"We're just giving him a slight advantage," Max said. "The rest he can do--or more likely, screw up--on his own."
"Even so. Don't you ever think about it? The person, whoever it is, who's going to get rejected because of us?"
"Look, if she's a deserving applicant--"
"He or she," Eric said.
Max smirked. "Whatever you say. If he or she is a deserving applicant, he or she will get in, whatever we do."
Eric laughed bitterly. "You know that's bullshit."
"Of course I do--and so do you. That's why we're doing this in the first place, remember?" Max leaned his head back against the wall, spreading his fingertips wide against the bubbling white
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paint. "And I quote, 'We're bringing attention to a broken system. It's the only way anyone's ever going to fix it.' Know who I'm quoting there?"
"Max--"
"It was a wise man, my friend. A very wise man. Can you guess
his
name:
"Max, all I'm saying--"
"It was you" Max jabbed his finger toward Eric. "You said it when we started this whole thing, and you were right."
"I know what I said." Eric sighed. "I just don't know if this is the way to do it. Not if someone's going to get hurt."
"The ends justify the means, Eric. Who said that? Oh, that's right--you again. Just this morning. And you were very persuasive."
"We both know the SAT version of critical reasoning doesn't apply to the real world."
"Tell that to the College Board," Max pointed out with a sly grin. Eric didn't smile back. Max ran a hand through his spiky black hair. "Look, nothing's changed. If this was a good idea yesterday--and it was-- it's still a good idea today. Bernard's just supplying the cash, which we need. Don't we?"
Eric nodded. He'd used up the last of his cash on SAT supplies, and they were still months away from the end of the hack.
"You weren't here, Eric. I was all set to discuss this, but you didn't show--and now it's too late." Max's tone softened. "Look, Salazat knows what we're doing, and if we cut him out now, no doubt he'll turn us in. He's an asshole."
Eric finally smiled. "You noticed, too?"
"I'm not blind," Max said. "Just poor. And now we've got a guy
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who probably uses cash as toilet paper. We need this. We need him. And all he wants from us is a little help. So let's just suck it up, okay?"
"You really think we can trust him?" Eric asked dubiously.
"Are you nuts?" Max shook his head. "But it'll all work out. No need to trust him. Trust me."
"Trust you?" Eric grinned, his eyebrows rising to his forehead. "Are you nuts?"
Bernard was like a wart.
A painful, infectious, oozing growth that wouldn't go away.
As the hours dragged by, they tried conventional methods, hoping to ease him out the door with subtle, then not-so-subtle, suggestions that it was time to go, but he stuck. Even when Eric logged into World of Warcraft and jumped into battle with a local wizard while Schwarz and Max hovered at his shoulder pretending to care, Bernard stuck around. He lounged on the roommate's bed, his shoes on the pillows, his head propped up on the Harvard sweatshirt that Schwarz's mother had bought him the day after the acceptance letter arrived.
Eric and Max had each, separately, tried making a break for the door, only to be drawn back in by Schwarz's plaintive expression and silent pleading: Do not leave me alone with him.
"Your presence, though magnanimous, is also superfluous," Max pleaded with Bernard. "Now that we've concluded the business portion of the day, I'm sure you've got a full social calendar, so . . ."
"Not a problem." Bernard pulled out a ballpoint pen and began
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drawing a lightning bolt on his left bicep. "We're just hanging out, right? I like to see who's going to be spending my money. . . . Unless you've got a problem with that."
"Of course not," Max said quickly. Schwarz and Eric shook their heads.
He was a stubborn wart, and conventional methods obviously weren't going to do the trick.
Bring on the cauterizer.
It was already dark outside when the door flew open, revealing Clay Porter leaning against the doorjamb, one hand in his pocket, the other propped over his head, resting against the frame. "Ready to go?
Eric looked at Max, Max looked at Schwarz, and Schwarz looked down at his calendar. "You are off for the night. It says right here-- morning, SATs. The rest of the day, nothing."
