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HOW TO TEACH FILTHY RICH GIRLS by Zoey Dean
On Sale: July 2nd
Hardcover
304 pages
ISBN-10: 0446697184
ISBN-13: 9780446697187
Recent Yale graduate Megan Smith comes
to Manhattan with big plans for a career in journalism and even bigger
student loan debt: $75,000, to be exact. When she flails at a disastrous
editorial meeting at her trashy tabloid job, Megan is called into the
editor-in-chief's office certain that she's going to be fired. And she
is. Sort of....
As it turns out, Megan's suddenly ex-boss
is old friends with the grandmother of seventeen-year-old identical
twins Rose and Sage Baker --- the infamous Baker heiresses of Palm Beach,
Florida, best known for their massive fortunes and their pension for
drunkenly flashing the paparazzi. Their grandmother is set on the girls
attending Duke University despite their combined GPA of roughly 0.2.
And if Megan can tutor the girls and get them into Duke, their grandmother
will pay off Megan's college loans in full.
Unfortunately for Megan, the Baker
twins aren't about to bend their busy social schedules for basic algebra.
And they certainly aren't thrilled to have to sit down for a study session
with dowdy Megan, who quickly discovers that if she's going to get her
bonus, she'll have to know her Pucci from her Prada. And if she can
look the part, maybe, just maybe, she can teach them something along
the way.
Zoey Dean is the author of the New York Times bestselling A-List series. She grew up in Beverly Hills and now lives in Palm Beach, where she is working on her next novel and dreaming of a Pulitzer --- Lilly Pulitzer, that is.
Some summer beach reads provide escape to exotic picturesque beaches with salt-laden balmy breezes, pristine sand, and of course, a steamy romance between a hero and heroine with perfectly bronzed bodies. HOW TO TEACH FILTHY RICH GIRLS is the champagne of summer beach reads, with a sexy millionaire “stepping through the sand in a black tuxedo minus the tie, his white shirt open at the collar” and the inside scoop about the ultra-rich lifestyle of Palm Beach heiresses.
Just fired from Scoop magazine in Manhattan because she suggests an informative feature on breast cancer might be as welcome as the latest celebrity gossip, Yale graduate Megan Smith is offered the opportunity to earn enough money to pay off her $75,000 college debt as a tutor to the latest duo to grace the cover of Vanity Fair --- the Fabulous Baker Twins, granddaughters of Laurel Limoges, founder of the Angel Cosmetics empire.
If there is a definition for a dream firing, Megan experiences it Palm Beach-style with her new job as a tutor to spoiled filthy rich twins Sage and Rose Baker. Partying, posing for the paparazzi and skinny-dipping are the girls’ primary goals, but Laurel insists they be accepted into Duke, despite their almost nonexistent grade point averages. Studying poolside with a bucket of Taittinger champagne and the promise of an $84 million trust fund is all most of us would need as incentive for an acceptable SAT score to get into Duke. However, the Baker twins are far from accepting of Megan until she teaches them that knowing geometry equals a future filled with caviar, champagne and Chanel.
Megan experiences a modern-day, billionaire-subsidized makeover that even Cinderella would envy. Her introduction to high society starts with a private jet ride to Palm Beach, Florida --- the American playground for the ultra-rich and ultra-famous. Les Anges, Laurel’s palatial oceanfront estate situated on acres of prime Gold Coast real estate and champagne lifestyle, is a long way from Megan’s East Village walkup. The island of itsy bitsy gold bikinis, black American Express cards and fortunes large enough for the family to be deemed royalty is where Megan’s own “movie moment” fantasies come true, and she falls in love with her very own multi-millionaire.
Zoey Dean, the New York Times bestselling author of the A-List series for teens, writes with a golden touch. How else could you write about the filthy rich? Champagne and flirtinis are mentioned so often they are almost characters. (Taittinger or Cristal, madame?) Laurel is regal, and expensive cosmetics erase the years (before or after the infamous Palm Beach facelift?). Beneath Laurel’s wealth is an honorable Parisian woman who wants to teach Sage and Rose the meaning of personal accomplishment (too much reality, but mothers can relate). Her world of private helicopters, butlers, coveted society event fashion shows with couture gowns, and flowing champagne is only the beginning of this Palm Beach paradise fairy tale (every woman should be so filthy rich).
