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by Rahul Kanakia


  Alex made a terrible scratching noise by running her nail across the rim of the table. Then she picked up her phone and tapped at it for a few seconds. She looked at me, and I raised my eyebrows. What the hell was going on? She pushed a button, and the phone made a tiny zoop noise.

  “I was only joking around when we were at the party, you know,” Alex said. “Chelsea and I are still best friends.”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t think so. Not anymore. Maybe not ever.”

  Alex smirked. “You know the biggest joke? I just e-mailed Stanford about you. And it wasn’t an anonymous e-mail at all. I don’t care if they know who I am. No one’s going to think less of me for warning the world about you.”

  My heart dropped into my stomach, and I could feel my face and shoulders getting hot. After she’d blown up at Chelsea at the party, some part of me had thought that maybe Alex was done fighting back against me.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  She took a sip of her coffee and looked me up and down as if she was trying to think of something else to say.

  “You wouldn’t do that to me,” I said. “Not to help Chelsea. You don’t even like her.”

  When Alex tapped her nail against the side of the paper cup, it made a thin, hollow sound.

  “You know what?” she said. “It’s not about Chelsea anymore. The truth is that I can’t afford to have a blackmailer on the loose. I mean, who’s to say you’ll stop after you get into Stanford? Maybe next year you’ll want money. Or for my dad to give you a job? Where would it end? So I thought, What can I do to neutralize her? And then I got it. No one trusts you. You are a liar and a cheater. And everyone knows you like to use the law to force people into line. And that’s when I realized, Hey, you know what? If I provide even a tiny reason for people to think you’re making up your allegations against me, then I’ll be fine. And now I’ve provided it. If you go to the police or to the school, I’ll point to my e-mail to Stanford and say you faked up the drug-dealer charge in order to get back at me.”

  She kept looking at me. “Well,” Alex said. “Now at least you know for sure that Stanford knows.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Everything was over. Stanford would turn me down.

  “You gave me the chance to follow your advice,” I said. “Oh my God, that’s why you called me here. You wanted to feel good about yourself. Reassure yourself that I deserved what you were doing. That’s it. That’s the only difference between us. You’re just as devious as me. But you also need to feel like a good person.”

  “Whatever,” Alex said. “Stanford is gone. And so’s your hold over me. What now? Do you still want to be my friend?”

  She could’ve said the last with a sardonic smile, but she didn’t. Her face was still. We sat there for a few seconds and I tried to understand what had happened. Then she tapped on the side of her cup a few more times and said she had to go.

  I looked up just as she went through the door.

  “Yes,” I said. The word twisted my stomach. It made me feel so small and pathetic, but…yes, I did still want to be her friend. I whispered the word again, but by then she was long gone.

  I’ve always thought my teachers were bastards, but now I have proof. Over the last two weeks, we’ve deposed almost every teacher I’ve ever had. Arjuna didn’t want to give me the transcripts, but I forced him to.

  My AP American history teacher, Mr. Kooning, said, “I sometimes had to avoid calling on Ms. Kapoor. She always participated in class—ninety-five percent of the time, her hand would be the first to rise in response to any question—but her comments were often quite general and rarely provided any particular insight.”

  Mr. Cordoba, my AP calculus teacher, said, “Ms. Kapoor was a great student. However, I got very tired of her behavior. When she got a problem wrong, she would come to my office and insist that I personally demonstrate the solution to her. Then she would try to convince me that I hadn’t provided them with the analytical tools in class to solve that type of problem.”

  Ms. Smithson said, “It’s not my policy to ever give an A plus. But she would not accept that. After getting an A on her final paper, she made me go over it and explain, in detail, why it wasn’t an A-plus paper. In the end, I gave in and changed the grade.”

  That’s what teachers are like. They don’t want you to learn, they want you to pretend like you already know everything. But I don’t have Chelsea’s sprezzatura. I need to try. It takes me hours upon hours every night, grinding at every problem in the book—even the ones that don’t get assigned—and reading every word three times, taking note after note, taking notes about my notes, beating the subject matter into my head. Do they think that’s how I wanted to spend my teen years?

  No. They don’t think. They don’t care. They wish I would sit quietly in class and pull down a string of B+’s. Then they’d remember me so pleasantly and wish me a thousand good wishes when I got into UC Santa Barbara.

  Last night, Mummy found me with my head on my laptop, sobbing. She thought it was about the lawsuit, but it wasn’t. It’s…none of my teachers or classmates think I’m really the best. But if I win in the end, then I’ll prove them wrong. I have to beat them. I can feel the need burning up my chest. All I want is to stand up front at graduation and incinerate them all with my greatness.

  But I can’t even finish this stupid novel.

  Dr. Wasserman doesn’t have a receptionist anymore. When I walked into the empty anteroom, he poked his head out of his office and said, “Come in.”

  Whiteboards were stacked up ten deep along the walls. In order to reach my chair, I had to move one out of the way. The only thing on it was bunch of wavy lines coming together and breaking apart, but Dr. Wasserman watched my hands like a dog watching a steak. He didn’t relax until I’d rested the whiteboard against a file cabinet.

