Scored

by Lauren McLaughlin

  Once she’d begun looking, Imani found the pattern cropping up everywhere. There were, she knew, many parts of the world where women were still treated as the inferiors of men, with rights and privileges commensurate with their status. And again, there was no way out. In the war-torn wilds of Afghanistan or the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, you couldn’t work your way up from female to male.

  But these examples presented a problem for Imani because they cast the score in a positive light. After all, as Diego had argued, at least with the score, you could work your way up. As much as she hated to agree with him, she was beginning to see that the score was a meritocracy with borders.

  Imani was staring at her tablet, trying to nudge the evidence into an argument she could use, when she noticed Amber standing a few feet away.

  “Can I talk to you?” Amber whispered.

  Imani glanced around the library, where other students worked silently. Amber motioned for Imani to follow her, then led her out of the library and into the nearest girls’ bathroom.

  Amber checked under the stall doors to make sure no one was listening, then leaned against one of the sinks. “Okay,” she said. “I was going to talk to Connor about this, but he’s been acting weird lately and I really don’t want to make a big mess of this, so I thought I’d come to you first.”

  Imani disliked Amber. Her rapport issues were of the kind that induced revulsion rather than sympathy, the way Deon’s did. But something about the way Amber bit her lip just then made her seem vulnerable.

  “I think we should boot Deon,” Amber said.

  “What? Why? We don’t even get our scores for another week.” Imani went straight back to disliking Amber.

  “Yeah, Imani, but dumping him when he’s already dropped out of the sixties is just expected. I mean, do we get any score boost from that at all?”

  “What makes you think he’s dropping out of the sixties?”

  Amber shook her head. “Are you blind or something? He’s practically retarded, you know.”

  The statement was untrue, offensive, and wrong in so many ways, Imani didn’t know where to begin. “I like Deon,” she said calmly.

  “So you’re just, like, giving up on your peer group issues completely? I thought when you dropped Cady Fazio you were serious about changing. I was hoping you’d be an ally in this.”

  Now Imani understood. Amber was operating under the assumption that Imani would rise now that she’d dropped Cady, and that by forging a bond with Imani through this action against Deon, Amber would benefit by association. It was fairly standard, as gamesmanship went.

  “Oh, forget it,” Amber said. “I can organize this without you.” She faced the mirror and wiped away a mascara smudge beneath her left eye. “Jayla’s already said she wants to dump him. I only need a few others. Just don’t say anything to Deon, okay? Or Connor. This is my thing, not his.”

  As Amber fluffed her unruly curls, Imani couldn’t help but think about the other things they had in common: freckles over the nose, a sense of panic about their final scores, and a keen sense of the tick of the clock.

  “Okay, Imani?” Amber pressed.

  “Don’t worry,” Imani said. “I’m sure you’ll get full credit.”

  When Imani got home that day, she went straight upstairs, sat on her bed, and spread out the articles she’d printed at the school library. She was hoping for a flash of brilliance, but her research wouldn’t cooperate. Every comparison between the score and the human race’s other attempts to divide each other into groups flattered the score.

  Outside her window, she could see her father’s legs sticking out from underneath the Madsens’ sport fisherman. Imani paused to watch her mother, bundled into a giant wool sweater, squat next to her father, a mug of cocoa in one hand and a wrench in the other. It wasn’t necessary for her mother to be there. Her father could get his own tools. But Imani knew there was nothing else for her to do. When things were slow for her father, he’d hang out with her mother in the bait shop reading catalogs and complaining about the price of everything.

  Camaraderie. That was what they had. Life was tough at LeMonde Marina. Though her mother did her best to shield Imani and her brother from the truth, Imani knew they were barely making ends meet. But her mother and father were in it together. That fact might not have changed the numbers in their bank account, but it made the situation a lot less depressing. There was a kind of nobility to it. Theirs was a challenge to be overcome, an opportunity for triumph, resilience, and other fine things.

