Enter Title Here

by Rahul Kanakia

  The resulting bedroom is dominated by a huge four-poster bed. The walls are tinged with pink and my bedspread has a profusion of purple flowers. My closet is a full, lush walk-in with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and smaller ones, angled at the floor, for trying on shoes. It’s half-empty.

  But lying on the bed wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I needed to work!

  When I got up, a dizzy rush made everything go white. But that passed in a few seconds, and now I’m at my bedroom computer (it syncs automatically with my MacBook), still trying to figure out what to put in my novel. In search of inspiration, I’ve been opening drawers and wading through the pile of old notebooks, journals, assignments, papers, textbooks, etc., etc.

  Just now, I picked up a black journal and flipped to a random page.

  It says:

  Things I Must Never Ever Do Again

  Fall when I wear socks on the stairs

  Eat more than three Double Stuf Oreo cookies at a time

  Put one of my bears back in its bocks [sic] without checking it for rips

  I actually remember this day. I was clambering down the stairs, while wearing socks, when my foot hit the edge of the stair and I slipped. Not a big slip: I caught myself and didn’t fall. But Mummy clucked her tongue and said she wasn’t going to tell me again to take off my socks before going on the stairs and that if I fell, then it’d be my own fault.

  Just to prove her wrong, I swore to NEVER take off my socks before going down the stairs and to MAKE SURE that I NEVER EVER fell.

  And I never did, because that’s who I am. Once I decide I’m going to do something, then I do it. My mom has never understood that. She thinks, Oh, you know, if you want something, then you try your hardest, and if you’re good enough, then someone will give it to you. I know she’s down there thinking, Oh, Reshma tried really hard, but she just couldn’t hack it on the tests, so I guess she doesn’t deserve to get into Stanford.

  But she’s got it backward. You start by saying, I deserve it. No matter what anyone else thinks, I deserve it. And then you do absolutely everything it takes to make it happen. And I did.

  At school there’s a group of otherwise smart and hardworking kids—the perfects—who weren’t willing to make the sacrifices, weren’t willing to give up boys, popularity, the respect of their parents and teachers. And that’s why they’ve always been in second place.

  Although, ugh, if I’d paid just a little more attention to those things, then writing this novel would be a lot simpler.

  Oh God, just had a brainstorm.

  Novel Synopsis: In order to get more material for her novel, an introverted, studious Indian American girl decides to break out and become one of the popular kids. She starts doing all the regular American girl stuff that she always used to ignore: making friends, going to parties, drinking, dating, falling in love, having sex, etc. Although she begins the project in a cynical manner, she eventually realizes that human relationships are the most important things in life.

  I bet you love this, don’t you, Ms. Montrose? White people like to think we’re all emotionless study machines. They tell themselves that their kids might not do as well in school, but at least they know how to enjoy life.

  Well, I’ll spend a month enjoying life and then, oh, I expect it’ll “transform” me. I learned in English class that stories often end with the character having a staggering realization: an epiphany. And I expect to have one sometime right around September 28.

  I’ll realize that life is only a series of moments. And that I’ve wasted a dozen years of those moments by constantly looking ahead and wishing that some other moment would arrive. I’ll realize that I never got to enjoy the things I had because I kept wishing for things that I didn’t yet have. And I’ll realize that even if I get everything I want…I’ll immediately find something new to want. I’ll realize that I’ve wasted my life.

  By the end of the novel, I’ll turn into a whimsical girl who harvests all the possible joy from each moment and lives a carefree existence and lets the future take care of itself and all that other bullshit.

  I don’t mind calling it that because, you see, we’re still at the beginning of the novel, and right now I’m still my cynical old achievement-obsessed self. But in three hundred thirty-two pages, you and I are going to look back on that “bullshit” and laugh at the naiveté of my hard-bitten pose.

