Copyright © 2016 by Rahul Kanakia
Arrow Image © Shutterstock
Cover design by Maria Elias
All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.
Design by Maria Elias
ISBN 978-1-4847-2880-2
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Sunday, September 2
Monday, September 3
Tuesday, September 4
Wednesday, September 5
Thursday, September 6
Friday, September 7
Saturday, September 8
Sunday, September 9
Monday, September 10
Tuesday, September 11
Wednesday, September 12
Thursday, September 13
Friday, September 14
Saturday, September 15
Tuesday, September 25
Thursday, September 27
Thursday, October 4
Wednesday, October 10
Friday, October 12
Tuesday, October 16
Thursday, October 18
Sunday, October 21
Monday, October 22
Wednesday, October 24
Friday, October 26
Saturday, October 27
Sunday, October 28
Tuesday, October 30
Saturday, November 10
Thursday, November 15
Sunday, November 18
Wednesday, November 28
Wednesday, December 5
Friday, December 7
Saturday, December 8
Monday, December 10
Wednesday, December 12
Thursday, December 13
Friday, December 14
Saturday, December 15
Sunday, December 16
Monday, December 17
Tuesday, December 18
Friday, December 21
Sunday, December 30
Tuesday, January 1
Thursday, January 10
Monday, January 14
Thursday, January 17
Friday, January 25
Sunday, January 27
Saturday, February 2
Sunday, February 3
Thursday, February 14
Saturday, February 16
Sunday, February 24
Tuesday, February 26
Thursday, February 28
Friday, March 1
Wednesday, March 6
Friday, March 8
Thursday, March 14
Friday, March 29
Thursday, April 11
Monday, April 15
Tuesday, April 16
Friday, April 19
Saturday, April 20
Tuesday, April 23
Wednesday, April 24
Thursday, April 25
Friday, April 26
Saturday, April 27
Sunday, April 28
Monday, April 29
Thursday, May 2
Friday, May 3
Tuesday, May 7
Wednesday, May 8
Wednesday, May 15
Tuesday, May 21
Friday, May 31
Saturday, June 1
Monday, June 3
Thursday, June 6
Wednesday, June 12
Monday, June 17
Thursday, June 20
Monday, June 24
Friday, July 28
Monday, July 29
Tuesday, July 30
Thursday, August 1
Monday, August 12
Wednesday, August 21
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For every kid who’s ever made a beautiful effort to win an ugly prize
From: Linda Montrose
To: Reshma Kapoor
Subject: Literary agent reaching out
Dear Reshma Kapoor,
I absolutely loved your column in yesterday’s Huffington Post. Your voice was so brassy and articulate, even though the content had me shedding tears right onto my coffee table. I can’t believe what your school tried to do to you. Thank God your parents were willing to stand up to them.
In fact, you’re such an amazing writer that I can’t believe you’ll stop with just a column. If you were to someday write a novel, I’d love to read it. This is a matter of no small interest to me. I’m a San Francisco-based literary agent with Connor and Pavlovich. Although our firm represents all kinds of work, I mostly specialize in fiction for the children’s market. I know that right now you’re probably not even thinking about longer-form work, but please keep me in mind for the future!
Warmest Regards,
Linda Montrose
From: Reshma Kapoor
To: Linda Montrose
Subject: RE: Literary agent reaching out
Dear Ms. Montrose,
Thank you so much for your kind words! I worked really hard on that piece, and I’m so happy that it resonated with you.
It’s actually very fortuitous that you brought up novels, because I have a secret project—a young adult novel—that I’ve actually been working on for years, and I think I’m finally about to finish.
When would you want to see it?
Sincerely,
Reshma Kapoor
From: Linda Montrose
To: Reshma Kapoor
Subject: RE: Literary agent reaching out
Fantastic! Please send it to me as soon as it’s finished. Don’t worry if it’s rough, I can work with you! So excited to read!
—linda
I’ll begin my novel by saying that I was lying when I told you I had a “secret project.”
The truth is that until yesterday I’d never in my life thought about writing a book. But when I got your message I felt compelled to reply immediately and say something that would keep you interested, because I knew your e-mail represented a can’t-miss opportunity.
To put it simply: you are the hook that will get me into Stanford.
All successful people have a hook. In fact, you’ve probably been using one for years, although you might not think about it in those terms. Your hook is your tag line: the one accomplishment that sums up everything about you. People use their hooks to get the right college, job, internship, award…you name it. An interesting hook is what makes that one special application rise up out of a stack of thousands of near-identical ones.