Megan finds out that every society celebutante has her very own “Marco,” private chef and certified sommelier, and “Mr. Keith,” “hair, makeup, wardrobe, everything and anything.” These “fairy gaymothers” save the day for Megan and her entrée into The Season, and her first Red and White ball is complete with an escort, a Zac Posen gown and a flirtini. “Everyone who’s anyone in Palm Beach does The Season, darling.”
“A guy who trolls the beach in a tux” wins the heart of the reader when he recreates a beach on Megan’s New York rooftop. Now that’s the epitome of filthy rich and utterly romantic. HOW TO TEACH FILTHY RICH GIRLS leaves the reader feeling that Palm Beach is Fantasy Island. The truth is, a sexy millionaire dressed in a tuxedo stepping out of a Ferrari is no fantasy in Palm Beach --- it is a dream come true.
--- Reviewed by Hillary Wagy
 Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
Q&A with Zoey Dean
Name: Zoey Dean
Nickname: No nicknames, thank
you very much. Sometimes my closest friends call me Z.
First job: My first job
out of college was as an A-List celeb’s personal assistant --- if you
call scheduling mani-pedis and blow-outs a real job.
Worst job: See above.
Perfect date: One that
starts with dinner in New York and ends with lunch in Paris.
Favorite place: The private
stretch of beach outside my Caribbean hideaway. And no, I’m not saying where that is!
Guilty pleasure: "The
Young and the Restless." Oh, Cane…
Best friend’s first name:
Katya
Good luck charm: My smile.
Tuesday night activity:
See favorite TV show, add best friend or boyfriend of the moment, and
voila!
Last thing I bought at the mall:
Zoey does not do malls. But the last thing I bought at Kitson was a
pair of white Missoni slingbacks.
Favorite movie: Casablanca,
and Clueless. Both classics.
Biggest fashion blunder:
I’ve worn some adventurous fashions over the years, but if I’m wearing
it, it’s instantly stylish.
Item atop your grocery list:
Mangos, at the moment. I’m on a mango salsa kick. And so is everyone
I make it for.
French fry dip: My secret
sauce is quite simple---ketchup and honey mustard. Best if eaten while
actually in France.
Astrological sign: Oh,
please.
Favorite TV show: "American
Idol." I refuse to be snarky about this.
Lucky color: Blush pink. Try
wearing a pink sundress for a day and you’ll see why.
Midnight snack: Dinner. When
you wake up at noon and go out every night, meals don’t always happen
at normal hours.
Celebrity crush: His initials
are J.G. And that would be his crush on me.
Favorite book: THE GREAT GATSBY.
I would have made an excellent 1920s socialite.
Favorite Hollywood Hangout:
Why in the world would I ruin LA’s best-kept secret by revealing it
here? My second favorite, however, is Park City, Utah during Sundance.
Best California Beach: You’d
expect me to say celeb-studded Malibu, right? But I honestly prefer
Huntington Beach --- cute surfers everywhere!
Life Motto: Fashion passes.
Style remains. (Thank you, Coco Chanel.)
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
Choose the letter that would best fill in the blank spaces in the
following sentence:
Exchanging family heirlooms and occasional sexual favors for
_____________ financial security is ______________.
(a) marginal; justifiable
(b) complete; commonplace in Beverly Hills
(c) a promise of; so 1990, circa Pretty Woman
(d) reasonable; unforgivable
(e) concert tickets and; totally legit
Chapter One
Snatching my receipt from the bodega ATM, I already
knew the bad news. I’d just withdrawn two hundred dollars,
and my account balance was hovering a little over zero. So
I stashed the cash and receipt in my battered backpack and asked
what any recent Yale graduate whose student loans had left her
seventy-five thousand bucks in debt would wonder:
“If I were to charge for sex, how much could I get?”
