Hacking Harvard

by Robin Wasserman

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  Advancement is partly a game, I learned in college, and while games are not always fair, they're still worth playing. So say the victors, anyway.

  --Walter Kirn, "The Ivy League's X Factor," Time magazine, August 21,2006

  I'm sorry." I blurted it out before Max could say anything. There was no point in denial. He'd found me sitting on the other side of the house, my back against the wall, my knees in the dirt, a blue RF jammer in my hand.

  Caught blue-handed, so to speak.

  Max had gripped my elbow firmly and marched me back to the others, but once we got there, I wrenched away. He let go. As I knew he would. These guys were determined, but they weren't fighters. Of course, neither was I. But I was, at least, a girl. And guys like this wouldn't hit a girl. So I had that going for me. Just not much else.

  Eric froze. "Lex, what are you--what's she--"

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  "Jamming our signal, that's what," Max said, flinging the jammer to the ground. "You're working for the Bums, aren't you?"

  I didn't say anything.

  "Aren't you?"

  I waited for Eric to stick up for me, to tell Max to calm down, chill out, look at things rationally for a moment. But he didn't.

  "Lex? Is he right? You're working for . . . ?"

  I still didn't say anything. I couldn't. But I nodded.

  "The whole time?"

  I nodded again.

  It was like he couldn't decide whether to yell or cry or break something. Or break me. "I guess this explains why someone like you would--with me. Stupid." He closed his eyes, shook his head violently. "I'm so stupid."

  Max gripped his shoulder. "Deal with it later," he said quietly. "We've got audio back. We can finish the interview. And then . . ." He glared at me, as if daring me to run away. "We'll deal with her."

  I didn't run. What was there to be afraid of?

  More to the point, what could be worse than getting caught?

  Atherton lived in a small Cape Codder about ten blocks from campus. After the interview, Clay headed off to hang with his friends in the Pit, while Eric stormed away in what seemed like a random direction, Max and Schwarz following closely behind for moral support.

  And traipsing after them like a disobedient child waiting for her punishment: me.

  We ended up in the empty parking lot behind a liquor store. It

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  was Sunday morning, and even though after two hundred years of Puritan blue laws it was finally legal in Massachusetts to sell beer on the Lord's day, Lloyd's Liquor Mart didn't open until noon.

  Eric glared at me. He paced. Stopped, and glared some more. Opened his mouth and held up his arms like he was going to start preaching, then shut up tight and dropped them. He started pacing again. I waited. Schwarz leaned against the side of the liquor store; Max perched on a fire hydrant. I waited some more.

  Finally. "You've been spying on us?" Eric asked, his voice husky. " Sabotaging us? For them?"

  I nodded, reluctant to speak until I absolutely had to. I wasn't sure I could get my voice to work.

  "You've known what was going on the whole time, and you put on this little show like--this whole thing has been a lie? Everything?" His voice jumped up to a nasty falsetto. "Oh, Eric, I'm so scared I won't get in. What if I get rejected? What if I screwed up my SATs and--wait." His face, which was already a fiery crimson, turned an even deeper shade of red. "That was you, too, wasn't it? At the SATs. You jammed the feed?"

  Yes, I mouthed silently.

  "So the whole thing was bullshit. You were just playing me."

  "You were playing me, too," I said, and it turned out my voice worked just fine. "Pretending like you just wanted to get to know me. Like you were just this nice guy. You were lying too."

  "That's different," he said.

  "How?"

  He pressed his lips together. And, for a long moment, I thought maybe I had him.

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  "Because I trusted you," he said, finally meeting my eyes. "Because I was going to walk away from it, for you."

  "But you didn't."

  "Neither did you." Eric--

  "What a fucking waste!" He took a step toward me. "I actually felt guilty, you know that? I actually wasted time, worrying about you, about what would happen if--" He blew out his breath in a short, loud burst. "And it was all a lie."

  "It wasn't." I glanced over at Max and Schwarz, wishing they would disappear. I may have known everything about them from their dossiers; I may have spent the last couple months watching, but I didn't know them. And I didn't want them to hear this.

  But I wasn't really in a position to choose.

  I drew closer to him. He turned his back, but he didn't walk away. "It wasn't all a lie," I whispered. "Not the important parts. Everything I said ... I am scared. That's why--"

  "It must have been torture," he cut in bitterly, jerking away from me. "Hanging around the nerd, pretending to be into all his geeky astronomy stuff, pretending to care what I had to say. Did you just go home to your friends and laugh about me all night?"

  "Did you?" I asked, feeling an unexpected stab of anger. "You're the one who was spying on me first. You're the one trying to get some deadbeat into Harvard--even though getting him in may mean knocking me out. Did you ever stop to think about that?"

  "You don't get the moral high ground," he snapped. "Not anymore."

  "Neither do you."

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  "It is not the same. What you did--it's not the same."

  "I lied. You lied. We both--"

  "You know what? I don't have to stand here and justify myself to you," he snapped. "Screw this. I'm out of here."

  And now he did walk away, with Schwarz scurrying after him.

  "Just let me explain!" I called after him. "Can't you just listen to my side of the story?"

