Hacking Harvard

by Robin Wasserman

  Glassgirl: glassn not glasses- as inn

  half empty

  GodwinAdama: ha (i don't do lol)

  Glassgirl: you don't laugh out loud?

  GodwinAdama: don't write it- that's for

  IE yr old girls

  Glassgirl: think I mean grrls- as in:

  omg! Lmfaoi U grrls R so kewl!

  GodwinAdama: ha xE

  Glassgirl: what about your name?

  GodwinAdama: figure it out

  Glassgirl: bite me

  GodwinAdama: godwin=an anti-revolutionary

  revolutionary- thought he could build a better human

  Glassgirl: so you think you're god?

  GodwinAdama: GodldIN , "

  Glassgirl: v- profound- kinda pretentious- and adama?

  GodwinAdama: fictional character

  Glassgirl: let me guess

  Glassgirl: star trek

  GodwinAdama: NO!

  Glassgirl: star wars

  GodwinAdama: what kind of total geek do

  you think i am?

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  Glassgirl: no one's a total anything.

  GodwinAdama: v. profound

  GodwinAdama: kinda pretentious

  Glassgirl: funny- who's adama?

  GodwinAdama: he's from bstar galactica

  Glassgirl: ohi you're THAT kind of total geek

  GodwinAdama: so which kind are you?

  Before I could write back, my inbox dinged with a new message, one that I almost junked as spam before realizing who it was from.

  Good luck tomorrow. Don't forget what you need to do- We'll be watching-

  It was exactly the reminder I didn't need, not eight hours before the test, not while I was talking to Eric, not when I'd almost convinced myself to forget what I had agreed to do the next day. But maybe that made it exactly the reminder I did need-- because, I warned myself, I couldn't afford to forget. I stared at the e-mail for a long time, then finally clicked delete. There was no need to reply; there was nothing left to say.

  GodwinAdama: didn't mean to be rude again

  GodwinAdama: shouldn't u be asleep or something?

  GodwinAdama: for tomorrow? GodwinAdama: hello?

  GodwinAdama: maybe ur asleep

  GodwinAdama: ok- good luck

  GodwinAdama has signed off

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  120

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  October 19-SATs

  Objective: A perfect score

  Use your laser thinking You can cut through the fog and illuminate each question. Focus directly and completely on the task in front of you--the test.

  --Mimi Doe and Michelle A. Hernandez, Don't Worry, You'll Get In: 100 Winning Tips for Stress-Free College Admissions

  B" Schwarz whispered into the mic. "D. C. A, A, A, C, B." This was , child's play. There was something almost fun about whipping ill tough the remedial math problems, watching the numbers fall effortlessly into place. After years of visualizing and fracturing complex systems, juggling multiple variables in a multidimensional space, contorting surfaces and interpreting possibility matrices, it was thrilling to face a problem whose answer was simply: 7.

  There was a simple beauty to the Pythagorean theorem, and a glee in plotting the most basic y=2x curve on a 5 x 5 graph. Although . . . if you tipped that curve along its axis and expanded it into a third and fourth dimension, then substituted a different function for y and assumed x was an imaginary number--

  122

  "I think there was a problem like this on the Putnam last year!" he said excitedly. Schwarz hadn't been eligible for the annual college math challenge before, but he was already preparing for this year's contest. "But you are not looking for the dimension of the real vector space, you are just trying to analyze the--"

  "Schwatz?" Max cut in. Like the rest of them, he was lying on his stomach beneath the bushes, his head propped up in his hands, his eyes fixed on the tiny monitor. "Personally, when I'm wallowing in the dirt, there's nothing I love more than hearing a lecture about imaginary numbers, but I think our friend Clay is less than enthused. ..." He nodded toward the screen, where page three of the first math section was being slowly but surely obscured by something fleshy and pink. The image soon resolved itself into a middle finger.

  "Um, maybe I will stick to the test problems," Schwarz said. "Sorry, Clay. Number twelve is D. Then E. B. C. C. . . ."