“Depends,” answered my best friend, Charma Abrams,
flatly. Her nasal monotone had been influenced heavily by too
many girlhood hours spent with MTV’s Daria. “Do you get to
pick and choose your clientele?”
“Let’s say I’m going for maximum cash.”
“Hard to say. Let’s go find you a pimp in Tompkins Square
Park.” Charma examined her reflection in the anti-shoplifting
mirror above the limp-looking green vegetables. “Or we could
ask your sister.”
My sister. Lily. As Charma well knew, Lily was playing a
rich-girl-turned-hooker-turned-pimp in Streets, Doris Egan’s
new off-Broadway play. Lily’s photo had graced the cover of last
week’s Time Out: “The New Season’s Must-See Young Thesp.”
My sister had been must-see her whole life. Drop-dead gorgeous,
talented singer and dancer, Brown University grad, Lily
had been born to be stared at. As I took in my own reflection in
the warped deli mirror—medium height and weight, size eight
on the top and size ten on the bottom on a good day, long brown
hair exceptionally prone to frizz, a heart-shaped face with nice
enough hazel eyes, a thin nose, and lips like the “before” photo
on a lip-plumper ad—I wondered for the zillionth time how Lily
and I shared a gene pool.
The chief reason I’d chosen to attend Yale was so I could do
one thing in my life that was more impressive than what she had.
The immaturity of this is not lost on me, by the way.
“Come on,” I told Charma. “I don’t want to miss him.”
We headed out of the bodega and crossed East Seventh,
dodging a couple of joggers and a bag lady carrying on a onesided
conversation with the president: “You call that a foreign
policy, you asshole?” It was one of those crystalline Indiansummer
days when nature puts on a last-ditch floor show—the
stubborn final leaves of autumn danced on their branches as
the low November sun bathed them in ocher light. I wore my
usual no-name jeans, a white Hanes T-shirt, and an ancient navy
cardigan that my favorite of our family’s three dogs, Galbraith,
used to sleep on when he was a puppy.
“Where are you meeting this guy?” Charma asked.
“Southwest corner.” I scanned the crowded benches lining
the walkway to the center of the park. Everyone was enjoying the
mild weather that surely wouldn’t last longer than a day or two.
“Did he tell you what he looks like?”
“Tall, thin, dark hair cut short, soul patch, right ear pierced
with a rhinestone stud,” I rattled off. “He’ll be wearing a red
flannel shirt and Levi’s, loose-fit.”
“Boxers or briefs?” Charma asked.
I raised an eyebrow.
“I just wondered. Since you’ve got every other detail down.”
“When I told him I was twenty-two, he said he was twentynine,
which probably means he’s mid-thirties and trying to pass.
So I’d guess boxer-briefs.” I made a beeline for an empty bench to
our right. Too late. Three old Polish ladies had spotted it first.
Charma shook her blond curls out of her eyes. “About the
whole sex-for-money thing? Waste of your brain. And I don’t
think your customers want to be remembered in that kind of detail.
Stick with the magazine.”
“Oh, like that’s not killing my brain cells on a daily basis.”
I had a magna cum laude degree with a double major in
English and American history and had been features editor
of the Yale Daily News. So you can’t say I arrived in Manhattan
with the wrong credentials. I thought I’d have no problem
finding a job writing in-depth stories at an important but leftleaning
periodical like The New Yorker, or Rolling Stone, or hell,
even Esquire —which only shows that a girl can be twenty-two
years old, ridiculously well educated, and still as dumb as a bag
of hair.
As it turned out, every other graduate from every other Ivy
League school had come to New York the day after graduation,
and we all wanted the exact same jobs. Many of them, however,
had something that I lacked. Connections.
My dad is a professor in the economics department at
the University of New Hampshire, and my mom is a nursepractitioner
at campus health services. Lily and I had grown up
in an old farmhouse filled with books, intelligent conversation,
and excessive pet fur. My folks lived an ecological life. Theirs
had been voted Best Compost Heap by Earth Lovers, the local
greenie newspaper. It is a little-known fact that parents who win
Best Compost Heap cannot help their daughter find a job at a
hot-shit New York City magazine.
