Ten Helicopters for the Wrong Girl
The entrance to the annual charity gala was a chaotic crush of people.
After I squeezed my way to the front, the school's star quarterback whistled, pointing right at me.
"Look, it's the gold digger who scammed her way into the Ivy League. That's the infamous sugar baby—rumor is, she'll go home with any man for the right price."
My dorm bed had been drenched in expensive red wine.
On the wall, "Bitch" and "Get Out" were scrawled in bright red lipstick.
The blonde, blue-eyed cheerleading captain, Blair Walcott, held up her phone.
"Girls, I seriously didn't want to expose her, but she's just so disgusting," she said, her face a perfect mask of contempt. "She's more desperate than any call girl. On Monday, it was a rich, handsome guy in a Rolls-Royce."
"On Wednesday, it was some old guy on a private jet—old enough to be her father. Yesterday, it was an elegant, sharp-looking gentleman in gold-rimmed glasses on a yacht. The type who looks like he owns the world."
She shoved the photos in the faces of the girls around her.
"Obviously, she's not here for a degree; she's here to land a sugar daddy."
The photos clearly showed me in those places, but I couldn't tell them the truth: that the men with me were my insanely controlling older brother, my ruthless uncle, and my formidable grand-uncle.
They were, respectively, the Crown Prince of the Duchy of Elandia, a top international lawyer, and the chairman of the Crestholm Family Foundation.
Roars of laughter erupted from the wealthy students around me, their eyes shamelessly raking over my body.
"Hey, new girl, how much for a night? I'll take a taste of that, too."
They had no idea that the men they sneered at as my "sugar daddies" were the powerful patriarchs of the Crestholm family—the very family their own parents were desperate to impress.