I:

Frank didn't consider himself the sort to have unfinished business, but he couldn't deny he had a few loose ends to take care of. "Loose ends" sounded menacing, like he was going to order a hit on somebody. "Unfinished business" it was then, except that didn't sound much better. Everything was an euphemism if he said it in the right tone, he figured, so he decided to call it unfinished business and leave it at that.

Pranav happened to be at Berkeley one day on club business, and since Frank had never bothered to come visit senior year during the summer—they had barely spoken over the last few months!—Frank figured it was time to do what needed to be done. Juliet was on vacation, too, so he had no other excuses, and if she were around, she'd ask why she wasn't invited. So this worked out nicely, and Frank walked downtown to the train station and sat around reading the Wall Street Journal until he reached his destination.

He had been on plenty of college campuses on vacation, on field trips, and that sort of thing, and Berkeley wasn't excluded: he had some Cal gear sitting around at home that he never wore. But anyway, Pranav was waiting by Sather Gate, and had promised to take Frank to lunch with the rest of the guys. Not just guys, of course—despite their more "creative" methods of operation, they were remarkably inclusive compared to some other groups on campus—but that's always what they called themselves when they didn't use the term "good people."

"You made it, Frank! Like what we've done with the place? We commissioned the gate ourselves! I'm just kidding, of course. How's Juliet? You could have brought her along. She'll have to do this sort of thing at UCLA anyway. I'd never have pegged her as a club president, but the responsibility will all be hers." Pranav felt confident in talking about Juliet this way because they'd never spoken in depth to each other. Pranav's first impression of Juliet was one of those first meetings his junior year, her sophomore year, when she vied to chant the loudest and march the stiffest. If it were his choice, he'd have promoted someone else to vice president, but at least it ended up working out at the end. If he didn't know any better, he'd think Frank promoted her only because she had a crush on him. That Charles Manson-esque style of psychological manipulation was clever, and it was also the sort of political calculus that had translated well to college.

"She's on vacation. We have our own lives, you know. Gosh, it's weird saying that, like there's that implication we're supposed to spend all our free time together."

"That's typically what people do when they're dating. And you two did talk a lot at Heller."

"That was for business. Now it's only pleasure—mostly pleasure. All thanks to you," Frank said, and they started walking through campus. Frank hadn't ever been to UPenn's campus, but he had seen pictures and it reminded him of Berkeley's to some degree. In the way that all college campuses looked the same.

"So, Pranav, how many people do we have total for the college branches so far? Obviously we haven't been talking too much about daily operations, but all I've heard through the grapevine is that we're as popular as we've ever been. We fit right in—isn't it funny how after all our efforts to stand out during high school, now we're just another pre-professional boulder dotting a rocky landscape?"

"Funny way of phrasing it. Well, the ten or so of us from Heller covered eight schools, and all of them kept recruiting more people. We make it pretty easy to start things up—our financial situation's improved dramatically, too. We give new branches a bunch of money and tell them how to spend it. We make enough off interest at this point for things to be really easy, and the more people who join, the better it becomes. If you want to work with college students for all your life, you could make a career out of simply doing finances. That's what I'm going to be doing."

"You've already decided what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life?"

"Why not? The worst thing that happens is this all collapses, and I take a golden parachute and go work on Wall Street. This club stuff is pretty fun, too, far more so than it ever was in high school. Not that there wasn't a value to all of that—anyone coming out of Heller now with three or four years of good person boot camp will be a valuable cog for the machine—but now that it's not a giant meme and everything feels more purposeful, I'm enjoying it a lot more."

"That reminds me, Pranav: what job title do you want? I feel like I have some special role as founder that we probably should keep, given that we've already commissioned and shipped out portraits, but it looks like you've already got a good handle on things."

