#*david attenborough voice* the lives of rich boarding school teens

[hello-imasalesman]

(the preppies: on russell northrop, gen, ~550 words)

The ever-present threat of the Old Bullworth Vale families’ increasingly incestuous bonds had physically manifested into one Russell Northrop. The only child and heir apparent of the Northrop family, Russell lived in a home so sizable his divorced parents lived comfortably on each side without ever having to see or interact with the other.

He was technically two or three years older than the rest of them, Bif couldn’t bother to remember, having been held back at various times throughout his school career. He had entered the Academy at the same time as his own class had, though the school considers him a sophomore still with the amount of credits to his name. Russell spoke ploddingly, in third person; his literacy rate was abysmally low. Northrop money could only go so far.

Russell was not Preppie material. Russell had the breeding, sure– too much of it, in fact– without any of the snobbery required to keep ones nose up and stratified away from the have-nots. He associated with those attending because they couldn’t afford a better school, because they’ve already got themselves kicked out of all the other boarding schools on the east coast. They shared the same remedial classes and perchance for cruelty and childish pranks.

Students were fickle and fairweather, and had the attention spans to match. It took magnetism to run a clique at Bullworth. And that magnetism could be bolstered by things like money, like favors, like strength, the same way any sort of politicking worked.

The Bullies were a Northrop original. Derby had honestly been impressed when they formed; Northrop was dull, but they were a ragtag, if persuasive, group. As soon as they shirked off their dark green school sweaters, they started to fight back. They didn’t take eggings or noogies lying down.

But they also weren’t untowardly aggressive. The Bullies targeted most of their anger on the same boys they had shared dorm rooms with, the ones who refused to assimilate and pick a clique. They teased the Nerds, but only in the immediacy of the Academy’s halls, never seeking out the Library. They didn’t vie for territory beyond the dismal, gasoline covered parking lot, and even that they acquiesced to the Greasers if some of their projects spilled out from the Auto Shop garages.

Derby called somewhat of a detente; none of them were allowed on any of their turf, of course, but no need to hunt them down like Greasers. It wasn’t lost on Derby that they also had some unfortunate strength behind them, unlike the Nerds.

Bif had been the only one of them brave enough to ever go toe-to-toe with Russell himself, and some of the other Bullies had brute, intimidating strength. Some of the softer members of the Preppies had fallen victim to marbles strewn across the ground, or the occasional two on one scuffle. Better to nip calls for outright violence, and keep it to taunting and snobbery. Bif agreed; he couldn’t be everywhere at once to back them up. It didn’t hurt that Gord had apparently struck up a friendship of sorts with the blonde-haired, muscled thespian Trent Northwick.

Derby had heard through the grapevine that they were officially in the Yearbook as a “social group of friends”. Obviously Ms. Philips would not allow them to write Bullies in a school-sanctioned publication, but she always let them be creative in concept ideas beyond the prerequisite pages and pages of student photos. That cemented them in the clique hierarchy; at least, for the year.