Full Ride

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  I groan.

  “Can I take back my promise?” I ask. “Did Stuart spend the whole lunch today talking about how kids like him are at a huge disadvantage because they’ve never had anything bad happen to them?”

  He’d been on that kick for a while last year, because someone had decided that junior English classes needed to work on preliminary drafts of college essays. Stuart maintained that, to have the right material for a good college essay, you had to have overcome something like cancer or incest or rape or, at the very least, parental divorce.

  And the whole time I sat there thinking, I am not writing about Daddy being in prison. I will never write about that.

  “Stuart talked about other things, too,” Rosa says. “He invited all of us to go on a college-visit road trip with him when we have that three-day weekend in October.”

  I snort.

  “Hasn’t he already visited every top school in the country?” I ask. Starting last September, Stuart and his parents began jetting all over the place, and he’d come back to regale the rest of us with so many pompous stories that even the teachers made fun of him. “What was it this weekend?” our AP lang teacher would ask him on Monday mornings. “The glory that was Stanford? The grandeur that was Yale?”

  “He says he still wants to see a few more,” Rosa says. She has a hint of wistfulness in her voice. “In the South. He says his parents will pay for gas, so it won’t even be an expensive trip.”

  Vanderbilt? I think. Is Vanderbilt on his list?

  I’m almost ashamed at the way my heart leaps at this thought. Could it be? What if this is just one of those days when everything goes my way?

  It’s about time, I think.

  Before I can ask Rosa for more details, Ms. Darien taps her desk to get the class’s attention.

  “Listen up,” she demands. “You’re going to want to hear this.”

  She starts passing papers down the aisles as she talks. I’m at the back of my row, so by the time I get a sheet, kids are already gasping in the seats ahead of me.

  Ms. Darien has just handed out the Whitney Court Scholarship information to the entire class. I can turn my head to the right and see the same papers flowing down the rows in Mr. Techman’s gov class across the hall. Ms. Stela was apparently more organized than I thought: All seniors must be getting this now.

  “This is that scholarship I was telling you about,” someone hisses on the other side of the room. “They are doing it again.”

  I look around—most kids in the class are wearing the same Yeah, I knew that expression they always keep on their faces in advanced classes, whether they understand what’s going on or not.

  But in this case . . . other kids would have known about this if they have older brothers and sisters. Or if they have friends who graduated already, I think.

  At least I’m not the only one who was clueless.

  “Am I reading this right?” Tyler Marco asks, making a big show of holding his paper closer and then farther from his eyes. What can I say—he’s in drama club. “Does this really say the scholarship’s a full ride?”

  “I would hope, by the time you’re a senior, you would be capable of reading those two one-syllable words,” Ms. Darien says drily. “If not, the Deskins school system has failed you. But I would hope that you could also read the three words before ‘full ride.’ ”

  Tyler immediately begins acting like a kindergartner struggling to learn to read: “Uh-uh-uh-ppp! T-t-t-o uh. . . .”

  “Aw, fifty cents would count as being ‘up to’ a full ride,” Shaquon James complains, throwing his paper down on his desk in disgust. “Why do you have to fool us like that? Has anybody ever gotten a full ride out of this?”

  “Not that I know of, but this is only my second year at DHS,” Ms. Darien says. “I do know Emily Riviera got ten thousand dollars last year. Not a full ride, but nothing to sneeze at. Ten thousand dollars a year—forty thousand dollars total—that would have put a serious dent in my student loans.”

  For a moment an awed hush falls over the class, which is impressive. Normally, Tyler and Shaquon never shut up.

  “As you can see if you read this, the way to apply for this scholarship is by writing an essay about some DHS student who graduated fifteen years ago,” Ms. Darien says. “Want to brainstorm a little about how you might gather information for that essay?”

  Nobody speaks. But the silence is different now—not awed, but anxious. Suddenly it’s like we’ve all turned into that miser from Silas Marner, jealously guarding his gold. No one wants to share any brilliant idea that might help the competition.

