Free Accelerated by Bronwen Hruska

well, he was going to get the crap kicked out of him. But this probably wasn’t the moment to get into that.
    Nicole rocked Kat. Her glare screamed disapproval.
    “Enough with the acronyms,” he said to Toby. “Apologize.”
    “But …” Toby started. He looked at Sean, then at Nicole, and decided not to push it. “Sorry Kat,” he said. It was less than convincing. But it would have to do.
    “And no more name calling,” he said. “Last warning.”
    They dragged their feet down the hallway. Before they turned the corner into Toby’s room, Kat stuck out her tongue. “Told you you’d get in trouble,” she taunted. Toby just shook his head and rolled his eyes.
    “Bradley kids—future leaders of the free world,” Nicole mumbled. “Nice.”
    Obviously Bradley had its drawbacks. He’d never planned on sending his kid to private school. And Ellie—always up for rejecting her past—had been fine with the idea of public school. They were all set to do it. Somehow Ellie’s mother had convinced them to take a look.
    “Bradley has changed,” Maureen had said. She was your classic volunteer lady—the thing Ellie was most afraid of turning into. “You’ll see. It’s very with it . They have minorities now—scholarship students from Queens and the Bronx.” To Maureen and Ellie’s father, Dick, the outer boroughs were exotic and volatile, much like third world countries. Sean couldn’t remember now why they’d agreed to take the tour.
    “At Bradley we focus on the whole child,” Mimsy Roach had said with feeling as she guided prospective parents from the gymnasium to the black box theater. “Each child’s differences make her unique.” The use of her had thrown him, but he tried to stay with Mimsy’s spiel. “Different ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, learning styles, we welcome it all,” she went on. “That’s what makes this place stand out from all the other independent schools. We don’t only accept diversity. We crave it.”
    Mimsy was a walking billboard for the place. With casual asides like, “There’s no challenge we don’t love,” and “our primary goal is to teach children to give back to the community,” everything that came out of her mouth was exactly what you wanted to hear. She let it slide toward the end of the tour that she’d graduated from Bradley and rushed back to work at the school after matriculating to Wellesley.
    By the end of the tour, every parent was sold on the place. Suddenly, neither Sean nor Ellie could imagine sending Toby to a school that didn’t have a state-of-the-art computer room, cutting-edge science labs, a competition pool, and a professional art studio. Ignoring, for the moment, the joy they knew it would bring Maureen and Dick (who never tired of wearing his Bradley ‘53 varsity sweater), they found themselves being swept up in the excitement. They decided to go for it. When they got Toby’s acceptance letter, they jumped up and down and shrieked with joy. They couldn’t help feeling like they’d won the lottery.
    “You’re spending tens of thousands of dollars,” Nicole said now, “or should I say tens of thousands of dollars are being spent—so Toby can learn to be a snob.”
    “I could send him somewhere I could afford,” Sean said. “But you of all people know you get what you pay for.” This hit her where he knew it would hurt.
    Nicole had decided to save on student loans by choosing an affordable law school. At eight thousand dollars a year, University of Buffalo seemed like the perfect choice. “Suckers,” she’d say, when her friends graduated from Yale and Harvard strapped with one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of debt.
    When it came time to apply for jobs, it turned out that Nicole was, in fact, the sucker. The big New York law firms—and the six-figure salary she’d been counting on—dried up when they saw SUNY Buffalo on her resume. Maybe if she’d been on Law Review or at the top of her class or