  When Imani glanced down at an article on American slaves, she realized that the slaves too had camaraderie, some of them anyway. They sang songs in the fields and wrote slave narratives describing their lives. By working together with likeminded people, they formed the Underground Railroad. Later, their descendants, who were still the lowbies of American society, forged the civil rights movement.

  After rereading that article, she dug out another one, on an organization of Saudi women who were fighting for emancipation. Camaraderie again. These women risked their lives to work for freedom, not merely for themselves but for all Saudi women.

  In both of those cases, the lowbies of society worked together to fight the caste system itself. But the scored never did that. Whenever they fought, it was always against each other. Like Amber and her dirty scheme to dump Deon, the scored plotted and backstabbed in an effort to ascend. Because they believed they could.

  That was the difference, Imani thought.

  The American slaves couldn’t ascend. There was no possibility of working your way up from black to white. The same was true for those women in Saudi Arabia. No matter how hard you worked, a woman could never become a man. Slavery and sexism were not merit-based caste systems. You couldn’t work the system, so the lowbies had no choice but to take the system down.

  Finally, Imani’s research was working for her. As she stared out the window to where her mother slid a set of pliers to her father, still wedged under the Madsens’ boat, she couldn’t suppress a victorious chuckle.

  15. sherry potter

  ON TUESDAY, MR. Carol gave in to the curriculum Nazis. After a brief resumption of his discussion of the collapse of the middle class, he abruptly turned his attention to the material he was “under contract to cover.” Namely, the Great Recovery, which he didn’t believe in but which Imani and her fellow students would be tested on at the end of the year.

  Everything he said was downloadable from the Massachusetts curriculum website, so there was little point in paying attention, and Mr. Carol went at the material like a bored carnival barker hawking the same lousy stuffed animals. Imani took notes, just to keep her mind—and her eyes—off of Diego, who she could tell was stealing glances at her again. She wished he’d stop.

  After class, Diego followed her into the hallway. When a cluster of freshmen blocked her way, Imani stopped suddenly, and Diego walked right into her, his chin grazing the back of her head.

  “So sorry,” he whispered. He slid his cool hand down her arm, pressed the folded paper into her hand, and whisked away in a rush of air that smelled of honeysuckle and something else Imani couldn’t place. There was an eyeball directly overhead, and it intrigued Imani that Diego believed he had fooled it. Perhaps he had. But once he was out of sight, she opened the note right in front of the eyeball. She had nothing to hide, after all. This was part of her mission to extract information on behalf of the score.

  You’re in good company with your theory about gangs as a caste system. Sherry Potter herself agreed with you. I’ve been digging around my mom’s files, and I may have some useful things for you. If you want to look through them, come to my house tonight. No eyeballs, and you can get there by boat. Just be careful on the cliff steps. I’m at 3 Corona Point Road.

  Diego L., Overblown Twit

  Imani’s peers rushed past her as she read and reread the address, the letters towering like the location they described. In all likelihood, Diego was a millionaire’s son. Perhaps
, she thought, that was the source of his outsized self-confidence. He was the only Corona Point resident at Somerton High, which meant that he was, by a wide margin, the richest kid in school.

  But all the money in the world didn’t change the fact that he had just unknowingly invited a spy to peer into his mother’s files. Ms. Wheeler, Imani thought, would rejoice.

  That night, Imani told her parents she was meeting her gang again at the library. To keep up the ruse, she rode her bike halfway down Marina Road, tucked it into the marsh reeds, and snuck back to the marina. She paddled Frankenwhaler far enough down the river to be sure they wouldn’t hear, then started her up and sped for Corona Point.

  The tide was coming in, but it was still low enough to make the river a minefield of dangerous shallows. With the muddy banks looming even higher, forty miles per hour felt like sixty. Her father would have killed her for taking the curves so steeply, but Imani couldn’t resist. There was no traffic to interfere with the sweet hum of her motor, no other wakes to interrupt her own. The air felt cleaner when there was no one else breathing it and Imani could imagine that the river was fertile again.

