“Jejune. You know, immature?” What? Don’t people say that?
“Let me stop you right here,” Alex said. “Please don’t ever say that word again.”
“Whatever. Childish, then. Kids play games; adults go for it. Ray, it doesn’t matter if they only take one of you, so long as you are the one that they take.”
Ray put his half-eaten sandwich back into his bag. Jeremy glanced down at his watch. Chelsea’s lips rose in that shy, reflexive smile. I looked across the table at Alex. I knew that if anyone would get this, she would. The rest of them were full of fear, but not her.
“No, don’t ignore me,” I said. “I’m serious. Beating Tina would be easy. All of your stuff is within school activities. Between now and application time, you need to find one outside award or honor—something not conferred by this school—that you can win. I have a list that I—”
“Look,” Tina interjected, flicking a look at Ray. “If you want Dartmouth so badly, I’ll go with Columbia instead.”
The table froze. Ray looked at her, then me. “Really?”
Tina stabbed at her salad, but the bit of hard-boiled egg split and fell off her fork. “I mean…it’s not…”
“No!” Alex said. “Those aren’t the rules. Tina worked harder. She got higher grades. She gets an earlier pick. Suck it up and deal with it, Ray.”
He was still looking at Tina, and she wasn’t saying anything.
“That’s it. We’re done. Thanks for coming,” Alex said. “Chelsea and I will go further down the list and tell everyone else where they’re allowed to apply.”
They settled back, trotted out their smiles, and started their little side-conversations: Ray and Jeremy talked about some movie they’d both seen; Alex and Tina exchanged gossip about Bell High kids who graduated last year.
I unwrapped my protein bar and tried to edge in on Alex and Tina, but Alex looked up and said, “Excuse me. I suppose we’re friends now. But this is still a private conversation.”
Friends. She was telling me she was agreeing to our deal. I angled away. I didn’t mind her sharpness. Sometimes friends were blunt with each other.
Chelsea took out a little salad of her own. As she was dipping her fork in balsamic, she said, “I’m really glad that we reconnected,” she said. “You see things in such an interesting way.”
Her sunglasses were down, so I couldn’t see whether she was serious or not.
“You always wanted to go to Stanford, didn’t you?” I said.
Alex was talking to Tina, but I could feel her attention expanding and spilling over into our conversation.
“Oh, you know…I’ll be happy to get in anywhere.”
“Come on, that can’t be true.” I normally don’t bother to argue with Chelsea, but this was too ridiculous. “Everyone has a top choice.”
She shrugged. “It would be nice to stay close to home.”
Which meant Stanford, of course, although she’d never say it. I nodded to myself, and then realized I’d been silent for a bit too long and scrambled for something to say.
“What was your poem about?” I said. “I tried to see, in class, but I couldn’t read it.”
A tall blond guy with a nose ring called out to her, then swooped over to our table, and she briefly embraced him. When she’d extricated herself, she said, “It was silly—the poem was about wanting something that I couldn’t have.”
It’s been my experience that if you’re willing to do what it takes, then there’s nothing you can’t have. But Chelsea doesn’t think that way, of course. Her world is full of obstacles that she’s too pristine and perfect to overcome.
“What happened to your novel?” I said. “Did you ever finish?”
“Oh, that wasn’t a serious project,” she said. “Anyway, I’m still tinkering with it.”
“I’m writing a novel,” I said. “I already have an agent waiting for my draft.”
The bell went off. Thank God. I threw my wrapper onto the ground and grabbed my things. But Chelsea hugged me!
“That’s great! You have to let me read it.”
During our next class, she kept shooting smiles at me! She was faking it. She had to be faking it. That was the thing about her. Chelsea was never honest. At least with Alex, I knew where I stood.
That evening, I texted her:
Well, I guess we have a deal then.
(My text was thirty-four characters, for those of you who are counting at home.)
An hour later, I texted again:
An answer within three hours, remember? And of equal or greater length?
And at exactly two hours and fifty-nine minutes, she wrote:
I hate you. You’re fucking crazy.
After class today, Ms. Ratcliffe asked me to see her at the end of the day so she could give me the regraded poetry assignment.
I didn’t think anything of it. Honestly, I haven’t been thinking of school at all nowadays: I only have twenty days until the end of the month, and I’ve hardly done any regular American girl stuff.
I don’t know. Maybe that was my mistake. I let myself get sloppy.
The upper rim of her office was crowded with posters that had quotes from famous writers. With their yellow paper and bold black iconography, they shouted at me to be violent and original in my work and heap up one true sentence on top of another. I snorted. If Ratcliffe liked these guys, then their advice couldn’t be that worthwhile.
Ms. Ratcliffe picked up her phone, dialed a number, and muttered, “She’s here.”
What was happening? My feet locked in around the legs of my chair, as if I was afraid of being pulled off the furniture and thrown out the window.
She slid my poem across the desk. “Is there anything you want to tell me about this?” she said.
“Did you regrade it?”
She tapped her fingers on the paper. With her close-cropped hair and her arm tattoo, she looked more like a San Francisco street kid than a teacher.
