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To Matthew and Madeline
Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
PART ONE
Viviana Rabinovich-Lowe’s College Application Checklist
□ May: AP Exams
□ June–July: Design and Engineering Summer Academy
□ August: Work on College Apps; Study for SAT
□ September: Finalize Stanford Application
□ October: SAT General Test; Submit Early Action Application to Stanford
AP Physics Exam: Sample Question
A girl is traveling home from the AP physics exam on her bicycle. She is traveling at x m/s and can stop at a distance d m with a maximum negative acceleration. If the bicycle travels at 2x m/s, which of the following statements are true?
(A) The girl is so stressed, exhausted, and overworked that she falls asleep while riding her bike.
(B) That’s right; she loses momentum after taking a three-hour exam on the laws of gravity.
(C) The girl won’t know for a few months how she did on the actual test.
(D) But it couldn’t have been good, considering she couldn’t get from point A to point B without falling on her face.
(E) All of the above.
You know the answer.
(Hint: Test-prep research shows you should actually always pick E.)
And now my mom wants me to explain that answer, not just mark the bubble black and call it a day. I also have to analyze data and make relevant observations and explain the process by which I’ve managed to land myself in a hospital room with a CT scan, a mild concussion, and a hideous gash on my forehead that probably makes me look like something out of The Walking Dead.
She stands at the edge of my bed, her face heavy with worry, her voice pained with the shame of what I’ve done, of who I am.
“How did you get to this place, Viviana?”
“How could you have done this, Viviana?”
“I can’t take much more, Viviana.”
I close my eyes and turn on my side. “I’m too tired to talk about it, Mama.”
My little sister runs into the room and turns up the TV.
“Come on, Mila,” my mom grunts at her. “Let’s go.” But before they leave the room, my mom leans over the bed and whispers in my ear: “We’ll talk about this when we get home.”
But I don’t want to leave this bed. This bed has crisp white sheets and a soft fleece blanket. It smells like bleach, which smells like peace to me, and in it I can lie still and watch Jeopardy! on mute so I can guess without knowing what the contestants are saying or how condescending Alex Trebek is. It doesn’t matter if I get the answers right or wrong—it only matters that I tried. There’s a call button if I get thirsty or want Jell-O or an extra pillow, and I don’t know my roommate’s name, nor do I care, so long as she keeps her TV on mute, too.
In this room, there are fluorescent lights and beeping machines, but there is no phone with the interminable notifications and reminders, no AP or SAT study guides, no agenda, no laptops, no books. All that was confiscated from me the minute they checked me in. I wish they’d keep it all forever.
The doctor meets my mom right at the door so that they can consult about my “mental state of being.” My mom closes the door halfway, and though she thinks she’s whispering, I can hear every word. Maybe part of it is the cold familiarity of a hospital room, the fact that we’ve spent too much time in consultations about her own prognosis and ultimate fate, which has turned out good so far but is still yet unknown—her accent isn’t usually that noticeable, but I can hear it’s thicker with the stress of what I’ve done and where I am.
She’s so very mad at me.
My chest starts to tighten with that light stabbing of anxiety that I’ve been feeling for months. It’s a remnant of the Episode that brought me here.
I take three deep breaths.
That’s what the nurses told me to do if I feel it coming on again.
But my lungs are cold and tight.
I have to force myself to settle down. Because I will not fall into panic. I will not lose control again.
Simply put, I don’t have time.
I still have the AP English exam next week and finals and then getting packed for the Academy, not to mention fall SATs and summer reading lists and all my college applications.
I will not fail.
Not again.
“Psst. Vivi, you okay?” It’s Mila, at the foot of my bed. She’s snuck away from our mom. I don’t open my eyes. I don’t feel like talking to anyone.
She pokes my leg. “I know you’re awake. You were just playing Jeopardy! You were wrong about the tiger question. The Sumatran is the smallest subspecies of tiger, not the Burmese.” She’s way too smart for an eight-year-old.
“I literally learned that from National Geographic,” she continues in this fake grown-up voice she’s recently taken on. “You want to watch when we get home tonight?”
My eyes are closed, but I can tell she’s doing that thing where she stares at me to make me respond. I bet her tongue is out and her face is contorted. I try not to move. I try not to blink.
“Vivi, come on.” She pokes me again. “Are you okay? Talk to me.”
She may be smart enough to memorize long lists of animal facts, but she’s too young to understand the long list of possible reasons for why I’m here today, why I’m stuck in panic mode, why I don’t ever want to leave.
AP English Language and Composition Exam: Sample Free Response Question
Viviana Rabinovich-Lowe nearly cracked her skull because she fell asleep while riding her bicycle home from a Very Important Test that will determine her Future Life Self.
In a well-written essay, develop your position with clear, detailed evidence to argue who is to blame for this particular mess of a situation.
