Enter Title Here

by Rahul Kanakia

  From: Linda Montrose

  To: Reshma Kapoor

  Subject: TV Appearance

  Reshma,

  Got a call from a producer on The Marshall Henderson Show. I don’t normally handle television appearances—that’s the job of our publicity division. I’m forwarding you to an agent in our LA office.

  —linda

  From: Amy Zazo

  To: Reshma Kapoor

  Subject: WELCOME!!!

  Hey there!

  I’m so happy to discover that you’re our client! Just the other day, I was reading some of your public statements, and I thought: “That girl is so articulate. We really ought to see if she’s represented.”

  We’re still considering how to manage your story, but I think the Marshall Henderson appearance is a great way to start! The show’ll be taped in LA on Saturday, February 2nd. Their advance department will be in touch to schedule your plane tickets and hotel room.

  xoxo

  Amy

  I’m going on TV soon, where I’ll undoubtedly be jeered and humiliated. But I can’t waste another opportunity. I have to use this to advance my story.

  Ugh. I thought I was done with this novel. I had a party in my own head when I finished it. But here I am, writing. Mostly, I’m afraid that if I e-mail Linda Montrose and tell her that I can’t finish this thing, she’ll write back: Oh, that’s all right! Good luck with all your future endeavors! and say to herself, Thank God I dodged that bullet.

  I need her more than ever. She’s an essential part of my case that I’m not just some soulless study machine. And at least Amy in the publicity department seems to like me: she’s been e-mailing me some tips for my upcoming appearance.

  But I’m stumped.

  Yesterday, I was awake, staring at this screen, until well after midnight. And I got so tired and frustrated that I found myself going through my drawers, not really knowing what I was looking for, until I finally turned it up: a single Adderall that must’ve slipped out from a pocket at some point. The pill was orange and vaguely rectangular: a 40 mg pill. If I took it, I’d be full of energy for at least the next twelve hours.

  I heard footsteps. My parents had their own bathroom, so why would anyone be in the upstairs hall at 3 A.M.?

  “Fine!” I shouted. “You can come in!”

  The door squeaked open.

  “I’m sorry,” George said. “It’s…you’re up pretty late. I got worried.”

  He looked around. I was in the only chair, so he sat quietly on the edge of my bed.

  “It’s the novel,” I said. “It’s always the novel. There are too many things to juggle.”

  I explained to him that I needed to:

  • Ratchet up the tension in the story: make things better, faster-paced, more emotional

  • Choose the third option, instead of the first, most obvious, option

  • Find some way to incorporate me questioning myself

  “So all you need is something big and unexpected that makes you question your course?” he said.

  “Yep, that’s all. And I need it in the next ten days.”

  I glanced down into the drawer. The orange tablet stared up at me. George made a sound that never turned into a word. I closed the drawer and turned back to my computer, but he didn’t leave. When I looked over at him, I saw he’d pulled a calculus textbook off my shelf and was glancing through it.

  “Are you in calc?” I said.

  “Oh, it’s these LVC classes. By the way, coach said you’re wrong. I won’t have to go to community college.”

  “Good,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  I stared at him with narrowed eyes, trying to make him leave, but he seemed totally oblivious. My hand was on the drawer.

  Finally, he looked up and said, “Hey, this calculus is kicking my ass. You have any of those study pills left?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “Actually, I thought I glimpsed one at the bottom of your drawer when I walked in.”

  “I flushed them all.”

  “You mind if I check?”

  He went right for that drawer and acted all surprised when he found the pill. As he pocketed it, he brazenly said, “You don’t mind if I take this, right?”

  And then he walked out.

  At least now I know that George isn’t too good to take something when he needs it.

  I know he wasn’t right for me, but, in some ways, that makes it even worse that Aakash rejected me. I wasn’t even good enough for the guy I’d settled for. Sometimes I can’t help scanning his Bombr feed for mentions of me. In the beginning there were a flurry of them, but now they’ve gotten less and less frequent.