  Giving a little wave at the camera hidden in his glasses, Clay went back to shading in the correct bubbles. Five minutes later, they'd finished the section.

  Things were going as planned, the questions captured by Clay's camera and sent out to the guys, who were huddled under the bushes outside the school's western wall. Clay and his secret weapons breezed through the sections, racking up the tight answers, penning an essay on the topic: "Do the Ends Always Justify the Means?" There was nearly a scuffle at that point, when Max lunged for the headset, eager to tell the College Board exactly how he felt about their means and his end. But cooler heads--or, at least, faster hands--prevailed. Schwarz held Max down as Eric dictated six bland paragraphs on corporate malfeasance, foreign affairs, and base

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  ball, adding just the right counterintuitive twist. Of the thousands of essays arguing for moderated means, Eric knew that "Clay's" incisive defense of righteous ends would stand out as a masterwork of eloquent inanity, just what the doctor ordered.

  And then, as Max and Eric eased into the sentence completions, debating the subtleties of chasm versus schism, it happened.

  The screen went dark.

  "Hello?" Eric whispered, trying not to panic. "Clay? You there?"

  Silence.

  Max gave him a sour look. "The microphone only goes in one direction, brainiac."

  They froze, staring at the screen, willing it to blink back on. Ten seconds passed. Then twenty. Still nothing.

  "What the hell's wrong with it?" Max asked.

  Schwarz checked his watch. They had twenty questions and eighteen minutes left--not to mention two sections still to come. Eric checked the connections at every port, measured the current, confirmed the signal broadcast.

  "Sixteen minutes," Schwarz said.

  "Would you fix it already?" Max snapped, his voice sliding toward higher registers. "We're running out of time. Come on. Come on!"

  Eric bit down hard on his tongue, trying to drown out Max's voice. Focus. He unplugged the transceiver from its portable power source, pulled out a fresh set of video cables for the monitor, reset the whole system. Held his breath. "This should do it." He flipped everything back on.

  Max clapped him on the back. "Finally! Never doubted you for a second."

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  They stared at the screen, which flared white, then faded back to a dull, fuzzy gray.

  They waited for an image to emerge.

  The fuzz danced across the screen in a static waltz.

  "Come on," Eric muttered. "Come on, come on, you can do it."

  "Fifteen minutes," Schwarz said in a doomsday voice.

  "We get it!" Eric shouted. "Clock's ticking, thanks."

  "I am just trying to help."

  "Help would be figuring out what the hell is wrong."

  "What's wrong is that your equipment failed," Max said.

  "It did not. Everything's working perfectly."

  Max tore loose a clump of grass and threw it at the screen. It fell several inches short of its mark. "Yeah, I can see that." He let himself fall flat onto his stomach, plowing his face into the grass. "We're screwed."

  Schwarz gave Eric a cryptic look. "Eric, we could still . . ."

  "Yeah." Eric sighed. "But I know I can fix this."

  "Fourteen minutes," Schwarz said quietly. "Maybe we should . . ."

  "What the hell are you two blabbering about?" Max asked, his voice muffled by the ground.

  "If it's actually broken," Eric said, "we do have a backup plan."

  Max sat up, bumping his head against a low-hanging branch. "We do? Who, exactly, is
this we?"

  Eric and Schwarz exchanged a glance, and Schwarz timidly raised his hand. "Him. And, um, me." He began rummaging through his backpack, pulling out a clunky, misshapen ball of wires and alligator clips, the new thermoswitch at the center. "Thirteen minutes," he reminded Eric.

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  "Yeah. Yeah, fine." Eric hung his head, defeated. "Hit the boiler room."

  Schwarz hopped up and ran off.

  "Where's he going?" Max asked, scrambling up as Eric swept away the equipment and crawled out from under the bushes. "Where are you going? And since when do we have a backup plan?"

  "Since always," Eric said, raising his binoculars in rime to spot Schwarz at the nearest fire exit. By the time he'd disabled the alarm, picked the lock, and slipped inside, Eric was off and running.

