by Ariel Kaplan
Nate and I had decided that Oedipal Pique would be an excellent name for a racehorse.
“Hi, Mrs. Hadley,” I said. She was seventy at least and kind of hard of hearing, so I had to raise my voice.
“Do you need a late pass?” she asked.
“Um, no,” I said. “It’s just, there seems to be a problem with my transcript? I wanted to talk to Ms. Pendleton about it, but she’s not here, and I was wondering if you could print me out a copy?”
“Sure. What was your name again?”
“Mischa. Abramavicius.”
She pulled up the file and printed it out. “Here you go,” she said, handing it to me. “Does it seem to check out?”
I scanned down the page: 3.98 GPA. And As everywhere, except that one stinking gym class. It was fine. It matched all of my report cards at home perfectly.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “It does. Can I keep this?”
“Well, sure,” she said. “It’s your transcript.”
I walked out of the office with my transcript and flipped through it again.
If the woman at Revere hadn’t shown me the version she had, I’d never have known there was a problem. It would have been one of those inexplicable things. I just didn’t get into college. It dawned on me that this could be happening to people every day. How would anyone know? We’re trusting the process because we don’t have a choice.
Someone had sent out a faulty transcript. But it wasn’t the one Blanchard had in the computer. Which seemed to imply one thing: someone had done it on purpose and then covered their tracks.
It occurred to me that I might be getting a little paranoid. But maybe some paranoia was in order.
* * *
—
Before ninth grade I was always just the smart kid at my regular public school. But then some rather unfortunate things went down at the high school I should have attended, and my mother decided she was not sending her only offspring to take her chances someplace that had recently dealt with a fairly epic scandal, in which it came out that the varsity cheer squad was pimping out the football team in exchange for drugs.
It was a bad year for Chinn Ridge High. And the principal’s speech to the middle school PTA that these were anomalies and the school did not have a problem with drugs, prostitution, or evil cheerleaders did nothing to reassure my mother. By January she’d assembled information packets from four different private schools; by February I’d bought a secondhand navy blue interview suit and had the “What famous dead person would you have dinner with?” conversation four times, and by April I had my admissions letter from Blanchard.
Mom was thrilled. I was filled with this fizzy optimism I’d never felt before, because I had a chance to be great, to go to school with the best and the brightest and blow them all away. I was going to be somebody. Somebody amazing.
I was going to show Mom that it’d all been worth it.
* * *
—
I found Nate in front of his locker after school the next day, since he had something he wanted to tell me in person before I went home. My phone was blowing up because I’d missed Monday’s French club meeting plus one for Students for Sober Driving yesterday, but I didn’t really know what to say to people, so I turned it off.
“Nate,” I said, “someone has royally screwed me over.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I might know some people who can help.”
“People who can help,” I said. “Who are these people? Like, one of those college coaches?”
“Okay,” he said. “Don’t freak out.”
“I’ve been freaking out for a week,” I said. “I’m already at an eleven on the freaking-out scale. It doesn’t go up any higher.”
“You know Emily Sreenivasan?”
I blinked at him. He and Emily had gone out for a whopping three weeks last fall, before she dumped him via text in the middle of a chemistry quiz.
“I didn’t realize you guys still hung out. What was it that she called you?”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Oh, right. She called you a neurotic troglodyte.”
“Let’s move on,” he said.
“During a test.”
“Could you let this go?”
“Which you proceeded to flunk.”
“The point is,” he said through his teeth, “this problem falls under Emily’s area of expertise.”
“Screwed-up transcripts?”
“Nothing that specific,” he said. “But I’ll let them explain.”
“Them? Emily and who else?”
“Just…just wait. You’ll see.”
I followed Nate down to the basement, which was mostly devoid of people at this time of the afternoon, and toward the computer lab at the end of the hall, where the computer science classes meet.
Emily Sreenivasan.
They’d been kind of a mismatch, I’d thought at the time, but then I thought everyone was kind of a mismatch with Nate.
I realize this is kind of unfair of me.
To my credit, I actually had tried to tell Nate how I felt about him. Just to clear the air, I guess. But my timing was off. It was freshman year. The conversation went something like this:
Me: Hey, so there’s this guy I like—
Nate: Is it Jim? You should ask him out.
Me: No—
Nate: You should! And then you guys could go out with me and Colin.
Me: Colin Braverman?
Nate: Yeah, didn’t I tell you? He asked me out after French yesterday.
And there was really no way to come back from that, you know? Except the next year I’d gotten up the guts to try again. And it had gone the exact same way, except this time he’d been going out with some girl from Sidwell he met at the Barnes and Noble.
I figured two hints were probably as much as I could stand to drop, since both times I went home and felt horrible for like three days, because, as it turns out, I do not take rejection all that well.
I wish I’d known that the implied no from Nate was just the universe’s way of gearing me up for the big NNNNOOOOO I would be hearing from colleges later. Maybe I would have found a better way to deal with it.
