But then she said, “Come now, perhaps Stanford won’t be able to look past your SAT scores, but there are many other schools which could—”
I ran upstairs, threw on a gray hooded sweatshirt, and grabbed my keys. When I stormed down the stairs, my mom just said, “Please don’t upset your father with this,” but I was already forwarding him the e-mail.
My dad works in a start-up incubator on the outskirts of Sunnyvale: a place where people rent a workstation or two while they’re still getting their companies off the ground. It’s a huge warehouse filled with desks. My flip-flops slapped against the concrete floor as I made my way between the empty cubicles. Even this late in the evening, a bunch of people were working.
One kid—he looked like he was still in college—was resting his cheek against the gray laminate surface of his desk. His chair was shoved out all the way across the aisle and I had to pick my way past him as he stared at me. It’s always like that in the incubator; there aren’t many girls in the tech industry, and almost none in that building.
My dad pays a little more so his workspace can be a bit fancier: it’s surrounded by chest-high office partitions.
When I knocked on his cubicle partition, he looked up at me and blinked. He has fierce eyebrows that are entirely white, and they meet in the center of his face whenever he’s angry.
He slammed a hand down on his desktop; his coffee cup shook and I grabbed it before it could fall. The coffee was cold, and an oily scum had built up on its surface.
“You…you got my e-mail?” I said.
“It is silly. Absolutely silly. And it is one more reason to be glad of our lawsuit. Clearly this Chelsea person does not deserve to be valedictorian.”
I shoved my fists into the pockets of my hoodie and held my elbows in close at my side. Suddenly, my body was cold. The whole reason I’d come here was because I’d known my dad would see my point of view. But now that we were face-to-face, my dad’s intense stare was unnerving.
“So…what are we going to do? We’re going to stop it from happening?”
“What? No, no. You must go in there and make sure they give you the first pick so that no one else can apply to Stanford.”
“But I’m not worried about Chelsea. I can beat her.”
He was silent for a long time. His fingertips were drumming against the countertop and he was staring off into the corner, as if he was doing some calculation in his head. This cubicle was all that was left of KapCo: the company my parents had started five years ago in order to pursue a major breakthrough in image recognition technology that they had discovered. However, a few months after my dad finally perfected the algorithm—among other things, it allowed computers to recognize ice on the roads with almost perfect accuracy—his chief investor and board chairman, Susan Le, sneakily forced my parents out, then turned around and sold the technology to Apple in a billion-dollar deal.
“You have already beaten her, and with this proposal she is signaling her defeat,” he said. “Now it only remains to ensure your victory.”
“But—”
“Remember,” he said. “You must always be careful with these people. It is best to go and learn the details of their plan. If they truly intend to not apply to the same college as you, then so much the better! Stanford will certainly take at least one student from Bell High, and if you are the only one who applies, then it will be you who they take!”
“I just—” I felt like I ought to object. This wasn’t…When I imagined getting into Stanford, it always came with the look of disappointment on Chelsea’s face when she didn’t get in. I wanted her to see what all her pretend-perfection had cost her.
“Come now,” he said. “I agree that this is silliness. And if you were in even the second place, then I would advise you to fight it to the end. But you are first. You will get what you want. Isn’t that what matters?”
I was going to object again, but instead I took a deep breath, because my dad was right. Beating Chelsea wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was getting into Stanford. And if I didn’t use every single tool at my disposal, then I’d be no better than the perfects.
Giving up my desire to humiliate Chelsea was almost physically painful, but I eventually said, “You’re right.”
“Yes. So it is settled. You will take the first place.” My dad squeezed my hand. “And justice will win out in the end, as it always does.”
I should’ve left that statement alone, but something compelled me to say, “Come on, Daddy. We know better, don’t we?”
His face had gotten so pouchy and old, and when he squinted at me, his eyes disappeared behind the flesh. And I thought for once he was going to be honest with me, but instead he said, “You’ve done well, beta. Don’t give up now. You are almost there.” And then he went back to his computer.
The thing you need to understand about my parents is that they are the biggest study machines who ever lived.
In the year my mom and dad graduated from junior college (i.e. the Indian version of high school) something like one hundred thousand of the smartest kids in India took the entrance test for the Indian Institute of Technology—India’s top engineering college. Out of that group, maybe one thousand five hundred would get spots at a good campus in a good program. In India, there’s no second place: the only people who are really securely middle class are the country’s most educated professionals. Which means that if you want to be able to afford proper medical care and a place of your own, then you need to be in the top 3% on a test that’s already only being taken by the top 5% of India’s kids.
Growing up, all my parents did was study. School in India is six days a week. And if you’re going to keep up, then you spend all of your “free” time going to extra classes—they call them “tuitions”—so you can have an edge over everybody else. Extracurriculars are nonexistent, and if you go on a date, then your whole town’ll be scandalized. Instead, your entire high school life centers around one test.
It’s clean, simple, and pure. Because that’s what life is like in India: if you study hard enough, then you get what you want.