  I’m certainly not saying anything about yearbooks.

  Ms. Darien laughs.

  “Funny, that’s how this conversation went last year,” she says. “Okay, if you need any help, you’re welcome to come see me privately. Let’s move on to Moby Dick. . . .”

  I glance over at Rosa, and she’s clutching the scholarship paper to her chest. She has an older sister; she probably knew about this a long time ago. Maybe she and my other friends have talked about it at lunches that I’ve skipped, or in the texts and Facebook posts that I always miss.

  She still looks as awestruck as I feel.

  “This is exactly what I need,” she mutters. “If it’s four years of a full-ride scholarship, I wouldn’t have to start racking up student loans until law school . . . I’ve got to win this.”

  I can see how it’s a glittering dream for her, the same as it is for me. I feel guilty that I got a five-period head start and had an entire lunch period of looking at old yearbooks by myself.

  “One of us has to win it,” I say, and I think I’m being incredibly generous, acknowledging that we both want this.

  She looks at me, blinks a few times, and then nods. “Oh, sure. One of us.”

  But I know both of us are thinking, Me, me, oh, please, let it be me. . . .

  Still now

  (Must fight against then . . . must resist . . .)

  I have what seems like a hundred pages of homework to do that night, and I’m scheduled to work at Riggoli’s from five to nine. But when I get home that afternoon, the first thing I do is fire up my laptop and look for Whitney Court online. A simple Google search doesn’t pull up anything useful—unless you think it’s helpful to find out that that’s evidently a popular street name.

  Daddy told me there are ways to search the deep Web, to find stuff that never shows up on Google, I think. That’s how he got a lot of the information for his scams.

  I do not want to win this scholarship by thinking like Daddy.

  I sit still for a moment, my fingers motionless on the keyboard. Then, very deliberately, I type: f-a-c-e-b-o-o-k-.-c-o-m.

  I start to gag. I fight back nausea.

  You’re okay, I tell myself. It’s all right. You can do this. Everybody uses Facebook, not just criminals like Daddy.

  We learned in AP psych about aversion therapy—how psychiatrists might try to get patients to have a negative association with behavior they’re trying to stop, like smoking or drinking or doing drugs. Sometimes this works naturally, as with an allergy: If you break out in hives and your throat swells and you have trouble breathing every time you eat shellfish, you’re really not going to be rushing to all-you-can-eat shrimp buffets. Feeling like you’re going to die has a way of making you rethink your behavior.

  Facebook is not going to kill you, I tell myself.

  But I still don’t hit enter.

  My treacherous memory has rewound three and a half years, to the time after Daddy was arrested but before anybody else knew.

  At least, that’s what I thought.

  I was supposed to go over to my friend Annemarie’s house that Saturday afternoon, and even though my parents had fallen into some rabbit-hole world of police and lawyers and computers being taken away, it seemed like everything could still be normal if I just acted normal. I texted Annemarie and asked if her mom could pick me up because “something came up” for my
mom.

  I sat on the leather seats of Mrs. Fenn’s BMW, and Annemarie and I giggled about which of our friends had a crush on which boy. We talked about the dresses we were going to buy for the end-of-eighth-grade dance, and how we’d have to get our moms to take us shopping together. Annemarie asked if I’d seen the pictures she’d just posted on Facebook.

  “There’s something wrong with my computer,” I said, not quite lying. “I’m going to go into Facebook withdrawal if Daddy doesn’t fix it right away.”

  I pretended to quiver, like an alcoholic or a drug addict desperate for the next fix.

  Maybe I wasn’t entirely pretending. Maybe I would have started quivering anyhow.

  Annemarie giggled and patted my shoulder.

  “Poor baby,” she said, sticking out her lower lip, looking for a moment just like she had in kindergarten. Even in eighth grade, Annemarie was still baby faced and a little childish; she didn’t have any sharp edges yet. “You can check Facebook on my computer when we get home.”