  "So why don't I know about it?" Max panted, trying to stuff the monitor and headset into his bag as he raced alongside Eric.

  "Because you were so proud of your little plan--I didn't want you think I'd lost faith in you," Eric said.

  "My plan worked perfectly. It's your equipment that screwed us up."

  "Fine," Eric said. "Then I didn't tell you about it because you would have wanted to know why I expected the equipment to break down.

  "And that would have been so stupid, except, oh wait, funny coincidence, it did break down."

  "Not my fault," Eric insisted.

  "Except that you saw it coming, and--"

  "And this is exactly why I didn't tell you."

  "How about you tell me where we're going, then?" Max asked, gasping for breath as they rounded the south side of the school.

  "We're already there." Eric stopped him and, counting silently, pointed to a second-story window midway along the wall. "Eight windows in. Room 207. SAT central for last names O through Q."

  "Damn, you're right. I can see that greasy hair from here."

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  "What?" Eric shook his head. "Not possible. They're sitting alphabetically. Which puts him third row down, two seats from the wall."

  "Nooo," Max said slowly. "He's right next to the window. There's his greasy hair, there's his leather bracelet, and there's his stupid earring blinding me every time the sun hits it."

  Eric took a closer look. "Shit."

  "Why am I suddenly getting the feeling we need a backup plan for our backup plan?"

  "It's nothing."

  "You're such a crappy liar. Haven't I taught you anything?"

  Eric pulled out a high-powered scope and a Megalaser 15mw OEM laser pointer. "This has a thousand-yard range and an adjustable filter. The scope has precision setting capability--I've already programmed in all the angles, I've hidden reflecting panes in the classroom, the calculations all work out, and as long as we're standing right here"--he pointed down to the shallow X he'd carved in the grass the day before--"we'll have a perfect view of the questions, and we'll be able to beam back the answers with the laser pointer. I customized it so we should be able to project the letter right onto the page."

  "Won't the window glass refract the beam?"

  "Schwarz is in the boiler room as we speak, turning up the heat to exactly eighty-five degrees."

  "Not hot enough to shut down the building, but just hot enough to--"

  "Open the window," Eric said as the windows began to rise.

  "The perfect plan B." Max grinned. "Impressive."

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  "Yeah. Genius."

  "So why aren't we smiling?"

  "Because you had it right the first time. We're screwed." Eric pointed toward the window again. "Everything depends on Clay sitting in the right seat. The seat three rows back and two seats from the wall. Without that? We can't get a line of sight from here, the mirrors in there are useless--and we're screwed."

  "Unless ..." Max took a quick look around. The Wadsworth south lawn was framed by a grove of low-hanging trees, which, according to the school's official history, had been planted by Henry Adams. According to unofficial rumor, the school's first principal had had a wannabe landscaper wife--she'd planted the trees just before walking out on him and moving in with her fertilizer supplier. Both explanations seemed equally unlikely, but there must have been some reason why the scabby, stooped grove hadn't been put out of its misery long ago. '"Military tactics are like unto water,'" Max intoned, staring at the trees. '"Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows.' Sun Tzu, The Art of War."

  "Is that supposed to mean something to me?"

  "Successful strategy has to be flexible enough to take the context into account," Max non-explained. "And the successful strategist knows how to use his context to get the job done. In other words, plan C."

  Eric stared back blankly.

  Max sighed. "You're the engineer, you tell me: Wouldn't that branch give you a perfect sight line to Clay's desk?"

  Eric looked up--and suddenly it seemed way up--to the narrow, twisted limb Max had chosen. "Give me a perfect sight line?"

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  "It's your backup plan, Inspector Gadget. And a brilliant one it is." Max checked his watch. "Eight minutes and counting. Climb safe."

  "Maybe you should come too. I might need help with some of the answers."

  "With an IQ like yours? Doubtful." Max gave him a none-too- gentle whack on the shoulder. "You can get an eight hundred in your sleep. As long as"--he glanced up at the tree again, his eyes following the trunk up, up, and up--"well, as long as you don't fall out."

