6. Will
WILL
Iget a notification from the group chat.
What the fuck kind of shit is this?
I Google Oak Hill Golf Club. As expected, it’s a fancy ass, private country club where you have to either be a member, or be the guest of a member to even enter.
Priestley, or his family, must be so important to this fancy club that he’s allowed to bring multiple guests.
There’s probably a dress code. He’s going to give poor Peter hell.
I send Priestley a private message outside of the group chat.
Don’t you think we should meet somewhere easier for everyone to get to? Like the library?
I stare at my phone, waiting for a reply.
If you don’t have a membership, William, I’d be happy to sponsor you as a guest. There’s just a short questionnaire I’d need you to fill out. A few personal details. Nothing major.
I can imagine the sorts of things this questionnaire might ask. I wouldn’t be surprised if Priestley wrote it himself just to get some dirt.
My blood boils. I didn’t work this fucking hard to get excluded from group meetings.
I message everyone else in the group individually.
No one seems to have a problem with the setting.
Peter Chow tells me his dad is a member and he’s been there a few times.
They have good ice cream, apparently. Either Emily and Scott don’t have a problem with Priestley’s questionnaire bullshit, or he saved that just for me.
Well, fuck me. I’m the only one who has a problem with this.
I think about going to Professor Moreno, but I’m not a snitch.
I can deal with Priestley myself. As she said, this group project is all about preparing us for difficult personalities.
The world of finance is going to be full of Priestleys.
If I learn how to deal with him now, it’ll be a whole lot easier later.
I’m still trying to figure out how to get into this stupid country club without Priestley when I head over to the rink for my shift.
A few of the guys are out on the ice, doing precision practice shots on net. I recognize a few of them from games we played against these guys last year. But one of them—Spencer—is especially familiar because we played juniors together on the same team for years.
He skates over to the bench and shakes my hand, giving me a pat on the back. He’s from one of those wealthy Boston families with a big house up on Beacon Hill.
“What are you doing here? I heard you graduated.”
“I’m just helping the equipment manager out while I get my grad degree.”
“Grad degree.” He whistles. “Forgot you’re smart as shit. It’s different here from BC, right?”
“You could say that.”
He laughs. “Any of those legacies giving you shit, man?”
“Nah.” I think about Priestley. It must show on my face because he probes.
“You sure?”
“There’s this one guy—Priestley Rosenthal.”
Spencer looks like he’s remembering something. “Wait a minute, Rosenthal? His dad’s a real prick, owns half of … well, everything.”
“You know him?”
“My dad does.”
That sounds about right. Spencer’s dad’s a big shot, too. A lot of kids I played with in juniors came from wealthy families. Hockey’s expensive to get into. You’ve got to shell out for a lot of equipment, then coaching, camps, travel expenses.
“He’s got us meeting at some fancy ass country club,” I say. “It’s so obvious he’s trying to push me out, but he knows I won’t snitch on him.”
“You don’t have a membership?”
I shake my head. I don’t need to be embarrassed about not having a membership to a country club, especially not around another hockey player. Most well-off hockey players usually play down their wealth.
“What one is it?”
I tell him the name.
“Oh, that’s my dad’s favorite place. No sweat man, I’ll get you in.”
“Seriously?”
“Hey, you saved my ass out there on the ice and made me look good I don’t know how many times when we played juniors together. I owe you one.”
“Don’t I have to fill out some sort of questionnaire?”
He frowns. “No, I don’t think so.”
Fucking Priestley.
PRIESTLEY
Everything’s going to plan.
I’ve reserved a table in a quiet part of the dining room for our team meeting. The sun is shining on an unseasonably warm day. People playing golf out on the course. The sound of quiet chatter over business mergers on nearby tables.
I’m in my element.
And best of all—Will O’Reilly can’t follow me here.
Even Peter Chow looks reasonably well put together.
To be honest, I had thought he’d be the first to message me, asking for a sponsorship.
I should have known better than to judge him based on appearance alone.
Some of the wealthiest men in the world are also shabby dressers.
Look at the state of Richard Branson. The man can’t even get a decent haircut.
I’m about to start the meeting when I spot someone new entering the dining room. I glance at them and automatically glance away before doing a double take.
No, surely not. How did he get in?
I offer a fake smile. “William, so glad you could make it.”
Will gives me a look that turns my blood to ice. The waiter takes a seat from an empty table and pulls it up for him.
Will thanks him, ignoring me.
“I wasn’t aware you had a membership here,” I go on, unwilling to sit in the silence. “I would have been happy to sponsor you as a guest. There was no need to go to any trouble.”