  We pulled into the Fenns’ three-car garage, and then it was two flights up to Annemarie’s pink palace of a bedroom. Annemarie and I made a game of rushing up there. She tugged on my arm as we scrambled up the steps; she called out, “Come on! You can make it! We’re almost there!” And I played the addict-in-withdrawal role to the hilt, tripping and reeling back and forth and moaning, “Must . . . have . . . Facebook. . . . Must . . . have . . . Facebook. . . .”

  I really did feel a little desperate for Facebook. It wasn’t enough to have Annemarie right there, all apple-cheeked and giggly and normal. I needed to dip into the love and adoration that only Facebook could give me, with hundreds of friends to buoy me up, their every post on my wall carrying the underlying message, People like you, Becca! I like you! You’re popular!

  I needed every single one of my friends right then.

  Annemarie’s laptop was sitting open and ready on her desk, but we dragged it over to her bed and sprawled on our stomachs across the puffy pink comforter. Annemarie generously shoved the computer toward me and said, “Go ahead. Check your page.”

  I logged in, and Annemarie said, “Wow, you’re even making it look like your hands are shaking. You’re such a good actress, Becca.”

  I hadn’t noticed that my hands were shaking. I wasn’t doing it on purpose.

  My Facebook page came up, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Except there, right at the top, was a post from a girl named Sadie Everly who went to my school. She’d written: “OMG! I heard your dad just got arrested and taken to jail! Is that true?”

  She hadn’t even done that as a private message. She’d put it on my wall.

  I really fast clicked on the mouse to refresh the page. I wanted a do-over, a new version of my page and my day and my life that didn’t include my father being arrested.

  “Why don’t you just delete that and block Sadie?” Annemarie asked. “You know she makes up lies like that all the time.”

  But my refresh brought in an explosion of other comments and questions: “Why were all those cop cars in front of your house this morning?” . . . “I just heard about your dad on the radio in the car—did he really do all those things?” . . . “All that money my dad invested in your daddy’s company—your daddy stole it?!?!?!? I hate you!” There was even a message from a reporter, of all things: “Becca, my niece Hannah goes to your school. I know this is a difficult time for you and your family, but I would really like to be able to talk to you and your mom, to get your side of the story . . .”

  I slammed the laptop shut, so hard it could have broken. Then I made the mistake of turning and looking Annemarie right in the face. I still thought I could make something up, convince gullible Annemarie that nothing she’d seen on Facebook was true.

  But it was like, in that one instant, Annemarie had gone from being a bunny rabbit to a wolf. The angles of her face seemed plenty sharp now. Her jaw was set, rock hard and judgmental.

  “Why . . . why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, as if I’d betrayed her.

  That was the last time I ever went on Facebook, except when I took my whole page down a few days later.

  I didn’t go back to school the following Monday, either. I finished out eighth grade with some weird, too-easy online school that I think was actually designed for truants and juvenile delinquents and kids who had been suspended. I had to do it on Mom’s computer, since mine was “evidence.” I didn’t go to the eighth-grade dance. I became my mother’s shadow, spending hours rubbing furniture polish into tables and chairs and armoires and bookshelves that she had to sell, just for there to be enough money for us to live on.

  None of that was Facebook’s fault, I tell myself firmly. I force myself to press down my pinky, my weakest finger, on the enter key.

  I’m back on Facebook.

  It’s not the friendly place I knew before Daddy’s arrest, but neither is it the horrid, nightmarish land of people virtual-shouting at me, “Your daddy’s a crook!” There’s nothing personal about it: Facebook doesn’t remember me. It’s just a nearly blank page asking me to log in or, if I don’t have an account, to start one. But of course that requires giving a name and an e-mail address, just like the collegedata.com site last night.

  What if I can’t win this scholarship without going on Facebook? I wonder.

  Technically, I know no one is supposed to use fake identities on Facebook. But of course it’s possible. Even easy. I trade my own bland last name for an even blander one—Smith—and create a nondescript Yahoo e-mail. I pick “Sarah” for a first name, because it’s the most common girl’s name I can think of. I make up a birth month and day at random, but use my correct birth year.