  “Are you still feeling a bit manic?”

  “You never diagnosed me with anything like that.”

  “Hmm, I think I remember writing about a mania in my notes.”

  I looked at the whiteboards. “You’re a hack,” I said. “No, a hack would be exactly what I need. You’re…you’re nothing! I followed your advice. I introduced the lawsuit as an external arc and now I’m nowhere! None of it fits together. I’m done with my interior arc. In ten days, my personal journey will end. But I still need at least another hundred pages or my agent says it’s not even salable! And this external arc is worthless. It’s all legal stuff. I barely need to do anything to move it forward. It’s taken up maybe ten pages out of the last hundred-fifty.”

  I threw my head into my hands. My hair was long and uneven. The magic haircut had run its course, but I almost couldn’t bear to go back to my regular stylist. Even the ruins of Pompeii are more beautiful than if they bulldozed everything and built some shiny new McMansions, right?

  “Last year, Tranh got into Stanford and he was only fourth in the class,” I said. “I mean, he’d played at Carnegie Hall, but still. I have an agent.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned your agent,” he said. “Who is she, if you don’t mind me…?”

  “Linda Montrose. Connor and Pavlovich.”

  He sucked air through his teeth. “She’s good. She represents Marley Trudow and Camille Thorstein and Saul Alleman and—”

  “I don’t know who any of those people are.”

  “As a plot twist, not getting into Stanford is too predictable. It’s the first thing anyone would think to try—what we’d call ‘the first option.’ With a novel, you always want to aim for that third option.”

  “So I’ll get in?”

  His fingertip hooked the corner of his lip. “I don’t know….That’s the second option, which is usually just the opposite of the first option. That’s fine, but still a bit too expected. That third option is the thing that surprises the reader, but also, in hindsight, feels like it was inevitable.”

  “Okay. Like what?”

  “You could murder someo
ne?”

  I got up, smoothed out my skirt and walked to one of the whiteboards. He sprang upright when I wiped my hand across the mass of tiny, cribbed writing on the board.

  “Don’t worry about it. That stuff was probably all part of the first option,” I said.

  I erased the rest of the board, and wrote:

  – Get into Stanford

  – Don’t Get into Stanford

  – Murder Someone

  “What else?” I asked.

  “I think murdering someone is solid,” he said. “You have so many options. Your parents. Your boyfriend. Your new friend Alex. This girl Chelsea. Your teacher. The principal. Even the lawyer. Actually, the lawyer sounds like a very good candidate. I would think about—”

  “No. Something else.”

  He pursed his lips. “Honestly, murder is too perfect. I’d be committing literary malpractice if I gave you any other options.”

  I clenched my fists and groaned. “Well, what if I get into a car crash?”

  “That’s too surprising. This story isn’t about recklessness and mortality.”

  Well, at least that got him talking. He still refused to suggest any more options, but he was willing to give comments as I diagrammed my polylemma on the board:

  – Stanford defers my application until the spring.

  “Too dull,” he said. “Doesn’t increase the intensity of the action.”

  – Aakash breaks up with me.

  “No one would believe it,” I said. “We’ve just been too perfect together.”

  – My parents announce their impending divorce.

  “You’d need to go back and revise everything, in order to make the father into a more vivid character. And you’d have to foreshadow it by inserting some marital tension and such.”

  – My family loses all our money and becomes poor.

  “Fits the theme of accomplishment and status anxiety and perfectionism, but there’s nothing there for you to do. That would just be a story about enduring a catastrophe.”

  – Chelsea sabotages me somehow.

  “No! No! This story already struggles with her. She feels more like a hero than a villain. In addition to being perfect, she’s also underprivileged? She works okay as a foil—someone who is different from you in a way that illustrates your own qualities—but if you start giving her an internal arc where she agonizes over whether to lose out on her dreams or to violate her moral code, then she’ll take over the whole story.”

  – Arjuna refuses to go forward with the lawsuit.

  “That’s the stuff. But you can go deeper.”

  – My mom steps in and terminates the lawsuit.

  “Right. That’s wonderful. A perfect grounds for murder, I might add!”

  – My mom steps in and terminates the lawsuit because she’s realized that she’s hurting me by teaching me to avoid the consequences of my actions.

  “She’s doing it for your own good. There it is. That’s the knife, twisting deeper.”

  – My mom steps in and terminates the lawsuit because she’s realized that she’s hurting me by teaching me to avoid the consequences of my actions and, as a result, the school alters my class rank and notes the disciplinary action in its mid-year report and I don’t get into Stanford?

  “Hmm,” he said. “The consequences don’t feel right. Is Stanford really the only thing at stake here?”

  – My mom steps in and terminates the lawsuit because she’s realized that she’s hurting me by teaching me to avoid the consequences of my actions and…I try to kill myself.

  “Whoa!” He got up from his seat. “Reshma. This is very serious.”

  I composed myself before turning around. “In the novel,” I said. “In. The. Novel.”

  “Look, let me call some specialists who can intervene and—”

  He was dialing someone on his phone. I took out my iPhone and snapped a pic of the whiteboard.

