“That wasn’t in my class,” Ms. Ratcliffe said. “And, well, we expect more from you seniors.”
“My legal team has done some research. We know that Asians don’t cheat at a greater rate than white people. But, at Bell, Asians are more likely to be punished for cheating and, when punished, are more likely to receive a harsh punishment: failing a whole semester instead of only failing the assignment, for example.”
Ms. Ratcliffe ran a hand over her buzzed hair. “Those are issues for your lawyer to deal with.” She dropped her voice. “What I want to know is, how are your parents treating you? Despite what you think, I am your friend and you can come to me.”
“These are the last words we’ll ever exchange without a lawyer present,” I said.
“Please,” she said. “Don’t you remember last June? You were struggling with that horrible dictionary”—my stomach spasmed—“and you came to my offices and you opened up to me. I thought we were finally getting somewhere!”
Fuck her. In some obscure way, everything she’s done to me has been a punishment for shedding those tears in this office.
I said: “If you ignore my warning, then you’re an arrogant bitch”—she gasped—“and you deserve what’ll happen to you.”
“I’m sorry Reshma, but that merits a detention.”
Agh. Why was I doing this for her?
“Look,” I said. “When my team starts winning this case, the school’s administrators will want to limit their liability. And they’ll do that by shifting blame. They’ll say that they’re not racist, but that a few awful, deplorable racist teachers managed, unfortunately, to slip under their radar. And that’s why you need your own attorney.”
She clicked her tongue. “Did your lawyer tell you to say that?”
“If you really knew how to ‘question authority,’ you’d have figured this out on your own.”
I took the handle of the door away from her and gently pulled it closed.
The perfects shuffled around a little bit when I sat down at their table, but they didn’t get up and spit in my face or turn away or do anything dramatic like that, because acting out isn’t something that a perfect would do. Although if they had made moves in that direction, I’d have expected Alex to do something about it. No matter how pissed off she might or might not be about my new lawsuit, I am still blackmailing her.
I nodded at her as I sat down, and her head tilted a fraction of an inch in my direction. “How are you doing with your parents?” Alex said. “Have you asked them about Le yet?”
“They’re, uhh, they’re working on it.” No, of course they weren’t. Never. But I was pretty happy that Alex had said something to me that wasn’t entirely sly and resentful.
Chelsea smiled at me and said, “Oh, hey! How’s it going?”
“I guess I’m doing pretty well….” I tried to see if I could spot even an inch of resentment in Chelsea’s face, but her smile never dimmed.
Jeremy narrowed his eyes and Ray fiddled with his cuffs. When I looked around the cafeteria at the groups of friends sitting at their tables, they always seemed so fluid and natural, interspersing laughter and hugs and jokes, almost like it’d all been scripted for a television show. But I didn’t feel like that. I felt weird and awkward.
“Umm, is anyone else looking forward to homecoming?” I said. Aakash hadn’t actually asked me yet, but it seemed like the kind of thing that a perfect would talk about.
“Oh!” Chelsea said. “Do you need help finding a dress?”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “I’m sure Chelsea will let you copy her look. Or why not just go over to her place and steal anything you want out of her closet?”
Chelsea turned and glared at her friend. The whole cafeteria had gone silent, like everyone could sense the drama going on up here on the dais. And as I looked around, I realized it wasn’t my imagination. They could sense it. They were staring at us.
The cafeteria is a sea of liquid attention. Most people only notice the flowing currents subconsciously: in the glance; out of the corner of a scrawny freshman’s eye; at the long, smooth leg from which Alex is dangling a flip-flop; in the slow scratch of chair legs on the linoleum as a table of drama geeks slowly orients themselves to look at Jeremy—oh, yeah, I think I remember that he was once in a play….
Everyone in this room comes to school with a tiny bit of attention to give, and they bait their lines with it and dangle it out in that great sea and sit there on their tiptoes with throbbing hearts and wobbly eyes, and they pray that they’ll reel back some attention for themselves. But usually people like Chelsea and Alex come along and gobble it up without thinking.
Wanting that attention is not just vanity. It’s not just pride. That attention is money in the bank: it earns interest. Having attention means you don’t need to shout to be heard. It means that you never fall into that bottom part of the application stack: the people who’re glanced over but never seriously considered. It means that when you like someone, they at least consider the possibility of liking you back. Without attention, you need to work twice as hard to get anywhere.
And for as long as I sat at this table, I had it.
Meanwhile, Alex had gotten tired with the staring contest and had gone back to her phone, while Chelsea was chirping about a party that weekend.
“Wait?” I said. “A party?” I’d gone on a date, and I had a boyfriend and a friend—well, a sort of friend—but I still needed to go to a party in order to finish my novel.
“Yeah!” Chelsea said. “Saturday night. Most of us have sent out our early apps, and we’re going to—”
She glanced at Alex, who shook her head.
When Chelsea spoke, she pitched her voice high, so the tables around us could hear: “You know what? You should come! Alex will text you the invite, won’t she?”
