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here, helping me make decisions.
    But this scrawny man-child is no guardian angel.
    A mouth-breather no older than yours truly, he looks like someone you’d expect to crawl out from under the floorboards in a Wes Craven flick. Pale irises, greasy hair, and bumpy gray skin with little orange hairs poking out all over his jawline. I look from him to Villicus and back. A prerequisite to work at Cania must be that you be the ugliest son of a bitch alive.
    “I’m Ted Rier,” my Guardian says. He’s got a German accent, just like Villicus. “You may call me Teddy.”
    “Ted is my newest assistant and the ideal Guardian for you,” Villicus adds, just as my pathetic excuse for a Guardian shuts the door and scurries to take the seat next to me.
    Trying to catch my gaze, Teddy lifts my hand and kisses it. It is impossible not to notice the white flecks in the corners of his mouth. It is nearly impossible not to cringe—yet I manage—knowing my hand is so close to that or not to pull away too quickly when he smoothly says he’s charmed to make my acquaintance.
    “It would be great,” I say as Villicus sits and Teddy opens his cheap-looking briefcase, “if someone could explain what exactly a Guardian is supposed to do. I assume there’s a connection between a Guardian and a PT, but I’m fuzzy on both.”
    “If I may?” Teddy asks Villicus, who nods, allowing Teddy to field my questions. “Miss Merchant, first things first. I understand you attended a school prior to this one, and at that school you earned top grades.”
    “Top of my class and top of the Dean’s List each year,” I admit.
    Teddy smirks. “I didn’t know they had ‘deans’ at public schools.”
    “Which is supposed to mean what?”
    Neither Teddy nor Villicus seems to appreciate my tone much. As if they’re allowed to imply insults, but I’m not allowed a defense.
    “You and I are on the same team,” Teddy tells me. “If I have offended you, forgive me. But the fact is that you are familiar with and comfortable in an academic environment that breeds much lower expectations than Headmaster Villicus demands here at Cania Christy. You were a top performer in California. You excelled among the uninspired. But now you’re among a new class of people. And you are competing for a title that, I give you my word, every student here wants more than you want to go to Brown on full scholarship.”
    I’m about to ask how on earth he could know that when I realize that my dad must have put that info on my application form. So I skip to my second question: “I’m competing to be valedictorian, you mean?”
    Teddy drops a leaflet in the hand he kissed, which still feels icky. I read its headline.
    “The Race to Be Valedictorian: Only the Supreme Survive.” Dropping the sheet momentarily, I look from Teddy to Villicus, who is watching me with a small smile tipping the corners of his lips skyward. “Like ‘only the strong survive’?”
    Teddy glowers at me, and I immediately realize that this may be the one school on earth where “stupid questions” actually do exist.
    “What I mean is,” I backtrack, “if evolution—perhaps the most complex process in the universe, a process requiring unimaginable patience and rewarding natural talents—is all about the strong surviving, attaining the Big V must be an incredible challenge if only the supreme survive?”
    Villicus stands and stoops behind his desk like a bird of prey, beady eyes glowing. He begins to speak—slowly, like one of those dictators you see in black-and-white films from the Second World War:
    “I see that you have already adopted the vernacular of Cania students,” he says. “The Big V, as the valedictorian title has become fondly known here, is the highest mark of academic honor one can receive in school if not in all of life’s endeavors. Alas, who among this student body does not seek with full desperation the gift of the title valedictorian and all that it brings?”
    I