“The other day, I was in a Starbucks and I opened a copy of Barista magazine. They’d printed your third-place essay in the ‘What Fair Trade Coffee Means to Me’ contest.”
I didn’t say anything. She broke eye contact first.
“Do you actually care about fair trade coffee?”
“This poem doesn’t have a new grade on it.”
“I worry about you, Reshma. Why do you never allow yourself to be genuine? Are you still having trouble with your mother?”
My hand was shaking slightly. I’m far from unflappable. I’m flapped all the time. But I know how to plow forward despite the anxiety.
“I’ve been busy lately,” I said. “I’m writing a novel.”
The tension went out of her cheeks. “That’s good. I’d like to see it sometime. What’s it about? Or is it too early for you to be telling me?”
“It’s going to be published,” I said. “I already have interest from an agent.”
Her eyes went wide. I bet that Ratcliffe once wanted to be a writer.
I pushed the knife in: “And I’ve confirmed that my plotline is guaranteed to succeed. I went to the Barnes and Noble and skimmed thirty best-selling books and figured out exactly what I need. All Indian American novels are about being trapped between our Indian and our American identities. And all young adult novels are about wanting to be popular and snare the handsome boy. Mashing them together is a can’t-fail combination.”
She glanced up at one of the literary quotes, then said: “Right…but what interests you?”
I shifted in my seat. “I just told you.”
“No, you told me what sells.”
“I told you about my novel. Was that not good enough for you? Isn’t anything I do good enough?”
“It’s not that it isn’t good enough. It’s that it’s not yours.”
I wanted to yell: What does it matter if I use other books for inspiration? Isn’t the point to produce a good book? An A+ book? If I know how to produce something that people will enjoy, then what
does it matter how I did it?
My face must’ve scared her, because she got up and stood near the window. The back of her blue cardigan had an eraser-sized brown splotch. Her office door creaked open and extruded the bullet-shaped head of Vice Principal Colson. He was wearing fingerless gloves, even though it was sixty-five degrees outside. His bald head is a sallow tea-stained color.
He tottered through the office like a gorilla with arthritis. “Right, ahem, then,” he said. “Have you explained what’s going to happen?”
I glared at him and said, “Nice to see you again.”
“Ahem…err…umm…”
Last time we’d been in a room together, my lawyer had questioned Colson so vigorously that the vice principal was reduced to muttering incomprehensible monosyllables.
Ms. Ratcliffe put a hand on her bookshelf. When she pulled out the book, my heart began pounding. She put it on her desk, next to my poem, then opened the book to “Ode to a Lamp” by Rupert Hazill.
I kept my face completely still.
“You knew what you were doing,” she said. “I ran your poem through three anti-plagiarism programs and turned up nothing. This book isn’t digitized, so its text isn’t on Amazon or Google. I only ran across it by chance, while hunting down a different poem that I was planning on using in class next week.”
“Yeah, it’s no problem when a teacher ‘uses’ a poem, is it?” I said.
Finally, the vice principal overcame his stuttering and started speaking very quietly. This was a major problem. They were very disappointed with me. Plagiarism was a serious offense. It imperiled the whole academic system. I was only cheating myself. And so on…
Since it was my first time, they would only fail me for this half-semester. My final semester grade—the only grade that would be reported to colleges—would be the average of the two half-semester grades. If I got an A in the second half, my average would almost certainly be a D or maybe even a C–. The only C or D on my whole transcript. It wouldn’t kill me.
“This is a very light punishment for this level of plagiarism,” Ms. Ratcliffe said.
I waited for that familiar coldness to come upon me—that feeling like a serpent coiling up in my gut. It’s what allows me to lash out instead of retreating. But this time it didn’t come, and I don’t know why. Instead, my whole body was hot, and I felt like they’d carved a window into my torso and exposed my shriveled-up soul to the light for the very first time.
“I won’t be valedictorian,” I said.
“The…umm…final class ranking isn’t determined until the end of this semester,” Colson said. “You could still, umm…Your grade point average is very high.”
“Arjuna was disappointed that you settled,” I said. “He was ready for trial.”
“We…err…uhhh…”
Ms. Ratcliffe leaned forward. “You could easily be suspended for this,” she said. “And if we did suspend you, we’d have to report that to colleges. They take plagiarism very seriously. If you’d pulled this in college, you’d be fighting to avoid expulsion.”
I tried to tell them that I wasn’t a cheater. I said that maybe I’d checked out a copy of the poem and maybe I’d read it once, but that was it. I have a good memory, and a few lines from the book must’ve crept into my poem by accident. I told them, over and over, that it was an accident. That I didn’t have any other disciplinary charges on my record. But they refused to believe me! No matter what I did or said, they kept repeating the absurd idea that they were going easy on me, and I knew that was a lie! I told them I knew of other people who’d gotten caught with little irregularities like this. Little mistakes. And in those cases the teacher usually just made them redo the assignment or, at worst, gave them a zero, but Ms. Ratcliffe’s only reply was that she couldn’t be held responsible for the way other teachers chose to conduct themselves.
