Okay, he'll admit it. He likes the car.

He doesn't like anything else about this arrangement. Not the school, not the town, not the apartment building with its clean shiny lobby and polite yet vaguely condescending security guards, and least of all the apartment, which looks so agonizingly Decorated with a capital Decor that he half feels like some kind of interior design assassin is going to pop out of the ductwork and gut him the moment he bumps into a painting or knocks over a vase or moves a piece of furniture an inch out of place.

Growling under his breath, he tosses his backpack into the middle of the living room, where it skids across the perfectly straight plow-lines of the freshly vacuumed carpet, marring their geometric precision with a broad smear of ruffled pile. Maybe letting his parents coax, cajole, and finally bribe him into going to college was a mistake, but there's two hundred thousand dollars waiting for him if he makes it through the first semester without getting arrested, so he might as well give it a shot.