My dad got 781st place. And my mom got 11th. Eleventh out of two hundred thousand. She was one of only three women to matriculate at IIT Bombay in her year.
And, really, that was the high point of their lives. Afterward, they came here and tried to do the same thing. They worked hard in graduate school and, later, at their jobs. They studied their industry and identified a gap in the prevailing knowledge, and, after starting their own company, they worked sixteen-hour days to fill that gap.
Then they took money from the wrong investor, and she stabbed them in the back and stole their company.
Because my parents don’t understand that in America it doesn’t matter how hard you work. What matters is that you learn all the tips and tricks and do everything in the right way. And you know why? Because white people know that if hard work was all that counted, then my family would destroy them. We would own this country.
So instead they shifted everything and made it so other things counted: extracurriculars and playing well on the sports field and helping other people. And when we Indian people started to do that stuff, too, then they changed the system even more so that what mattered became intangible stuff: leadership and charm and attractiveness and being able to impress people at interviews.
And even after everything that’s happened to my parents, they still don’t understand. Whenever I have any kind of trouble, my mom tells me to buckle down and do my best. And whenever I try to argue with her, she sighs and looks away, as if I’m some big disappointment.
My dad is a little better, though. The frustrating thing about him is that he almost gets it; he almost sees the truth about how the world works. And although he’s not willing to talk about it, sometimes he hints at how he respects me for not making the same mistakes that he did.
For instance, I remember way back in freshman year, when I’d just started at Bell. Even then, all of us smart
kids were grouped together. We were only a small subset of the school, but everyone else was invisible: they were the people I saw in the halls but never in my classes. Even back then I was taking honors physics and AP European history and precalculus.
So from the very beginning I was spending a lot of time around people like Chelsea and Alex and Aakash.
And of course we knew we were competing for the best GPA, but it was all right, because we all understood the system. We would spend our lunch periods talking about how many AP classes it was logistically possible to take by the time you graduate, and which AP classes were easiest and which ones we should avoid at all costs because the teachers were hard graders. And it was apparent, even from really early in the first semester, that I was getting better grades than everybody, and that I was probably gonna end up as the valedictorian.
But then, one day—it was maybe about two months into the year—Chelsea went around the lunch table and shut everyone’s books. “No school talk today!” she announced. And then she began asking us which guys we liked. Every time someone brought the conversation around to school, she’d stare at them silently until they quieted down.
And sure, I had fun and I went along with it, because it was good to talk about something other than school for a bit. What did I know? I was only in ninth grade. I was bright and shiny and innocent, and I still thought we were all playing the same game.
Over the next few weeks, she and Alex and Tina Huang codified ten rules.
The Rules of the Perfects
1. Always take the hardest classes.
2. Never do the extra-credit assignments.
3. Never do the reading.
4. No talking about class, homework, or tests.
5. Never raise your hand or contribute to class discussions, unless class participation is a major part of that teacher’s grading.
6. Homework has to be done at school—preferably in the five minutes before class.
7. The weekend before a midterm, you have to party.
8. On a party night, you have to drink and/or smoke.
9. Never wear sweatpants, flip-flops, ponytails, polo shirts, or any skirt or dress that goes below the knee.
10. If you violate one of these rules, you can’t eat lunch with us for a week.
And they started talking about sisterhood. About how we’d be better than all the other kids, because we’d take the hardest classes and get the best grades without making a fuss about it. Which seemed weird, and maybe a little frightening, to me, but whenever I complained about it, Chelsea and Alex said it was just a game, so I went along with it. And during that first semester I could almost convince myself that it was possible, since most of my classes were so easy that I didn’t need to study or spend much time on the homework.
But then it happened. On the honors physics final, I got a 75—my lowest grade of the semester. But I wasn’t alone. The class was impossible. Chelsea got an 82; Alex got a 71; and everybody else got a 65 or below.
At lunch, after we got the tests back, I remember I said something about transferring to AP environmental science next semester, since it was an easier class and also it was an AP, but Chelsea stared at each of us and said, “No school talk.”
That night, I showed my parents my grade, and my mom was confused: she asked what had gone wrong. And when I told her that I’d gotten the second-highest grade in the class, she said okay, I should stay in the class and learn as much as I possibly could, and if the best I could get was a B then that was fine.
My dad was quiet. That was right after their company had failed. My mom had gotten her job at Google immediately, but my dad was still sitting around the house all day. As my mom talked to me, I kept looking at him to see what he wanted, and he gave me a little smile.
When I finally said maybe AP enviro would be better for me next semester, my mom went ballistic. She said it was absurd that one test was enough to make me run away and quit.
But my dad put his hand on her arm and said, “No. We should discuss this.”
And the next morning he came down and said to me that I could transfer if I thought it was best.
Something passed between us at that moment. He couldn’t come right out and say it, but I knew he admired me for being savvy and adaptable and doing what needed to be done.
