"What happened to you?"
She lowered the sunglasses, showing me eyes so green, they stung like peroxide. "You are staring."
"Sorry, but yeah."
"I will pay for the drink. Meet me outside." She picked up her bag and glanced over to the front of the club, where several guys in bridge-and-tunnel suits and greasy-looking haircuts were lingering over drinks with girls in barely-there dresses. "Not in front of the window."
I stood up, looking back, almost walking into a table as I watched her cross the room. Outside, I handed the valet my ticket. When he brought the Jag around, Gobi still hadn't come out. I got behind the wheel and nosed up as close to the front of the club as I dared, then pulled out my cell phone and dialed the one person who would most appreciate this, meaning the one guy I was pretty sure would believe me.
It rang three times.
"Yo, Perry?" I could hear the noise and music of the prom in the background.
"Chow."
"What's up, dog? That's whack about what happened at the prom with Whittaker and—"
"Chow, listen. I'm in the city."
"What, what? The ci-tay? That's cool."
"No, listen. We're at the 40/40 Club—"
"Fawty-Fawty," Chow said, not exactly hiding that he was an eighteen-year-old Korean kid who spent too much time listening to Young Money and playing World of Warcraft. "Heard that, yo. You the man, Perry. You more than the man. You the—"
"Chow, will you shut up a second and listen?" I said. "I'm here with Gobi. She just came out of the bathroom, and she's, like, completely transformed into this total epitome of hotness."
"Hold up," Chow said, dropping the hip-hop affection entirely. "We are talking about the same foreign exchange student here? The one that kicked those guys' asses at the prom?"
"Wait," I said, "what?"
"You didn't hear about that? Shep and Dean? That's what I was going to tell you. After Whittaker punched you, she came back and finished it. She put them both in the ER, dude. Ambulance ride on prom night. Where were you?"
"I was..." I started, and stopped. I was remembering her telling me that she had to go fix her makeup. Asking me to bring the car around while she—
Suddenly the front window of the club shattered, spraying glass into the street, and something came flying out, the body of a greasy-haired man in a gray suit bouncing across the hood of the Jaguar so that his bloody face pressed against the windshield in front of me, ten inches away. It looked like a flesh-colored candle melting against the glass, eyes open, glazed and lifeless.
I jerked back, screaming, dropped the phone and started fighting to get out of the car when Gobi appeared next to me, gliding down into the passenger seat and yanking me back in.
"I told you not to park in front of the window," she said.
7
Reflect on your reaction to a crisis or a critical moment in your life when thinking as usual was no longer possible. Describe the event and tell us how it changed your thought processes. (Ramapo College)
Here's me: still screaming.
"There's a dead guy on the car! Oh, man. What the hell? There's a dead guy on top of my dad's car!"
Out of the darkness, something pinched my shoulder, hard enough to cut through the fog of panic. Gobi was squeezing me just above the socket of my arm, and when I looked over, the sunglasses were off and her eyes were drilling straight into mine.
"You should put the car in reverse, Perry. That will get the body off your car."
My gaze went down to the bulky bag between her knees, the only remnant of the person she'd been fifteen minutes earlier. The bag was open and I could see a gun resting on top of a bundle of clothes, next to the BlackBerry.
"You did that? You shot that guy?"
"Back up the car, Perry." Her voice was totally calm. "Before the police arrive."
I was still grappling with the latch to get the door open, fighting to get out of the car, when Gobi swung one boot-clad leg over the gearshift and stepped on the gas while simultaneously dropping the Jag into reverse. We jolted backwards hard enough that I felt my incisors click together and the dead man's body flopped forward and disappeared completely from the Jag's hood. Gobi whipped the wheel hard so that we swerved around between a stretch Hummer and Lexus waiting for the valet.
"Now," she said, "drive."
I shook my head, thrashing like a fish in a net. "Let me out! You can have the car! Just let me out!" Where was the door handle? I'd only had to get out of the Jag's driver's seat three or four times in my entire life, counting the times that I'd worked up the courage to sneak out to the garage and sit in it, and my fingers were still raking the interior trying to locate the handle when I felt something hard and hot press against my right temple. I could smell heated steel and gunpowder very close by.
"Do you remember when you helped me with that PowerPoint presentation for Mr. Wibberly's economics class?" Gobi said. "You were thinking very clearly then, Perry. You are not thinking clearly now." Her voice became an odd combination of gentle and didactic, as if she were explaining something completely simple to a complete simpleton. "I cannot drive a car. You know this."
"It's New York City! Who needs a car?"
She touched my hand. "I need you."
I looked right and left. Outside the club, people were gathering around the broken window, staring at the body sprawled out on the street, the body that had seconds earlier been on the hood of the car. Some of them were glancing back toward us. I could feel the presence of the gun hovering just outside my peripheral vision like some suicidal thought that I was too terrified to acknowledge. "Who are you? You're a foreign exchange student! You're in high school!"
"I am twenty-four years old."
"What?"
"Drive the car." The barrel of the gun pressed harder on my skull. "I will not ask again."