June morphed into July, which morphed into the hothouse
of August, and I still was ridiculously unemployed. Then, right
after Labor Day, I got my first and only job offer. Since I owed
Charma the September rent and felt it would behoove me to
sustain my body on something other than ramen noodles and
canned tuna, it was either become an editorial assistant at Scoop
or learn to intone “May I run through our specials this evening?”
with a perky smile on my face. Walking gracefully while carrying
hot food is not my strong suit. Nor is perkiness. The choice
was made.
You know Scoop, though you may not admit to actually purchasing
it. It’s one step up from Star and two steps down from
People. A few of my highlights to date included captioning such
photo spreads as “Did Jessica Get Implants?” and “Lindsay’s
Wild Mexican Vacation!” Yes, I’d found it necessary to lower my
journalistic aspirations a standard deviation. Or ten.
As Charma and I ambled along, a guy with short blond hair,
a day’s worth of stubble, and a ratty Wolfmother T-shirt smiled
at us. Well, her. Charma turned to watch him pass, letting out a
low, appreciative whistle. She ’s a much better flirt than I am.
I looked around, trying to find my mark. There was a junkie
looking to score at ten o’clock. At high noon were two teenage
schoolgirls with too much everything—makeup, hair, boobs,
skin, stiletto boots—who apparently felt the need to shriek
every other word at each other. Then I spotted a guy in jeans and
a flannel shirt cutting through a stand of trees at two o’clock.
Bingo. I waved.
“Megan?” He held out a hand with slightly dirty fingernails,
but I was in no position to turn down a shake. He had something
I really, really wanted.
“Yeah, hi, thanks for coming. Pete, right?”
“Yeah.”
A couple with a baby stroller vacated a bench to our left. I sat
down and motioned for Pete to join me. Meanwhile, I noticed
Charma chatting with Wolfmother, who’d circled back to make
actual contact. Who could blame him? Charma had the kind of
natural curves women pay a small fortune for and even then have
to settle for saline.
“You got it?” Pete asked, drumming his fingers on his jeans
impatiently.
“Right here.” My heart hammered as I unzipped my backpack,
taking out the white T-shirt that had, until an hour before,
hung inside a frame on the exposed brick wall of our living room
(whose futon also doubled as my bed). The front of the shirt
featured a bird sitting on the neck of a guitar and the inscription
woodstock: three days of peace and music. Not only was it
the real deal from the greatest rock concert of all time, it was
also signed by Jimi Hendrix. Two Cornell students, who would
later become my parents, had stuck it out until Hendrix’s set
on Monday morning. My father had managed to get the shirt
signed by the guitar god himself and gave it to my mother as a
sign of his love and devotion.
Now, as a sign of my love and devotion, I was passing it on.
To what’s-his-name. Right. Pete.
“Like I said on Craigslist, it’s in mint condition,” I told him.
He held out a callused hand. “Let’s see.”
I hesitated. “I’d like to see the tickets first.”
Out came his wallet, and then there they were: two frontrow
seats to the Strokes at Webster Hall for that very night. The
show had sold out within minutes last month. I’d tried everything
to get tickets, but nada. Until now.
I should tell you, to be perfectly candid, the Strokes are not
my favorite band. But my boyfriend, James, worships them.
James—of the dazzling intellect and shining prose, a guy who
considers Doris Lessing light reading—would blast “Heart in a
Cage” and dance naked in his dorm room playing air guitar like
a twelve-year-old. How can you not love a guy like that?
We ’d met in a senior writing seminar where James quickly
established himself as the most articulate student in the room,
thinking nothing of arguing—and doing it well—with a professor
who just happened to have written the preface to the latest
edition of The Elements of Style.
I noticed James, of course. From my seat in the back, I was
wowed both by his intellect and by his swagger as he walked to
his rightful place in the front row. It was amazing what you could
see when you weren’t worrying about people watching you.
