Hacking Harvard

by Robin Wasserman

  "Notpussy," Max said, overemphasizing. "Painter."

  "Same difference." Clay kicked his feet up on the coffee table. A spray of dirt showered down on the glass. "I failed art. Twice."

  "Welcome to the wonderful world of modern art," Max said. "Artistic talent not required. Check out pages twelve through seventeen." He leaned over Clay's shoulder, pointing at a series of images as the pages flipped past. One showed a white canvas with a thick red stripe down the middle. Another showed a black canvas with a light blue border. A third was a photograph of four sticks, assembled into a square.

  "'A spare interpretation of the deforestation of the planet and the social constraints imposed on modern man,'" Max recited from memory, "'using naturalistic materials on an artificial backdrop to synthesize the contradictory yet symbiotic elements of twenty-first century life into a free-flowing yet structured whole.' Nice, huh? I wrote a program that'll spit as much of that crap out as we need. We should have the art professors eating out of your hands--they'll be the admissions crew to let you in."

  "You're going to call that shit art?" Clay asked dubiously.

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  Max nodded, smirking. "So I guess that makes you the shit- artist."

  Clay shrugged. "For six hundred bucks, I'll be anything you want." "Five," Max reminded him. "We said five hundred." "And now I'm saying six." Clay waved the Binder of Power in the air. "You want me to do all this shit, it's gonna cost you." Eric blew out sharply. "You can't just--" "Eric, I got this," Max said. He glared at Clay. "Five hundred."

  "I'm out of here."

  Eric lurched off the couch.

  "Fine. Six hundred," Max said quickly. "But no more. Agreed?"

  Clay leaned over and squeezed his hand. Hard. "So what's first?"

  "First, I make sure we can put together enough cash up front to set everything in motion, Schwarz installs his surveillance cameras in the admissions office . . . and Eric shows you how you're going to ace the SATs."

  "I what?" Eric yelped.

  "You're the one who designed the equipment," Max hissed to Eric. "You're the one who shows him how to use it."

  "I told you I don't want anything to do with him," Eric whispered.

  "Scared?"

  "No!" Eric stood up. He stood unafraid. "Fine. Whatever. You go, and I'll show Clay what he needs to do."

  Max hopped off the couch, his face plastered with a maddening smirk, and dragged Schwarz up the stairs.

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  "You'll be fine!" he called back down to Eric, just before slipping through the door. "You're a big boy now."

  Only one problem, Eric thought. Clay was still bigger.

  The sign hanging outside Circuit Surplus read WE GOT IT. YOU WANT IT?

  And they definitely had it. All of it.

  Resistors, capacitors, toggle switches, radar display indicators, yards of twelve-gauge wire, hydraulic pumps, planimeters and insulatots, coaxial switches, hermetically sealed relays, pin modulators, altimeters, even a vintage U.S. Army Signal Corps generator. Amidst the rows of dusty shelves cluttered with semifunctional parts, Eric had, over the years, found everything he'd ever needed, and done so with a quiet but determined relish that cemented his position in the community of gearheads who floated through the aisles high on solder fumes, bickering over the last universal potentiometer, kneeling in reverence before a sixty-year-old oscilloscope that still had its original knobs and display screen. It was everything an aspiring engineer could ever want, and everything Boston's top hackers would ever need. It was also the one place Eric felt completely at home.

  So he had been understandably reluctant to bring Clay Porter along. This was his place. It had always been a refuge, a place to hide from problems like Clay Porter. They were two worlds that should never have to collide.

  Just tell him what he needs to know and get rid of him, Eric told himself. No fear.

  "So like I said, you don't need to do anything, it'll be all set up,"

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  he said, pulling out a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. The camera was lodged in the black bridge between the two lenses, with a pair of nearly invisible wires running along the frame to a Wi-Fi transmitter that would be hidden behind Clay's left ear. "On the morning of the test, you just have to press this button, and--"

  "Dude, this place is awesome," Clay cut in. He plunged a fist into a nearby box of resistors and pulled out a handful. "Fifty cents each? Sweet."

  Eric wondered whether he thought they were bullets of some kind. Or maybe he just liked shiny things.

  "I'm retooling my speaker system," Clay said, veering toward a discounted coil of copper wire. "Amping it up, you know?"

  "Uh-huh." Eric almost asked what his plans were, whether he'd built his own system or was just supplementing something store- bought, whether he'd had the same problem with the filter frequency that Eric had struggled with the year before. But this was Clay Porter, he reminded himself. "Amping up" probably meant giving the speaker a kick and waiting to see what happened.

  They walked through the next aisle in silence until, finally, Eric found what he was looking for, the final thing he needed to make the SAT plan work. The thermoswitch controller cost thirty dollars, and, as he counted the bills out at the register, he hoped Max meant what he'd said about having a solution to their money woes. Expenses were piling up. "So you get what you have to do?" He handed Clay the glasses, along with a transparent molded earpiece that would relay the test answers.