"I can be CEO, and you can be head of the board of directors. And the founder, of course. You aren't going to be kept out of any meetings or anything that you don't want to be kept out of, but the more we can do to preserve your status as a shining image and Platonic ideal, the better. How did you call yourself again, Frank the Ineffable? Any Heller freshman can look up to you and live in your image, and by the time they graduate, they'll be ready to discard such needless ideas. Do you want to keep being in charge of the stuff at Heller, especially since, well, you built it?"

"Sounds good to me. I've never accepted a demotion this willingly before, but there's a first time for everything."

"It's not a demotion. This is exactly the sort of game you played at Heller with who had a title and who didn't that we all know had no intrinsic meaning. I never had an official title at Heller, and everyone who mattered knew I was still important. Let's hurry up. Everyone can't wait to meet you."

Frank didn't think he'd ever had to shake as many hands as he did that lunch. When Pranav said that all the Berkeley people were there, he'd neglected to mention that this was a get-together for all the college-level Bay Area "good people," and that Frank was going to deliver opening remarks. All the conversations blurred together, even the speeches, but Frank could gather that Pranav didn't lie: he may have not been micromanaging all the operations of the club anymore, but he had it as good as he could get. And in a way, his current position was even better: all of the clout, and far fewer responsibilities. A few hours later, people began trickling out, and Frank felt like he'd seen enough too.

"Are you still talking with any other Heller people?" Pranav asked. "I mean not about club business. For fun. Because they're your friends."

"We went to Lake Tahoe over the summer again, and I've seen a few of them around. I'm getting lunch with John tomorrow, actually. And the day after that's the first day of the new school year for Heller. I invited myself back to say hello to a few people and see how everything will proceed without my supervision. I have all the faith in them to make things right, and the thing about anything related to the club is that things go far better than they should. So I think it will be more symbolic than anything. Unfinished business."

"Keep in touch, Frank. Not just about business. I want to hear how things go with college, and everything. You've let this consume your life for a few years now. You've earned the right to spice things up a bit, and I hope you aren't going to live your life forever defined by the decisions you've made over the last year. It's what you always say: the future is only what we make today. Play your cards incorrectly and that future will be romping around Heller and its neighborhood making piles of money that can't buy satisfaction. What's the word again, catharsis? You're looking for that release of emotion and undeniable contentment. A happy ending. What happens in cheerful movies after the credits roll. I'm a shallower person than you will ever be, which is why I would be happy with repeating this sort of day forever. Maybe, after a few years of this, you'll realize that this is it. But I have this nagging feeling you won't. You should go catch your train. You have plenty of time to think about this sort of thing. Next time you're in town, pay us a visit."

Back in high school, besides that one time Pranav came to visit, they had never talked about anything so existential. Pranav had caught him on a bad day then, and that was also before Frank had learned his gambit had paid off. That senior-year angst was in the past. He had brighter futures to look forward to, ones where he was in Hawaii at a fancy hotel with club money lounging on the beach—Juliet wouldn't even have to be there. Maybe it would be kind of nice. But that was for another time. Pranav had copied him on a massive email thread and shared a few Google Drive folders with him, now that he was baptized in whatever his high school dream had evolved into. So that was going to take most of his evening, catching himself up. It was nice to be part of a movement even more unfettered than before, where any hour of the day there was something going on, something that he could weigh in on if he chose. And he didn't have to choose! He could take a day off and nobody would notice anymore, or he could help the Harvard branch choose a T-shirt design and feel he had made a positive change in the world. With that end of his unfinished business taken care of, he only had tomorrow and the following day. Then he would be done with it all.

II:

John had said he wanted to meet at the park, which meant Frank knew exactly where to find him: sitting on a bench in the Japanese garden staring at the pond. Some things never changed.

"You arrived exactly when expected, Frank. Nice to see you again," John began after a few moments of silence. What an odd way to phrase it, Frank thought.

