Enter Title Here

by Rahul Kanakia

  No. My novel will be bold and triumphant. It’ll be about someone who wins and wins and wins until the entire world begs to be her friend.

  So, I texted to say I’d pay twenty dollars each.

  I stared at the little three dots that showed she was composing a message.

  Fine. You know where to meet.

  Within fifteen minutes, I’d transported myself to her surprisingly filthy silver beamer, which was idling in the little parking lot on top of the CVS on the other side of El Camino. From up there, we looked down on the big, complicated T intersection where El Camino flew over the Embarcadero expressway. Bell High was off to the left, on one side of the expressway, and I could see tiny clusters of people sitting around at the picnic tables in front of the cafeteria.

  Alex rummaged through all the trash at our feet: old scarves and sandwich wrappers and Starbucks cups, until she came up with an orange pill bottle. We conducted our business without talking. Alex sold her prescriptions to a bunch of other kids at Bell, but I was probably one of her biggest customers.

  After the pills were in my hands, I took one and popped it into my mouth—not even caring about how it’d look—and crunched it into powder so it’d dissolve into my bloodstream quicker.

  After I swallowed, I ran my tongue through my teeth to pry loose any bits of the pill that might be stuck.

  Alex cleared her throat, trying to get me to leave, and my words came out so fast that they tasted jagged and sour in my mouth: “What was that about, this morning? You don’t honestly care about my lawsuit, do you?”

  Alex cocked her head at me. “No matter what the court said, Chelsea deserves to be valedictorian,” she said. “She took harder classes and did better in them than you would’ve.”

  “She knew the right classes to take; she just chose not to do it.”

  “Chelsea is too nice to confront you,” Alex said. “But I’m not going to pretend like you didn’t screw over my friend. Did you ever stop to think what you were taking away from her? Your parents aren’t poor. You’ll get into a good school, and they’ll have no trouble paying for it. You don’t think being the valedictorian would’ve helped Chelsea a lot more than it’ll help you?”

  I squeezed my eyes tightly together. When I opened them, she was still looking at me. “I earned—”

  “No, you didn’t!” Alex said. “I already know that you’re a cheater and a liar, but it would really make me happy, just for my own sake, to know you’re not lying to yourself. We’re alone. No one’s here. No one’s listening. Just admit to me that you know, in your heart, that Chelsea is smarter and more deserving than you.”

  “No.” I rubbed the heel of my hand against my aching head. I didn’t want to get bogged down by all this talk about Chelsea. “If she was better, then she wouldn’t have lost.”

  I felt myself balancing on the edge. Once I spoke the next words, I’d be committed. “You shouldn’t be friends with her,” I said. “You should be friends with me.”

  Alex shook her head slowly. She chuckled a few times, and then the laughter trailed off. “You can’t be serious.” When she raised her thinly plucked eyebrows they looked like a pair of apostrophes.

  “Don’t you see it, though?” I said. “We always should have been friends.”

  “Umm, you never cared about being my friend,” Alex said.

  I squinted at her. I guess that was true, in a way. “Yeah, of course,” I said. “But not because we didn’t have compatible worldviews and social backgrounds. It was because I had better uses for my time.”

  Alex blinked. “Oh wow, thanks. You’re making an amazingly strong pitch for my friendship right now. So you’re saying now you do have the time?”

  “Well.” I mentally slid my schedule around, trying to figure out when I could hang out with Alex. “Not really…But I’ll find space for you.”

  “And what’s changed?”

  I wouldn’t have told just anyone about this, because I know that making friends for the purposes of a novel would strike most people as, well, strange. But Alex was different. She was ruthless and canny, and I knew that in some way she’d appreciate it. So I told her about Ms. Montrose and the novel and how I needed a hook.

  Alex glanced across the street, and I followed her eyes, trying to see what she saw. “Riiight.” Her voice was slow and distant. “Got it. And, umm, how exactly do you see this playing out?”

  I calculated what I’d need for my novel. “I want to sit with you at lunch. I want you to respond to my texts, within three hours, with a message that’s of equal length. And I want you to invite me to at least one of your parties.”

  She twisted around in her seat to look at me. Her face had narrowed and I could see her mind working. “I think I’m going to pass,” she said. “I honestly…I cannot believe the ridiculous story you just gave me. You don’t want a friend. You want something weird and sick and artificial.”

  “I wouldn’t make this offer to anyone. But you’re not like Chelsea. You’re like me. You’re maybe the only other person at school who’s like me. You don’t believe in rules. You believe in doing exactly what you want. And that’s why we ought to be friends.”

  “No,” Alex said. “We are not alike. You are a liar. And a cheater. And a manipulator. And I’ve never seen you think of anyone who’s not yourself.”

  She looked right into my eyes.

  I didn’t look away.

  You know what? This is what life was like. You could give people the opportunity to be your friend, but they wouldn’t respect it. No. To them, any friendly overture was weakness. Which meant the only real way to make friends was from a position of strength.