Well, here I am, applying to college…and I’m still completely hookless. Yes, I’m going to be valedictorian, but there are thirty-one thousand high schools in America. That means (at least) thirty-one thousand valedictorians are competing for only sixteen hundred spots at Stanford. I have my op-ed, but The Huffington Post publishes a few high school students every year and, in my case, I got the chance because my dad has a friend who works at The HuffPo. Although I know you loved that column, any astute college admissions person could see it for the strategically placed thing that it was. And anyway, plenty of valedictorians have written plenty of bitty little columns that appeared in Slate or Salon or the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or what have you. It’s not hard, if you know how to exert the right pressure.
But an agent? That’s a hook. Out of that thirty-one thousand, I doubt that more than two or three are bein
g represented by a literary agent.
The only problem is timing. It takes years to publish a book, but my first app—I’m going to apply early to Stanford, even though Mummy thinks my SAT scores are too low for them—is due in less than two months, on November 1.
(Your best chance of getting into a school is to apply by their early deadline, but you can only apply early to one school, so you don’t want to waste it on a school where you have no shot.)
However, I don’t need to publish a book by that deadline; I only need to show that I’m capable of publishing one. The “secret project” might’ve started as a lie, but by the time you read this, it’ll be true!
Since fiction—unlike a school paper—doesn’t require any kind of research or preparation, I’m certain that I can finish in the twenty-seven days between now and October 1. Then, after you read it, you can sign me as a client and send a supplemental recommendation letter to all my colleges.
My main application materials will only barely allude to the novel I’m writing: it’d be too much like boasting, you know? But then, in your supplemental rec, you’ll rave about my talent and precocity and emphasize the fact that I, at only eighteen years of age, am writing on a professional level. After that, we can publish this thing at our leisure.
Although, ideally, it would be good if it came out within four years, before med school application time.
Great! Now I just need to write it.
To start with, I’m your protagonist—Reshma Kapoor—and if you have the free time to read this book, then you’re probably nothing like me.
Since my second semester of freshman year, I’ve never gotten a grade on anything—test, homework, presentation, paper—that was less than an 87 out of 100.
And don’t go thinking that I attend some soft private school where there are no class ranks and everyone gets an award for trying hard, because that’s not how we do things here in Silicon Valley.
No. I live in Las Vacas, which is one of the richest towns in America. And it’s full of engineers and entrepreneurs: people who constantly agitate for the school to become tougher and more competitive. Alexander Graham Bell High School has fifteen hundred Asian kids whose parents are top-notch researchers and engineers (or very upwardly mobile Dunkin’ Donuts owners) and fifteen hundred white kids whose parents own the companies where the Asian kids’ parents work.
The school’s got a fifteen-million-dollar science lab, a theater that seats five thousand people, and a football team that’s won State two times. It offers twenty-seven advanced placement classes, and over two-thirds of the student body will take at least one of them before they graduate. The average SAT score is a 2100 and 95% of its graduates go on to four-year colleges. Its alumni include two Nobel-prize winners, four billionaires, two pop stars, three film stars, and a National Book Award–winning novelist. Every year, at least one kid commits suicide.
And I’m its number one student. Not its smartest student. Not its most beloved student. But, by the numbers, the best.
I suppose I should set the scene. Don’t novels begin by setting the scene?
I’m in my basement, sitting on the black plastic bench of the weight machine, with my MacBook Air poised on my knees and a big pitcher of ice water on the mat next to me. It’s very early in the morning and the room’s dark, but the blue light of my screen makes all the junk in the corner—a box of Christmas lights, a barely used carbon nanofiber bike, three old desktop computers, and a professional espresso machine that Daddy got shipped in from Italy after he got tired of standing in line at Starbucks—stand out like a pile of boulders. My heart is clicking irregularly, and the back of my brain is desiccated, and I have that cracked-out, numb feeling that I always get at the end of a long day. But it’s okay. I can feel the tingles in my hands and arms. When I started writing this, I was pretty tired, but I popped an Adderall, and now I’m coming back to life. With each sip, I can feel the cold water pooling deep inside my chest.
George Trivandrum, the son of one of my dad’s college friends, groans beyond the door. I hear him roll over. Then there’s a loud sigh. He’s registered as an occupant of this house so he can go to my school. This is borderline illegal, but my dad says it’s okay because George actually does sleep here on most school nights. In fact, I think my presence might be keeping him up. Normally, George wakes up early for his track and field practices, but I guess today he’s trying to sleep in.
Sometimes I can’t even believe the two of us go to the same school, much less live in the same house. We have none of the same classes, and I almost never come down into the basement, so I literally never see him in either place. In fact, right now I’m a bit anxious that he might venture out here, but there’s no help for me. Either I need to hide out down here and risk seeing him or go upstairs and risk facing Mummy.