  He glanced back without slowing down. "I've heard enough."

  I guess I could have followed him. But instead, I stood frozen in the middle of the parking lot, watching Eric disappear down the block. "If you'd just listen to me," I said softly. "I could tell you why. . . ."

  "I'll listen." Max hopped off his fire hydrant and sidled up beside me. "So why don't you tell me exactly what's been going on these past couple months."

  "Why should I tell you anything?"

  Max smiled, but his eyes stayed cold. "Because you need to tell someone--and I need to hear it."

  I didn't tell Max everything. I didn't tell him about the night with Eric on the roof of the observatory, because that belonged to the two of us. Even if Eric didn't want it anymore.

  I didn't tell him when things had shifted, when Eric stopped being a target and the game stopped being any fun. Mostly because I didn't know myself.

  I did tell him that I'd wanted to walk away--and that I hadn't been strong enough to do it. I didn't expect it to matter. Because in the end, I'd gone along with the Bums. I'd done everything they'd asked, all so I could get my reward.

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  I told him that the Bums had promised to make me the valedictorian, had promised to get me into Harvard. I told him everything they'd made me do, and everything I knew about their plans and their operation which, even after all these months, wasn't much. Max guided me through every detail, making sure not to miss anything that mattered. I talked for two hours, rehashing conversations, comparing strategies, examining equipment, treading and retreading the same worn ground. I talked about everything.

  Everything except Eric.

  One month before, I had sent off applications to sixteen schools.

  There was the dream: Harvard.

  Then my other reaches: Yale, Princeton, Stanford (even though my parents had already forbidden me to go to college on the West Coast).

  Schools I thought I could probably get into and wouldn't absolutely hate: Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell (because Ivy League is Ivy League, even when it's stuck in cow country), Duke, Northwestern, University of Chicago, Emory, and Berkeley.

  Safet
ies: BU and UMass.

  Even though Harvard was mine if I wanted it--at least assuming the Bums came through--I had written my personal statements, filled in all the personal data, secured extra teacher recommendations, aced my interviews ... I was finally, after weeks of work, months of preparation, years of stress and anticipation, finished. The decision was out of my hands. And if the Bongo Bums delivered on their promise, I didn't have anything to worry about.

  But that night, I couldn't fall asleep.

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  Guilt sucks.

  You won, I told myself, staring at the row of junior high plaques and trophies that still lined the top of my bookshelves. Even if they'd caught me, they hadn't done it in time--I'd managed to screw up the interview, at least for a few minutes, just as the Bums had commanded. I would get what I'd been promised.

  I would get what I deserved.

  But something felt off. I was, as my father always told me, a natural winner. Born to be number one. So I knew precisely what winning felt like.

  It didn't feel like this.

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  The enemy's spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed. Thus they will become converted spies and available for our service. It is through the information brought by the converted spy that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies. It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.

  --SunTzu, The Art of War

  There were one too many people in the room. Eric's first thought was that Schwarz's roommate had returned, girlfriend in hand. It was a reasonable guess, as it had already happened once before. Toward the beginning of January, the girlfriend's proctor had discovered she was hoarding an illicit boy in her room and, citing chapter and verse of the Harvard housing code, outlawed the cohabitation. So the inseparable pair had returned to Schwarz's room and taken over.

  Schwarz wasn't used to living with another person, much less two

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  other people, much less two other people who didn't seem to mind having sex while a third person cowered under the covers six feet away. Or so he had discovered, trying to sleep while mattress springs creaked, sheets rustled, a voice of indiscriminate gender moaned, and, one memorable pre-dawn morning, the girlfriend shrieked, "I told you, never do that again!" before conceding, "Okay, but just one more time."

  Schwarz spent the month of January living back in his old bedroom at home, until the Canaday Hall proctor got a girlfriend of his own and stopped monitoring his students' sex lives. The roommate and his appendage moved out; Schwarz moved back in.

  Now, there was a girl in the roommate's bed all right, lying face down with her head buried in a pillow, but she wasn't a brunette, and she wasn't attached to the roommate, a tall, muscular prep school jock who exemplified the kind of words Eric had read but never before seen in the flesh: Hale. Strapping. Robust.

  Nor was it Schwarz's beloved Stephanie, whom Eric had met only once but whose mere presence, Eric knew, would have been enough to turn Schwarz--who was calmly flipping through a notebook at his desk--into a quavering, stammering, Bunny-mumbling mass of goo. No. This girl was someone else, someone more familiar and more devious, someone, as he'd very clearly informed both of his friends, he intended never to speak to again.

  Eric turned toward the other side of the room to glare at Schwarz, who looked up from his notebook only long enough to give him a defensive Don't look at me wave, and when at Max, who remained infuriatingly serene.

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  "What's she doing here?" Eric growled.

  I sat up in bed and glared right back at him. "She is about to save your ass."

  I had tried apologizing. Twice in person. Then by phone, e-mail, instant message, text message, snail mail--if there were still a Pony Express, I would have turned his house into a stable. He wouldn't listen. He wouldn't answer his phone. He wouldn't return my e-mails. His IM status was permanently stuck on "Away from computer. Try again never."