"Like a wizard. Gandalf? No? Anyway, I'm here. This park is where it all began for me. Right out that gate and to the left, the rose garden I'm sure you're all too familiar with. That's where I had the misfortune—I probably shouldn't call it 'misfortune' anymore now that we're dating—of running into Juliet on her birthday. And there I promoted her to vice president, and then we got ice cream. I think she got black sesame; I got salmon. Then later that night I went to her birthday party and met her parents, who I think liked me as soon as they saw me, and the rest is history. What memories does this place bring back for you?"

John continued to look pensive, and Frank wondered if he was sleep-deprived or just being himself. Before Frank could prompt him again, John spoke again: "I remember meditating in the January wind through the fog and rain. I remember Regina dragging me away, all for Starbucks. I remember her dumping her problems on me. I remember Beth finding me here some afternoon and doing the same. All I do is soak up problems like a sponge. It's awful. I can't wait to go to Maine."

"Surely you have some positive memories, too?"

"Oh, I went here with Beth and that crowd again, Juliet and everybody, probably to get ice cream. Or escape our exams. Maybe just to gossip. There was one time where, well, I forget. But it was nice. How is Juliet anyway?"

"She's on vacation."

"No, how is she?"

"Happy, I hope? She has her hobbies and escapes, I have mine. I don't think about how she's doing too often because I assume she's having a nice time. She sent me some pictures of a fancy breakfast earlier today, if that counts. Want to see?"

"Sure, I'd love to."

"How is Beth?" John looked repulsed. "You don't like that question either? Neither do I. Nobody ever asks how I am anymore."

"I haven't broken up with her yet. I've wanted to for a while now. Definitely before I head to campus, or shortly after. But I don't know what the best way would be. I've been busy with other stuff. I got a positive response from an agent the other day for my manuscript, so that's been taking up a lot of my time."

"Oh, really? You're an author now?"

"Don't call me that until I'm published," John laughed.

"What's the book about? Gloomy philosophy? An unauthorized biography of me?"

"It's a slice of life about a far more normal version of Heller. Very literary. So no How To Be A Good Person Club, although I did toss your manifesto in for a side character. I hope you don't mind, I made it a lot more authentic to what I think most teenagers would write—what I would have written back then if I wanted to teach others how to be good. Do you think you're going to keep that up in college? Forgive me if I don't run around Bowdoin singing your club's praises." Frank shifted around in his seat a little.

"Well, funny you should ask that. You remember Pranav, right?"

"No?"

"How don't you remember him? Anyway, let's pretend you do for the sake of argument. My friend the year above me has spent the last year setting up our expansion into the college world, which has gone far better than expected, and I spent yesterday meeting all of his friends and marveling at how successful we all are. We've been making out like bandits. You sure you don't want to keep being a good person?"

"I've left that life behind. I'm more mature than I was when I joined your club to start with. I had nothing better to do, and it seemed like everyone else was. It was all peer pressure. Unlike you, I don't look back at high school with rose-tinted glasses. I see the struggles I had, the ugly truths latent in it all—sure, some of these were truths you thankfully dug up for all of us to see, but then you've clearly abandoned any principle you had behind all of this by making it just about lining your own pockets. I don't want to be corrupted by any of that. I don't want to be stuck in high school forever!" John exclaimed, his voice tinged with frustration like a child's tantrum.

"I suppose you have a point. It's like we're repeating one of those summer days over and over again. Same setting, same atmosphere, even the same people. Speak of the devil. Look over there, by the entrance. The two high schoolers holding hands. I couldn't have planned this better if I'd tried."

"What sorcery is this, Frank? Bringing Harry and Daisy here just to prove a point?"

"No, I swear, this is a coincidence, John. I honestly don't want to talk to them. Let's watch from a distance—looks like they're turning away. I barely talked to Harry during high school, only once to get him swapped out of Ms. Liu's academic support class so someone who actually needed the help was there. But Juliet insists he and Daisy are the spitting image of us. I don't see it."