From the very early years, Viviana Rabinovich-Lowe’s father told her to work hard, to give nothing less than her “very best.” Even when she earned—EARNED, I say—straight A’s, he still insisted that she could “do better.” He’s an engineer and should know. He made her promise not to date until she was at least eighteen, until after she was accepted into college (fingers crossed for Stanford, his alma mater).
Then, after she makes one mistake—one wrong choice, one missed bubble on the Scantron—he disappears—threatens to destroy his marriage, her family, the equilibrium of everything she knows. He didn’t care that her mother—his wife of twenty years, the so-called love of his life—looked death in the eye—thyroid cancer—and won. Instead, he moved halfway around the world to build skyscrapers in Singapore without explaining why. He didn’t care about leaving a recently very sick woman. He didn’t care that his daughters needed him, that Viviana needed him.
Of course, the
n, her father must be to blame.
However, upon second thought, perhaps Viviana Rabinovich-Lowe’s mother is no better. She won’t admit it, but she’s just as disappointed and embarrassed. She’s always sided with Viviana’s father when he pushed her. Her mother, for her part, likes to remind Viviana of how much she’s survived. How her family left the former Soviet Union when she was thirteen. How she spent her prime teen years in flux, without a real home. How the government promised them a new, better life, but they became stuck in the middle of an international tug-of-war, simply because they were Jewish. How they waited eleven months stuck in middle-of-nowhere Italy, not knowing what was to become of them, before the governments finally allowed her family to leave. She came to the U.S. so Viviana could have a better life than her. All Viviana’s heard, her entire sixteen years, is that she has to work hard, be grateful, do her absolute best, make her proud.
It’s too much pressure, these stories.
It’s too much to take in.
Therefore, her mother must be to blame.
However, then there’s Viviana Rabinovich-Lowe’s ex-boyfriend, Dean Andrews. Apparently, Viviana’s BFF Sammie always knew he was the biggest ass on the North Side of Chicago (perhaps even all of Illinois, perhaps even all of North America, Canada and all). During their late-night Binocular and Braiding Sessions, Sammie repeatedly reminded Viviana of that fact. She said so from the very start, that he’s totally and completely to blame.
While the evidence presented above is thorough and complicated and nuanced with the conflicting emotions of all those involved, do not be swayed by such arguments. They are only part of the mess, not the main contributor to it.
The bottom line is: Viviana Rabinovich-Lowe is, ultimately, the most at fault. Her father warned her; her mother begged her; her own best friend questioned her life choices.
But did she listen? Of course not.
Instead, she took on a boyfriend—she’s the one who made the choice to succumb to that distraction, and then to send him that picture (no one forced her). She had other, more important things she should have been focusing on.
Instead of accomplishing the very best, she’s sunk to her absolute worst.
“Viviana, talk to me.” Mila’s voice sounds small again, scared. “What happened? Mom won’t tell me. Are you going to be okay?”
I roll over and open my eyes. “Hi.”
“Hi.” Her little face is full of worry. She’s a tiny version of my mom, with her big dark eyes and stick-straight bob. I look nothing like either of them. I inherited my dad’s light eyes and wild red hair. But Mila and I both inherited my mom’s ability to worry. I suppose it’s better than inheriting his ability to flee. “Are you sick?”
“Kind of. Not really. I just fell and bumped my head.” I don’t mention the blacking out or the concussion or the choking feeling that won’t go away. “I’ll be okay.”
“I can take care of you tonight,” she says. “You can lie on the couch, and we can watch whatever you want. I’ll be your nurse, get you juice, and take your temperature and stuff.” She strokes my hair, as if doing that could erase everything that’s happened. “I’ll get you anything you want, anything at all.”
All I want is to be left alone. I probably, really, most likely, absolutely did fail that exam today, but if there’s one thing I did learn from my physics class, it’s that an object at rest wants to remain at rest. I want to remain at rest.
I want to resist motion.
I want inertia.
But I know that’s not an option right now.
There is no option F.
“Thanks, Mila,” I say. “Right now, I just want to sleep a little.”
“Okay,” she says, but then she sits down next to me and continues to pet my head. I wish she’d leave the room, let me be.
I don’t say anything.
Instead, I close my eyes and try not to cry.
Habits of an Effective Test Taker #1
Find a study buddy, someone you can trust, someone who can really push you to do your best work. Have that person test you on the material so that you uncover your weaknesses. Make sure you return the favor!
We get home, and I immediately text Sammie to come down. She lives above us on the seventeenth floor, and I’m feeling especially grateful that the only fully normal human being I know lives a mere forty seconds away via an emergency stairwell.
She lets herself into our apartment with her key. We lock my bedroom door so my mom can’t nosy her way in. “What happened to you? I’ve been texting you all day.”
