“What?” I said. “Really? That’d be great! Thanks so much! Yeah. No. It’s wonderful. The exercise room is…There’s no chair. It’s a bit cramped. Your room has a desk, right?”
“Are you…?” He cocked his head and looked at me out of the corner of his eyes. “Are you serious? You’re gonna make me go back to Fremont every day?”
“Umm…” I said. “I could really use a private place to work.” He didn’t look away or blink. “I’m…I’m writing a novel. And it’s about my life. And when I try to write in my room I feel too close to everything. Too—”
“I was being nice!” he said. “I was expressing concern. I was trying to defuse tension. But my parents’ place is twenty miles away! Jesus, what is wrong with you?”
I shrugged. I was too tired. I didn’t know or care what was happening. “So now you don’t want to leave?”
He let out an exasperated breath, but whatever he was about to say was cut off when our maid, Maria, began trudging up the stairs with the vacuum cleaner. She looked down, pretending she couldn’t see us. As she passed, George and I pressed ourselves to the side of the stairs. I could feel the moisture coming off my body and sticking to the wall.
And that’s when I had a weird inkling. My thing with Aakash was already well under way, but I did need another guy to complicate things. A dangerous-but-charming one.
“Hmm,” I said. “All right. You can stay. I’ll write in my room from now on.”
I’m still not sure exactly how I’ll use George, but if I keep him around, I bet I’ll eventually find a place for him in the novel.
Okay, I just spent twenty minutes trying to think of a joke about how I’m an Indian and Indians know how to use all the parts of the buffalo (where, in this analogy, the buffalo is my life, and George is a particularly weird indigestible part like the hoof or something), but I couldn’t figure out how to phrase it, so I’m just going to plop this down here and move on.
A day of many meetings.
Yesterday, I looked on Yelp to find the best hair salon in Silicon Valley (even I’m not confident enough to attempt to cut my own hair) and made an appointment for a four-hundred-dollar haircut. Mummy flipped out when I told her about it. She keeps saying that I’m having “my troubles” again. Mummy projects these “troubles” onto me whenever she’s feeling particularly stressed-out by her work. Over the summer, she became obsessed with the notion that I was secretly very unhappy. She’d hold my face in her hands and stare into my eyes and say, “Oh, poor child,” and then make another therapy appointment for me.
So I also had to go to Dr. Wasserman’s office: an old house on the outskirts of Mountain View. Although I’ve never seen anyone smoking in it, the place always smells like cigars. The black lacquer of the tabletops is covered with a complicated Venn diagram of coffee rings, and the dark greenish wallpaper has a raised design that looks like a bunch of spades. Since Mummy picked him out, it’s no surprise that all three diplomas on the wall are from Harvard. He’s a huge, rangy guy with scraggly hair and a narrow face.
When I walked in, he raised an eyebrow: I was wearing a T-shirt that showed four inches of midriff above the waist of my skirt. Then he started asking me all kinds of questions about whether I was feeling unusually good about myself or experiencing a surge in sexual behavior. Finally, I explained to him about the stuff I needed to do to write my novel.
“See? I’m not crazy. I’m just an artist,” I said.
“Interesting. What’s your inciting event?”
“What?”
“It’s one of the basics of any narrative: in the middle of the first act you need an inciting event that’ll drive the rest of the plot.”
“Deciding to write this novel wasn’t enough of an event?”
He sucked in his breath. “Well, okay. Stories should have an internal arc—the way the character changes over time. Your book’s internal arc is about the character’s secret worry that her all-consuming ambition has robbed her of her girlhood, and that arc plays out through the ‘I’m writing a novel that requires me to do things that I unconsciously want to do anyway’ metafictional conceit. And for a very literary novel, it might be sufficient to only have an internal arc. But I think you want to produce a more commercial book, right?”
For the first time, I noticed all the detective novels—hundreds of paperbacks—on his shelves. “I don’t care about its genre. All I want is to get into Stanford.”