I shifted the Jag into drive and pulled out into the street, every part of my body shaking at different vibrational frequencies. Gobi reached over and hit the windshield wipers, smearing the dead man's blood across the glass in a gruesome double rainbow. She squirted wiper fluid and ran them again. The glass got a little cleaner. Now I could see the lights of Broadway up ahead, shining away in drizzled bloody streaks. In the rearview mirror, the crowd in front of 40/40 was getting bigger by the second. Sirens were rising up in the distance.
"I can't believe this. This isn't happening."
"You can drive a little faster."
"I am!"
"You are driving five miles an hour."
Up ahead, the light was turning red. "Please, okay, just ... put the gun down, okay?"
"Here." She lowered it until the barrel was resting against my side. "Do you prefer this?"
"You shot him. You totally just shot that guy back there. I think I'm gonna throw up."
She didn't say anything.
"Who was he?"
"No one."
"What?"
"Keep going. Get in the right lane. We have to go downtown." With the gun still pointed at me, she reached into her purse and brought out the BlackBerry, tapping keys. "Take a right and get on Broadway."
The intersection was crammed with pedestrians and cabs, and two NYPD cruisers parked at the light. We were still close enough to the club that I could see the crowd getting bigger outside, and cops were getting out, fighting their way through traffic. "We're screwed. We're so utterly, hopelessly screwed."
"Just get us away from here and I will explain everything."
"That's a red light!"
"Run it."
"I can't! I'll hit somebody!"
I ran the red light. Behind me, blue and red lights started swirling. Not even thinking, I slammed on the brakes. My heart stopped and everything below my waistline just seemed to disappear—a total eclipse of the balls. I saw two cops get out and start walking up toward the Jaguar on either side. To my right, Gobi reached into her bag and draped a kerchief over the gun she had jammed against my side, pushing it tighte
r into place.
"If you say anything wrong, I will kill you first."
The cop bent down to my window, glaring straight at me.
"Get out of the car," the cop said.
8
Using actual details, create a completely fictional version of some pivotal moment in your life. (Oberlin College)
For a second I didn't react. Muscles locked on to tendons; ligaments grabbed hold of bones. It wasn't that I didn't want to move; my body just wasn't about to obey, almost as if it thought that if it didn't budge, it could somehow negate that all of this was really happening. Police lights splashed across the Jag's interior, filling it like rising water crackling with lethal electric current.
"Did you hear what I said?" the cop said. "Get out."
"I..." I felt the barrel of Gobi's gun gouging my pelvis. "I can't."
The cop gazed at me with depthless indifference. He looked like the kind of guy that would rather be smashing some crack dealer's face against the pavement or tossing a pedophile off a fire escape but was willing to use me as a little warm-up on a slow Saturday night.
"I can't get out," I said. "My legs won't move."
"What, you're handicapped?" He whipped out a flashlight and shone it down at my feet, one of them hovering over the gas, the other resting above the clutch. "You think that's funny? My brother lost a leg in Fallujah—you think that's funny?"
"No, of course not. I'm sorry."
He flipped the bow tie around my neck. "Where did you come from tonight?"
"We were at the prom," Gobi said from beside me.
"The prom?" His tone of voice hadn't changed. "License and registration, now."
I dug for my wallet, handed him my license, and reached for the glove compartment for the registration.
"Wait a second." The flashlight froze on the windshield. "Is that blood?"
"That? Oh, yeah," I said. "I hit a deer."
"You hit a deer."
"Yeah..."
"Where, Madison Square Garden?"
"The Connecticut Turnpike," I said. "It ran out in front of the car."
He looked disgusted. "Get out of the car."
What happened next couldn't have taken more than a second or two, but in my mind it lasted forever. I saw the cop's hand reach through the open window and realized that he was going to drag me out of the car if I didn't comply. Except that Gobi was going to shoot me first. I would die on the sidewalk at the corner of Twenty-Fifth and Broadway with a bullet in my lung, having spent just enough time inside the 40/40 Club to take one sip of Pepsi. My headstone would read PERRY STORMAIRE: HE DIED A VIRGIN.
Then—
The explosion shattered the air somewhere behind me, a deafening blast that sent the cop ducking for cover. I caught a glimpse of flame in the side-view mirror and saw the exterior of the 40/40 Club plume outward onto the sidewalk in a churning horizontal cloud of smoke and dust. People scurried like rats out into the street, and cars swerved and slammed on their brakes to dodge them. When I looked up again, the cop was running back to his car, shouting something to his partner. Car alarms were yelping up and down Broadway in all directions, the noise rising up through the debris.
"What the hell was that?" I shouted.
Gobi tugged my arm. "The light is green. Go."
Cranking the wheel, I swung out onto Broadway, weaving my way downtown, hardly aware of what I was doing. I kept looking back until I couldn't see the club anymore.
"What happened back there?"
"Semtex. I left it in the alley outside the club."
"What? You did that too?"
"No one was hurt. Just a distraction."
"Just a distraction? That was a bomb!"
"Only a little one."
"Only—" I blasted through a red light, yellow cabs hitting their brakes, blaring their horns and missing our back bumper by centimeters. "I can't believe this."