Alex rolled her eyes.
“In fact, why don’t you send it now?” Chelsea said.
Chelsea was smiling at me insanely. She is amazing. She never breaks character.
The silence went on for so long that Ray and Jeremy stopped talking and eyed Chelsea and Alex, as if they were wondering what was going on. Finally, Alex said, “Fine, I suppose it’ll be at least somewhat entertaining.”
She sent me the party invite, sure, but she followed up by writing:
Let me know how many you’re bringing. Will it just be you or should I expect your lawyers, too?
I stared at the message for a long time, thinking of exactly how to answer. In just a few weeks, I’d made so much progress with Alex, but she still wouldn’t let herself admit that she liked me. So I finally decided to lay everything out for her.
Hey, Alex. You should know I’m not really that good at playing your low stakes games. Stuff like calling someone over and subtly insulting them and making them feel bad. Can’t do it sorry. Wish I could but I can’t. Maybe I’m just not quick-witted enough. But you should also know that nothing you say can really touch me.
I saw those three dots. She was composing a reply. And a weird sense of heaviness built up in my chest as I stared at the phone. It wasn’t dread, exactly. It was anticipation. I needed to know: What was the worst she could do? The worst she could say?
You know why Chelsea’s been so nice to you, right? I told her about how you’d begged me to be your friend and now she’s telling everyone to go easy on you because you’re really just lonely. That’s how pathetic you are.
That hurt, a little bit. I tried to tell myself that she didn’t really mean it. That she was only being defensive.
Your act is getting tiresome.
Is it? Well guess what. If you want to be my “friend,” then you need to know that I don’t hold back. Although tbh when it comes to you I sometimes don’t even know where to start. I mean I could call you a cheater and a liar and a sore loser and a vindictive friendless skank and that would all be true. But it wouldn’t even come close to getting at the core of your awfulness. Which is that you’re a robot. You don’t care about an
ything. You don’t have any interests. You really have nothing going on inside you.
I sat in my room and reread that last message for a while. Then I put my phone in my drawer and tried to do some homework. But I kept reopening it and going back to it and rereading it. I cried a little bit, yes. But they weren’t tears of despair. I felt…something else. I don’t know what it was. An aliveness. I’d never had a talk with anyone that was like the one I’d had with Alex. Finally, after hours of turning her message over and over in my mind, I got up in the middle of the night and wrote her back:
You’re right about me. Really I don’t care about or need you. The only reason I want to be your friend is for my book. But the book can end however I want it to. So here’s what will happen. I’ll come to your party. We’ll fight. You’ll try to destroy me. We’ll rage at each other over text message. And eventually you’ll realize you respect me. Finally, you’ll open up and confess you admire me b/c you feel trapped by having to be perfect all the time and you wish you were capable of going straight for the things you want. You’ll say you respect me for ignoring your stupid rules and not playing your silly games, and you’ll say you wished you had the courage to do the same.
Although I waited for hours, she never replied. Which wasn’t a big deal. Now that I know how my friendship with her is going to go, I almost don’t need her anymore.
I sent in the main part of my Stanford app a few weeks ago, but today I made sure that the teacher and the guidance counselor recommendations went out in good order. My teacher recs were from Ms. Lin and my Spanish teacher, Ms. Arroyo. Ms. Lin even let me see the recommendation that she was going to mail out.
Her rec included the phrases: “most conscientious and diligent student I’ve ever had” and “if I could buy stock in my students, I would put my life savings into Miss Kapoor. She will achieve great things someday.”
I choked up a bit as I read that last part.
On the forms that asked her to rank me, she’d checked “one of the top students I’ve ever taught” for almost every field. After I put it down, I couldn’t talk. My arms opened up. I wanted to throw them around that little gnome of a woman. Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that I really am a good student, and I really do deserve to get into Stanford.
She murmured, “Is that acceptable? Or should I change it?”
I nodded.
Before I left, she whispered: “Even exceptional people can make mistakes.” My instinct was to reassure her that the plagiarism had all been unintentional, but I realized I didn’t need to.
In our school, the guidance counselor recommendation is usually signed by the vice principal. That obviously posed some problems. I mean, I’ve sued the school twice, and one of the suits is currently in progress. Not to mention this plagiarism charge. Obviously, none of that could be in the recommendation. We used an injunction to force them to submit the rec to my legal team (to be reviewed for possible libel) and to make sure that Colson both gave me the number one class ranking and checked the box that said I shared my ranking with no one. We still haven’t settled the plagiarism suit, but, for now, I am indisputably number one.
After checking my online status and making sure that everything had been entered into the Stanford database, I felt really weird. I’d entrusted my whole future to an online form. Dazed by the enormity of what I’d done, I got up and wandered downstairs.
My mom was sitting on the couch, as usual. But I don’t even know what I would’ve said to her.
I went into the basement and knocked on George’s door.
He shouted, “Someone’s already in here!”
