The Wrong Kind of Money by Stephen; Birmingham Read Free Book Online

two have been given the nicknames Toots and Caspar. We’ll leave it to you to guess which name belongs to which.
    Melody is also nearly a full year younger than Anne, making Melody one of the few seventeen-year-olds in their class. She has always been an intellectually gifted child. At the age of four it was discovered that Melody had taught herself to read. In grammar school, because she was so much more gifted than the others in her class, she was allowed to skip the entire third grade so she could be placed in a group where she would find the work more challenging. She has been challenging her classmates, and her teachers, ever since.
    Melody, in further contrast to her best friend, is from a relatively poor family, and attends Bennington on a special scholarship. Her father, a career diplomat, holds a minor post in the U.S. State Department, and is presently stationed in Japan. Because her parents can ill afford to send their daughter halfway around the world for the winter break, for the past four years she has been spending these weeks with Anne and her family in New York. Noah and Carol have become very fond of Melody, and have begun to think of themselves almost as her foster parents.
    There will be one other guest at the little family dinner party tonight, thanks to Melody. His name is William Luckman. You may have heard of him. Only twenty-one, he is the prodigal young Yale senior who has just published his first book, Blighted Elms, that has been climbing best-seller lists all over the country. His book’s title is ironic. Taking as his central image the Dutch elm disease that has devastated Yale’s once leafy campus, he wrote a book that is a startling exposé of the degree of sexual promiscuity that has afflicted, and diseased, a prestigious Eastern university. Names, of course, have been changed, but just barely. Yale, for instance, is called “Eli University” in the book, and several members of Yale’s faculty and student body are said to be able to recognize themselves in Mr. Luckman’s pages. There has been some sword-rattling talk of lawsuits.
    Homosexuality and lesbianism account for only some of the tamer revelations. The amount of faculty-student sex is prodigious, according to the author. Incidents of sexual blackmail within the college community are rampant, as are cases of physical and sexual abuse and harassment of minors. A child pornography ring operates openly, while drug and alcohol abuse abounds. Male and female students in need of money sell themselves as prostitutes, while a prominent dean earns handsome sums as a pimp and a procurer. Orgies involving students, professors, and administrators are described in vivid detail, while the top administrators—from the president on down—and even the college’s trustees provide an elaborate and cynical cover-up. In Blighted Elms Eli University emerges as a cesspool of degeneracy and depravity, crime and vice.
    The book has become a succès de scandale. And, needless to say, Mr. Luckman’s scorching depiction of this college and its sexual mores—and the book’s sudden huge popularity and the publicity surrounding it—have left Mr. Luckman’s future at Yale somewhat problematic. He has not yet been expelled—and has in fact almost arrogantly dared the college to expel him. “The only reason they haven’t done it is because they know that will only generate more publicity for my book,” he has stated. “I hope there are lawsuits, because lawsuits sell books, and whoever sues me will have to prove that what I say isn’t true. They’re scared to expel me. They’re caught between a rock and a hard place. If they don’t kick me out, they’re admitting my details are accurate. If they do, I’ll be crying all the way to the bank. The book’s already been sold as a miniseries.”
    Melody Richards met the young literary lion in October, when she