"It's a natural symbolic parallel, and she's right: you do look similar. That's probably why she set them up, she realized she had an opportunity and chose to load the dice. It's not like they already didn't get along, but I don't think it would have progressed as picture-perfect as it did if not for her. But that's a good thing: their courtship makes my point clearer. For you, Juliet, whether you realize it or not, is the ultimate ideal of what you wanted: her perfection is proof that being a good person pays dividends as you insist it does. Just like in The Great Gatsby, and of course that's what her name is. Harry only met her because of the club and because he became a good person—or what he thought being a good person meant. That he was a good enough person to deserve what happened to him. It's textbook-perfect. And kind of sad, too, that you're still stuck in capitalist decadence. I'm not saying that life imitates art, but I'm just saying it's something you should consider."

"I can see why you're an author. You know, maybe you're right. Pranav told me something similar yesterday, that I was above this lifestyle, that I don't deserve to spend the rest of my life reliving high school. Just think, I might see Harry and Daisy again tomorrow, and who knows how many more times over the next three years I'll have to talk with them! We pegged them for future president and vice president, believe it or not."

"Repeating the past, Frank. My theory gains credence."

"Hilarious. Want to come to Heller tomorrow? I don't know what you'd do there, but it's an option."

"I told you, Frank, I don't want to repeat the past. Well, it would be kind of nice to see my old teachers again. But no, I'm above that. Have fun. We should do something else besides sitting around here. Want to get boba?"

"You're testing me," Frank said with a thin smile. "Of course I'd love to. I haven't had it in years."

III:

Frank had made it halfway to Heller before he remembered that while it was the start of a new school year, it wasn't a fresh start for him. His alarm had gone off at the usual time, he had rolled out of bed, put on his Tuesday suit, eaten some steel-cut oatmeal with homemade fruit preserves, waved goodbye to his parents, taken a deep breath of heady autumn air, and walked along the route he had taken hundreds of times before. Typically he took his walk to school on autopilot, not fully turning on his brain until Heller was in sight, but today he was busy reading through his emails. Before he could offer his insights on a proposed Microsoft Excel workshop, he was at those same steps by the parking lot that stood proudly over the landscape, and Frank became Frank the Ineffable once more.

Frank didn't feel like attending the orientation assembly because it would be the same as usual and someone would be likely to recognize him, so he sat in the central courtyard watching it from his phone. The PowerPoint looked a lot better than it did the previous year—definitely a lot better than the one Ms. Wolfe had presented to his class—and his face was even on one of the slides. How delightful. Even though the new president and vice president were presenting, Frank barely recognized them until they had introduced themselves. He had an entire year to get to know them, anyway. That was his responsibility now.

"Frank? What are you doing here? You graduated already, right?" Ms. Baldwin asked the all-too-familiar kid sitting by the bush. By school policy, she was supposed to get the student's ID number and lower their social credit score on TigerTalk if they were a new student, and if they weren't, they should have been on janitorial duty, not lazing about and making the school look bad. That was really draconian, now that she thought about it, but if she were caught giving a student slack, all the other teachers would start gossiping about her, and she couldn't have that.

"I wanted a vacation, and well, this is my job now. I'm in charge of supervising the club at Heller, not running it or anything. Just watching from a distance, making sure that everything is going as it should so when they get to college, everything is planned out for them. That sounds ominous. I promise it isn't."

"I'd always pegged you as the nice sort of person who would volunteer his time to, well, help out the younger generation. Is that all to it? Your official duties? Or is there a tinge of sentiment behind it? You can admit it, Frank. You like this place."

"What would I have to admit? If I didn't like this place, I wouldn't be working to make sure this place remains awesome." Ms. Baldwin chuckled and gestured her hand across the courtyard, which looked the same as before, except the club had thought to helpfully color-code the zones for the different castes to match their armbands.

