Wealth, status, and beauty define the elite of Kensington Prep. Every one of them possesses the ability to get away with anything and everything they want, unscathed and remain as privileged and superior as ever.
But Amory Scout decides that tim...
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Before my parents died and Atticus took his own life, I actually led a quiet, simple life.
My father worked as a chemical engineer so I've inherited my interest in chemistry, narcotics, and explosions from him while my mother was a kindergarten teacher at Kensington Prep, which was one of the reasons why I managed to go to that school since kindergarten for a discounted price. At that time, I went by a different name and a different look. Once upon a time, I had dark brown hair and my full name was Bronte Amory Emerson- sorry, is.
In order to fully complete my transition as a new person into Kensington Prep, I've changed my name by going by my middle name, Amory, which not many people know about, and using my mother's maiden name, 'Scout'. That way, Orson and his friends will not see the connection with 'Emerson' to my past.
I knew deep down in order to be successful in my vendetta, I had to become a completely different person. Not just as a safety net but in order to seep into their ranks and become one of them. I had to talk, look and act differently.
Being in Los Angeles, the town of the rich and famous, and attending Beverly Hills High, an institution that overflowed with hot girls, have made the change from dorky nobody to glamorous Elite a lot easier. On the West Coast, the newly rich and attention-hungry dominated the A-List. The only reason that anyone became anybody was because you were hot with a verified checkmark on Instagram or because your parents were movie stars, had their own TV series or talent agency or ran a studio.
The top of the food chain in New York was demarcated differently, along the lines of old money, relationship to royalty, and/or the arts. You could be an Elite if you could trace your lineage back to Peter Stuyvesant; you could be an Elite if you were the kid of the first-name partner at a Wall Street law firm; you could be an Elite if you were well-reviewed in the New York Review of Books.
One thing that never differed between the two towns was the requirement of looking the part. Luckily, being in LA, a city full of girls always trying to fix something about themselves, has made this easy to pick up on what I needed to do to properly transform.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, I had only just turned fifteen and yet it seemed as if every other person I've met in Southern California had work done, including a lot of my classmates at Beverly Hills High School. None of them admitted it, of course. But showing up after vacation with a different nose ("I had a deviated septum; that's the only reason I did it"), sudden cleavage ("I just developed late"), or newly toned former thunder thighs ("I'm doing South Beach, plus I found this amazing cream that melts cellulite") was so commonplace as to be banal. If anything, I quickly realized, not having any work done was bound to get you some strange stares.
So for my fifteen-birthday, I begged Veronica to sign the permission slip at the surgeon's office and bought myself the best breasts money could buy, along with fixing my crooked nose. I changed my name from Bronte Emerson to Amory Scout, bleached my boring brown hair into a glossy, golden blonde, and invested in an Equinox gym membership. But I wasn't always this way- minding over my appearance, caring about clothes, or how my butt looked in a pair of jeans.