The next day, I transferred into AP environmental science for the spring semester. Somehow the news got out, and when I sat down to lunch, Alex said, “You can’t sit with us, Resh.”
Chelsea looked uncomfortable and tried to say something about how I could come back in a week, but Alex cut her off and said, “I’m sorry. No offense, but you betrayed our pact, and traitors aren’t allowed at this table.”
So I walked out to the edge of the courtyard, and I cried about it. What hurt the most was this idea that they were somehow better than me. They knew I was the smartest. They knew I was the hardest worker. But because they were willing to sacrifice their grades, they were entitled to look down on me? It was a vile and stupid stance, and even though I went back a few times, over the course of the semester, and tried to explain that to Alex, she never changed her mind.
But it doesn’t matter. At the end of the spring semester, my 5.3 in AP enviro had propelled me into the top spot in the class—Chelsea, Alex, and Tina were knocked out of the running by a 3.3, 3.0, and 2.7 in physics—and I’ve been number one ever since.
Finally heard back from my would-be suitor.
Hey, you wanna hang out sometime?
Sure. When?
Sat night? You want to see a movie? “Total Kismet” looks good.
K. Works for me. =]
Cool. Pick you up at 8.
That made me smile a little bit. I’d wondered if I would need to do everything for him, but he stepped things up. Of course, his next text to me was:
OMG, everyone! She said yes! #CrushedIt #TotalVictory #ThanksForAllTheFish.
A second later, he texted me:
Uhhhhm sorry that was meant for someone else. ;)
So I wrote back:
No problem.
A quick search led me to what I guess Aakash thought was his “anonymous” Bombr account: @AardvarkPatel. Personally, I don’t even have a Bombr profile. Every day, you read about colleges using people’s online postings to reject them. Why run the risk?
Clearly Aakash wasn’t so cautious. He’d thrown 10,541 bombs, and he had 713 followers. As I watched his feed, he replied to dozens and dozens of congratulatory bombs:
@Thriptych
Yep, did it by text message.
@Prozblem
Thanks! Yep, just now! I followed your advice. Totes great.
@Azblyni
I went with a chick flick. Seemed like the simplest thing.
Wow. Even Aakash has managed to find a few hundred people who care about him.
This morning I realized I had skipped one of the steps in my novel-writing plan. I was well on my way to going on a date, securing a boyfriend, etc., but what about the very first item? What about making a friend? For the last week, I’d gone around and around on this one, but in the end I had just one real option: Alex was the only girl my age whom I regularly interacted with outside of school.
I was sitting at my computer, rubbing at the sides of my head as if I could physically push another friendship possibility into my brain, when I saw I was about to run out of Adderall.
That settled it. I needed to see Alex.
I wanted to wait until school hours to talk to her, but by 7 A.M. I was so antsy that I texted her and asked if we could meet today.
She wrote back instantly.
What happened to “mind your own business”?
I wrote back right away.
Sorry about that.
I don’t need the hassle.
Alex has access to plenty of money: she drives a silver beamer and carries a thousand-dollar handbag. But it’s all on her credit card, which means she can’t use it to buy…well…other things. For that, she needs cas
h. Which is where the Adderall comes in: five dollars a pill, except during midterms and finals, when it’s ten.
Come on. Stop playing games.
Should’ve thought about this before you went after Chelsea last summer. She never did anything to you.
You don’t want to do this.
We’re done.
And that was that. I was left in the basement, staring at my phone. I put my last remaining pill into my desk drawer, since I knew I’d need it for finals, but by 8 A.M. I was feeling so cracked out and empty and exhausted that I took it.
But even then, my energy didn’t come back. My heart just started to race and my fingertips tingled and the whole world felt distant and blue and when Aakash tried to talk to me during class I looked at him with faraway eyes, because I was just not in the mood for this.
And when I tried to do my homework during lunch, I couldn’t write one coherent word because my fingers were shaking so hard, and I could feel the blood pulsing through my wrists. I’m not addicted to Adderall. I go off of it for a few days each month, just to prove I don’t need it. But most weeks, I sleep so little that normal life becomes really difficult when I don’t have it.
I couldn’t think. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw circles inside circles inside circles, all vibrating rapidly. I closed my books and opened my phone. I had less than three weeks to write this book, and I needed a friend. And if Alex refused to see me, who did I have left?
I scrolled through the names. I’m not a complete loser. I do have a certain austerity that the other study machines admire. They band together for support and friendship, gathering in their sad, battered geek klatches that meet in libraries or basements or the corners of the cafeteria. They sit around and whisper to one another that they are the smart ones and the talented ones and that someday the world will belong to them. Maybe some of them are even right. But right now, at this moment, their lives are just so unbearably sad. And I knew I could work my way into one of those circles. It’d be easy. All it would take was a call. But what would be the point? I wasn’t actually trying to make a friend. I was trying to write a novel. And not a sad novel: a novel about some poor girl who was bravely able to soldier on and carve out a nice little friend circle for herself even though the world didn’t care about her.
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