I opened the door and said, “It’s not a bathroom. Two people can be in here at one time.”
George was putting a bunch of textbooks into his backpack. “Oh, hey.” He shrugged. “Sometimes your mom puts guests down here.”
He had a knee pressed down on the suitcase and was trying to pull the zipper closed.
“I sent in my Stanford app.”
Since driving him home that night, I’d avoided him. I hate people seeing me when I’m emotional.
He turned around and leaned against his bed. “You’ll get in,” he said.
I felt weirdly disappointed. I expected that pabulum from, like, a cousin: someone who didn’t know me.
“No, it’s hard,” I said. “Even if I stay valedictorian, they might reject me.”
“People like you are the ones who get into Stanford.”
That might’ve been a compliment, but he also spun his finger around while he said it, as if he was also talking about the house and the cars and the maid and everything.
The room was pretty bare. Two twin beds that faced each other. All the walls were blank and white. Since we were in the basement, the only window was high up and was blocked by some bushes. It was basically a dorm room.
“Wow,” I said. “This place is depressing.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean, I can’t believe you’ve spent so many years down here.”
He zipped his bag up, then cursed and tried to work the zipper down again. He jerked on it a few times.
“Is it stuck?” I said.
“What do you think?”
Then my hand was on top of his. “Let me try.” I brushed aside his fingers; they were so long and thin.
He swung the bag around. “I’ll carry it upstairs and work on it while I wait for my mom to pick me up.”
Then he rushed out before I could say anything else. Doesn’t matter. I was stupid to think that a person like George could understand what Stanford means to a person like me.
The article in the Silicon Valley Examiner wasn’t too unfriendly. The headline was:
VALEDICTORIAN SUES SCHOOL OVER ALLEGED RACIAL BIAS
But the online comments were something else:
If she doesn’t want to work for her grade, she should go back to India!
Another person wrote,
Sad to see that our “model minorities” have become as entitled, spoiled, slovenly, and whoreish as the typical American teen.
And at least those were on topic. Others were pure venom:
If that dothead bitch was my daughter, I’d bend her over my knee and whip her until she stopped whining.
God, did you see that picture? What a FATASS.
I go to school with her, and I can tell you that she’s on hella drugs and is sleeping with like four guys. She doesn’t do any work, runs her mouth constantly in class, complains all the time, whines to teachers to get her grades raised, and then sues them if they refuse.
Doesn’t matter. I’m used to it. During the last lawsuit, I’d read the comments and cry every day. But I won in the end.
At school, I’m a ghost. I was never popular, but at least people respected me. Now students look through me when I pass them in the halls, and teachers don’t call on me when I raise my hand. When I go to their offices and ask them questions, they look down at the floor and answer in short sentences. Ever since that day when I sat with the perfects, I haven’t had the courage to go back. If it wasn’t for Aakash, my days would pass in complete silence.
But I’ve just gotten a text from Chelsea:
Hey. Haven’t seen you lately. Hope you’re still coming to the party tonight.
Looking at the text makes my hands twitch, but…well…I need to go to a party in order to round out my novel, right? Part of me wonders whether they’re staging some elaborate plan for revenge. I don’t even know what they’d do. Violence doesn’t seem like their style, and by now I’m pretty immune to humiliation.
Today, Aakash was driving me home from a walk in the hills, and while he was talking about the e-mails he was exchanging with some MIT professor, I leaned my head against the window and worried about tonight’s party. As we went over the Dumbarton Bridge, with the shining blue bay spread out underneath and around us, I looked at him and thought, I don’t have to be alone.
So I said, “Hey, Aakash, can you put your arm around
me?”
He blinked a few times, as if I’d disrupted his subroutines, but then he leaned over and rested an arm on the back of my seat and rubbed my shoulder.
“Thanks.” I gulped. My voice was getting strange and croaky.
“What’s wrong?”
“Hey, umm.” I cleared my throat, trying to make myself talk. “Do you think you could, umm, go with me to this party that Alex is throwing at her place?”
“Uhh,” he said.
The Dumbarton Bridge was windy, and I could feel our car wavering across the lanes as the cross-breeze slammed into it.
“It’s tonight?” I said.
“I, umm, what time? I mean, sure.”
His eyes were on the road, so he couldn’t look at me, but his face had gotten long, with his mouth slightly open and his chin drooping. I reached over and touched his forehead. It was clammy and damp.
“You…you don’t have to.”
He gulped. “I’ll do it if you really want me to….”
“Hey.” I shook my head. “It’s okay. You don’t have to go.”
“No, no, I’ll come….It’s just…I don’t usually hang out with those people. I mean, I know they’re your friends, but…”
“What? They’re not my friends.”
“Oh, I, umm…you just seem to…”
“No, they hate me. That’s why I wanted you to come.”
He bit his lip, and I could feel him sucking the saliva back down into his throat. The bridge ended and the road dipped down into the broad, flat, swampy part of the peninsula.
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