  My stomach is roiling as I click on “Sign Up.”

  Right before I see the screen welcoming me to my new Facebook page—or, rather, welcoming “Sarah Smith”—I blink and get one last glimpse of the information I entered. That random date I just made up? Not so random.

  I used Daddy’s birthday.

  Daddy made up all sorts of fake identities on Facebook, I think. He used them to trick people into giving him money. Having a fake identity was, like, the gateway drug for his crimes.

  The only reason I know that fake identities are prohibited on Facebook is because the lawyers talked about it in Daddy’s trial. The only reason I know how easy it is to get around the rules is because Daddy did it all the time. He dodged little rules like “Don’t pretend to be somebody else on Facebook,” and he dodged big rules like, “Don’t steal millions of dollars.”

  And Daddy got caught. Daddy deserved to get caught.

  I am almost retching as I x out of “Sarah Smith’s” brand-new Facebook page. I can’t do it. I can’t be this much like Daddy.

  But what if there’s an RIP page on Facebook for Whitney Court? I wonder. I know she must have died a long time ago, but people leave those things up forever. And everybody loved her. There would be tons of comments on there I could use for my essay. And lots of names of people to contact . . .

  I can’t use my real name. Even if reporters have given up on searching for Mom and me, I can’t risk someone I knew in Georgia finding me and posting anything that would tell everyone I know in Ohio exactly who I am. Outing me, as it were.

  I sit for a moment, staring at my blank computer screen. Then I reach for our apartment phone and dial one of the few numbers I know by heart in Ohio.

  Jala picks up on the first ring.

  “Becca? It’s really you, Becca? I’m so glad you called!”

  She sounds so delighted that I feel guilty. We haven’t talked since June, when school ended. We just never had that kind of friendship, where we called each other all the time or got together a lot outside of school. I was always too afraid to allow myself that.

  “How’s college?” I ask.

  “Okay,” she says, but her voice is guarded now. “Ohio State is very big. I don’t really know anybody yet besides the other kids from DHS. And the few times I’ve run into
any of them, they say, ‘Wait, Jala, weren’t you just a junior last year? What are you doing here?’ Yesterday I got brave and went up and talked to this other girl I saw wearing a hijab—and it turned out that she just got here last week from Yemen and she doesn’t really speak English yet. She’s not even in school; she’s just married to a grad student. Married!”

  “She must have been happy to have somebody else to speak Arabic to,” I say.

  “She told me my accent was terrible,” Jala said. “She was kind of mean.”

  Even over the phone I can hear the loneliness in her voice. I feel even guiltier. Jala is still living at home, not on campus. We really could get together sometime in Deskins. I could do that without revealing too much.

  As soon as I finish this scholarship essay, I tell myself.

  “Well, you’re not missing anything in high school,” I tell Jala, trying to sound cheerful. “Stuart is freaking out even more about getting into college. And everyone is getting cutthroat about this scholarship we found out about today.”

  Quickly I tell her about it.

  “I remember that one,” Jala says. “I didn’t apply because I hadn’t decided yet last fall that I was going to college early. Or—my parents hadn’t decided.”

  I don’t know the whole story, but it kind of seems like Jala’s parents forced her to graduate early.

  “Yeah?” I say. “Well . . . remember how my mom’s so strict she won’t let me have a Facebook account?” Jala and I have talked a lot over the years about having restrictive parents. Only, most of my complaints are half lies, placing the blame on the wrong parent. “I think I need to go on Facebook to look up stuff for this essay. . . . Would you mind if I logged on to your account? I wouldn’t look at any of your messages or anything, and of course I wouldn’t post anything. . . .”

  “Sure,” Jala says, so fast that it almost seems she’s excited to be asked. Like she wants to go back to that mean Yemeni girl and tell her, “See? See? I have friends! This is proof!”