Chapter 1 : Part 1

How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls
by Zoey Dean

Recent Yale graduate Megan Smith comes to Manhattan with big plans for a career in journalism and even bigger student loan debt: $75,000, to be exact. When she flails at a disastrous editorial meeting at her trashy tabloid job, Megan is called into the editor-in-chief's office certain that she's going to be fired. And she is. Sort of....

As it turns out, Megan's suddenly ex-boss is old friends with the grandmother of seventeen-year-old identical twins Rose and Sage Baker - the infamous Baker heiresses of Palm Beach, Florida, best known for their massive fortunes and their pension for drunkenly flashing the paparazzi. Their grandmother is set on the girls attending Duke University despite their combined GPA of roughly 0.2. And if Megan can tutor the girls and get them into Duke, their grandmother will pay off Megan's college loans in full.

Unfortunately for Megan, the Baker twins aren't about to bend their busy social schedules for basic algebra. And they certainly aren't thrilled to have to sit down for a study session with dowdy Megan, who quickly discovers that if she's going to get her bonus, she'll have to know her Pucci from her Prada. And if she can look the part, maybe, just maybe, she can teach them something along the way.

Chapter 1

Snatching my receipt from the bodega ATM, I already knew the bad news. I'd just withdrawn two hundred dollars, and my account balance was hovering a little over zero. So I stashed the cash and receipt in my battered backpack and asked what any recent Yale graduate whose student loans had left her seventy-five thousand bucks in debt would wonder:

"Let's say I'm going for maximum cash."

"Hard to say. Let's go find you a pimp in Tompkins Square Park." Charma examined her reflection in the anti-shoplifting mirror above the limp-looking green vegetables. "Or we could ask your sister."

My sister. Lily. As Charma well knew, Lily was playing a rich-girl-turned-hooker-turned-pimp in Streets, Doris Egan's new off-Broadway play. Lily's photo had graced the cover of last week's Time Out: "The New Season's Must-See Young Thesp."

My sister had been must-see her whole life. Drop-dead gorgeous, talented singer and dancer, Brown University grad, Lily had been born to be stared at. As I took in my own reflection in the warped deli mirror - medium height and weight, size eight on the top and size ten on the bottom on a good day, long brown hair exceptionally prone to frizz, a heart-shaped face with nice enough hazel eyes, a thin nose, and lips like the "before" photo on a lip-plumper ad - I wondered for the zillionth time how Lily and I shared a gene pool.

The chief reason I'd chosen to attend Yale was so I could do one thing in my life that was more impressive than what she had.

The immaturity of this is not lost on me, by the way.

"Come on," I told Charma. "I don't want to miss him."

We headed out of the bodega and crossed East Seventh, dodging a couple of joggers and a bag lady carrying on a onesided conversation with the president: "You call that a foreign policy, you asshole?" It was one of those crystalline Indiansummer days when nature puts on a last-ditch floor show - the stubborn final leaves of autumn danced on their branches as the low November sun bathed them in ocher light. I wore my usual no-name jeans, a white Hanes T-shirt, and an ancient navy cardigan that my favorite of our family's three dogs, Galbraith, used to sleep on when he was a puppy.

"Where are you meeting this guy?" Charma asked.

"Southwest corner." I scanned the crowded benches lining the walkway to the center of the park. Everyone was enjoying the mild weather that surely wouldn't last longer than a day or two.

"Did he tell you what he looks like?"

"Tall, thin, dark hair cut short, soul patch, right ear pierced with a rhinestone stud," I rattled off. "He'll be wearing a red flannel shirt and Levi's, loose-fit."

"Boxers or briefs?" Charma asked.

I raised an eyebrow.

"I just wondered. Since you've got every other detail down."

"When I told him I was twenty-two, he said he was twentynine, which probably means he's mid-thirties and trying to pass. So I'd guess boxer-briefs." I made a beeline for an empty bench to our right. Too late. Three old Polish ladies had spotted it first.

"Oh, like that's not killing my brain cells on a daily basis."

I had a magna cum laude degree with a double major in English and American history and had been features editor of the Yale Daily News. So you can't say I arrived in Manhattan with the wrong credentials. I thought I'd have no problem finding a job writing in-depth stories at an important but leftleaning periodical like The New Yorker, or Rolling Stone, or hell, even Esquire - which only shows that a girl can be twenty-two years old, ridiculously well educated, and still as dumb as a bag of hair.

As it turned out, every other graduate from every other Ivy League school had come to New York the day after graduation, and we all wanted the exact same jobs. Many of them, however, had something that I lacked. Connections.

My dad is a professor in the economics department at the University of New Hampshire, and my mom is a nursepractitioner at campus health services. Lily and I had grown up in an old farmhouse filled with books, intelligent conversation, and excessive pet fur. My folks lived an ecological life. Theirs had been voted Best Compost Heap by Earth Lovers, the local greenie newspaper. It is a little-known fact that parents who win Best Compost Heap cannot help their daughter find a job at a hot-shit New York City magazine.

June morphed into July, which morphed into the hothouse of August, and I still was ridiculously unemployed. Then, right after Labor Day, I got my first and only job offer. Since I owed Charma the September rent and felt it would behoove me to sustain my body on something other than ramen noodles and canned tuna, it was either become an editorial assistant at Scoop or learn to intone "May I run through our specials this evening?" with a perky smile on my face. Walking gracefully while carrying hot food is not my strong suit. Nor is perkiness. The choice was made.

You know Scoop, though you may not admit to actually purchasing it. It's one step up from Star and two steps down from People. A few of my highlights to date included captioning such photo spreads as "Did Jessica Get Implants?" and "Lindsay's Wild Mexican Vacation!" Yes, I'd found it necessary to lower my journalistic aspirations a standard deviation. Or ten.

As Charma and I ambled along, a guy with short blond hair, a day's worth of stubble, and a ratty Wolfmother T-shirt smiled at us. Well, her. Charma turned to watch him pass, letting out a low, appreciative whistle. She 's a much better flirt than I am.

I looked around, trying to find my mark. There was a junkie looking to score at ten o'clock. At high noon were two teenage schoolgirls with too much everything - makeup, hair, boobs, skin, stiletto boots - who apparently felt the need to shriek every other word at each other. Then I spotted a guy in jeans and a flannel shirt cutting through a stand of trees at two o'clock. Bingo. I waved.

"Megan?" He held out a hand with slightly dirty fingernails, but I was in no position to turn down a shake. He had something I really, really wanted.

"Yeah, hi, thanks for coming. Pete, right?"

"Yeah."

Copyright © 2007 by Zoey Dean

About the Author

Zoey Dean is the author of the New York Times bestselling A-LIST series. She grew up in Beverly Hills and now lives in Palm Beach, where she is working on her next novel and dreaming of a Pulitzer - Lilly Pulitzer, that is.