  January 10

  Had a good result in the lab, but don’t know anyone who’d really understand it. Kind of miss having someone to talk to.

  January 14

  @Yablokov

  Yeah, we broke up. No, no, your advice was good, but I just didn’t love her.

  January 17

  @Keith292

  I don’t know. It’s really no big deal. It all feels like it happened a long time ago.

  I can’t say that I don’t miss him. It was nice to know that someone was thinking about me.

  Since the studio had no windows and all the lights were on, there was no way to tell if the sun had gone down yet.

  The audience was exhausted, disheveled, and wired on too much cheap coffee; they’d been waiting since 4 A.M. They were tourists: men in shorts and women with fanny packs clipped around their waists, and they had close-cropped hair and wide noses and leathery, sunburnt faces. They spoke with a low, huffing sound, like cows snorting through their cud. And they booed when I entered.

  The host, Marshall Henderson, is a hulking former football quarterback with a soft, high-pitched voice who makes a living dispensing tough-love advice to people with ridiculous problems. My couch was so plush that I got wedged into the back of the seat, while he sat on a chair that, under his huge frame, looked like children’s furniture. He rubbed his jowls and started the hatchet job:

  “On the Internet, they’ve gone through all of your essays, and, my gosh, it looks like you were lifting stuff right and left, weren’t you?”

  I forced a smile.

  Marshall leaned forward and pried into my hesitation. “Come on now. Cheating is nothing new. But when a cheater sues to get her school to ignore the cheating…well, that’s asking for trouble, isn’t it?”

  The audience screamed and booed. But…one voice, at the edge of the crowd, shouted, “You tell them! Don’t be afraid!”

  I’d decided that I’d be honest and sincere; hopefully that would drum up a little sympathy. So far I’d had a few lawyers reach out to me, but not many. And the ones I’d heard from hadn’t seemed very good.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Initiating the lawsuit was simple arrogance. I’d gone so long without being caught that I was sure no one would turn up the other essays.”

  Marshall raised his eyebrows. “But you’re continuing the lawsuit. The trial’s starting later this month, isn’t it?”

  “Well, the lawsuit isn’t exactly about cheating. It’s about discrimination. Students cheat. It’s unethical, but not uncommon. But why was my paper the only one that was examined? And why did they exact such a severe punishment for a first offense? Sad to say, but my lawyers believe it’s because school officials are quick to assume that Asians are cheaters.”

  Marshall parted his tobacco-stained lips and gave me a xanthodontous smile. “So you’re playing the race card, are ya?”

  “I was approached by several civil rights groups who thought a suit could highlight important issues. But I wish I’d said no. I can’t sleep at night for worrying about all this.”

  The audience was booing me again. Marshall nodded; this was usual for his show. A man in the front stood up and shouted, “You oughta be ashamed!”

  I was amazed: ev
en though it was an act, my cheeks ran wet with real tears!

  “I deserve that. I’m a disgrace. Honestly, my family puts up with me because they have to, but…I think they’d be better off without me. Everyone would.”

  Marshall leaned across with his trademark handkerchief: a red Jack Daniel’s bandanna.

  Then he looked at his audience: “Come on, guys. Open your hearts. This is only a kid. The real question is: Who’s responsible? How did she get that way?”

  What was he getting at? All the faces were angry. How was I being set up?

  Marshall blathered on about how, during his on-field days, they’d get some rookies who were so wound up on adrenaline—and other things, I mentally added—that their moral compasses had stopped pointing at true north.

  After Marshall monologued about God and Jesus for a bit, he asked for comments from the audience.

  A man who was entirely bald but for a thin fringe of white hair above his ears said, “You’re so entitled nowadays. You think you deserve the world. But not everyone can have what they want.”

  I said something contrite, while thinking: Maybe you can’t get what you want. But I can. You just wait.