Then she tried to tell me this would be a learning experience in the end. It’d spur me to finally live up to my potential. I’m tired of those words: my potential. Couldn’t they see that I was past just having the potential to be a high achiever? I was already the best.
But not anymore.
I came home, popped an Adderall, and opened my class rank spreadsheet. It lists the top thirty people in my class, along with all of their grades—I’m not above stealing a transcript if I have to—and their current weighted and unweighted GPAs. Then I crunched every likely scenario regarding their final semester GPAs.
I’m dead. There’s no situation—barring everyone else falling prey to breakdowns, suicides, arrests, etc.—that gets me above the tenth rank. In the most optimistic scenario—I get a C–as my final grade, a 4.2 average in my other classes, and everyone else’s average is about 3% lower than normal (to account for senior slump)—I end up as the eleventh ranked person in the grade!
Without the top slot, I’m nothing more than a decent student with a few extracurricular activities. I’m not even editor-in-chief of the newspaper: I only do layout. There are thirty-one thousand high schools in America. That means there are three hundred and ten thousand students who are graduating this year with a class rank in the top ten. And there are only sixteen hundred spots at Stanford.
My life is over. They’ve won.
Just got eight full hours of sleep for the first time since, I don’t know, seventh grade.
When I woke up, I had a text message from Aakash and another insult from Alex, but I ignored them both. After all, there’s no point in working on this novel anymore, is there?
THE END
Wait, here’s the official ending.
From: Linda Montrose
To: Reshma Kapoor
Subject: How’s your work coming along?
Hope everything’s going well! I had a few more thoughts about the novel: I was thinking it might be best, for the purposes of marketing, if we could pitch your novel as a proposal—all I’d need would be a few chapters and an outline—to editors before you graduate high school. Do you think you could get that to me?
—linda
From: Reshma Kapoor
To: Linda Montrose
Subject: Re: How’s your work coming along?
Dear Ms. Montrose,
Personal circumstances have conspired to make it impossible for me to complete my novel. I’ve attached what I’ve written so far, in case you want a fuller explanation. I’m sorry the writing isn’t as strong as usual. Normally, I pretty up my work a bit before I send it out, but this time I was forced to quit before I could reach that stage.
Sincerely,
Reshma Kapoor
I have plenty of free time now, so I thought I’d note some more weird stuff.
Lately, all my body wants to do is sleep: I’ll be watching TV and then I’ll suddenly be asleep; I’ll wake up and feel energetic for fifteen minutes and then, bam, I’m asleep again.
That’s why I was napping when Aakash rang my doorbell.
I’d totally forgotten about him. I mean, in my mind, giving up on the novel meant giving up on the dating thing, too, but Aakash, unfortunately, is not telepathic. Mummy called out, “Reshma, you have a visitor?”
I woke up instantly and began throwing off clothes and throwing on clothes and yelling incoherently to my mother, and then I stopped. What did it matter? I didn’t really like Aakash. He’d just been the easiest material at hand.
I pulled my hair back and yelled, “Sure, Mummy, send him up.”
He knocked on my door with the slightest possible pressure, but it still swiveled inward with a long creak. His hair was slick, and he smelled heavily of Old Spice. I rolled my eyes at his shiny black shirt with swirling patterns stitched into the front. It was such an Indian thing to wear. He looked around, taking in all the pink fairy princess stuff, and then his eyes dropped onto me—I was sitting on my bed—for a moment before leaping to the shelves on his left. I bet he likes to judge people by what books they have.
; “Wow!” he said. “A lot of Voltaire. I didn’t know you liked philosophy so much.”
I shrugged. He was holding one of the books I use for inspiration when I’m trying to write an essay for a contest.
“I play around with it,” I said. “Look, I should’ve texted you, but—”
“Do you like Rousseau? I read his Confessions over the summer. The book was crazy!”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” I said.
“How did you like it? I mean, I didn’t know you were interested in the Enlightenment, we should really—”
“Look, there’s no point pretending anymore. I don’t know anything about Rousseau.” I took a deep breath.
“Oh.” He dropped the book. “You’re looking beautiful today.”
I pushed a strand of hair back behind my ear. Did his Bombr friends tell him to say that?
Mummy was rustling around somewhere within earshot. “Close the door,” I said. “Just for a second.”
Aakash’s hand lingered on the knob for a moment after it clicked shut. “Hey, what happened to your class rank?”
I wiped my eye. “Does everyone already know?”
He sat on the edge of my bed. Only a foot of pink bedspread separated us. And then his arm bridged it. He murmured, “It’s a rumor. You know Kian always has to be ridiculously early with everything, right? Well, he’s already sent out his college apps and gotten his recommendation letters. But, when the vice principal filled out his class rank, Kian noticed he was fifth instead of sixth. Kian asked everyone else whether their rank had gone up and…well…we guessed it had to be you….”
His arm lay dead and heavy across my back. “They’re bastards,” I said. “That’s against the rules. Class rank can’t officially change until new grades are added at the end of the semester.”
“But the midyear evaluation would have your real class rank anyway. If it’s different from the one on your recs, then the colleges will know you went down like six places in one semester.”
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