In the past three years, ever since my freeze-up at new-student orientation, I’ve perfected all sorts of comebacks. If anyone asks where I lived before Deskins, I say, “Oh, here and there. I’ve moved around. Nowhere that really stuck with me.”
If anyone asks, “Hey, don’t you kind of have a Southern accent?”—though I’ve done my best to get rid of it—I shrug and say, “You know, I pick up accents so easily! I always sound like the last person I talked to! I talk to Rosa for five minutes, and you’d swear I was born south of the Rio Grande!”
If anybody asks, “What’s your father do?” I say, “Enh, he’s not really in the picture. It’s just me and my mom.”
The trick is to sound so bored with my answer that nobody wants to ask anything else.
I’m just not sure I can pull that off right now, after looking at the picture of Daddy, after reading those words. After feeling, once again, that everything was my fault.
Rosa elbows me again.
“Wh-what?” I ask, jarred.
“You liked this assembly so much, you’re going to sit here until they do it again for next year’s seniors?” she asks.
I look at her blankly.
“It’s over! We’ve been released from the torture del día,” she says. “It’s time for lunch.”
I realize I’m the last senior still seated. Everybody else is fleeing. Shannon Daily walks by with her head down, her face red. She looks like she’s holding back tears.
I was right. The queen bee has been deposed, I think.
Being right doesn’t make me happy.
• • •
Rosa and I have the same lunch period as three of our other friends: Stuart, Oscar, and Clarice. As Rosa drops her brown-paper lunch sack onto the table, she begins surveying the crowd: “Everybody feeling okay? How’s your blood pressure? Your pulse? Nobody’s stressed out yet, are you?”
“Of course I’m stressed out!” Stuart snaps. “I’ve got eighteen college application essays to write between now and January first—six of them before November first, if I do early action at Chicago and Georgetown and Yale. And AP calc is going to ruin my GPA, but I can’t drop it, because that will look like I’m just being lazy. And the band director says when we get close to contests, we’re going to have to practice an extra hour every night, which I don’t have time for, but I can’t drop that, because then I won’t have the marching band president position to put on my college applications, and—”
“Stuart,” Oscar says. “Shut up.”
Rosa shoots me a triumphant look.
“It’s starting,” she sings. I think she’s trying for the same eerie effect as a narrator in a horror movie.
“Guys,” Clarice says earnestly. “Promise me we are not going to be mean to each other over this. My brother said some kids in his class stopped speaking to each other for a while over who got into which schools and who got which scholarships and . . . we’re not doing that, okay?”
“Dream on,” Stuart snorts, even as he reaches out and tries to smash Oscar’s head into his french fries and ketchup. But Oscar sees him coming and dodges the shove. Stuart ends up with ketchup on his hand.
I signed up for honors and advanced classes freshman year because I thought smart kids would be nice. And this is what I got?
Honestly, at first it seemed like they really were nicer. I was just a timid mouse who sat at the back of every room—no threat to anyone. But even Stuart, who was a total stranger to me then, kindly patted me on the back when he saw I got a 79 on my first writing assignment in honors freshman English. “You’ll do better next time,” he said. He got a 98.5—he could afford to be magnanimous. (And condescending. He’s always been very good at condescending.)
But then a funny thing happened. Did you know that if you can’t afford a cell phone and you don’t have a Facebook page and you’re scared to let even your closest friends know too much about you—and you can’t even try to be popular—then that really doesn’t leave much for you to do except homework?
And, surprisingly enough, homework is actually kind of important in high school?
On my second writing assignment in honors freshman English, I got a 96.
Stuart got an 89.
When he saw my grades, he shoved his face near mine and yelled, “I hate you!”
This struck me as so ridiculous that I started laughing.
“Next time, Jones,” he threatened, actually shaking his fist at me. “Next time we’ll see who dominates!”
I kept laughing. It didn’t even occur to me that he might be serious until he’d left the room, and Clarice and Lakshmi crowded around me, speaking to me for the very first time.
