Baby, You're a Rich Man

Chapter 4

The next morning, I arose bright and early to bid farewell to my father before he left for work.

"Make me proud," he said, patting me on top of my brown, wavy hair.

"I always try, dad," I assured him.

My mom offered to drive both Pete and me to the school, since Pete's parents were too busy to take him and neither Pete nor I had turned sixteen yet.

"I wonder what it'll be like," Pete muttered dreamily.

"Will we have to wear uniforms?" I countered.

"Will we have 'professors' instead of 'teachers'?"

"Will everyone else there be rich?"

"You boys will just have to wait and see," my mom told us, smiling. "I'm sure it will be very different."

We pulled into the Milford parking lot at 7:30 a.m. In front of us sat a three-story building with marble stairs leading to an archway wrapped in vines.

"This is where I leave you," my mother sighed. "This is where hopefully all your dreams will come true."

So, after one final hug for my mother, my old beat-up suitcase in one hand and my guitar slung over the opposite shoulder, we went inside.

The inside of Milford was just as impressive as the outside. Velvet rugs lined the floors, and above us we could see two overlooking balconies and a forty-foot-high ceiling with a chandelier hanging from it.

"What are your names?" a tall kid with reddish hair asked us hurriedly, a notepad in one hand and a pen in the other.

"Uh...Charles Hamilton," I said warily.

"Peter Benson," Pete added.

The kid flipped through his notepad in search of our names. "Bakersville?" he asked at last. We nodded.

"I'm Jimmy," the tall kid introduced. "I've been asked to show you boys the school."

"Er...okay," I replied awkwardly.

"We'll have to get you measured for uniforms later," Jimmy said, signaling to his own tie and blazer. "But for now, I'm just going to show you around a bit."

As we walked alongside Jimmy, we took in his every word. "First of all, congratulations," he told us. "Every year, we get a freshman class of about a hundred kids who pay to attend our school. However, every year we also pick fifty schools across the state to send us their two best sophomore students to join the class. That's you, boys."

We walked through hallways, past various groups of teachers and students, but something that stood out to me immediately about Milford was how well the school uniforms hid the division of class. Looking at a student in the hall, I couldn't discern whether that student came from a rich family and had bought his way into the school, or if he had simply been accepted based on merit. Bakersville, on the other hand, made it easy to tell who was rich and who wasn't. Besides the fact that the majority of people in Bakersville had little to no money, the ones that did were easy to pick out. Instead of leather jackets or overgrown farm clothes, upper class kids were known to wear plaid and overalls. Here, however, all those lines between classes were blurred. I wondered if the lines between cliques were also blurred.

"This is the math hallway," Jimmy said, stating the obvious. I stared at the wallpaper, which was covered in thousands of tiny numbers, all in a row. At least, I thought it was wallpaper at first, but the more I stared at the tiny white digits, the more I began to notice subtle differences between them. The numbers had been painted on the wall—individually, by the looks of them.