  RESHMA KAPOOR’S SEPTEMBER TO-DO LIST

  Needed in Order to Complete Novel

  ____ Make a friend

  ____ Go on a date

  ____ Go to a party

  ____ Get a boyfriend

  ____ Have sex

  Journalism-related

  ____ Check layouts

  …

  …

  Today was not a good day.

  You know, the way I got to be valedictorian was by knowing the unspoken rules. I know what teachers are looking for, and I know exactly how much work it takes to get the highest grade they’re willing to give.

  But sometimes teachers break the rules.

  I never wanted to take Ms. Ratcliffe’s literature class. For more than three years, I’ve tiptoed around her down at the newspaper, where she’s constantly interfering and lecturing and playing favorites. Do you know how many times I’ve put together a comprehensive and well-researched story, only to hear her say: “Come on, Reshma, can’t we go deeper?”

  Even though she’s thirty-plus years old, her brunette hair is buzzed almost to the skull. She paints her nails black and wears colorful peasant skirts that swirl around as she bounces back and forth across the room.

  When I first met her, she told us, “My last name sounds so severe, doesn’t it? Please, just call me Tami.”

  Ever since then, I’ve never called her anything but Ms. Ratcliffe.

  Everything I’d heard about her class made it sound even more insufferable than the woman herself. And guess what? All of it is true! For instance, she teaches in front of a huge poster that says QUESTION AUTHORITY in bulbous purple hippie-type lettering.

  Why can’t she understand that she is the authority?

  But since the school wouldn’t let me use this period to take AP Mandarin at the charter school down the street, her class was literally the only Bell High AP class that fit into my schedule. At Bell, AP classes get additional weight when they calculate your GPA, which means every semester I need to take eight APs if I’m going to stay at number one.

  Still, I thought I’d be fine. This is an AP literature class, and I know how to write about literature. But, on the first day, she asked us to pick something that mattered to us and write a poem about it. And she only gave us two days to write it. The short deadline was so it’d sound “fresh.”

  Well, what do I know about poems? I have no idea what an A+ poem looks like. I had to go to the library and check out a book about poems. And when I asked her to give me some more guidance, Ms. Ratcliffe said, “Oh, do your best. Write what you feel….”

  I know that means I’m being set up to fail. Teachers always try to game me. She thinks if she gives me a bad grade on the first assignment, I’ll try harder on all subsequent ones. But in order to stay at number one, I need as many A+’s (not A’s, not A–’s) on my report card as possible. And getting an A+ for the semester means never getting a single bad grade, ever.

  Immediately, I understood that I couldn’t write a regular poem with line breaks and whatnot. I had no idea where the line breaks were supposed to go: they all looked pretty random to me. No, I needed something clever. I was flipping through the book, almost too tired to read it, when I opened it to a section on “prose poems.”

  These are basically long, beautiful sentences that are full of flowery words and complex metaphors. Well…I know how to do that. My poem was:

  “To a Gas Lamp”

  The dark blots in the gas lamp move frenetically for a time, battering against the glass and trying to find the paper-thin ingress that’ll allow them entrance to the chamber of their despair
, but soon enough the miasmic air, sweetened by fire, lures them down onto a bed of silky moth-wings.

  But today she returned our poems, and I immediately sensed that something was wrong. My throat went dry when she dropped it facedown on my desk, and my hand shook as I flipped it over.

  Not even a straight C. A C–. The only note was: Please come see me.

  During class, I read it over and over. She lectured us on the first pages of A Tale of Two Cities (which starts with a poem), and though my hand was automatically taking notes, I couldn’t concentrate. Ms. Ratcliffe always organizes the classroom desks in a big rectangle, and she sits at one corner, as if she’s juuust another student.

  After the first week of class, I realized she wasn’t going to call on me unless I sat directly opposite her and waved my hand right in front of her field of vision. But that meant she saw everything. After I wiped a tear away with a flick of my jacket cuff, she shook her head, and her bloodless lips twitched up into a slight smile.