"Remaining awesome? According to whom? Your cronies? When you say 'remaining' awesome, it implies it's always been like this. That you've rewritten history, that all high schools have Alphas and Epsilons. Well, I guess I can't stop you, or the current Heller students who would take your place in a heartbeat if you weren't around. At least we have a bigger budget now. I really appreciated that, last year, and this year too. We've been able to hire more paraprofessionals for the special education department and increase the cafeteria workers' wages. It's almost like we're a private school now. I have to get to class now, but as much as you refuse to admit it, just know that you're a good kid with his heart in the right place. When they get to college, most of these kids are going to forget what high school was like anyway. Even if they don't go, once they graduate they'll forget most of this. That's what you said in your graduation speech. So I guess it's all right. I'm telling the other teachers you're back. Expect lots of well-wishers with advice."

That could have gone a lot worse, Frank thought. He still had some time before the assembly let out and he would have to try harder to hide, so he went inside and took the familiar, sterile hallways out to the teacher's parking lot, and then to outside Mrs. Huang's door. Four years ago, almost to the date, he had been waiting out there not sure if high school was all it was promised to be. And a few minutes before that, Ernest (Frank paused a moment when his name crossed his mind) had asked him for directions, and Frank had felt so happy to even on his first day be of help to someone else. But anyway, that was the past.

Mrs. Huang knew all too well that silhouette knocking at her door, and ushered Frank in before he could think of something suitably intelligent to say.

"You're back! I knew you'd come."

"You got Ms. Baldwin's email?"

"Why would I be checking my emails? No, it's instinct. How's Juliet? Are you two finally dating?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"She said no?"

"No, we're dating. I'm just tired of talking about her. Everyone, especially if they haven't seen me since last year, always wants to know. Like I couldn't possibly have done anything else. But yeah, she's well. Same as before. She's on vacation, otherwise she'd be here. Your classroom looks the same as I remember."

"If it isn't broken, don't fix it! This was your desk, right? And this was hers?" Frank and Mrs. Huang walked over to examine them, like they were museum relics.

"They were. I should tell the club to get better chairs," Frank said as he sat down and shifted a little in his seat. It was exactly as he remembered. And he could remember now some arbitrary Thursday afternoon, when fresh from a club meeting he and Juliet would get here at the same time, say hello to Mrs. Huang, and watch her immediately leave for a meeting. And then they'd sit there working on homework unless Juliet felt like a conversation or he wanted to play Scrabble on his phone instead. That same routine, over and over again. Sometimes Juliet would ask for help on her Chinese homework, or he'd ask her to look over some club slides and spot typos. She always had an eye for small turns of phrase that he never spotted, and he would always joke that she could go into copyediting. But that was the past.

"I also want to tell you that I'm so excited that everything is going to be the same as last year, with the club and everything. I had the president and treasurer in my AP Chinese class last year. They are both very smart—almost as smart as you! TigerTalk and everything makes it very easy for me to keep order in my classes. Sometimes the other teachers tell me that I'm too eager to take advantage of all these new things, but I like it. Mr. Simon has stopped calling me a racist and a sexist, and now he says I'm a collaborationist. Such an ugly word! You should say hello to him too."

"Ms. Baldwin gave me some advice when I saw her. Do you have any final words you think I need to hear?"

"You will always be my student," Mrs. Huang said after a moment. "Always being a student means that you can never stop learning. Clearly you've already learned a lot, but you can always find something else. We always say that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but it also ends with a single step. Then you prepare for the next journey, and it repeats forever. I don't want to keep you any longer, Frank. Good luck."

When Frank stepped outside, Mr. Simon was already waiting outside his door.

"Frank!" Mr. Simon called out. "The prodigal son has returned! Ms. Baldwin told me you'd be here. I have to prep for class, and I know you don't have time for one of my monologues, but I'm curious to know why you need to be here. Surely all of your cronies are plenty self-sufficient. I have a friend who's a professor at Berkeley who's told me you apparently have some allies over there. So with all of that, why come back to Heller?"