“Well, almost all popular novels have an external arc—some outside obstacle that the hero must confront. Usually, the internal and external arcs are related. In order to defeat the external obstacle, the hero eventually has to confront the internal demons. Audiences don’t want a character who just thinks and thinks and thinks. They also want a character who does things. That’s why, in each of my own books, Dr. Nathan West solves a murder which thematically echoes whatever neurosis he’s currently afflicted by.”
“Are these books published?”
“I’m, uhh, I’m currently looking for an agent.”
I picked up my bag. “You better not charge my mom for this session. You don’t think I have an external arc? Every single day I have to struggle against bullshit obstacles like this meeting. You know my mom forced me to come here.”
The doctor lifted his face from his hands. “Mmmhmm,” he said. “As one artist to another, I sympathize. But, umm, your ambiguous relationship to parental authority is part of that selfsame ‘stunted girlhood’ internal arc. Don’t worry, though. As I understand it, you still have a few thousand words left in the set-up phase of your novel. That’s plenty of time for your external arc to appear.”
God, that guy was crazy. I understand writing a novel to get into medical school, but why would a certified doctor waste his time writing unpublished, and probably unpublishable, novels?
Still, he unsettled me. I’d rushed into this novel-writing business without doing enough research. And I only had twenty-one days left.
The hairdresser gushed about my beautiful complexion, because, yeah, four hundred dollars ought to buy you some flattery, too. But it still left me smiling. And when he was done, my hair was perfectly layered and highlighted with subtle tinges of brown. I couldn’t afford to do this all the time, of course. But it only needed to last until the end of the month.
I don’t know what Wasserman was babbling on about. The secret to succeeding as a writer is pretty simple: in general, people don’t try to understand anything; they judge a work by how smart it sounds. So, after I finish an article or essay, I go through my work and rewrite every sentence to make it sound more complex. I increase the register of the diction—using weirder and more sesquipedalian words—and make the syntax a bit more complex: often through the addition of parenthetical asides—(this is one of them!)—and dependent clauses. The result is prose that sounds a bit more complicated and beautiful than it needs to be. I call this the prettification process.
Teachers eat this up. They’re lazy. They have ninety papers to grade. They want the external markers of intelligence. I figure that you, Ms. Montrose, will be no different, so I have to remember to allocate some time at the end to prettify this novel.
…And take out a few passages, like this one, that are too revealing. The perfects have taught me that it’s not enough to look smart; your intelligence also has to look effortless.
When I first told Mummy about the perfects, she laughed and said, “No one can be perfect.”
People say that all the time, as if it’s obvious.
But is it?
That’s the problem with people. They think perfection is about things you can’t control: your intelligence or your wealth or your beauty. But if they thought of it as avoiding mistakes, they’d understand how achievable it is.
We all know that it’s possible to go one hour without making a mistake. And if that’s possible, then it must be possible to string together twenty-four consecutive mistake-free hours into a perfect day.
Having an e
ntire mistake-free day is difficult, but it’s doable. I’ve done it for more days than I can count. Yesterday was a mistake-free day: I got a haircut, calmed down my doctor, did my calculus and chemistry problem sets, finished reading A Tale of Two Cities, made flash cards and memorized vocabulary for Latin and Spanish, studied for my econ test, ate less than twelve hundred calories, made progress on my novel, started writing my newspaper column, called hotels to make arrangements for the World Leadership Conference I’m organizing, made a set of flyers for the Halloween Charity Auction, and slept for more than four hours.
And if I can have one mistake-free day, then I can have two, and three, and four, and eventually whole weeks and months and years will pass without mistakes. Is that so insane?
God, I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I finish my writing for the day and lie awake with my skin buzzing and think, I’m writing it. I’m writing it. I’m actually writing it.