“Are you all right?” Lakshmi asked, as skittish as a bird. She kept darting her gaze around, as if she feared Stuart would come back and she wanted to be ready to fly away if he did.
“That boy is just nasty!” Clarice declared, shaking her head. “But—is it true? Did you get an A? The only A in the class?”
And I saw something I hadn’t known before: There were other things to want in high school besides popularity. The kids who were chasing high GPAs and top class ranks could be just as cutthroat as the Shannon Daily mean-girls crowd. But the proof of their success was more . . . absolute. I’d learned in eighth grade that you could go from being the most popular girl in school to being a total pariah in nothing flat if, say, oh, I don’t know. Maybe your father got arrested? Maybe his picture was all over the news and people called you up pretending to care when they really just wanted ammunition for making fun of you? Maybe you swore and double-swore and triple-swore and quadruple-swore—even on a stack of Bibles, even though you felt kind of wrong about it—that he really was innocent, just wait, everyone would see?
Only, he wasn’t?
Meanwhile, an A on your report card—nobody could take that away from you.
You might think having Stuart yell, “I hate you!” would have scared me away. But it didn’t. It made me want in, all the way. It made me want to beat him again.
And it made us friends, to the extent that you could say anyone at Deskins High School was my friend, when nobody knew a thing about me.
Oh, and when I brought home my first high school report card, covered in nothing but A’s? Mom burst into tears of joy.
“Then—you’re going to be okay,” she exclaimed, simultaneously crying and laughing into my hair as she hugged me a little too tightly. “This proves it. You’re not going to start doing drugs, or dressing all in black, or cutting yourself, or—”
I shoved her away.
“You thought I would do any of that stuff?” I demanded. “Really, Mom?”
“I-I was joking,” Mom stammered, still reaching out, her arms hugging nothing but empty air. “I was working up to ‘holding up liquor stores,’ and, um, I don’t know, ‘cheating on your taxes . . .’ ”
Both of us froze, and she let the words dribble away. Cheating on his taxes was one of the things Daddy did.
And I could see it in her face, the shock exposing her like a camera’s flash: She really had been afraid for me. Of course. My father was in prison. I was being raised in a single-parent home. I was “at risk.” All those things that hadn’t even occurred to me were the things she’d been terrified I would do, the person she was afraid I’d become.
Or worse.
Was it because she thought I was too much like Daddy?
“Oh, thanks, Mom. Thanks a lot,” I exploded. I was shaking. My words slurred together, self-propelled. I wanted to hurt her as badly as she’d hurt me, just by the way she’d looked at me. Just because of what she’d feared for me. “What else are you going to accuse me of? Are you saying I must have cheated to get these grades? At least Daddy always thought I was smart!”
That was the nuclear weapon of comebacks.
And in my memory, it was nuclear winter in our apartment for weeks after that, both of us like survivors picking their way through radioactive wreckage, each of us too alon
e in her own misery to reach a charred hand to the other person. We said nothing deeper than, “Are we out of cereal?” and “Which days are you working next week?” and “Where’s the remote?”
Let me translate: What we were really saying, either one of us, anytime we spoke—or even when we didn’t—was, “You huuurrt me. I’m in paaaain.” And, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
Mom started going to church again.
I refused. And, to my surprise, she didn’t force me.
Mom started apologizing all the time: for having to sell the TV, for keeping the heat in our apartment set barely above freezing, for serving macaroni and cheese several days in a row, for “everything else.”
The second or third time she apologized for “everything else,” I said, “Okay! I heard you! Just forget about it, all right?”
And that’s how we left it.
But before, in that cold, dark, ashen place that was my life freshman year, I thought about all the things I could do just to serve Mom right—to serve both my parents right. Anybody who spent more than five minutes at Deskins High School could tell who the drug dealers were; even in the honors and advanced classes I heard about parties where kids stayed drunk all weekend long. I heard about kids who went joyriding in stolen cars, kids who hooked up with anybody they could find, kids who walked away from school and just never bothered coming back.