(By the way, Mummy is a British/Indian term for mother. Not pronounced like the monster—it’s Mum-Me, with a hard stop between the syllables.)
Of course, there are parts of this novel you’ll never see. I’ll maintain two versions of it, like I do for all my newspaper articles and school papers: an honest version and a pretty version. I suppose I could start with the pretty version, but when I do that, I get all mixed up and forget what I’m talking about. Eventually, I’ll go back and prettify this and remove all the paragraphs—like this one—that would make you hate me.
Once people meet me, they start to hate me. That’s because when I speak, I find it hard to create a pretty version.
I haven’t read many novels, because reading is a waste of time, but I think they usually contain more than a girl sitting alone in her basement. God, I have no clue what this novel is about….
Before leaving the exercise room, I wedged my laptop into the piles of junk and ran in place for a little while in order to build up a sweat. When I opened the door, the hall was dark, and I picked my way across the floor very slowly, trying to not even breathe. I hate to disturb George. But I was only halfway down the hall when his door opened a tiny bit and he stage-whispered, “Goddamn it. Just go,” so I jogged up the rest of the stairs.
Out in the hall, Mummy said, “Reshma, is that you? Reshma, where have you been?”
She was sitting in a corner of the living room in her shapeless beige nightgown and typing on her computer. Our first floor is a huge open-plan space that the decorator did up with the latest in European-influenced furniture: chairs that look like martini glasses; a couch that looks like cubes of red Styrofoam arranged next to each other; a glass table that’s held up by a single titanium rod that juts from the wall. But Mummy prefers the battered, sunken love seat whose sides were clawed up by a now-dead cat she and Dad owned when they were in grad school.
Until two years ago, my mom and my dad swapped out responsibility for making breakfast in the morning, because they ran their own company and they had total freedom over their schedules. But ever since their company was stolen out from under them, my dad’s been doing his own projects, and my mom’s been too busy with her new job as a product manager for Google.
When I entered, she looked up over her glasses and said, “Have you slept tonight?”
“I was exercising,” I said.
Mom’s eyes flicked over me. “Exercising is good, but you should sleep, ke nahi?”
“I’ve been thinking about writing a novel,” I said. “But I’m not sure where to go with it. I’m not a sympathetic main character. My quirks are not lovable. I am not clumsy. I am not overwhelmed by life. I am not unlucky in love.”
“Love? What love?” She shook her head. “Is there some boy you’ve been seeing?”
“No. But if I wanted a boy, I could get one.”
She snorted. “Life is not so easy as you think. You can’t conjure up love.”
“I know. That’s my problem. The readers are not going to love me.”
“Come now. Are you depressed? I can call Dr. Wasserman.”
“I’m not depressed. I was never depressed.”
“You were very much not yourself after your SAT scores came back, but I had thought we were past that.”
I took the SAT three times and never got higher than a 1710. My mom keeps trying to tell me that’s a fine score, since it’s better than 75% of people who take the test. But it’s actually terrible: only 2% of admitted Stanford students have scores that low, and I bet they’re mostly athletes.
“I already told you: I’m not worried about my SAT anymore. I have another plan for getting into Stanford.”
“Please, beta, all this silliness with hooks and lawsuits and class ranks is meaningless. You will simply apply to a number of colleges and the one that can see your specialness is the one that will be right for you.”
Mummy reached out for me, and I backed up to stop her from getting ahold of my hand. “Even without Stanford, I know you will be a success,” she said. “By God, you know how to work hard, and that is the most important thing. When I remember your effort with the dictionary, well I—”
“Can we please not talk about that?”
My mom’s fingers pulled and plucked at each other. “Why not? Why do you always treat me like I am your enemy?”
I felt a single Adderall pill floating around in the pocket of my pajamas. My mom is energetic and smart and creative, but, fundamentally, she’s a sucker. Which is good for her, I guess, since that hard work will win out in the end thing is what’s stopped her from becoming bitter like my dad.
I clicked my tongue. “I’ve got it,” I said. “You’re the villain. People will really sympathize with a girl who had a crazy tiger mom that forced her to work too hard. You messed me up. That’s my angle.”
Mummy’s feet slipped onto the ground. “What is this? What are you blaming me for? This is not good. I have only ever—”
I made tamping-down motions with my hands. “Don’t worry. It’s no big deal. It’s for the novel.”
She tried to argue with me some more, but I ran upstairs and through my door and collapsed onto my bed. I’ve never cared about decorating my room. What would be the point? No one is ever going to see it. But when I was eleven, my mother hired a decorator: a woman who wore perfectly creased white slacks and pink blouses and horn-rimmed glasses.
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