Enter Title Here

by Rahul Kanakia

  “They’re breaking the rules. If we break any minor little rule, we get punished. But they can do whatever they want.”

  His thumb was sketching little circles on my back. I guess it was meant to be comforting. He scooted over a little; now my shoulder was an inch from his. When his thumb crossed the axis of my bra strap, his whole hand twitched as if I’d electrocuted it.

  “You’d have liked Rousseau,” Aakash said. “He was a French philosopher who did whatever the hell he wanted. In Confessions he writes about how, whenever he fathered a baby with his longtime girlfriend, he’d force her to drop the kid off at the orphanage, where they probably died, since, as Rousseau himself used to tell everyone, kids in those days were way more likely to die if they weren’t breastfed by their mothers.”

  A chuckle wormed its way out of my throat. “And that’s the factoid that made you think I’d like him?”

  “Hey,” Aakash said. “You’re kind of a bitch. That’s your thing. Everyone knows that.”

  I wanted to be offended, but my lips kept curling into a smile. “Really?” I said. “Everyone knows me?”

  “You sued the school and won, like, a million dollars off them. Of course everyone knows you.”

  “It was only fifty thousand dollars.”

  I was resting my head on his shoulder.

  “Do you…do you still want to go to this movie?” he said.

  “What’ll you do if I say no?”

  “I would, umm…I’d need to craft a backup plan: I might make a decision tree and assign probabilities to each of the branches, then I’d…”

  “Duck into the bathroom and ask some advice from your Bombr followers?”

  His arm dropped to the bed.

  “Come on,” I crooned. “You had to know I’d find it…”

  “You don’t have an account. I thought you might be computer-illiterate.”

  “All right, let’s go,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Let’s go. The show’s in half an hour, right? I don’t have anything else to do.”

  On the way out, my mom looked up from her chair and packed about as many questions into her glance as is possible. I said, “Just going to make out a bit in Aakash’s car. We’ll be back soon.”

  Mummy laughed, but Aakash missed a step and nearly tumbled down the staircase. I grabbed one of his flailing arms, and even after he’d recovered his footing I kept ahold of his hand.

  I hate movies. They’re a waste of time. I felt antsy during the whole thing. Aakash kept finding my hand and then letting go of it. I understand why people make out in the movies: it’s a way to end this tension. I wouldn’t have been unwilling to go along with that, if Aakash had started it. But I had a feeling that I’d somehow messed up his planned schedule for initiating physical contact with me.

  After the movie, he nonchalantly suggested that we eat ice cream. Normally, I never eat sweets, but today, for some reason, I was ravenous. I ordered a large cup of rocky road with M&M’S. After I’d eaten all the M&M’S, I asked Aakash to go back to the counter and try to persuade them to put more in. I had assumed this would be against the rules—I guess because I’m too used to the perverse strictures of high school—but he handed the guy a dollar, and the M&M’S were dispensed liberally.

  The store smelled like coolant and sugar. The hum from the refrigerators wiped out the noise from surrounding conversations and put us on our own little island.

  Aakash told me about his scientific research. Over the summer, he’d interned at a cancer research lab at Stanford and, in his spare time, developed a method for marking lymph cells so that they showed up more clearly under MRIs if they were cancerous. In about 5% of cases, the test would lead to better treatment outcomes. But really, it wasn’t a big deal, he said: his principal investigator had helped him a lot.

  “You are full of shit,” I said. “You basically said this thing is gonna save lives.”

  “Well, or at least make life a bit more comfortable for a few people.”

  “Don’t be so modest.”

  He shifted from side to side. “I don’t want to act like I’m a genius. Any grad student could’ve—”

  “No, I’m serious. Don’t. Be. So. Modest. People will believe whatever you tell them about yourself. No one knows anything about cancer research. If you act like it was no big deal, then people will assume you just answered e-mails and copyedited reports. If you tell them you were designing experiments and formulating hypotheses, they might hate you for your arrogance, but they’ll also believe you.”