I did none of those things. I made geometry my drug of choice; I drowned my sorrows in Rebecca and The Great Gatsby and Things Fall Apart, in the League of Nations charter and the laws of thermodynamics. I piled up golden A’s around me like I was building a fort.
Did I really have to work that hard just to prove Mom wrong? (Or . . . right? Which was it?)
Now again
(Really. I’m staying in “now.” I worked too hard to get away from “then.” Why go back?)
So, anyhow. It’s the start of my senior year, and I’m sitting atop three years of those shiny, hard-earned A’s. I’m number four in my class. I will be number three if Stuart really does drop or flunk AP calc, but I know he’s not going to do either of those things. And I’m sitting at a tableful of my fellow high-ranked seniors, and everyone’s eating and laughing and talking. And even though Stuart still has ketchup on his hand, I’m sure that anyone watching from afar—say, a timid, insecure freshman who doesn’t know anyone yet, the person I used to be—would think we act like we rule the universe. The people I’m with have that confidence built into their marrow, that air of assurance that everything’s going to go their way. It’s like they’re genetically engineered to succeed.
And I’m good at faking it.
Clarice taps my arm and asks, “What about you, Becca?”
“Huh?” I say, ever so eloquently.
Rosa playfully jostles against me.
“Earth to Becca! Earth to Becca! What is wrong with you today?” She appeals to the rest of the table. “She was zoned out the whole time we were in that assembly, too.”
“I think that’s a sign of advanced intelligence,” Oscar says, and I blow him a kiss.
There is nothing romantic going on between me and Oscar. We just goof around like that all the time.
“Focus, people!” Stuart scolds us. He trains his green eyes on me. Really, Stuart isn’t bad looking—until he opens his mouth. Then he’s so obnoxious you forget what he looks like.
Unfortunately, Stuart talks a lot.
“The question on the table, Becca,” he asks, smirking a little, “is what would you do, if you had to, to go to your dream college? What laws would you break? What moral dictates would you toss aside?”
And, yes, he really does say “moral dictates.”
“Would you sell your soul?” Clarice asks.
“Would you sleep with Mr. Dingleheimer?” Oscar asks.
Mr. Dingleheimer is one of the physics teachers, and he weighs four hundred pounds. I’m guessing Mrs. Dingleheimer probably doesn’t even sleep with him.
“Would you pay someone to take the SAT for you if they could guarantee perfect scores?” Rosa asks. “Would you rob a bank? Would you sell state secrets to the Chinese?”
“Hey!” Oscar says. His family came to the United States from China, like, three generations ago, but sometimes he acts like it was yesterday.
“Would you hack in to Harvard’s admissions system and sabotage your competition?” Stuart asks.
I am still a little off today. It isn’t until I hear the word “hack,” that I realize what started this whole guessing game.
That article about Daddy and what he did, I think. They’re just laughing at it.
I can feel my legs and my hands start to tremble. I slide my hands under the table and hold on to my knees.
Fake it fake it fake it fake it . . .
I put on my sweetest smile.
“I would practically kill myself to get an A in AP chem,” I say. “I would spend four Friday nights in a row taking SAT practice tests. Oh, wait. I already did those things last year! I’m all set!”
I turn toward Oscar, because I’m sure he’s going to put his hand out for me to high-five—he’s so nerdy and predictable like that. But he’s just sitting there, gazing at me sadly. He shakes his head a little.
I look back at the rest of the group, and they’re all wearing the same pitying expression.
Do they know something? I wonder. Did one of them figure something out?
“Oh, Becca,” Stuart says, appointing himself spokesperson for the group. “Becca Becca Bec.”
“What?” I say. Or screech, actually.
“What did you do all summer—hide under a rock?” Stuart asks. “Didn’t you work on college stuff at all?”