I was about to open the door when I got a text from Leo Michaels saying, Why aren’t you in French club?
“Oh crap,” I said. I texted, I thought that was Monday.
Right. You missed the Monday meeting, too.
Nate, who was reading over my shoulder, said, “He can’t argue if you don’t answer him.”
“I can’t just ghost on Leo.”
“Then tell him you’re sick.”
“Fine,” I said. I texted, Super bad headache, on my way home, sorry.
He texted back, YOU SUCK.
“See?” Nate said. “That’s why I told you not to answer him.”
I sighed, because I knew I’d have to deal with French club drama later, and put my phone away.
The door to the computer lab was locked.
“No one’s here,” I said. “They probably lock it at the end of the day so nobody steals the computers or whatever.”
“They’re here,” he said. He knocked three times.
“Cute Nate?” said a voice from the other side of the door, which might or might not have been Emily’s.
“Cute?” I whispered to Nate, but he just shook his head and smiled, like this was an old joke that he pretended to be annoyed by.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Did you bring food?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
“Not even chips?”
“Could you just open the door?”
The door swung open. The person speaking, as it turned out, wasn’t Emily, who was sitting at the long table i
n front of the room, typing away on what was definitely not a school-issued laptop, but Shira Gastman. Which was very strange because I couldn’t think of a single thing she and Emily had in common, and also because Shira looked soberer than I’d ever seen her before.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Not eating chips, I guess,” she said. She went and sat down across from Emily, who did not look up from what she was doing. “Emily,” she said. Then, louder: “Emily.”
“Hello, Mischa. Cute Nate,” Emily said, her eyes still locked on the screen.
“Her ladyship will be with you shortly,” Shira said, rolling her eyes to the ceiling.
“It’s not my fault,” Emily said, “that you have no focus.”
“I focus plenty,” Shira said. “You’re just showing off.”
Nate cleared his throat into his fist, but I saw him stifle a smile. If Emily was showing off her mad focus skills, I guessed it was probably for his benefit, not mine.
“Shira,” said a warning voice from down on the floor, where there was a third person I hadn’t seen. Bebe Tandoh sat surrounded by computer parts like a little kid in the middle of an A+ Lego session, in her ubiquitous fabulous shoes. She had a tiny screwdriver behind her ear and was holding a circuit board an inch from her eye. She didn’t look up when we came in, and I stopped to watch her put the circuit board down and pick up some kind of computer chip. “I’m almost done here,” she said. “Just a sec.”
I looked at Nate. “What is this?” I asked.
“Officially,” said Shira, “we’re the girls’ STEM club.”
I was pretty familiar with Blanchard’s extracurricular offerings. “We don’t have a girls’ STEM club,” I said.
Emily broke eye contact with her laptop and shut the screen, leaning back and stretching her arms over her head. “Technically we do,” she said. “We just don’t recruit.”
“Also,” said Shira, “our sponsor is dead.”
“She’s not dead,” Bebe said from the floor. “She’s in Boca.”
“Same difference,” Shira said.
Emily shook her head. “Here’s the rundown: We had a girls’ STEM club freshman year. Our sponsor was Ms. Silverman. She retired and moved to Boca. But when Ms. Ishikawa took over, she didn’t want to run two clubs, so she tried to roll us into the coed STEM club.”
“So we went rogue,” Shira said.
“We made a deal with Ms. Ishikawa,” Bebe said. “We keep our club status, she doesn’t have to come to meetings, and once a month one of us hands in a sheet with a list of whatever we did.”
“Some of it’s even accurate,” Shira said.
“And in return, we get a key to the computer lab and a share of the Blanchard Community Cash.”
Ah. The Blanchard Community Cash was a fund set up by the school for extracurriculars—every school-sponsored club was entitled to two hundred bucks a year for expenses. Most of the clubs used it for snacks and stuff that we ate during meetings, or supplies for posters or flyers or whatever, but it didn’t seem like Emily and company were using it that way. I wondered what they were using it for.
“So that’s the official story,” Bebe said. “If anyone asks.”
“Is there an unofficial story?” I asked.
Emily waved an elegant hand at Nate. “Cute Nate, you can go now.”
“What? I…”
“Girl talk,” Shira said. “You know.”
“Right,” he said. “You guys are going to paint your nails and talk about boys.”
“Of course,” Bebe said. “What else do girls talk about?”
“Bras,” said Shira. “Pantyhose. Hot guys named Ryan.”
“Oooh,” said Bebe. “And Chris. Don’t forget Chris.”
“Our periods,” Shira added. “Cramps. Tampons. Trips to the gyno.”
“Fine,” Nate said. “I’ll go.”
“But you’re my ride!” I protested.
“We’ll make sure Mischa gets home,” Emily said. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.”
I grabbed Nate’s wrist. “Don’t leave,” I said.
“What we have to discuss,” Bebe said, “is not for Cute Nate’s ears.”