  “It’s really no big deal. Every aspiring doctor has stuff like that on their resume.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Yeah, but you’re going to be a journalist, right?”

  “I’m going to medical school, same as you. But I realized way back in eighth grade that I was never going to be a junior genius who could invent things and do research, so I’m going at it from another angle—I’ll be the applicant with the provocatively weird, but still impressive, outside-the-box background. I’ll work in a lab a little bit when I’m in college, but that won’t be my focus.”

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “You love the paper. And you win all these essay contests. And you never talk about science or medicine or…”

  The store was full of chattering couples. I even recognized a few kids from the hallways of Bell High. They sprawled in their seats and used fluid gestures when they talked. Or they leaned close and held hands across the table. Or both were on their phones, anchoring each other in companionable silence while they texted away at other people. Aakash was skeleton-thin and his slightly oily forehead glistened under the fluorescent light. Still, he had his upsides: if I’d been with any of those other guys, I wouldn’t have had any idea what to say, but conversation with Aakash flowed easily.

  “Come on,” I said. “We both know how things work.”

  For people like us, there’s only four acceptable fields: technology, finance, law, and medicine. But the first three are all too risky for me. Tech stuff offers the best chance of becoming super wealthy, but it’s so all-or-nothing: if your company fails, you get no money. And even if you do produce something worthwhile, it’s always possible for someone to swoop in at the last second and screw you over. Besides, the only people who succeed at that are the ones who really care about technology and software and all that nerdery. Finance also offers a chance of huge rewards, but the competition is too intense. Only a tiny fraction of associates end up making partner; everyone else has to find another profession. Law is the same, except that you also have to pay tons of money to go to law school, and there’s a chance that the economy will tank while you’re in there and you’ll end up unemployed. That only leaves medicine. If you graduate from any med school, even a terrible Caribbean one, then you’ll eventually (after your residency) end up making six figures. If you graduate from a decent med school, then four hundred thousand dollars a year is pretty common. And the best of the best can expect to make a million a year. But the main thing is that there’s no risk. If you can get into med school—although it is, of course, extremely hard to get into even a bad med school—then you’re set for life. No more worrying about the future. Just put in your time and collect your money.

  During my explanation, Aakash kept moving forward and backward in his seat. Sometimes he’d be leaning close to me and other times it was almost like he was trying to escape. Finally, he said, “But that’s your life. Do you want to spend every day doing stuff that bores you?”

  I rolled my eyes. “How is that different from now? Do you enjoy homework? Studying for tests? Participating in bullshit extracurriculars? At least in ten years, they’ll pay us before making us do stuff we don’t want to do.”

  “I—umm—I kind of—”

  He stuttered around the edges of that sentence for a few moments before I said, “You really do like it, don’t you?”

  Aakash wouldn’t look at me.

  “Well, you’re lucky
that you like the stuff that you’re supposed to like,” I said. “And lucky you’re so smart that liking the material is enough for you to get good grades.”

  There were plenty of geeks and slackers in our class who were somewhat intelligent and liked the material well enough, but who weren’t willing to put in the work to succeed. They thought that so long as they understood the material, it didn’t matter what grade they got. And that’s why they were never going to be as successful in life as they’d have liked to be.

  “So…what happened to your GPA?” he said. “What did you do?”

  I threw the little plastic spoon into the cup and got up.

  Aakash drove a huge town car whose backseat was filled with white document boxes: their cardboard exteriors were neatly labeled, in fine black Sharpie, with the names of his experiments. My house is hard to find—it’s on an anonymous, unlit cul-de-sac in Las Vacas—I let him miss the turn two times. It was nice to circle the neighborhood with him. He almost ran over an old woman who was walking her dog; if the golden retriever’s eyes hadn’t glittered in the headlights, I’m not sure he’d have swerved in time. He let out a quick “Shit!” and pulled over to the side until he had calmed down.