"Watch the traffic." She was working the BlackBerry again. "We need to get to West Street, Battery Park. Stay on Broadway. It should only take ten minutes."
The delayed shock was hitting me now, the combined effect of everything that had just happened collapsing over me in a blinding, numbing wave. Studying for the SAT was one thing; this was some thing else. My skull was going to blow apart if I let it, but I forced myself through grim determination to keep it together.
Gobi glanced at me. "You are upset?"
"Upset? Am I upset?" Here all I needed was some hack cartoonist to reach down and draw steam shooting out of my ears. "I never should have taken you to prom!"
"Perry, listen to me. Tomorrow morning I will fly out."
"I thought it was next week—"
"It is tomorrow morning. Before that I have four more appointments I need to make here in the city. You drive me to these, everything will be all right."
"Four appointments. You mean four more people you have to kill?"
"Please pay attention to your driving."
I shook my head. "You know, it all makes total sense now why you weren't good in math. Every single foreign exchange student I know is good in math. You sucked in math because you're actually a hired killer."
"Red light."
Slamming on the brakes, I stopped just short of getting T-boned by a bus heading east on Fourteenth Street. Gobi was still typing on the BlackBerry. I caught a glimpse of digitized information, photos, a Google map scrolling upward.
"So the whole time you were living with us, that was all a cover?" My mind flicked back to the nights where I'd heard her talking in Lithuanian, the hours she'd spent in front of her laptop. "The last nine months you were just getting the assignment together?"
"It is not an easy process." She lifted the BlackBerry. "The research was extensive."
"Who are they? The people you're killing?"
"Light is green."
That was when my cell phone started ringing. Gobi's eyes flashed down.
"Who is it?"
I picked up the phone, checked the number, and felt a slick dark cloud of nausea swooping down over me, eclipsing all thought.
"It's my dad," I said.
9
Describe a disappointment in your life and how you responded. (Notre Dame)
"What ... what do I do?"
We were coming into Union Square now, traffic looking worse than bad, and all I could think was that my father would never have wanted any of this for his car, or for his son, but mainly for his car.
"Get in the left lane," Gobi said. "Take Fourteenth Street around the park, pick up Broadway the next block down."
"No, about my dad."
"What will you do if you don't answer?"
"He'll probably just keep calling."
"Then you need to pick it up and talk to him."
"I can't—" The phone slipped out of my hand and Gobi caught it midair, switched on the speaker, and held it up to my face so that I could keep both hands on the wheel, cutting off the cab behind me on my way left. "Hello?"
"Perry?"
"Dad?"
"I hear car horns. Where are you?"
"We, ah..." I threw a frantic look at Gobi. She shook her head, which could have meant anything, but which I interpreted as Improvise, stupid. "We had to leave the prom. Some stuff happened."
"Some stuff? What are you talking about?"
"We're sort of in the city."
"What city? You're in New York?" His voice sharpened, becoming more angular with every syllable. "May I remind you that you're driving the Jaguar, Perry."
"Dad, I know ... Look—Gobi asked me to take her to the city, and, uh—"
"I don't care if the ghost of Frank Sinatra extended you a personal invitation to Carnegie Hall," Dad said. "I want to know what you're doing, driving my car into New York without conferring with your mother and me?" The anger in his voice was a controlled burn. "Now I want you to listen to me very carefully. As quickly and as safely as possible, I want you to turn around and come home, right now, where we can discuss the cons
equences of your rash decision. Do you understand me? Perry?"
The light changed and I took a left onto Fourteenth Street. Before I could answer, Gobi took the phone away and brought it to her own ear. She was still on speaker.
"Hello? Mr. Stormaire? This is Gobija."
"Gobi, put Perry back on the phone, please. This is a private matter."
"Mr. Stormaire, you must understand something. Your son is a good boy. All his life, he has dedicated himself to making you proud of him." She gestured up ahead where Fourteenth fed back into Broadway, continuing downtown. "Tonight I asked him to show me the city one last time before I flew home."
"Gobi, no offense, but this doesn't involve you in the least." I could hear his temper slipping a notch and felt the tightening in my sphincter that always preceded the instinct to do whatever he said. "Now put my son back on the phone."
She actually seemed to think about it. "No."
"No?"
"Not until you apologize for the way you have treated him."
There was a second of silence, and my dad said, "Come again?"
"For nine months I see things in your home, Mr. Stormaire, and I watch how you treat your son. I see that you want the best for him, but you have crushed his spirit with your expectations, and you have discouraged him with your restrictions. Family is important, but it is not immune to the indifference of a cold-hearted parent."
"I see," my dad said. "And you're an expert on this, are you, Gobi? On my family?"
"I know that the man who does not put his family first places his own soul at peril. I have been watching and listening. And while that may not make me an expert, I would say that I know what I am speaking of." She shifted her weight around in the seat, and I saw her face, the way she was focused intently on the phone. "There is a proverb in my country, Mr. Stormaire: The faithless husband poisons his family at the roots."
"The faithless..." My dad stopped. "Wait a second. What are you talking about?"
Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick Page 4