We climb into my bed and lean our backs against the window that overlooks all of Chicago. I fill her in on my accident, how my mom had to leave her Constitutional Law class and how obviously annoyed she was about all of it. How my dad, away on what has become a six-month business trip, hasn’t even returned my mom’s calls to see if I’m okay. “Once again, I’ve proved that I can’t do anything right.”
“I’m sorry.” Sammie reaches over to me and gives me a hug.
“The doctors say I need therapy.”
Sammie shrugs. “I went to group counseling after my dad died. It helped to talk to someone. It’s just talking.”
That’s easy for her to say, but my mom is skeptical of things like therapy and counseling. When the ER doctor handed her a printed list of local psychologists along with my discharge papers, my mom visibly winced. “It’s like one hundred and fifty bucks a session,” I say. “So, I don’t know. I mean, we probably can’t afford it anyway.”
“Well, you can always talk to me.”
“At least I’ll be out of here in a few weeks.” When I was in the eighth grade, I announced that I wanted to be an engineer, like my dad, so he immediately signed me up for the Illinois State Design and Engineering Summer Academy. I spent the last two summers in a downtown day camp program learning about things like computer modeling, design thinking, data acquisition, and structural analysis. This summer, since I’m going into my senior year, I’m going to be staying on campus two hours away as part of the residential program.
Sammie pouts. “I’m going to miss you.”
I lean my head on her shoulder. “I’m going to miss you more,” I say, though the truth is, I’m looking forward to getting away from home.
My mom knocks on the door. I slink down onto my pillow, and Sammie unlocks the door to let her in. My mom approaches the bed and places her hand on my forehead, as if I were a child with a slight fever and something as simple as a small dose of Tylenol would make me feel better, as if she could make all the discomfort go away. “You need to go to sleep.”
“Mama, I’ve been sleeping all day.”
My mom frowns. “The doctors said you work too hard, that you’ve made yourself sick.”
“Please, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But, Viviana, I don’t like how you—”
“Mama, I’m fine.” I tell her that I don’t need anything, that I have Sammie to watch over me, that I will go to sleep if she’d just leave me be. Sammie nods, and finally my mom leaves.
Sammie crawls into bed next to me. “She’s pretty upset.”
“Let’s not talk about it anymore?”
“Whatever you want.”
I roll over and look out the window at the city outside. “Tell me a story?”
“Sure,” Sammie says, and reaches for the binoculars, but then she stalls before she picks them up. “You want me to braid your hair?”
“No thanks,” I say, and point to my bandage. “Headache.”
“Right,” she says, and then she picks up my binoculars to peer into other people’s apartments.
I lean my forehead against the cold glass. Bennett Tower is shaped so that a whole section of it juts out, which means that we can peek into the windows of people we don’t know. We’ve been doing our Binocular and Braiding Sessions since we were kids, spying on our neighbors, making up stories about them, all the while braiding each other’s hair. Of course, it star
ted as a way for us to see if we could see anyone naked (we were ten)—and for sure, we’ve seen plenty. In fact, we’ve seen many things over the years: drunken brawls, late-night parties, and, yes, even sex. (It was under the covers, so I didn’t really learn anything beyond what I could see on TV, and it was way more tame than anything on the Internet.) But now it’s evolved into a bit of a pastime, with Sammie giving them all names and filling in intricate details about their lives. It’s just the right distraction.
Sammie lifts her binoculars two stories above us. “The O’Briens are eating pizza again.”
“Again?” The O’Briens have four little kids who do nothing but play video games and eat frozen food. “They’re so boring.”
She scans down a few floors. “The Nut’s painting another self-portrait.”
“The Nut” is what Mila calls this strange guy who lives a few floors below us in Bennett Tower with his nervous Chihuahua, whose amber eyes and pointy pink ears shake, even if it’s ninety-five degrees outside. He spends most nights out on his balcony, painting, usually pictures of himself.
We always see him in the elevator, and he’s usually talking to himself. Mila named him the Nut after we got stuck in the elevator with him last year. He spent all eleven floors cracking pistachios, throwing the shells on the floor, twitching and mumbling. It’s hard to get an eight-year-old not to stare at adults who are testing the boundaries of appropriate behaviors themselves.
After we left the elevator and he was safely out of distance, Mila started singing this song she had learned at Girl Scouts. “Called myself on the telephone, just to see if I was home. Made a date for half past eight. Better hurry, or I’ll be late. I’m a nut, I’m a nut, I’m a nut, nut, nut.”
I tried to explain to her that he probably struggles with mental issues, but she wouldn’t listen. She sang that annoying song for two days straight, until our dad finally made her stop, saying she had a lovely singing voice but that she really needed to vary her repertoire.
The Best Possible Answer Page 1