  He said, “It’s Leo—”

  I shouted, “Dr. Wasserman told me to kill my mother!”

  His phone dropped.

  I waved the picture. “You can’t have it both ways. Either it’s a novel or it’s real. Either the murder is a real murder or the suicide is a novel suicide. And let me tell you”—I twirled my finger around the room—“when they see this place, it’s not me they’ll cart off to the hospital.”

  He ended his call. We sat down. I talked to him in a quiet voice. We ran over my hour, but he didn’t complain. I don’t think he has any other patients. Finally, I patted him on the hand and got up.

  He said, “You…you’re not going to do anything rash, are you?”

  “You are never going to see me again. This is a waste of time.”

  A tear fell from one of his eyes. When I left, his head was in his hands.

  Of course I wasn’t actually going to let Mummy shut down the lawsuit. But before I could write it, I needed to talk to her about it. I don’t get it. In her life, my mom has always tried to be the best. But when it comes to my future, she’s always trying to get me to stand down or back off.

  Finally, I cornered Mummy on the couch and said, “You don’t really like this lawsuit, do you?”

  She looked up. Then she closed her computer. “No,” she said. “Not particularly.”

  “Why?”

  “You cheated.”

  I gritted my teeth. “But I already explained to you that—”

  “Enough. I know. I understand what you’ve said. But I don’t believe it was an accident. I heard you complain and complain about that poem assignment. So instead of doing it, you decided to cheat.”

  My mouth hung open. She’d reached down through my throat, hooked my intestines, and pulled out my guts.

  “Why let me go ahead with the lawsuit, if you think I’m so useless?”

  “You made a mistake, it’s true. And it’s my right to criticize you for that mistake. But, in return for that right, we have to support you. I won’t ever let you say that we didn’t give you everything you needed to achieve your dreams.”

  After that, I hugged her for a long time and told her that I loved her.

  I crept up to my room with tears in my eyes and sat down to write a scene where she yanks the lawsuit away from me. But I couldn’t. Maybe that’d be a good story. But it wouldn’t be fair and it wouldn’t be honest.

  I’m honest, dammit.

  So here I am, staring at the screen. I have three papers due in the next week. The week after that are my final exams. And, in between, Stanford said it would notify by the fifteenth. I need this story to be finished.

  I haven’t been able to sleep. I get tired, and I lie on my bed and hover right on the edge of sleep for hours. Sometimes I close my eyes and the barest wisp of nothingness descends on me and then, when I open them, I know that I’m not getting any more, and that, yes, that little bare hint of sleep that you wouldn’t even think was enough to support even the most senile old person is gonna have to be what I use to get through the day, and not an easy day, either—one where I nap in class and pay no attention to anything and stumble around like the stoners—but a hard day where I take tests and quizzes and participate in class and try to learn the material because if I don’t learn what they teach in class, then I have to come home and teach it to myself out of books and sometimes I’m so tired when I come home that all I want to do is cry because the letters are swimming around and I read the same sentence over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and then twenty minutes have passed and I can’t even tell you the name of the book that’s in front of my eyes. And it won’t end. It won’t. I don’t see any ending for any of it.

  I’ve written 15,429 words since my last entry. And exactly zero of them were usable. You should’ve seen the endings that I spun. Honestly, it started getting weird. A prince swept in through my window. He was riding a unicorn, and he told me that I was the queen of a distant land that needed my help. I got really into it. I wrote three thousand words before I finally rea
d what was spilling out from under my fingertips.

  Parents are gone on a wine-tasting tour for the weekend. I’m going to power through and finish this. I haven’t slept since Thursday.

  Yesterday evening, I was sitting at my computer, typing my way through another fifteen thousand words of false endings—I now have a file called “Useless Trash” on my computer that contains over thirty thousand words of endings for this book. No joke, my wrists ache. This is all that I did for almost sixty straight hours.

  I finally got so desperate that I took Wasserman’s suggestion. I murdered so many people. I murdered them in the school and at my house and in my car and in Wasserman’s office and on Alex’s patio and in the hair salon and at the library and at the park and in outer space. I murdered them with poison, guns, pickaxes, shovels, toxic waste, garrote, lead pipes, nuclear bombs, missiles, and genetically modified influenza. I murdered murdered murdered.

  And then, finally, I started murdering myself. Hard to do in a first-person, journal-style book. But possible. Very possible. So I wrote notes. A dozen very plaintive suicide notes. And it was dark outside and the rain was coming down and I can swear that I even heard thunder and saw flashes of lightning, even though George tells me that the sky was clear last night.

  I was seeing all kinds of things. My computer bulged outward and shriveled down. When I stared at the walls, they separated and moved sideways, forming these infinite concentric circles that I could stare at for ages. When I closed my eyes, my entire vision was filled up with a fiery ring that got larger and larger and larger. Eventually, I became afraid to lower my eyelids. Even though my eyes dried out and got all crackly whenever I moved them, I still refused to blink.

  But that meant I couldn’t escape from all the other things I was seeing: my chair was floating a few inches off the ground and the table was spinning in slow circles. And still, I kept typing typing typing.

 

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