  "I'm not afraid of heights," Eric muttered, hugging the trunk. "Schwarz is afraid of heights. I'm fine. This is all going to be fine."

  And then, later.

  "I'm going to kill Max. If I don't kill myself. Max is dead."

  One foothold after another, bark stains running up and down his jeans, his muscles--disgruntled at being called upon for the first time in a decade--screaming in complaint. And then, without warning, he was there, shimmying out onto the btanch, his heart thudding and his entire body trembling. Slowly, carefully, he shifted to the left to get a glimpse at his watch.

  The climb had lasted only four minutes.

  Feeling especially sorry for himself, Eric lodged his body into the crook between the trunk and the branch. He drew in a deep breath, then,very slowly, pulled the scope and the pointer out of his carpenter's belt and got to work.

  But first he looked down.

  Way down. Max gave him a silly grin and a thumbs-up.

  Eric gave him the finger.

  Four minutes left in the section, twenty questions to go.

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  He put the scope to his eye. Max had been right: The angle was perfect. The resolution was so sharp that he could see the wax in Clay's ear, the zit on his nostril, the space between his front teeth, and the rhythm his fingers tapped out as he waited for some signal of what to do next.

  Eric could also see the test booklet and the next question. He flicked on the laser pointer, took aim, and a bright red D popped up at the top of the page. Surely not the first time Clay had seen such a thing--but still, he jerked in surprise, nearly knocking the booklet off his desk. He shot his head to the left and right, looking for the source.

  "Come on, you psychopath," Eric muttered. "Figure it out. Answer the damn question."

  Through the scope, he could almost see Clay's brain struggling through its thought process.

  "Come on." Eric gritted his teeth as the seconds ticked by. He waved the pointer around, so that the glowing D danced across the page, landing on Clay's answer sheet atop the appropriate bubble. "Put it together."

  It took twenty more seconds, but finally, with a relieved smile and an eager nod, like he'd just solved Fermat's Last Theorem, Clay did. Bearing down hard, he filled in the bubble.

  One question down, nineteen to go--with three minutes left.

  Piece of cake.

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  There's no success like failure.

  --sample SAT essay prompt; Linda Metcalf, PhD, How to Say It to Get Into the College of
Your Choice

  It was over. All that studying, all that cramming, all those torturous nights lying awake, juggling equations, memorizing Latin roots . . . and it was over. I'd pulled out my number two pencil (one of seven sharpened ones in my bag of supplies, just in case), carefully bubbled-in my name, half-afraid, as always, that Alexandra Talese would prove too tediously long for the space provided, and then--no. I couldn't think about the "and then." I wouldn't. Not now, when it was too late to change it, when the booklets were closed and the envelopes sealed and the Scantron warming up to determine my fate. Not when it was over.

  The crowd of students flooding out of the school fell into two categories: the triumphant and the destroyed. It took only a single glance to figure out who fit where.

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  Triumph was complex: a half-suppressed grin, a strained combination of modesty and pride, fingers twitching in a caricature of a body too stressed, too sleepless, too driven for too long. They raced for the parking lot or wandered lazily, savoring the long-awaited feeling of having nowhere in particular to go. A couple even flung themselves down in the grass, arms stretched out, faces tipped toward to the sun, as if needing physical confirmation that, beyond the sterile realm of number two pencils, the world was still there.

  Destruction, on the other hand, was simple: misery. Tears, welling or gushing. A dead look of abandoned hope. Some of the destroyed sat on the steps of the school, as if reluctant to leave. Leaving would put the final seal on the day, admitting there was no turning back and no hope of reprieve.

  That's where Eric found me. And he was the only one bold enough to ignore the Stay the hell away vibes and sit down--next to me, but not too close.

  Just not too far away.

  A car honked, and someone shouted at him from the driver's side window. He waved them away. The car peeled out of the lot. Eric stayed.

  "Hey." He was looking straight ahead, not at me. Maybe because he was nervous; maybe because he knew I preferred it that way.