"So you can go do . . . whatever it is you do," Max added.
"I party," Clay said. "Never aced a test before in my life."
And you didn't do it this time either, Eric thought. We did.
"It felt good," Clay continued. "We're going out."
"I have to get up early tomorrow," Eric said.
Max tapped his cell phone. "I've got a few transactions to take care of."
"And I have homework," Schwarz said quickly.
"I'm out too, yo." Bernard leaned toward Eric and lowered his voice to a whisper. "I can't be seen with someone like him--you know, my rep." Then he turned back to the rest of the room. "Yeah, I'll just stay up in here wit' my boy Schwarzie."
"You know what?" Schwarz shut down his laptop and leaped out
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of the chair. "It is Saturday night. Fornicate my homework." "Eric?" Max raised his eyebrows. Eric looked back and forth between his two options. Both sucked. He shrugged. "All right. Fornicate the homework it is."
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Premature senioritis can be disastrous.
--Paulo de Oliveira and Steve Cohen, Getting In! The First Comprehensive Step-by-Step Strategy Guide to Acceptance at the College of Your Choice
They rode the T into South Boston. The farther Clay led them down back streets and dark alleys, the closer they stuck to him, refusing to meet one another's eyes. They trudged in silence, heads bowed, shoulders hunched against the wind, so no one noticed when Clay stopped abruptly in front of what looked like just another broken shell of an empty house. "Guys!" he called. His voice echoed down the deserted street. "Here."
On closer examination, it wasn't a house. At least not according to the crooked wooden sign hanging over the entrance, its paint faded and nearly illegible.
It was the Yankee Doodle.
"Don't laugh," Clay advised them, when he saw they'd noticed the name. "They don't like it when you laugh."
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No one felt like laughing.
A small stairwell led down to the entrance, and at the bottom sat a man in a black T-shirt who was almost as wide as the doorway. He didn't look like he laughed much, either. Max pulled out his wallet, but Clay grabbed his wrist and shook his head.
"IDs," Max whispered. The year before, he had cooked up fake licenses for all three of them, the test run for a business that never got off the ground. They had yet to be used.
"Don't need 'em," Clay said. "Not when you're with me."
He jogged down the stairs and bent his head toward the bouncer, murmuring something too quietly for the rest of them to hear. Then he pointed up toward the boys, and they both began to laugh.
"What's he saying?" Max whispered, squinting as if, through sheer willpower, he could read their lips.
"Maybe 'you hold them down while I beat the crap out of them'?" Eric suggested.
Clay beckoned.
"This is them?" The bouncer laughed even harder as they lined up at the bottom of the stairs. His stomach rippled with every gasping chuckle, but that was it as far as the flesh jiggling went--those arms, nearly as thick as Eric's head, were obviously pure muscle. "Shit, Clay, I thought you were joking."
"Meet Jesse," Clay said, clapping him on the shoulder. "My mom's ex."
"One of 'em," the bouncer added, winking.
Schwarz, whose homeschooling had included a steady dose of maternal etiquette, extended his hand. "Nice to meet you."
The bouncer kept his arms folded. "I don't shake."
He jerked his
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head toward the bar. "Get in there." He burst into another round of laughter. "You boys are gonna have some fun tonight!"
Was his face red?
It didn't feel red. Not any redder than usual, at least. It was hot, but then, he was hot all over, tingling, almost glowing. He took another swig of beer. He liked that. Swig. It sounded manly.
His father's face always got red when he drank. That's how Max knew what he was doing every Saturday afternoon at lunch with the boys. Lunch, right, except he came home smelling like he'd taken a bath in gin, his face a radioactive, highlighter pink, wanting to talk about the old days.
What else was new?
For Maxwell Sr., the old days were all that mattered, after all. Four years, four golden years-- crimson years, Max corrected himself-- that mattered more than anything he'd done before or since.
More than his career, his promotions, his research.
More than his wife and family.
More than his son.