  Speeding up at Goodwell’s Fish House, where the river made an S, Imani reveled in the deep turns that brought her so close to the mud flats she could smell the rot. As the lights of Somerton faded from view, she aimed for Corona Point, the frigid air lashing her face. Once into the rough waters of the channel, she searched for markers of the old marina. Only a few rotting pylons and some warped dock fragments remained. With help from the sliver of moon, Imani steered around them, then cut the motor and drifted onto the fringe of beach.

  After pulling the boat onto the sand, she trekked through low bushes and reeds until she found the steps that led up the cliffs. The steps had been built when the land was publicly owned, but after years of neglect, they were loose, overgrown with weeds, and, in some cases, missing. It was a treacherous climb, but if the bottles littered about were any indication, the off-limits signs were being ignored.

  When Imani made it to the top, she found herself in someone’s giant backyard. It took a few minutes to get to the front of the house, then another five minutes down a long woodsy driveway to Corona Point Road. There she found a wooden sign with WHIMSY written on it. Imani rolled her eyes and thought of her dad, who had once joked that the people of Corona Point gave their homes names because numbers weren’t good enough for them.

  Imani set off down the road beneath the dark canopy of trees, passing “Cliff Haven,” “Moonrise,” and the ludicrously understated “Mooney Hut.” Eventually, she found some driveways with actual numbers on them and was able to follow them to number three, a house with no name. Its driveway was unpaved, and the trees and bushes on either side were overgrown. The driveway brought Imani to a stone mansion, three stories high. It was one of the older homes, smaller than the others, better integrated into its natural environment, but still basically a castle. The house was dark except for two rooms—one on the first floor and one on the third.

  Imani walked around the side just to see what was there. She found a covered swimming pool, a trampoline, a stone barbecue, a wrought iron table with matching chairs, and a croquet game that had stopped mid-play. Underneath a gigantic deck was Diego’s black scooter. Imani heard nothing at first, but as she returned to the front of the house, she noticed the tinkling of piano playing. At the stone walkway that led to the front door, a motion-triggered light came on.

  The piano music stopped. Imani froze and had a quick debate with herself over staying versus fleeing, which was interrupted by the front door opening. She took a deep breath and tried to appear unintimidated by her surroundings.

  “You showed up,” Diego said. He was barefoot, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. “Did you take the cliff steps?”

  “Yes,” Imani said. “And I almost died three times. I should sue you.”

  “Good luck,” Diego said, grinning. “My mother’s a lawyer.”

  “So I’ve heard,” she said.

  He held the door open and she went in.

  The interior of the house was crisply modern, with heavy, dark wooden furniture and large unframed paintings on the walls. In his cavernous kitchen, outfitted with gleaming professional-grade appliances, Diego offered Imani a soda, which she declined with a shake of the head. He led her through an even more gargantuan living room, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on two walls and a grand piano in the center of it. Piano music was spread out on the stand, the bench, and the floor.

  “My parents are out,” Diego said. “But I dragged some of my mom’s boxes into my room.”

  He didn’t wait for Imani to say anything, and, after a moment’s hesitation, she followed him up a wide spiral staircase, edged with stacks of books.

  “You guys read a lot, huh?” she asked.

  “That’s my dad. My mom put a moratorium on bookshelves to try to stop him, so now he just leaves them around the house.”

  They skipped the second floor, where, Diego explained, his “pack rat” father kept the rest of his books, going straight up to the third.

  In keeping with the scale of the house, Diego’s room was more of an apartment than a bedroom. Not only did he have his own bathroom, he had his own kitchen.

  “Wow,” Imani said. “Do you have to pay rent?”

  He laughed politely, then pointed to the foot of his bed, where three cardboard boxes interrupted the pattern of a Persian rug. He had sheet music framed on the walls.