“I worked at Riggoli’s,” I say. “You know—making money for college? Do the math: Every minute I spent shredding mozzarella or slicing pepperoni earned me point-oh-eight seconds in a college classroom.”
I know this group: They won’t let a ridiculous statement like that stand unexamined. I didn’t actually do the math myself, but Rosa will. She’ll pull out her calculator. She’ll ask how much I make, and then she’ll figure it all out: How much time my summer of pizza making would earn me at a private school, a public school, a community college . . .
I’ll have them distracted in nothing flat.
But all of them are still staring at me.
“You’ll never earn enough for college working at Riggoli’s,” Stuart says flatly. “That’s if you even manage to get in anywhere good. Grades and test scores aren’t enough. Do you know, there are people with almost-perfect SAT scores who still don’t get into Georgetown? Georgetown! It’s not even the Ivy League!”
“Stuart, you have got to stop looking at collegedata dot com,” Clarice says. “It’s making you crazy.”
“And stop texting me about it!” Rosa adds, waving her peanut butter sandwich at him for emphasis. She sees me looking confused and seems to remember that I don’t have a cell phone, so I haven’t gotten any texts. “Collegedata’s this website that tells you your chances of getting in at any school.”
“And where kids like you got in last year, and what kind of aid they got,” Stuart adds. “Though everyone says this year’s going to be even tougher. . . .”
He does look a little wild-eyed. Maybe this conversation hasn’t exactly been a joke. But then, Stuart’s the kind of person who walks out of an exam moaning about how this time he’s sure he’s failed, he’s ruined his life forever, he’ll be lucky someday just to get a job emptying Porta-Johns. And then it will turn out that he only missed one question, and with the curve, he’s got 100 percent.
“You’ll be fine,” I tell him. “You’ve got a million extracurriculars. Marching band president, remember? Aren’t you senior class president, too?”
Stuart shakes his head violently.
“That’s not enough,” he says. “There’s a senior class president at every high school in America. Do you know how many spaces there are in Harvard’s freshman class? On
e thousand, six hundred and fifty-seven. A certain percentage of those are legacies; a certain percentage has to be international students—you break it down far enough, I’m probably competing with ten thousand other kids for just five spots!”
“You like competition,” I say.
“But how is that fair, when the odds are so stacked against me?” Stuart asks. He stabs his fork a little too hard against his cafeteria tray. “It used to be, if you were a decent student, you did okay on the ACT or SAT, you could go anywhere you wanted.”
“If you were a white male,” Rosa mutters. “And rich.”
Stuart ignores her.
“But now it’s like, if you haven’t already discovered the cure for cancer as a high school student, forget it,” Stuart says. “You don’t have a prayer.”
“So discover the cure for cancer, already,” I say. “You’ve got a couple months.”
I look around—surely Oscar will high-five me for that zinger. But he and both the girls are slumped down. Stuart has them all stressed out now, worrying about college. He’s discovered something, all right: insta-depression. He could market it to people with bipolar disorder, bring them down from their moments of euphoric mania just by talking.
“Or, I know,” I say. “You could take your gloom-and-doom act on the road. Go around telling high school seniors everywhere just how screwed they are. You’ll be famous, and that’s what will get you into Harvard. Then ten thousand senior class presidents will murder you because they don’t appreciate the irony.”
“Very funny,” Stuart says.
Then, to my horror, he picks up a stack of papers from beside his tray—the packet Ms. Stela passed out in the assembly. Stuart flips it over to the last page, to the picture of Daddy.
“This guy,” he says, and he puts his finger right on Daddy’s face. “He stole millions of dollars, right? You don’t actually need that much to pay tuition. I bet he was going to buy his kid’s way into Harvard. That’s what I would do, if I had that kind of money. That’s what lots of people do. It’s like, nowadays, you have to cheat to come out on top.”
I’m standing before I even realize I’ve moved. Now everyone is staring at me again. Kids at neighboring tables are staring at me too.