  Even worse, Chelsea had caught onto the same trick, so she always sat next to me. I glanced over. Her poem had gotten an A. Of course. Ms. Ratcliffe loved her. During the newspaper elections last year, she told a bunch of the freshmen and sophomores that Chelsea was the most energetic and knowledgeable staffer she’d ever taught.

  The perfects don’t have an official leader. That’s the point: they’re all perfect. But if there was one, it’d be Chelsea. She went to the same elementary and middle school as me, and we’ve always been in the same advanced classes. For a while, in middle school, it looked like she’d get ahead: we used to duel on tests, competing to get at least one point ahead of each other, and although our middle school didn’t rank people, I remember that when we compared final report cards, she ended up ahead of me by a sliver of a percentage point. But during freshman year, she decided that maintaining appearances was more important than doing well in school, and now she struggles to stay in second place.

  That day in class, her sunglasses were cocked on top of her brunette hair. Sometimes, when she moves too suddenly, they’ll flip down onto her face and then she’ll tweak them up again with two fingers.

  I craned my head to look at her poem. “What did you write about?”

  “Oh, just something silly.” She smiled. Her poem was entitled “Storefront.”

  I tried to read the first line, but she hurriedly slid it into her notebook.

  “Come on, I’m sure it’s brilliant.”

  I wanted to tell her that a literary agent had contacted me, but I wasn’t sure how to do it.

  When she turned her head, her sunglasses flipped down again, so she took them off entirely. Up front, Ms. Ratcliffe was saying good-bye to everyone by using big operatic sweeps of her hand.

  “Hey.” Chelsea tore out a scrap of notebook paper and handed it to me. “Write down your e-mail. I have something to send you.”

  “What’s happening?” I said.

  “Oh, it’s not a big deal,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  I scrawled my e-mail on the paper. She stashed it in her bag, then smiled and said, “By the way, Resh, I meant to tell you: I saw your article online, and I thought it was so great, and, you know, just absolutely true.” The corners of her mouth came up slowly and fitfully, as if she was cranking up her smile with a winch. “I mean, I hope by now you know me well enough that this goes without saying, but…I never supported Colson’s scheme.”

  I didn’t buy it, but I nodded anyway. What can you do with a person who never says what she really thinks?

  After class, I approached Ms. Ratcliffe with my paper in hand. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’d like to talk about this assignment.”

  She looked up at me. “Oh yes, Reshhhma.”

  Ms. Ratcliffe always pronounces my name with way too much emphasis on that h, as if she’s so much more enlightened than all the other stupid Americans who can’t recognize that my name contains some crazy-sounding Indian phoneme. Except, umm, she’s wrong. The sh sound in my name is pretty much the same as in English. It’s the first syllable that actually ought to sound different.

  “Look,” I said. “I’ve never gotten a grade this low before.”

  “Hmm, right…Why don’t you come and see me in my office after school?” she said. “We can have a good long talk about it.”

  My lips made a noise as they pulled apart. “You can’t write ‘Please see me’ and then refuse to talk to me.”

  She rubbed her stubbly head with one hand and looked at the exit. No one was coming in. She reached down—exposing the red hint of a tattoo on her upper arm—and raised the doorstop. The door crashed shut as she stood up.

  “It’s unusual for a creative assignment to get a grade like this,” I said. My heart was tap-tap-tapping against the inside of my chest.

  She tucked herself into one of the student desks and said, “It’s the creative part that I wanted to talk to you about. I know you’re smart. But I’ve seen a lot of your writing over the years, with the newspaper. And you never seem to go as far and as deep as you could.”

  “You’re supposed to prepare us for the advanced placement test,” I said. “Writing poems isn’t part of the curriculum.”

  She cocked her head and spoke softly. “Where did you get the idea for your poem? Gas lamps are an odd subject for a modern teen.”