  “My mom doesn’t know I took these, so we have to make sure everything goes back in order.” Diego sat cross-legged in front of the boxes. “If we can figure out the order. I don’t think it’s alphabetical.”

  Imani sat opposite him, noting the tight weave and subtle sheen of the rug. The LeMondes had a “Persian” rug in their living room too. It was from Kmart, and you could see the digitized edges of the design screen-printed onto it.

  “You know my mother’s semi-famous, right?” Diego asked.

  Imani shrugged. Her own mother was not semi-famous, although she did win a clam chowder contest once and got to meet one of the Red Sox players. In the news coverage, you could sort of see her in the background, behind the reporter and the Red Sox player.

  “You should interview her,” he said. “People are always doing that. She’s incredibly busy, but I think she’d find the time. But if you ask dumb questions, she’ll walk out. She does that.”

  “I wouldn’t ask dumb questions.”

  “She’d probably make allowances for your age anyway.” He grabbed a stack of papers that were stapled together and sitting on top of one of the boxes. “I thought this might be useful. It’s from an interview Sherry Potter gave just a few months before she disappeared.” He flipped through the pages until he found the relevant paragraph, then read aloud: “ ‘The focus on peer group is sound and based on very good data. I’m not denying that. But what we’ve done, I’m afraid, is to create a kind of caste system.’ ” He paused to look up at Imani meaningfully. “ ‘And it’s been … well, shocking, to put it mildly, to see how obediently kids have organized themselves into it. You have to understand that was never our intent.’” He pointed out those final three words to Imani, then handed her the stack of pages. “Useful?” he asked.

  Imani flipped to the front page. The interview was from Neuroscience Quarterly and went on for about twenty pages. “Potentially,” Imani said.

  “Some people think score gangs are the reason Sherry Potter bugged out and went underground,” Diego said. “Later on, she compares the whole system to Brave New World. But you probably haven’t read that, have you?”

  She hadn’t. “Don’t tell me.” She sighed with faux boredom. “It used to be required reading?”

  “Ask your parents.”

  “Whatever.” Imani started skimming the interview. It did seem to be full of evidence in support of her thesis that the score created a type of caste system. “That’s strange,” she said. “I don’t see the phrase
‘meritocracy with borders’ anywhere.” She shook the pages as if the phrase might fall out.

  “Semantics,” Diego said with a dismissive wave. “The important thing is the type of caste system it is, which is why for my essay I’m going to compare the score to other caste systems.”

  Imani looked at him in horror. “But that’s my idea.”

  “I figured,” he said. “I’m taking the opposite position.” He grinned at her. “You want to hear my thesis?”

  Imani fumed silently for a few seconds, then pretended not to care. “Can I stop you from telling me?”

  “Don’t try to be funny.”

  Imani felt her anger rising. “Don’t try to be superior.”

  “Okay,” he laughed. “Anyway, what I’m going to argue is that—”

  “Because you’re not superior to me,” Imani broke in, anger getting the better of her. She took a breath and softened her tone. “Regardless of what you may think.”

  “How do you know what I think?” Diego’s blue eye zeroed in on her.

  Imani held his gaze, determined to prove that she was not intimidated, either by his attitude or his wealth. They didn’t move, they didn’t even blink, until a single drip from the faucet broke the standoff. When Imani looked away, Diego marked her defeat with a chuckle. “Please continue,” he said. “You were about to prove my point.”

  She surveyed his kitchen to avoid looking at him. “Was I?” she asked.

  “Brilliantly too.”

  “Oh, please enlighten me.”

  “Fine,” Diego said. “I’m going to argue that human beings have a natural tendency to rank themselves.”

  “So?” Imani scoffed.

  “So.” He mimicked her tone. “We can say all we want about equality, but we don’t believe in it. We believe in superiority and inferiority. It’s in our nature to rank ourselves into status groups.”

  “Exactly,” Imani said. “Like score gangs.”