Maka
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jan 17, 2003
- Posts
- 1,432
The Telford Academy was legendary. It was older than the United States themselves. It produced an eighty five per cent rate of Ivy League acceptance. Three past presidents and eight Supreme Court Justices had been taught there. Telford alumni were an elite group, a class apart with their own private jokes and rituals. And, to the fury of hundreds of wealthy parents with underperforming children, one couldn't buy entrance. Despite the astronomical tuition fees, entrance was dependent on the student passing an extremely rigorous entrance exam, and keeping up an exceptionally high grade average during their time at the school as well as maintaining an exceptionally broad portfolio of extracurricular interests and participating in at least two sports.
Drop-out rates were somewhere in the region of thirty per cent every year. Suicides were not unknown in the pressure cooker of the Telford environment. Cliques, bullying and passionate love affairs all blossomed and burned out spectacularly within a single academic year. And yet Telford Academy continued to recieve vast appliation rates.
The press maintained a love/hate affair with the Academy. It was often called America's last class bastion. It was trying to fight this essentially accurate perception that the Academy had instituted the Tyson Scholarships. Every year, underprivileged American teenagers would be offered the chance to compete for a single, fully funded place at Telford Academy.
"They'll be destroyed."
Jonathan Blackwell offered the statement with cool, crisp and pitiless certainty. He was rarely anything other than coldly confident. He was the scion of the New England Blackwell family, one of the oldest and most powerful legal and political dynasties in America.
Jonathan was brilliant, already taking college-level classes in mathematics, philosophy and psychology. He had won at chess against grand masters, was infuriatingly good at everything he turned his mind to. He honed a taut, leanly muscular body playing tennis and practising judo. His sharp, saturnine good looks and arrogant charm made him devastatingly successful with girls. who reported him to be as successful in bed as everywhere else. Many admired Jonathan, some loved him, others hated and envied him, but few liked him. Liking Jonathan Blackwell hardly seemed an option. It would be liking a glacier, or a forest fire.
He seemed perfectly at ease in his surroundings, the sun-dappled morning room of Telford Academy's east wing. The room was decorated in spare, bright white lines with the academy's usual rigorously classicall aesthetic. Members of Jonathan's clique lounged around the room, which had been long been understood as their territory. One of them, Jo van Dorn who liked to affect a punk rock stylings in deliberate contrast to the prep aesthetic generally favoured at Telford, looked up.
"Who'll be destroyed?" she asked, running a hand through shorn, ice-blue locks.
"The scholarship kid," Jonathan explained. He stared out the window at the gardens below, stretching to the hedge maze and the distance green dome of the arboretum in the distance, his frozen blue eyes far away. "I understand the logic, but it won't work. Class insecurity on top of the Telford meatgrinder? They'll be destroyed."
"Eight to one on suicide, Jonathan? Shall I put you down for a c-note?" offered Parker Somers. But Jonathan did not respond.
Below, a taxi drew up into the Telford Academy courtyard. The high white walls of the school rose up on either side as the driver got out to take his passenger's luggage from the trunk.
Drop-out rates were somewhere in the region of thirty per cent every year. Suicides were not unknown in the pressure cooker of the Telford environment. Cliques, bullying and passionate love affairs all blossomed and burned out spectacularly within a single academic year. And yet Telford Academy continued to recieve vast appliation rates.
The press maintained a love/hate affair with the Academy. It was often called America's last class bastion. It was trying to fight this essentially accurate perception that the Academy had instituted the Tyson Scholarships. Every year, underprivileged American teenagers would be offered the chance to compete for a single, fully funded place at Telford Academy.
"They'll be destroyed."
Jonathan Blackwell offered the statement with cool, crisp and pitiless certainty. He was rarely anything other than coldly confident. He was the scion of the New England Blackwell family, one of the oldest and most powerful legal and political dynasties in America.
Jonathan was brilliant, already taking college-level classes in mathematics, philosophy and psychology. He had won at chess against grand masters, was infuriatingly good at everything he turned his mind to. He honed a taut, leanly muscular body playing tennis and practising judo. His sharp, saturnine good looks and arrogant charm made him devastatingly successful with girls. who reported him to be as successful in bed as everywhere else. Many admired Jonathan, some loved him, others hated and envied him, but few liked him. Liking Jonathan Blackwell hardly seemed an option. It would be liking a glacier, or a forest fire.
He seemed perfectly at ease in his surroundings, the sun-dappled morning room of Telford Academy's east wing. The room was decorated in spare, bright white lines with the academy's usual rigorously classicall aesthetic. Members of Jonathan's clique lounged around the room, which had been long been understood as their territory. One of them, Jo van Dorn who liked to affect a punk rock stylings in deliberate contrast to the prep aesthetic generally favoured at Telford, looked up.
"Who'll be destroyed?" she asked, running a hand through shorn, ice-blue locks.
"The scholarship kid," Jonathan explained. He stared out the window at the gardens below, stretching to the hedge maze and the distance green dome of the arboretum in the distance, his frozen blue eyes far away. "I understand the logic, but it won't work. Class insecurity on top of the Telford meatgrinder? They'll be destroyed."
"Eight to one on suicide, Jonathan? Shall I put you down for a c-note?" offered Parker Somers. But Jonathan did not respond.
Below, a taxi drew up into the Telford Academy courtyard. The high white walls of the school rose up on either side as the driver got out to take his passenger's luggage from the trunk.