  I love those moments when I can feel the power collecting inside me. They don’t come very often, but when they do…

  “I know how to get what I want, Alex.” The ice had crept back into my voice.

  “Get out of the car. Our business is done.”

  “Look, you can either fall into line, or I can force you into line,” I said. “But in the end, you will become my friend.”

  She tried to laugh, but the sound died in the back of her throat. I closed my fingers around the pills and dropped them into a side pocket of my bag, then searched the floor of her car and came up with an orange bottle that had her name on the side. “Do you know how many of these I have? Enough—more than enough—to prove you’ve sold me a serious felony-level amount of Adderall.”

  “You don’t actually think you can report me to the police, do you?” Alex said. “Because you’d go down, too.”

  “Maybe, but I’m just a victim here. You’re the drug dealer. Somehow I think you’ll go down harder.”

  “Reshma, this is unbelievably sad. Seriously, you should get help.”

  “I am serious,” I said.

  And in that moment, I tested myself and found that I was telling the truth. I didn’t care about the consequences. I needed to be friends with Alex in order to write this novel, and I needed to write this novel in order to get into Stanford, and I needed to get into Stanford in order to live. Ergo, my life depended on this.

  Her smile flickered in and out of existence. “Just what are you…?”

  “Look at me, Alex,” I said. “You’re rich, so you won’t go to prison, probably. But you will be arrested. You’re eighteen, which means your name will be in the police blotter. There might even be newspaper articles. Your parents will hear about this. And so will Princeton. I’ll tell them about it if no one else does. Your life will be ruined, and you will be nothing. So do we have a deal?”

  Her mouth was hanging open. “Get out of my car, you crazy bitch.”

  “Okay.” I opened the door and put one leg out of the car, then looked back. “Let’s do it this way. I’ve told you my terms. And if you fail to meet them, if you don’t respond to my texts, or ignore me when I talk to you, or refuse to let me sit with you at lunch, or throw a party without inviting me, then I will go to the police.”

  Before she could answ
er, I hopped out into the parking lot.

  I stood on the asphalt in the noontime light at the tail end of summer. The wind brushed past my sides and tickled the trees that grew along the side of El Camino. And, for the first time in days, I felt truly happy.

  All day, I kept thinking, When can I finally go to sleep?

  But school is in four hours and here I am, still awake.

  I thought I was going to relax this year. I was going to apply to colleges, do my activities, turn in my assignments, and let my momentum carry me through. But my unconscious saw that I had an easy month ahead of me and said, Welp! Why not write a novel?

  Is this an insane plan?

  I got home at 4 P.M., long before either of my parents. I tried to nap for a bit, but my heart and mind were racing. My novel had only one thing I couldn’t control: the romance. Without a romance, I was sunk. If being forced to read Pride and Prejudice in the tenth grade had taught me anything, it’s that I actually needed two guys: a stolid, mildly rude one—Aakash—and a dangerous-but-charming one. In the end, I’d go for the former, of course. But what if it didn’t work out with either one?

  In a movie, this is where I’d go to a salon and get a makeover. But that was bullshit. School is full of vaguely pretty girls with their hints of lip gloss and their painted nails and their brand-name jeans, and they get even less attention than me. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that if you want competent work, you either have to pay for it—and pay a lot—or you need to do it yourself. I grabbed my computer from the bedside table and YouTubed “How to make guys notice you.” A somewhat overweight British woman reeled off the names of various cosmetic products. Halfway through her spiel, I popped an Adderall and started taking notes.

  I dropped the computer on the countertop of my bathroom, set up a stool in front of the mirror, and collected an armful of Mummy’s cosmetics from the master bathroom. I was the only one who used the hall bathroom nowadays, but there was a time when my sister, Meena, and I had to share it: our rooms were clustered around one end of the hall and my parents’ room was at the other. The cabinets still held remnants of my sister’s presence: Meena’s curling iron and her facial creams.

  There were a whole series of videos online. I began with lipstick.

  Four hours later, night was seeping into the bathroom. Goose pimples were rising on my arms, but I did not feel cold. A bird sat on the windowsill, still and silent.

  “What are you doing?” Mummy said. “We can hear voices.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Were you in my bathroom? If you want to learn cosmetics, then at least let me teach you.”

  I took a deep breath and moved the eyeliner pencil closer and closer to the edge of my eyelid. My hand was shaking so hard that I thought I was going to stab myself in the eye, but I stared at my fingers and concentrated on them until they went still.

  “Go away, Mummy,” I said. “I don’t need you right now.”

  The door sighed as my mom stopped leaning on it. My eyes stung when I blinked. Where was I? What was I doing? Out on the street, my Explorer was parked next to Dad’s Corolla and Mummy’s Passat in the semicircular drive. A young couple—holding hands—phased in and out of view as they passed behind the intermittent foliage of our hedges.

  I was starting to crash, so I took another pill.

  An hour later, my phone rang.

  “What crazy stunt are you pulling now?” my sister said. Meena graduated near the top of her class and went to Yale. Now she earns a half a million dollars a year as a trader for Morgan Stanley.

  “Right now? Applying foundation.”