Fuck my father, Max thought, and when someone thrust another beer in his face, he grabbed it and choked down the putrid, bitter liquid without even making a face. He'd hate to see me now. The thought almost made the beer taste good.
The Yankee Doodle was the kind of place where Maxwell Sr. assumed all non-Harvard graduates ended up. Dank, dark, dirty, crammed with drunken regulars, the bar reeked of thwarted potential, frustrated mediocrity, and stale popcorn. Someone had hung a row of dartboards along the back, because nothing says
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fun like a bunch of drunks with needle-nosed projectiles.
Three dartboards, a wall of sagging booths, a mahogany bar-- where Clay was, at that very moment, turning Schwarz into a Southie Casanova--and one faded, pitted, three-legged, absolutely beautiful pool table.
Not as fancy as the one in the Kim basement, sure.
Bur when Max beat his father ten games out of ten, week after week, until the old man refused to play anymore, all he got out of it were bragging rights. And bragging wasn't worth anything in the Kim household unless it came complete with a certificate to hang on the wall.
This place was different. Bragging be damned.
Max smelled money.
"She is beautiful," Schwarz said, slumping onto the bar, his head lolling against his shoulders. "Perfect. So perfect. Like . . . like pet- feet, you know?" The beer had been bitter in his mouth, but he had choked it down, first one mug, then the next, and now it didn't taste like anything anymore. It was just cool. Not like him. He would never be cool. He was a loser. He was miserable. He was alone. He was confused. And he was having trouble pronouncing his words. "I look at her, and it is like in the magazine. Beautiful. Her hair and her eyes and when she looks at me, she doesn't even see me. She just talks, and I am listening, but she doesn't see me. And it does not matter, I don't need her to, I just want to look at her. It's like she is not even real, like I imagined her, but if she was an imaginary number then I could square it and then . . . what?" "What?" Clay asked.
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"What was I just. . . I'm sorry, I lost what I was . . . what?"
"Dude, I have no idea what you're--"
"Oh. Yeah. 'Scuse me, but like an equation? That's what she is. There's symmetry and elegance and on the surface it looks simple but then within it there are multitudes, and an infinity of complexity but it all falls into place and there are rules." Schwarz guzzled down more beer, barely noticing when half of it sloshed onto his jeans. "'S like music. All those different pieces, chaos, and then it all blends together in harmony, everything fits into the system, and that is magnificent, because how can the grass and the stars and the quarks and the footballs all follow the same rules, but they do, everything's vibrating in sync, and everything that's real has an ideal and it's there beneath the surface, and that's what she is, the ideal. Except that she has no rules and no equations and if she were a number she'd make sense but she doesn't. I want some rules!" He banged his fist on the bar. "Math has rules. There is always a system. There's always order. And the magazines, the pictures have a system. One a month, always one a month, and it's always the same and she's just there and you know what you're getting, and every chaotic system resolves itself into order, except in chaos theory, and even that has rules and formulas and it all makes sense, but she's real and she doesn't make any for-nic-at-ing sense?
Schwarz buried his head in his hands.
"Dude, you're one messed-up little geek," Clay said.
Schwarz hiccuped.
"You wanna know what your problem is?"
"Yes, please?" He looked up, took another swig. Now the beer tasted like hope.
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What does hope taste like? he thought. His mind was floating, like it wasn't attached to anything. Like if he didn't hold on, it would slither down the bar and slip away. It should be cotton candy. Or Milk Duds. Chocolate. Pizza. I wonder if the bar has pizza.
"You got that?"
Schwatz looked up. "What?"
"He said you don't understand women," Eric snapped. He was slouched in front of his second glass of Coke, pretending not to listen, acting like he had a stick up his posterior--even more than usual, Schwarz thought.
Clay clinked his shot glass against Eric's Coke. "Right. Whoever this girl is--"
"Stephanie," Schwarz moaned.
"Yeah. Stephanie. She's not perfect. She's not some goddess that's going to rule the universe, or whatever that shit meant that you were saying."