  The next man who came up to the microphone said, “The thing no one’s talking about is affirmative action. I know plenty of kids who didn’t get into any schools, because, look, if you go to the schools, you’ll see it: everyone’s Asian! They only want to admit Asians!”

  I tried being conciliatory, but the man started bellowing. Security guards ran up and pushed the man back. They tore the microphone out of his hand and wrestled him into his first-row seat. Whenever I looked his way, his eyes would narrow slightly and his leg muscles would bunch up under his shorts.

  “Seems to me there’s a hidden element here,” Marshall said. “Who is providing moral guidance to these children?”

  The audience roared.

  I said, “Uhh, we do go to temple somet—”

  Marshall’s voice overpowered me. “Reshma, we have someone who wants to talk to you.”

  The lights dimmed and the band played ominous music. A figure walked through the dark space beyond the curtains at one end of the stage.

  It was Ms. Ratcliffe.

  Shit.

  She shook hands with Marshall and then sat next to me. I scooted down on the couch, but I was trapped between her and Marshall. He briefly introduced her and said that, with the blessings of the school administration, she’d called the show because she was having so much trouble getting through to me.

  “During the three years I’ve known her, Reshma has grown up in reverse,” Ms. Ratcliffe said. “She’s transformed from an intelligent, thoughtful freshman into a robotic, amoral senior. I—”

  “Would you say she’s got a demagnetized moral compass?” Marshall said.

  “I don’t precisely know what’s wrong. Reshma, why won’t you talk to me?”

  Marshall nodded his head. “It’s hard to find safe harbor when you have a faulty moral compass.”

  The audience broke out in a riotous cheer, except for the lone voice, which shouted: “That makes no sense! What is the ‘safe harbor’ in this analogy?”

  Ms. Ratcliffe shifted in her seat and looked directly at me. “I know that cultural expectations differ from country to country. In my travels, I’ve seen that some cultures don’t place as much value on original creative expression. But, it’s—”

  “In America, that doesn’t fly,” Marshall said. “You gotta use that moral compass to hack out your own trail.”

  “Exactly.” Ms. Ratcliffe took my hand.

  A weird sensation oozed up my arm. I brushed at her hand. “Let go,” I said.

  Her other hand captured mine. “Please. Talk to us. You’ve been under a lot of pressure, haven’t you? Come on, Reshma, you’re an adult now. You can follow your own heart.”

  For once, the audience was quiet.

  “You know,” Ms. Ratcliffe said. “I remember one of your tenth-grade teachers telling me a story: You’d gotten an A minus on a quiz, but you’d misused a few words. A few days later, you came in after class and handed her a thick stack of paper. You’d constructed a hundred original sentences for each word, and you spent twenty minutes begging her to use them as extra credit for the quiz.”

  I smiled. “And she did.”

  “Come on, Reshma,” she said. “What kind of fifteen-year-old does that? Your teacher told me that when she called your parents to complain about the high-pressure tactics, all your mother wanted to know was whether the words in the extra sentences had been used correctly.”

  The audience was utterly still. The man who’d shouted about affirmative action was wiping his glistening eyes. Suddenly, the crowd was on my side. I was amazed. Ms. Ratcliffe had whitewashed my black heart with just a few sentences.

  This was it. The big and unexpected thing. By slandering my parents, Ratcliffe had won over the crowd. All I had to do was say nothing.

  She leaned close to me and a pendulous tear fell down her cheek. “And what about the dictionary?” she said.

  A tremor ran through my heart and a light sound escaped my lips. The silence cloaked us. All the muscles in my face were pulling against each other at right angles.

  “Please,” I whispered. “That story doesn’t belong on television.”

  Ratcliffe bit her lower lip. “In the summer before her junior year, Reshma took the SAT for the first time. Her family was unhappy with her outcome. They made her take an intensive SAT class for the whole fall semester, even though she’d already taken one over the summer. Then she retook the test in January.”