It’s the same way I felt over the summer, after the lawsuit, when I realized that I’d clinched the valedictorian spot. During my whole first three years of school, I was convinced that I was about to lose the top spot. But after we won the case, I let myself believe that I was actually going to get it.
I started spending hours staring out my bedroom window at the vines sucking the life out of our elm tree and mentally composing valedictory speeches.
I know, it’s dumb. We’re one of the last Silicon Valley schools to have a commencement address by the valedictorian: everyone else has moved to elected class speakers. But that speech will be the first time in all of high school that I’ll be publicly acknowledged as the best. I want to pierce the bullshit and let some air into that auditorium. I’m thinking of starting it:
In your life, a lot of people are going to tell you that if you just do good work, then the world will recognize you for it, and I honestly can’t tell if those people are lying on purpose or if they’re just deluded….
They all need to be told that if they’re going to indulge in that “I’m so high above everything” posturing, then they’ll be defenseless against people like me who’re willing to swoop in and take whatever we want.
Our cafeteria is an octagonal building whose whitewashed walls are covered with huge splatter paintings: pseudo-Impressionist pictures of trains and canyons where the neon colors run together like an oil slick. They were donated by Susan Le, the CEO of Bombr. She only graduated in 1999, but she’s already worth $1.8 billion.
(And she stole a few hundred million of those dollars from my parents.)
The biggest painting is a forest of floppy purple trees—if it wasn’t fifteen feet tall and framed in gold leaf, it would look like a child’s finger painting. My mom said that since the artist committed suicide last year, it’s probably worth millions. It’s kept on a raised platform, under glass, and sometimes students come from Stanford or Berkeley or the Art Institute to sit there for hours amidst the tumult and sketch it. The one cafeteria table that’s also on that dais is, thus, above and apart from the other tables. Whenever you enter the caf, your eye naturally flits to that vomited-upon canvas. And then it travels downward to that lone table.
The remaining perfects are the only seniors who still eat at school. Almost everyone else goes off-campus or, if they want to be seen, they lunch on, in, or near their cars. But since almost all the perfects are taking classes during both lunch periods, they can only eat during the twenty-minute intersession.
Ever since switching to AP environmental science, I’ve lunched on protein bars in the hallways or at the newspaper offices.
But not today.
The moment I stepped onto the dais, I felt a hundred eyes snap onto me. I hovered there for a moment, debating whether to bolt. But then Alex sneered at me, and I steeled myself. No, if I was going to write this novel, then I needed Alex to be my friend, and I needed for that friendship to begin right now.
When I slid into the seat next to Tina, she didn’t even nod. Her hair was so straight, black, and shiny that it rippled at even the slightest movement.
Alex looked up from her phone, though her fingers never stopped moving. “What are you doing here?”
“We’re doing that dividing-up-the-colleges thing today, right?”
Tina looked up. “Chelsea said you never got back to her.”
“Well, yes,” I said. “But then Alex convinced me that I ought to drop by. I know, right? She’s such a good friend.”
Alex’s phone went down, and she blinked a few times. I looked at her. If she told me off, I’d call the police right away. I wouldn’t even wait until I was out of the cafeteria. All of my actual pills were hidden away in an Altoids tin that I’d buried behind our house, but I had five of Alex’s empty pill bottles in my bag. Hopefully, that would be enough to put her away without necessarily threatening me.
I said, “Don’t you remember, Alex? You said it would be in my best interest to cooperate.” Then I leaned over, slightly, so my bag was behind Tina’s chair, where only Alex could see it, and opened it up a bit. She glanced down, and I knew she was seeing the orange pill bottles inside.
She sighed, and said, so quietly that I almost missed it, “Yeah. Fine,” and the moment was over. As she went back to her phone, I felt a weird pressure build up in my chest. I’d done it. I’d come back.
Jeremy Ozick nodded at me. “Hey, you’re looking good today, Resh.”
I let out a nervous laugh.