Take, for example, Cassie Crockett. She had a Maxim body
and fabulous blond hair. But on the first day of class, I noticed
two fingers sneak under what I quickly realized was a fantastic
wig. Her fingers reemerged holding a few strands of dung-brown
hair, which she covertly dropped to the ground. Then she did it
again. And again. Trichotillomania—the obsessive-compulsive
need to pull out your own hair. I spent whole seminars wondering
what it was like for Cassie to go out with one of the guys
constantly circling her. Maybe she never had sex. Maybe she had
a No Above the Neck rule, instead of a Below the Waist one.
This is the kind of thing that goes around in my brain.
Anyway, back to James. A few weeks into the semester, I
wrote a five-thousand-word piece for the Daily News about a
New Haven intersection where businessmen pick up transvestite
hookers. I’d spend an entire week blending in at a nearby coffee
shop, observing the girls and their customers, memorizing every
detail. Our writing professor read aloud a section of my article
to illustrate the kind of specificity he sought from us. Then he
nodded in my direction.
Every head craned around to look at me. I could see their
reaction all over their faces: Her? Really?
James corralled me after class. I was too shocked to be nervous,
and then I was too at ease to remember why I would have
been nervous. We went for coffee and agreed on everything and
everyone from Jonathan Safran Foer (loved Everything Is Illuminated
) to Donna Tartt (loathed The Secret History). Lily, oracle
of all romantic wisdom, had cautioned me to never, ever, ever
have sex on dates one through three. I suppose you could say
that I took her advice, in that my first meeting with James wasn’t
really a date. I was in his loft bed within five hours of “Want to
grab a cup of coffee?”
We’d come to New York together after graduation, though
not so together that we shared an apartment. His parents owned
an excruciatingly chic white-on-white pied-à-terre in a Donald
Trump Upper West Side development, though their threemillion-
dollar mansion in Tenafly, New Jersey, was actually
home. Dr. and Mrs. Ladeen—he was an intensely anxious but
gifted cardiologist, she was a senior editor at the New York Review
of Books—offered James the condo rent-free while he began what
would surely be his meteoric rise to literary fame. Their expectation
was based not only on the fact that he was truly talented, but
also on the fact that his mother had used her connections to snag
James a junior editor job at East Coast. East Coast is kind of like
The New Yorker, except with even more of a focus on fiction.
Alas, James’s parents had never warmed up to me. I’d tried, I
really had, but there was no question they harbored hope James
would get back together with his former girlfriend, Heather
van der Meer, the youngest daughter of their longtime family
friends. And thus the offer of lodging did not extend to me.
That was okay. There was plenty of time. James and I were
happy. And tonight was his twenty-third birthday. I wanted it
to be memorable, which was why I’d cut my bank account in
half: first, dinner and a fabulous bottle of wine at the restaurant
Prune. During dessert, I would casually break out the concert
tickets, which would cause him to whoop with delight and lavish
upon me the kind of public display of affection to which he was
normally allergic. After the concert, we ’d go back to his place
for the best part of the evening. And morning.
To finalize my plan, all I had to do was trade my dad’s Woodstock
T-shirt for the tickets.
“We doing this or not?” Pete tapped his coffee-colored loafer
against the sidewalk.
I bit my lower lip. My parents would understand. Of course
they would. Or at least that was what I told myself. We made the
swap. God, James was going to be so surprised.
I stuck the tickets in my backpack and then rose to wish Pete
a pleasant life. A kid with a shaved head—he couldn’t have
been older than fourteen—wheeled toward us on one of those
delivery-boy bicycles. He was swerving from side to side, taking
pleasure in scaring the little old Polish ladies nearby.
“Thanks,” I told Pete. “Take good care of my—Hey!”
The kid on the bicycle sped past me, snatching my backpack
before I could sling it over my shoulder.
“Stop! Stop that kid!” I bellowed.
I gave chase, Pete gave chase, and a lot of other people did,
too. But the kid cut off the path and through the trees, pumping
for all he was worth. A few seconds later, he was speeding down
Avenue A with my backpack swaying from a handlebar.
It was almost as if the concert tickets and my two hundred
dollars were waving goodbye.
Copyright © 2007 by Zoey Dean
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