  I was halfway hoping he’d ask me to go somewhere else, but, finally, he found the turn and stopped in front of my house. I put an elbow on my doorsill and angled toward him. “Well,” I said. “I had a good time….”

  We looked at each other. Then he raised his hand and put it on my neck. He drew himself forward slowly. Then, at the last minute, he cocked his head, perhaps a little too far. Everything was so perfectly well-studied. I bet I’d watched the same “How to Kiss” YouTube videos as he had. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth slightly. He docked his lips against mine and applied slight pressure. I allowed the momentary insinuation of his tongue. It was wet. I felt nothing in my heart, but there were strange palpitations in my stomach.

  As per the video, we both drew back after three seconds. He nodded at me. “I’ll call you,” he said.

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  He pulled out his phone as he drove away.

  My house’s floodlights flicked on—they’re motion-activated—and I went inside. I remembered, from my older sister’s dates, that Mummy and Daddy would have a hundred questions, so I snuck upstairs to my room and lay on my bed for a few minutes, trying to sort myself out.

  Aakash has worshipped me for years, and for years I’ve ignored him. So what’s changed? How can I even consider going out with him again?

  But let’s be real. I’m not the person I was two weeks ago. When I was number one, I was too good for Aakash. But now that I’m number ten? Ehh. He’s not unattractive. He has a certain amount of charm, too, I guess. And no one could accuse him of being stupid.

  I’ve accepted that I won’t get into Stanford or be valedictorian. I’ve become an ordinary person, and from now until the end of days I’ll be part of that huge faceless mass of humanity that lives and dies without amounting to much or being noticed by anyone. But Aakash is still a special person. And when I was out with him today, I felt…I don’t know…he made me feel like I was a special person, too.

  So yeah, I suppose he’s the best I can hope for.

  And I know that doesn’t seem fair to Aakash. He’s a good guy and he should date someone who’s excited to be with him. But if he’s been paying any attention at all, then he should already know I don’t have a heart that can love him back. And if he’s willing to take his chances, then who am I to stop him?

  Today, I was walking through the cafeteria when Alex shouted, “Hey, Resh!” and called me over to the perfects’ table.

  I was startled—for years, Alex would never have deigned to talk to me in the cafeteria—but I realized that even though I’d given up on the novel, she was still bound by our deal. That was one bright spot. For the rest of the year, I’d have at least the semblance of a friend.

  “No, no, Resh knows something about this,” Alex said. “She might be able to help us.”

  The guy next to her stifled a laugh. I looked up. Alex was sitting right next to George!

  “Sorry.” I looked away from the two of them. “I…have some work to do.”

  “Are you sure?” Alex said. “Copying an assignment doesn’t take that long, does it?”

  I forced myself to laugh. For all I knew, this was exactly how Alex liked to tease her friends.

  George said, “Hey, it’s good to meet you.”

  She saw the glances between George and me and said, “Oh, do you not know each other? Resh, this is George with the unpronounceable last name. The other half of the school stuck me with him as senior class co-president.” She looked at him. “George, this is Resh—she used to be our valedictorian until she…had some problems.”

  My skin was crawling. I’d kind of known that George was on the student council, but it was weird to see my worlds overlap. And his left hand was lying just inches from her right wrist. That was odd. They didn’t belong together. Even their skin tones clashed.

  “Hello there,” I said. “What are you guys up to?”

  “So…” said Alex. “Is it true that your parents know Susan Le?”

  I was about to say no, but Alex was giving me a slight smile. I was finally getting somewhere with her, and I didn’t want to screw it up. “I, umm…Why would you want to know?” My parents hated Susan Le. They switched off the television whenever her name came up on the news.

  “We’re trying to get Le to be our graduation speaker,” George said. “And her speaker’s bureau keeps saying her fee for a commencement address is a hundred thousand bucks. I don’t think they understand that she actually graduated from this school. If your parents could get a message to her for us, it’d be…”

  I shook my head. “No. No.”