“Yeah,” said Tina. “What happened to you? Alex said you were all over Aakash in class the other day.”
I froze. Two years ago, Tina relentlessly mocked me for coming into school in a pair of skinny jeans. She said I’d be a millionaire after I patented whatever machine I’d used to load my fat ass into them. I stared at a red blotch in the corner of the painting. Whatever they said, I wouldn’t react.
Jeremy drummed the side of his head with two fingers. “Yeah, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a skirt.”
“Just following rule number nine, right?” I said.
Tina was silent for a moment. Then a loud exclamation erupted from the back of her throat. At a nearby table, a junior dropped his fork and looked up, startled. Tina’s hair danced as she shook with laughter.
“My God. I can’t believe you remember that!”
Raymond Lodge dropped a soggy SUBWAY sandwich onto the table. “What? What’re we laughing about?”
“Resh reminded us about these rules we made up when we were freshmen,” Tina said. “Like…you had to drink on the night before tests and stuff like that.”
My face burned with embarrassment. I normally never thought about those rules. She was the one who’d created them.
“You got drunk before your tests?” Ray said.
“No. Well, maybe like a sip,” she said. “We broke all the rules all the—”
Chelsea took the seat next to me. Every eye turned to Jeremy. He nodded and twisted the dial of his watch.
“Oh, hi! You’re here!” Chelsea said. “Look, everyone. Resh came, too!”
“Really?” Alex said. “You’re still going to be nice to her? Even after she—”
“Alex.” Chelsea frowned. “She’s part of this, too. Now come on everyone, give me your phones. I hate how everyone’s always going tap-tap-tap on their phones when we’re at lunch.”
Ray looked at me, then at Alex. “Wait…didn’t you invite her?”
Chelsea stacked all the phones up into a neat little pile and then started cutting and recutting them like a deck of cards.
“So,” she said. “It’s really simple. We’ll go through by class order. So, Reshma. What college is getting your early app?”
Five heads swiveled toward me.
“Well?” Tina said.
“Oh…I’m applying early to Stanford.”
This whole thing was stupid, and I still wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t trying to trick me, but if Chelsea was really afraid to compete with me, then fine: I’d let her slink away.
Chelse
a shrugged. “Fine. Harvard.”
Jeremy knocked on the table. “Yes! Then I’ve got Yale.”
Alex said, “I’m Princeton, of course.” Both her parents and her grandfather had gone there.
“What about Aakash and Kian?” Jeremy said. They were fifth and sixth, respectively.
“They e-mailed me this morning,” Chelsea said. “Both are applying to MIT. I tried explaining that one of them should choose Caltech or something, but they both started naming MIT professors they wanted to work with, so I don’t know, whatever. They’re set.”
“All right, Tina,” Jeremy said. “What about you?”
She let out a long breath before saying, “Dartmouth.”
“Damn!” Ray said. “Then I guess I’ll settle for Brown.”
Tina flashed her condescending little smile. Ray had pulled back from the table, physically disengaging. Tina was actually the worst. Chelsea was reasonably smart, and Alex was stylish. Tina just had looks.
I whispered, “You know, this is pretty silly, Ray. You could just apply to Dartmouth anyway.”
Alex glared at me.
Ray put out his hands and shrugged. “What can I do? We’re pretty much the same person. I’m eighth and she’s seventh. We live in the same neighborhood. We’ve taken pretty much the same classes. I play golf, she plays tennis. I’m in charge of the yearbook, she’s president of the honor society. Oh, not to mention that she’s Asian.”
“What? Since when’s that been a help?” Tina said.
Asians aren’t a real minority. Colleges do their best to keep our numbers down. We get such good grades and SAT scores that if colleges only admitted based on merit (like MIT does), then every top college would look like MIT: 40+% Asian.
Although, whatever. Tina isn’t a full Asian: her mom is white.
“God, this is so jejune,” I said.
“What?” Alex said.
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