  Ratcliffe squeezed my hands. I tried to tug them away, but she wouldn’t let go.

  She continued, “Her score improved, but not by enough, and both times her verbal score was significantly lower than her math score. Which is why her family bought two identical dictionaries.”

  Sour saliva flooded the back of my throat and I swallowed repeatedly, trying to keep it down.

  “Reshma carried one of these dictionaries in her backpack for six months and read it cover to cover. Then she read it again. She made flash cards: thousands upon thousands of flash cards.

  “Sometime in March, her mother started taking out her copy of the dictionary, flipping to a random page, and reading out a word. On the few occasions that Reshma was able to reel off the definition, she closed the book and ended the quiz. But if Reshma didn’t get it right, then her mother would drill her—going through word after word after word. This would sometimes go on until two or three in the morning.”

  A woman in the audience cried out. “Lord, no! Poor baby!”

  “And when Reshma finally retook the test, her score went down by twenty points. She was so distraught that she came sobbing into my office and confided this whole story to me. And you know what? The original score—the one that started all of this—was a seventeen-ten! Higher than seventy-five percent of test-takers.”

  An audience member broke the silence: “No wonder.”

  Ms. Ratcliffe pulled on my captive hand. “We know this isn’t your fault. Work with us and we’ll work with you. No matter what your mother wants, the suit can’t continue without your cooperation.”

  They were all with me. And didn’t I deserve it? Hadn’t I suffered? This was all owed to me. This was it. This was the thing. The moment. If I let her embrace me, then I’d win. It was perfect. People distrusted Indian parents even more than they distrusted Indian kids. I’d win back their sympathy, and then I’d worm my way around to making them see my point of view on the lawsuit. Hadn’t I screamed to my mom that I’d do anything to win? I hadn’t known, at the time, that anything meant selling her out in front of an audience of millions of people. But so what? Wasn’t I prepared to do it? Wasn’t I?

  Ms. Ratcliffe looked up at me with tear-clogged eyes. Her face was close as a lover’s.

  I spat on it.

  Silence.

  She recoiled backward and dropped my hands so she could w
ipe at the line of spittle that crossed the trails of tears.

  The audience erupted with noise.

  I slowly turned my head and looked straight at the camera.

  “I learned that dictionary cover to cover. Would your kid do that? No. And you know what? Neither would most Indian kids. My mom didn’t force me learn it. In fact, she thought it was crazy and self-destructive. She begged me to stop, and even made me see a therapist. But when I told her that I needed her to help me with this, she put aside her own work, and she made the time.”

  Ratcliffe was wiping frantically at her face. Everyone was yelling. Marshall waved his hands, saying, “Please! Please!”

  What was wrong with me? All I’d needed to do was agree with Ratcliffe, and instead I’d made everything so much worse.

  I stood up. So did the man in the front who’d shouted about affirmative action. “For those people, that’s a deadly insult! That woman’s being marked for death!” Then he plowed through the cordon of security guards and rushed toward me. But another person jumped up from an aisle seat in the back. He leapt from the top row to the ground and sprinted, with limbs pistoning and long black hair flowing behind.

  I got one close-up glimpse of the onrushing man’s face, big and snarling, and then he went down under George’s tackle.

  Security officers grabbed George and the man. Bodies were everywhere, and the din of the crowd died down, as people struggled to avoid trampling each other.

  As he and George were led away, the man raised up a titanic shout: “Go back to where you came from!”

  From the couch, Ratcliffe beseeched me with an outstretched hand, but I ignored her.

  I strode out of the emergency exit and into the warm Los Angeles day. I was on a placid back lot: two guys in jeans and tight T-shirts were sipping coffees by the door and exchanging gossip about some new movie.

  George was leaning against a concrete bollard. He visored his eyes with his fingers; he’d no sooner focused on me than I was standing next to him. He placed a hand, featherlight, on my back.