Chapter 2
I didn’t accept the money right away.
Instead, I typed:
I don’t want money.
A moment later, he replied.
Then what do you want?
I stared at the line, my heart pounding.
I don’t want to go to school anymore.
The chat went silent.
At the same time, the floating text appeared again.
Clare has some nerve. Trying to become a sugar baby the second she gets an opening.
Too bad the male lead hates gold diggers like this. He likes ambitious women.
Just wait. He won’t reply.
Older men despise this type the most.
My heart tightened, and I hurried to send another message.
I mean, I want to drop out and retake the SAT. Can you help me?
Time ticked by, second by second.
I stared at the screen, my palm damp with sweat.
One minute.
Two minutes.
Just when I started to think he had figured out I wasn’t the original girl and would never reply again, a new message appeared.
Okay.
The very next day, I got a call.
The caller introduced himself as Mr. Quinn’s assistant and asked me to bring my ID documents to a café near campus. He said he wanted to discuss my SAT retake.
Even though Stella had never shared her real identity information with the man online, I was still nervous when I went.
Fortunately, after Assistant Lewis looked over my documents, he didn’t say anything strange. He simply asked, “Do you have a target university?”
I felt embarrassed.
“Harvard,” I admitted.
Assistant Lewis looked mildly surprised.
The floating text exploded in front of me.
Clare, do you have some kind of misunderstanding about Harvard?
Does she seriously think the older man can buy her a Harvard acceptance letter?
Her level is community college at best. She should stay there.
I knew it sounded ridiculous.
The only reason I had ended up at community college in the first place was because I had gotten a fever during the SAT and missed one section. After my scores came out, I had wanted to retake it, but my parents refused. They said I should just start college early so they could focus their support on my younger brother.
Even so, my SAT score had still been more than one hundred points higher than Stella’s and all her friends’.
So when Assistant Lewis didn’t laugh at me, I almost thought I had misheard him.
“That’s fine,” he said with a nod. “We’ll create a plan for you based on getting into Harvard.”
I blinked. “What kind of plan?”
He folded his hands neatly on the table. “First, we’ll help you withdraw from your current school. The state you’re in now is too competitive for what Mr. Quinn has in mind. We’ll relocate you to Massachusetts, handle the local enrollment procedures, and hire professional one-on-one tutors.”
I stared at him.
Transfer to Massachusetts?
Did that mean I could prepare there and apply with local advantages?
The educational resources where I came from were nothing like Massachusetts. And private tutoring—real one-on-one tutoring—was something I had never even dreamed of.
If I’d had that kind of help before, would I really have needed to guess on the last physics problem?
I forced myself to stay calm.
“Assistant Lewis… how much is all of this going to cost?”
He gave me a polite smile.
“You don’t need to worry about money, Miss Clare. Mr. Quinn will take care of it.”