"It's not ex-e-cre . . . excrement," Schwarz said, his tongue tripping over the syllables. "It's math."
"Yeah, like I say, this Stephanie chick's not math, and she's not perfect. You're never gonna get her if you think she's perfect. And even if you do get her, it's not gonna take you too long to figure out that she's not."
"Could you, um, talk slower?" Schwarz asked. He felt like a multivariable calculus student trying to comprehend hypoellipticity of sub-Laplacians.
"Let me break it down for you," Clay said. "Women are just people, okay? You can't be scared of em. You can't worship 'em. You have to just treat them like regular people. It's the only way to understand them."
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Schwarz moaned.
"Don't panic. I got this." Clay tapped his shot glass against his teeth, then slammed it down on the bar. "Okay, first thing, no more of this 'whatever you say' shit. You gotta start standing up for yourself. Be your own man."
"Okay!" Schwarz slammed his glass down on the bar too, and straightened up. For a moment. Then he slouched again. "But . . . please, could you tell me how?"
Clay rubbed his hands across his face. Schwarz drank more beer. He wondered what it meant that his tongue was getting numb. Or maybe it wasn't quite numb. Maybe it was just bigger. Clumsier. Like a dead fish clogging up his mouth. The thought made him gag. He washed it away with another mouthful of beer. And he listened.
"Okay. You know what? Forget being your own man. Maybe that's like--that's like an honors class, right? You get that? You belong in remedial."
"I'm a genius," Schwarz said proudly. "Everyone says."
"Yeah . . . that's not gonna help. And you need some major help. We're gonna take this step by step, got it?"
"Got it."
"Step one. You wanna be tough, but not too tough, you know?"
"Tough. But not too tough," Schwarz repeated.
"They like to think you're this bad boy, right?" Clay said, clapping him on the back. Schwarz pitched forward, and caught himself just before his head smacked into the mahogany. "Some tough guy who won't take shit from anyone. But then ..."
"Then?" I should be taking notes, Schwarz thought. Then he giggled. "I think I'm drunk. Do you think I'm drunk?"
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"Tough," Clay said. "And then you gotta be soft. But just a little bit, and you act all embarrassed about it, like it's this big secret they've uncovered. Like they're the only ones who know the real you, right? The rest of the world thinks you're a thug,
but they know you're just a sweetie. They totally get off on that shit, trust me."
"That really works?"
Clay pointed across the bar, where the bartender was bending over to get something off a lower shelf, her tight skirt riding up her thighs. "Worked on her," he said, with an appreciative nod. "Want to meet her?"
"No! I can't--"
Too late.
"Sammi!" Clay called. "Get your ass over here."
The top half of her was even better than the bottom. Schwarz tried not to look.
"You got any friends for my boy here?" Clay asked, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. "He needs to get laid."
"No, I do not," Schwarz squeaked. "Really. Don't worry about it. I've got Stephanie. I mean, I don't have her, and she's got someone else, but maybe--"
"He's your man?" Sammi asked. "Did you join Big Brothers or something?"
Clay grinned. "He's cool. I'm just trying to teach him how to be, you know. Cool. He needs a girl."
"Woman," Sammi corrected him.
"Girl. Look at the kid. He's three feet tall."
Sammi reached over the bar and patted Schwarz on the head-- he could barely feel the pressure of her hand through the wiry mop
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of hair. "Don't listen to this guy," she said. "He likes to play like he's tough, but deep down . . ." She gave Clay a kiss back, first on the cheek, and then somehow--and despite Schwarz's wide-eyed stare, he couldn't figure it out--ended up attached to his mouth, sucking at his lower lip like it was a lollipop. Schwarz felt his lungs tightening at the sight of it--how was she breathing? "He's a good guy," she said, finally breaking away. "A real sweetie."
Clay waved good-bye as she was called over to the other end of the bar. His eyes twinkled. "See what I mean?"
"Three ball, side pocket," Max called. He cradled the cue, leaned down toward the table--and almost threw up.