He smooths his hand over a napkin on the table. Of course he looks good in a suit. Damnit.
“It was no trouble,” he says.
He’s giving me serial killer vibes right now. Acting all calm and collected in front of the witnesses before he takes me somewhere private and does me in with a butcher’s knife.
“How did you ...” I trail off. I’m losing face by showing him I care, but I need to know how he got in here. He’s obviously welcome, because if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have made it past the entrance.
He raises his eyebrows. “I have friends, too, Priestley. One whose dad knows your dad.”
“Oh? What’s his name? I’d like to thank him.”
“No need. I already did.”
I wait for more information. When none comes, I drop the subject, though not knowing is killing me.
It hinders my concentration and I somehow end up ceding control of the meeting to Will.
I wait until the rest of the group are leaving at the end of the meeting to pull Will into a quiet corner and ask him how the hell he got in here.
He smiles. It’s infuriating. “It’s killing you not being in control for once, isn’t it?”
I smooth a hand through my hair, just in case I have a strand out of place. I noticed a couple of waitresses whispering behind their hands through dinner and looking at Will. Let’s just say, if he stands out here, it isn’t for the wrong reasons.
I grit my teeth. “I’m asking you a simple question. Why must you be so insolent?”
“Just admit one thing to me first.”
“What?”
“You had this meeting here so I wouldn’t be able to come, didn’t you?”
I scoff. “If I didn’t want you to come, why would I offer to bring you as a guest?”
“So, it was just to humiliate me then?”
When he words it like that, it makes me sound like such a dick.
“Not humiliate, no….” I trail off. I’m no longer sure why I did it. To exert my power? To remind him of our places? No, that doesn’t sound very good either. I am not a bad guy. This isn’t personal, it’s just business. Why can’t he see that? It’s a competition, for heaven’s sake.
He sighs. “I played juniors with a guy on the hockey team. He owed me a favor.”
“Hockey. I knew it had to be something like that.”
Will rolls his eyes. “Are you happy now?”
Not really.
I spot someone coming toward us, recognize him as an old friend of my father’s.
I stand up a little taller and straighten my tie. Will frowns, noticing the sudden change in my demeanor.
“Priestley,” George says. “Are you here with your father?”
I shake his hand. “No, sir. I held a group meeting here with my class from Princeton.”
“Ah, yes, of course. Your father told me you were on the graduate program. You’ll be joining him at work soon, no doubt.”
I glance at Will. His jaw’s doing that thing again.
“I expect so.”
Will’s nostrils flare.
“Mr. Wilkes, this is a classmate of mine, William O’Reilly.”
I see George Wilkes scanning his brain for the family name. Coming up blank.
“Nice to meet you, sir,” Will says, holding his hand out for George to shake.
I have to say, he looks the part. He doesn’t try to mask his accent, but then, most people wouldn’t recognize it as being particularly strong anyway. A lot of people have an accent.
“You’ll both have to join me for a round of golf some time.”
We both nod, then an idea comes to me.
“How about sometime this week? William, are you free? I know you have your job and everything.”
To his credit, Will only looks taken aback for a second before he composes himself.
“Sure,” he says. He sounds confident, but he must be bluffing. How good can a hockey player be at golf?
When I get home, I carry out some research on William O’Reilly—something I should have done earlier. I underestimated him. I won’t make the same mistake again.
His college hockey career was mediocre. There are the usual pictures of him in that stupid hockey gear, mostly hidden in a large group, holding up a trophy.
I can’t find anything on his junior career, but that isn’t too important anyway.
I have to will myself to keep going. Even reading a couple of articles on college hockey bores me to tears.
What I don’t quite understand, is why he got his undergraduate degree at Boston College where he played hockey and then his Masters at Princeton.
Princeton is more well-known for its undergraduate programs. I’m here because my father hates every other Ivy League school—especially Harvard—and anything less than Ivy League is unacceptable.
Had Will been rejected from Princeton originally?
I’m probably clinging to this scenario so I have ammunition in our little sparring matches.
Will O’Reilly doesn’t have an Instagram account.
At least, not one that I can find. I do a quick scan of Facebook, just in case, and find a private account with an old profile picture of a young Will, smiling in a maroon hockey jersey.
He probably has this account to keep up with old school friends or family members.
I don’t imagine there’ll be anything interesting enough on there worth trying to friend him to find out.
My research has given me nothing to go on. All I can do is call on my experience at beating people by any means necessary.
Taking the business card from my pocket, I call George Wilke’s office and agree on a time for Will and I to play golf with him next Wednesday.