“You’ll be fine,” he said. “Call me later.”
“Bye, Cute Nate,” Shira called to his retreating back. Nate shook his head and kept walking.
“So, Mischa,” Emily said. “Have a seat.”
I sat down in the third chair, which I guessed was normally Bebe’s when she wasn’t disemboweling computers. The whiteboard at the front of the room had a bunch of lines of computer code scribbled on it, interspersed with a lot of profanity.
“Cute Nate tells us you have a problem that might be in our wheelhouse.”
I looked over at Bebe again. She’d pulled the keyboard out of the laptop she was working on—like, I didn’t even know that was possible—and was sticking something into a slot inside. Without looking up, I said, “I’m not exactly sure what your wheelhouse is.”
Shira said, “Let’s just say that our little syndicate has some experience with the problems of hacking.”
I looked up from Bebe, who was screwing her patient back together. For all of her reputation, Shira seemed almost alarmingly sober. She grinned at me. It was unnerving.
“Syndicate,” I repeated.
Emily spun a business card at me from across the table. On it was printed THE OPHELIA SYNDICATE, and then there was an email address: [email protected].
I wondered who they normally handed these out to. It seemed…rather not secret to have business cards. Also: rather pretentious. They were embossed. There was a little picture in the corner, some kind of flower.
“You have a logo,” I said. I read the card a second time. “The Ophelia Syndicate?”
“This is very off the record, Mischa,” Emily said.
“Right,” I said. “So you’re, like, gamers?”
“We are not gamers!” Emily said indignantly.
“Really,” Bebe said. “Don’t call us that. We don’t play games.”
“We’re hackers,” Emily said.
“What do you hack?”
“Oh. A little of this. A little of that. Just believe that we’re in a position to uncover what happened to you. There are two possibilities: either this was an accident, or someone did this to you on purpose. Did you try getting an updated copy of your transcript?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I did. The one they gave me in the office had the grades right.”
Emily and Shira exchanged a glance. “It wasn’t an accident, then,” Emily said. “Someone would have had to change the transcript and then change it back again after it was sent out to your colleges.”
“There’s no way that was an accident,” Bebe agreed. “So apparently someone doesn’t like you very much.”
Emily leaned back in her chair with her arms crossed behind her head. “Well, well,” she said. “Always-in-the-front-row Mischa has an enemy. And here I always thought you were boring.”
Bebe dumped her computer parts into a box and came to sit next to Emily, who was drumming her chrome-painted fingernails on the table. Shira was standing at the whiteboard with a dry-erase marker in her hand.
“So,” she said. “Who hates you? Besides the obvious.”
“What do you mean, ‘besides the obvious’?”
“Honey,” she said. “Meredith Dorsay’s been gunning for you since we were freshmen. Why is that, by the way?”
“I’m not really sure,” I said. “She kind of hates anyone she thinks might be getting better grades than her, doesn’t she?”
“To a point,” Emily said. “But you seem to be a special case.”
“You haven’t heard what she’s been saying,” Shira added.
I winced. “What
has she been saying?”
“That the reason you aren’t telling people where you’re going is that you didn’t get in anywhere,” Shira replied. “Oh, and that you lied about your SAT scores.”
“God.” I closed my eyes. “And I’m sure everyone believes her, too.”
“Well, technically, she’s half-right,” said Shira. “Anyway, I think we can agree that she hates you. Did you pee in her cornflakes freshman year or something?”
“Honestly,” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”
Freshman year, Meredith and I had been in the same classes for English, Algebra II, and PE, which seems like a lot, but for a small school like Blanchard, it really isn’t. She’d pretty much ignored me until the end of the third week, when we’d gotten our essays about Wuthering Heights back. I’d gotten an A. She’d gotten a B+.
The next week, we’d had a problem set due in math. I’d gotten a 98. She’d gotten a 94.
Apparently, she’d been considered the smartest kid in her grade back in middle school, and here I was, a nobody from some third-rate public school with a home haircut and shoes from Target, and I was showing her up. The next time we got a math quiz back, my grade had been five points higher, and I could see that she was stewing. I didn’t realize it was about me, not really. I thought it was the grade. I didn’t have any friends yet; I hadn’t started hanging out with Nate or Caroline, so I went up to her after class and said, “Hey, we could study together sometime. If you want.”
This had been the wrong thing to say.
She’d sneered at me and said, “I don’t need help from you.”
I’d been too stunned to say anything back. Caroline, who had been in that class, too, had brushed by me and said, “Here’s some free advice: don’t let her see your grades.”
“What?”
“Trust me. Just don’t let her see them.”
And I’d tried. I’d flipped my papers over as soon as they were handed back, and I could see her neck always craning to check out my work. But after a while I was sick of it. I was getting 98s and 100s and hiding them, and what was the point of doing the work and then acting like I was ashamed of it? What was she going to do, throw me in a dumpster?