"I'm technically in charge of monitoring what goes on here. Every year, we can have fifty Alphas graduate. Fifty future cogs in the machine, and who knows how many more they can recruit? And as people graduate from college, they can open the doors for future generations. So that's my job. Not to innovate, but to enforce tradition."

"The classic school to college to JP Morgan pipeline. I see. How would you feel if Heller turned back to normal someday? It won't, but let's say it would. Would you feel disappointed? Would you come back here as a thirty or forty year old to restore Heller's former glory? Or would you let bygones be bygones?"

"Why waste time thinking about an impossibility? But if that were to happen, it would be fate. I would accept it. Say, have you ever seen Groundhog Day?"

"Of course I have, Frank. Who hasn't?"

"Sometimes it feels like I'm just repeating the same day over and over again. I don't know why I bring it up. Something reminded me."

"You're at your old high school. Of course that's how you feel. Work the same job for thirteen years. Then tell me you aren't repeating the same day over and over again. Have fun, Frank. Come back next year. I want to hear what you think of college." Mr. Simon went back in his room, leaving Frank alone with his thoughts again. Since he was in this wing of the school, there was one other teacher he wanted to see.

"Frank? Of course it's you. Come in and have a croissant," Mr. T beckoned. "Nice to see you again. I heard from Pranav that you're going to be our guardian angel now. Good choice."

"Well, I live nearby, so it's not like this decision had too much symbolic import. It was a matter of convenience, really, and boredom. I want to meet everyone before we're stuck with communicating via video chat. Or, you know, a symbolic reminder that we are watching for any signs of sedition."

"That's cheerful. So I assume then I'll be seeing more of you, and I can save my long speech for when you don't catch me by surprise. If you want to come by for breakfast for the next few weeks, until you head off to Philadelphia, I don't mind. Unless that's hitting a bit too close to home for you."

"You know, everyone keeps telling me that coming back to Heller is some childish regression to the past that only proves how I've failed as a person. They don't phrase it quite that harshly, but I know that's what they're thinking."

"Anyone's first instinct on graduating high school is going to be burying the past. You're teenagers, you don't know any better. It's a sign of maturity that you can straddle both worlds and focus on what Heller means in the present for you, instead of a past that doesn't exist anymore. So I guess that's my advice. Naturally, I imagine you won't be spending much time thinking about Heller, about us, beyond what your professional duties demand. You might be CC'd on emails between the club people and Mr. Kurtz occasionally, and maybe you'll respond. But they won't be any different than if you're CC'd on some email from Yale or USC."

"Funny you should mention USC—we will never have any offices there."

"For Juliet?"

"Yeah, for her. They can take the metro and come to UCLA if they need anything."

"Funny indeed. Well, I'd better not keep you. If you want to pay your respects to all of us before school begins, you'd best hurry. If someone writes a novel about us, that can be the climactic final scene. It might work better in a movie, but those are harder to make."

"Again, funny you should mention that—John's apparently written and queried a novel about, well, not us, but a similar school."

"He'd better be careful with the details he includes, although clearly whatever he wrote is credible enough. Who would believe someone spent weeks carrying around copy paper boxes, multiple kids took calculus as freshmen, or that I was a Serbian revolutionary?"

"Wait, what?"

"That's a story for another time. You've talked to, what, three teachers already? I certainly hope any book with a scene wouldn't drag on like this forever, talking to everyone. That would be boring. How about we end this chapter on a better note? Especially now that we're coworkers and not teacher and student. Perhaps even friends."

"Max, I believe this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

"Now that's more like it."

Discussion Questions:

Does Frank seem happy to be finally leaving Heller behind?

How accurate is John's appraisal that Harry and Daisy are symbolic representations of the power of good person ideology, or greed ala The Great Gatsby?

What narrative significance is there to this idea of a story within a story (John's novel, the literary comparisons) coming up again and again?