  I thought of my parents sitting out there in the audience, listening to Susan Le deliver a speech about how to be a success in life. My shoulders and the back of my neck crackled with tension. No. The idea was repulsive. I needed to make Alex forget about this idea.

  “I really don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. “I mean, is Le really a good role model? Her success is more due to luck than skill.”

  Alex spread the fingers of one hand and examined her nails. Then she looked up at me.

  “Really, Reshma?” Alex said. “You think a billionaire isn’t good enough to speak to our class? I mean, I’d beg to differ. The rest of the student council was very enthusiastic about the idea. Vice Principal Colson loved it, too. Le’s really the voice of our times, right? It used to be that rich people all got that way by crushing their competition. Le is so different, don’t you think? She made her money by making an innovative product that—”

  “No! I don’t think that’s accurate.”

  George blinked and looked over his shoulder, as if he couldn’t figure out who I was shouting at.

  I tried to control my voice, but as I spoke, I kept getting louder and louder. “Le has nothing to teach us. She got lucky. Bombr was no different from a dozen other start-ups—worse, even, in a lot of ways—but because she happened to start hers at a rich, well-connected high school, hers expanded moderately faster than the rest. It had nothing to do with hard work or intelligence or creativity. Her speech would be arrogant, useless drivel. And that’s not the kind of thing that Bell High should give a platform to.”

  People were staring. What’d happened to me? I wasn’t like this. I didn’t shout and scream in the cafeteria. I was usually silent and self-contained. I could feel myself splintering apart. There was no way I’d subject my parents to this. If Susan Le was our speaker, then I wouldn’t even go to graduation. I’d stay home.

  “I don’t know.” Alex’s eyes were narrowed. “Maybe you’d have a point if Bombr was her only success, but she’s had a hand in lots of businesses, hasn’t she? What about your parents’ company? That was more than luck, don’t you think?”

  “Just an aside,” George said, “but I
have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Alex let the silence extend for a moment too long, and then she looked at George. “Oh, Reshma’s parents’ company was about to go bankrupt, but Le saved them. She brought in new investors to buy out the original venture capitalists, then recapitalized it, put out a real product, and basically kept the buzz going until Apple swooped in and bought the whole company for a billion point one.”

  George gave me a blank expression. Was it possible that he hadn’t known about all this history?

  “So you can help us, right?” Alex said. “Maybe I could just drop by sometime and ask your parents about—”

  I didn’t have any witty comebacks. “Fine,” I said. “If it means so much to you, then I’ll talk to them.”

  “Really?” Alex said.

  “Yeah, of course.”

  Alex ran one nail along the surface of the table, and I remembered how much she liked straightforwardness. Maybe this had all been a test?

  “Good,” she said. “Let me know how it goes.”

  I stood there with them for a few moments. George asked me something, but I couldn’t hear it over the pounding of my heart. Alex looked up at me for a second.

  “I didn’t necessarily want Le, you know,” Alex said. “Every year, it’s always some tech person, and it gets boring, so I thought maybe this year we should invite a politician or activist. But the moment Le’s name came up, everybody got so excited about it.”

  I nodded at her. Now it made sense. She was telling me that she would welcome some quiet way of disregarding Le. Well, I could do that. No problem. My parents were never going to hear about this conversation.

  Yesterday was the annual Friends of Bell Fall Gala. It’s a big to-do, with black ties and evening gowns and a catered meal and a silent auction. Bell doesn’t really need the money, but my parents think they’re somehow obligated to donate.

  Anyway, they were seated next to Sadie and William Ozick—Jeremy’s parents. The Ozicks hate me, of course, ever since my lawyers deposed them during the lawsuit, so Mrs. Ozick took great delight in asking my parents whether I felt okay about losing my class ranking. Apparently, the vice principal had told Jeremy that he’d moved up a rank.