  The words were cracked and painful. My throat refused to swallow—not enough saliva. A glass of water, its rim stained with lipstick, was on the counter in front of me, but I couldn’t glance down at it, much less raise it to my lips.

  She laughed. “God, I bet you look grotesque. I understand why you didn’t want to go to Mom, but you should’ve at least come to me.” Meena lives an hour away, in San Francisco. But since she works a hundred hours a week, we don’t see her very much.

  “I can do this, you know,” I said. “It’s not hard. I just never cared about it before.”

  “Fine, then send me a pic.”

  I ended the call.

  My face was mottled with browns and reds and pinks. My lips looked like a child had colored them in with crayon. At some point I must’ve been crying, because my tears had etched a trail of black down my face. I wet a paper towel. Then I removed everything. Back to square one. I keyed up the first video again.

  And then, suddenly, I was calm. My face and hands were the world, and I finally understood everything there was to know. Euphoria snaked through the dry sands of my back-brain. I would not be unhappy if this moment never ended.

  At midnight, Daddy knocked on the door. “I know that you were unhappy with your SAT scores,” he said. “But this is not the time to give up. We know that if you work hard, you can get into a good school.”

  “Leave me alone,” I said. “I’ve almost got this.”

  The click of a key. The bolt slid back, and the door sprung open. Another stroke through my lashes. The trash can next to me was full of powder-stained paper towels. Both the sink and my white T-shirt were a mess of dark splotches. The British woman droned on.

  “Oh,” Dad said.

  He was kneading the ridge of bare scalp above his forehead. He was wearing a wrinkled maroon-colored polo shirt. My mom peeked out from behind him. I rinsed out the head of the mascara wand.

  “When did you learn to do all of this?” Mummy said.

  “Do you mind?” I said. “I still need to do my nails.”

  At 2 A.M., I sent a selfie to Meena. All she texted back was:

  =)

  I wasn’t sure why everyone was so surprised. In the pic, my eyes are a bit larger, my face is a bit smoother, and my lips are a bit fuller. Minor changes: maybe a 3% improvement. But 80% of the effort is in going from an A to an A+.

  Afterward, I think I felt happy for a while, but my heart was beating so loud and fast that I couldn’t fall sleep even though I lay in bed for hours.

  It occurs to me that my readers might not’ve heard of the lawsuit. Honestly, though, it wasn’t a huge deal.

  At the end of last year, Vice Principal Colson took me aside at school. He said he was going to e-mail the whole student body about this, but he wanted to talk to me privately so I wouldn’t be surprised. Really, he said, it was a minor adjustment: the school was changing the formula that they used to weight the grades. He said some of the teachers had been agitating for some of Bell High’s tougher classes to be redesignated as Professional Track classes. There wouldn’t be many PT classes, but they would be worth 1.5 additional GPA points. The change didn’t affect many people, but there was a chance that my final GPA would shift by a few hundredths of a point.

  Basically, they were changing the system so that Chelsea would be the valedictorian, and not me.

  About fifteen seconds into our talk, I hit RECORD on my iPhone. When I played the recording for Daddy, he went quiet and forwarded it to Arjuna Rao: a college friend who had become a very famous lawyer. Because Chelsea is white, Arjuna filed a racial discrimination suit, saying that the school didn’t want an Asian valedictorian. During the discovery phase of the lawsuit, we found out that they’d only redesignated classes that Chelsea and Alex and the rest of the perfects had taken and which I hadn’t. That honors physics class, for instance. And, because of that, the primary impact of the change would’ve been to shift me from first place to fifth place. Chelsea would’ve been the new valedictorian.

  Anyway, after a ton of very tense depositions, we arrived at a settlement whose terms are sealed.

  But the upshot is that I’m going to be the valedictorian.

  I finally collapsed into bed around 5 A.M. but only slept for an hour. Woke up with pins and needles all over my body. I put on my tennis shoes and started running up and down the first-floor stair
s, trying to calm myself, but George came out from the basement and said, “Come on, I’m right underneath you.”

  I shrugged and kept running. “The steps are carpeted.”

  When I tried to squeeze past him, he barred my way. His chest hair formed a thin black T whose bottom end disappeared under the waistband of his plaid boxers. I feinted to the left and then to the right, trying to slip around him. But he caught my wrist. I pulled away, and he squeezed, rubbing my wrists together.

  “Christ, you have a huge case of crazy-eyes right now,” he whispered. “Ecstasy?”

  My face got hot, and I felt needle pricks of heat all over my cheeks and arms. For a minute, I thought it was a weird drug reaction, before realizing I must be blushing! God, I hope I didn’t actually turn red.

  “Why don’t you ever go home?” I said.

  “Why don’t you ever sleep?”

  “You don’t belong here.”

  Locks of long black hair swished as he jerked his head backward. And when he spoke, his voice was quiet.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I, umm, I know you’ve been trying to work on stuff down here, and, if you want, I could start sleeping at my mom’s apartment, and you could work in the guest room. My mom is always telling me not to get in your way and—”