  I tried again anyway. I tried harder. Even knowing I was veering into pathetic Fatal Attraction-- stalker territory, I kept trying.

  And then one day, I stopped.

  Enough. If he wanted to be pigheaded, let him.

  So I wasn't in that dorm room for Eric. I wasn't there for Max, who'd listened to my side of the story and, after taking a few days to digest it, called to congratulate me on the subterfuge. And then to ask a favor.

  I was there because I hadn't been able to sleep all week, and I was tired. Tired of it all.

  "We have a crisis here, guys." Max paused and shot a glance at me. "Guys and girl. Two crises, actually, but"--he checked his watch--"we've still got time before the second one arrives. So let's deal with what we've got."

  "You should've told me she was coming," Eric muttered, looking everywhere but at me. I kept my eyes on him, but molded my face into a mask of casual, couldn't-care-less detachment, like staring at him was only slightly preferable to staring at a pile of Schwarz's dirty underwear. Like he just happened to be in my line of sight.

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  "Then you wouldn't have come," Max pointed out.

  "Of course I would have," Eric said. "I just would have made sure that she didn't."

  "She is the one who brought crisis number one to my attention," Max said. "Aside from the fact that I think you should take the stick out of your ass and give her a break. She's my kind of woman."

  "Thanks, Max," I said, beaming.

  That only made Eric scowl more. "You mean cold, calculating, duplicitous, and completely untrustworthy?"

  Max grinned. "Exactly."

  "Excuse me, but maybe you should just tell us what the crisis is," Schwarz said.

  "Gladly." Max updated them on my encounters with the Bongo Bums. When he got to the part where they promised to get me into Harvard, Eric's eyes darted toward me for a second; when he got to the part where I tried to back out, Eric looked again, and I wondered if he was trying to figure out the timeline, and whether he would guess exactly when I had lost my nerve.

  Or, depending on how you looked at things, found it. And then lost it again.

  "Why would they bother?" Schwarz asked. "Why not hack into the admissions system themselves and change Clay's status?"

  "Exactly," Max said. "Why not?"

  "They said that would be cheating," I reminded him.

  "And this isn't?" Eric asked, being very careful to direct his question to the room, not to me.

  Max grabbed a yo-yo off of Schwarz's bookshelf and began flicking it idly up and down. "Maybe not in their minds," he said,

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  staring down at the yo-yo like it could offer up some answers. "They probably told themselves that sabotage was just part of the game."

  "Well, it's not," Eric said. "It's cheating."

  "Yeah, which is why I'm sure they weren't planning to get caught. I'm just saying that if we confront them, they'll try to weasel their way out of a forfeit. And if we don't confront them, I assume they'll keep right on cheating. Which means no cash for us, either way."

  Eric scowled. "If they think sabotage is fair play, then they're just as free to hack into the computer system as they are to hite a spy."

  "Exactly. And when they realize that their spy here--deliciously sneaky though she may be--didn't get the job done, what do you think their next step's going to be? Especially since--"

  "Especially since they're planning to hack the system anyway," Eric realized. "To reward her for a job well done."

  I was distracted, wondering if Eric had gotten a haircut since I last saw him. Had his hair always flopped over his forehead like that? And hadn't it been a little longer around the ears, a little shaggier? I felt like I could remember running my hands through it and rubbing the soft fuzzy hair behind his earlobes, but that was silly, since I had never touched his hair or his ears, or that spot at the nape of his neck where his T-shirt met his skin. I was just imagining it.<
br />
  Still, his hair looked softer than I remembered.

  "They're going to cheat," Max said firmly. "No question. They're just waiting for the right time. The application's in, the interview's over, we've done everything we can do--and now they're going to try to steal our win."

  "If we have a win to steal," eric pointed out.

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  "Oh, we won. Clay killed the interview." Max pounded his hand against the mattress with a soft thwack, looking disappointed that it hadn't made a more satisfying sound. He slapped the yo-yo down on the bookshelf with a sharp crack. Much better. "We're going to win. And Lex here has volunteered to help seal it. As long as she's still willing to make the sacrifice."

  "Sacrifice?" Schwarz asked. "Is someone getting thrown into a volcano?"

  "Why, Schwarzie? Scared that when they come a-calling for sacrificial virgins, you'll be the most obvious candidate?"

  Schwarz made a noise like someone had punched him in the stomach. He turned his face toward the wall. It might have made him feel better if I'd pointed out that the volcano gods would be equally happy to have me. But I kept my mouth shut.

  "If we lock the Bums out of the admissions system, we can keep them from changing Clay's file," Max said. "But that means they won't be able to change Lex's file, either."

  Eric laughed, a nasty noise that sounded like scraping metal. "After all this, you're going to give it up, just like that?" he asked, finally acknowledging me. "Don't do me any favors."

  Had I actually been attracted to such an egomaniac? "You think this is about you? We've been out on what, one date?"

  "That wasn't a date--as you were oh so quick to remind me."

  "Exactly. So you really think I'd be willing to throw away my whole future for you? Forget Harvard just to make you feel better?"

  "If not that, then why?"

  I finally looked away from him. "I think you've given up the right to ask that kind of question."