d been asked. Maybe she should consider doing that. “What I’m trying to say is, lots more people don’t get in than do get in. So if every person Zelda ever rejected from Aggie is a suspect….”

“Have they all made threats?”

“Well, no.”

“Have any of them made threats?”

“Sure. Some. But they’re along the lines of: You’ll be sorry. My son is going to be national chess champion and you’ll have given up the opportunity to enroll him at your school, or My daughter is developing a unifying theory of everything, succeeding where Stephen Hawkings failed, which proves she’s too good for your lousy school, that sort of thing. They more wish for bad things to happen to us. Like, they hope somebody treats us as horribly as we’ve treated them, and that our kids end up on the street, hooked on drugs, or that we get fired and blackballed from working in admissions ever again, since we have no ability to judge true genius when we see it. And then they tell us how we probably wouldn’t have accepted Einstein, because he didn’t speak until he was four and failed all his math and science classes. Which isn’t true, by the way. It’s a myth that got started when people misunderstood the German grading system.”

There Jamie went again, answering questions she hadn’t been asked. To a person who, like Logan, didn’t give a fraction of a damn.

The woman looked around her. There wasn’t much to observe in the admissions vestibule. Behind Jamie’s desk was a mounted school crest, featuring an open book to denote knowledge freely shared, the school mascot, a raven, a nod to their immense intelligence and a reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s classic poem, a tree, which spoke of Aggie’s commitment to conservation and also invoked the Biblical tree of knowledge, as well as a cross. Jamie was present at an all-school meeting when a self-identified Hindu parent asked why the cross was there, when Aggie was not a religious institution. She was advised that the cross represented all religions. On either side of the emblem hung frames filled with graduation photos of class after class decked out in the school colors, purple and white, all smiling broadly. The only difference from the 1920’s to the 2020’s was the school going from all-boys to co-ed, from all white to… slightly less all white. “What’s so great about this place, anyhow?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Isn’t that what you ask in all those essays parents have to write? You ask them to explain why they want to be here?”

“Yes. But, the reason parents say they want to be here, the reason they think they want to be there, it’s not the real reason.”

“You’re a mind reader?”

“Me? No. But Zelda, she’s been doing this for twenty years. She explained it. She said the parents think they love our curriculum, where kids learn Latin and Shakespeare in third grade, or when we introduce trigonometry in middle school, or the Makerspace to program their own robots, or how our students often qualify for the State Geography Bee. But it’s not that, not really. What it really is, is that every parent thinks their child is remarkable. The smartest, the most talented, the cleverest, the most special. But they know they’re not supposed to say that out loud. Well, most of them know. The ones that don’t know, those are the ones Zelda eliminates first.”

“Remember, we’re not rejecting your child, we’re rejecting you.”

“Yes, exactly! It’s not that the rest feel any differently, they just understand you’re not supposed to run around, blurting it out. That’s what they need us for. We validate what they already believe about their child. We give them that desperately needed seal of approval. If Aggie says yes, your child is gifted, yes, your child deserves to be here, yes, they belong in this hallowed company, alongside all the famous alumni who came before them, it validates the parents. Not just their parenting, per se, but their entire existence. Their taste and their judgment and their life choices. Also, Aggie has enough of a reputation - not just in New York City, around the world, really - that it saves the parents the trouble of explaining just how remarkable their child is. The Aggie brand does it for them. They can be as modest as they like now. They don’t have to brag. As soon as someone asks where your child goes to school - and, in New York, that’s like the third question, after what do you do and how much real estate do you own? - you say Aggie, and that’s it, there’s nothing more that needs to be said. They know your child is special. And, by extension, that you’re special too.”

Had Jamie said too much again? She realized how silly most of it sounded, how irrelevant, how unreal. She hadn’t known it herself, before moving to NYC. And it’s not like Jamie had grown up poor or even middle class. Jamie’s parents had created some of the most popular television sitcoms of the 1980s and 1990s. She’d gone to private school herself, nursery through high school. But if anyone thought they understood the New York private school scene because they’d gone through it in Los Angeles, or San Francisco, or London, or Singapore, well, they were just wrong. NY was its own animal, its own ecosystem, its own fiefdom. You couldn’t fully comprehend it until you swirled in the middle of it. Until you’d seen captains of industry, financial masters of the universe, heiresses, movie stars and mafia figures groveling in front of someone making the same amount of money per year that they might spend on a single night out.

“So,” the detective said slowly, nodding her head rhythmically as she processed what Jamie had just explained to her. “Definitely something worth killing over.”

***

For those who think I’m exaggerating, here’s a report I was interviewed for, when news of NYC Kindergarten insanity made international news!