  I rocked up and down on my toes. “I was looking at a bug trapped in a lighting panel. I changed it to a gas lamp to be more poetic.”

  “Oh, well that’s what isn’t working. It’s too artificial. Not authentically yours. Not your background, your experience. I know you like to win at everything, but I can’t promise you that you’re going to win at this assignment. The problem is that in the entire three years I’ve known you, I can only think of one time when you’ve been honest with me.” God, how many times would I have to pay for confiding in her that night? “You’re always trying to tell people what they want to hear. I wish you’d stop worrying about your GPA and start worrying about how you’re living your life. I think if you looked into your own life and family and culture, your writing would be different and more interesting.”

  Let me tell you, it’s true. When you get super angry, you do see red at the edge of your vision. I think it’s because of increased ocular pressure. So much pressure. My body felt like it’d been pumped full of air.

  I stood totally still, except for the quivering, and I said, “I am one hundredth of a grade point ahead of Chelsea Blahnik and two hundredths of a grade point ahead of Jeremy Ozick. Every point on every assignment counts. Maybe you know that over the summer, Mr. Colson tried to revamp our grading system so Chelsea could be valedictorian instead of me. But I stopped him. I stopped the vice principal. Don’t you think I can stop you?”

  She rubbed her fuzzy head and let the hand fall down over her face. From under that shield, she mumbled, “Well…all my grades are final. What you handed in was generic and the sentiment was cliché. Nor did it have any poetic form. It’s a stretch for me to even call it a poem….”

  “Fine.” My heart quieted. I’m always prepared for a fight. “This will keep going. We’ll argue about it day after day. You’ll have to meet with my parents, with the principal, with my lawyers, with the school’s lawyers, with your own lawyers….The meetings will go on and on and on and each one will cost you a fortune in legal fees.”

  I grabbed my backpack and put a hand on the door.

  She said, “I know you’re under a lot of pressure at home. But at some point you have to begin charting your own course in life.”

  We locked eyes for a long moment. And she sighed. Thank God. Most teachers will back down after putting up a show of resistance, but occasionally I encounter someone who doesn’t understand what I’m capable of. I’d been worried that Ms. Ratcliffe might force me to go ahead and destroy her life, but I was glad to see she was no different from the rest.

  I don’t enjoy destroying people. Or, well, I suppose that’s not strictly true. But still, I try
to only do it when I have to.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll take another look at the assignment.”

  Before closing the door, I added, “By the way, you’re still saying it wrong,” I said. “My name is pronounced Raysh-ma. That’s a long a; not a short e.”

  “That’s fine, Rice-shma,” she said. “I’ll try to remember.”

  When I left, she was still hiding behind her hand.

  On Google Earth, Bell High looks like a huge smiley face. It’s a cluster of buildings that are organized around three huge courtyards. The biggest one—the mouth—is the south courtyard, near the main entrance, and it’s flanked by two jowls—the gym and the auditorium. The eyes are the east and west courtyards. In the center, the cafeteria rises up like a bulbous glass nose. Painted on the roof of the caf is a stick figure wearing a huge sombrero. It was put there years ago by some students who understood the potential humor value of this whole satellite imagery thing. Every spring, the seniors like to sneak up there and arrange random stuff near the stick figure’s midsection so that it appears to have a penis.

  The school is built in a Spanish style, with red shingle roofs and walls that’re painted a faux adobe brown. Arid-climate plants—cactuses and shrubs and fruit trees—live in the planters around the school. We don’t have too many internal hallways, since classrooms usually open right into the courtyards. Around the edge of each yard the roof overhangs a little to keep out the rain, but that’s about it. In a lot of places, greenish lockers line the yards. So the courtyards are hallway and dining area and hang-out spot. It’s a bit miserable from November to January, when it rains all the time, but during fall and spring, it’s glorious. The wind rushes through the courtyards at exactly the right speed to wick away the sun’s heat. It’s like being at a tropical beach.