  Clay stuffed them into his pockets as if they were loose change, rather than delicately designed mechanisms Eric had spent two

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  weeks perfecting. "What's your problem?" he growled, scooping his resistors off the counter and slipping them into his other pocket.

  "With what?"

  "With me." Clay stepped outside the store and leaned against the wall, his bloodred shirt fading into the brick.

  "No problem," Eric said, half-hoping Clay wouldn't buy it.

  And then what? he thought, disgusted. I punch him? He punches me?

  I run away?

  Third grade didn't feel so very far away. Back then, in his mind, Eric had been a hero, defending the even smaller kids against the brutish giant. Defending himself. But his body had always been a coward. It shook. It ran. It stumbled. One memorable day, it had peed its pants just at the sound of Clay's laugh.

  It was pathetic. And now his legs were trembling. "I've got to go," Eric said. "I'm late."

  "For what?"

  "None of your business." Late for not getting my ass kicked, he thought in sudden alarm as Clay grabbed his forearm--and part of him wanted it to happen. At least then it would all be out in the open, and he could finally fight back. He could prove that at least one of them had changed.

  "What the hell is your problem? You're acting like I screwed your sister." Clay looked thoughtful for a moment. "I didn't, did I?"

  Just let it go. But that was Max's voice in his head--a voice Eric had long ago learned to ignore.

  "You don't remember me, do you?" he asked. "Samuel Adams Elementary?"

  "What, you went there too?" Clay narrowed his eyes and peered

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  closely at Eric's face. "I don't know. Maybe. Kind of short, with bigger glasses? Or, like, a smaller head. Why? You remember me?"

  Eric paused. "Not really." What was he supposed to say? Yes, I remember every hellish moment? "Maybe. Who knows. It was a long time ago."

  So there was the truth: Clay Porter's reign of terror was one of the most important memories of Eric's life. He'd shaped everything. But apparently Eric was just a blip on his radar.

  Not even that.

  "I really don't have a problem," Eric said, offering a hand for Clay to shake and willing it to be true.

  "Cool." Clay slapped his hand, rather than shaking it.

  "Yeah. Cool. It's all good."

  It was something he'd often heard Lissa say to her friends, usually after one of them had made the mistake of pissing her off and
she was in that stage of feigning forgiveness before taking her revenge.

  It's all good meant watch out--soon it will be.

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  Tired people are not good test takers.

  --The Princeton Review: Cracking the SAT

  T

  was the night before test day, when all down the block, Not a creature was stirring, not even a jock. The prep books were stacked on the desks with great care, In hopes that--

  Okay. So I guess you can see why I was marketing myself as a chemist, not a poet. But if Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Conor Oberst could wring poetry from the damp towel of desperation, why couldn't I?

  And it was definitely desperation. Tortured, sleepless, sweat- drenched, red-eyed, heart-pounding, stomach-churning desperation. Nine hours until the test that could determine my fate, and what was I, Alexandra Talese, model student, professional test-taker, soon-to-be valedictorian, doing?

  Certainly not sleeping.

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  Not memorizing vocab or drilling math problems or assembling a list of generic literary allusions that would work with any essay topic, and certainly not cramming in one last piece of crucial advice from one of the eleven prep books lined up on the shelf over my desk.

  I was lying in bed, my eyes wide open, because when I closed them, all I could see were rows and rows of tiny bubbles. And in the quiet, I imagined I could hear a clock ticking down the seconds. Message: Your time is running out. My eyes locked on to the Harvard sticker I'd foolishly stuck on the corner of my window three years before, in the afterglow of a month at Harvard's high school summer program. At the time it had seemed my unquestionable destiny to return there, triumphant, as a "real" student. But now the sticker just haunted me, the first thing I saw every morning, the last image I blocked out every night, mocking me and my ignorant, long-gone certainty. Alexandra Talese, Harvard material? It seemed to say. I don't think so. And in my slowly-losing-its-grip-on-reality mind, the sticker often seemed to have the same haughty Boston accent as the not-so-friendly neighborhood admissions officer who, when I'd cluelessly introduced myself to him in Starbucks that freshman summer, had given me a once-over, decided I wasn't worthy of a twice-over, and gone back to his cappuccino.

  I had one chance to prove him wrong. One morning, one test, one shot.

  Sleep was not an option.

  The following sentences test your ability to recognize grammar and usage errors. Each sentence contains either a single error or no error at all. No sentence contains more than one error. In choosing answers, follow the requirements of standard written English:

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  1. If you screw up the SATs, you will be totally screwed. A B CD

  No error E

  2. Everyone is expecting you to get a perfect score .

  A B C

  But no pressure . No error D E

  3. The SATs have been scientifically designed to measure

  A

  your intellectual aptitude , and, therefore, you should B

  feel free to interpret your score as a measure of both C

  future earning potential and inherent self-worth .

  D

  No error E

  Answers:

  1. B (Trick question. You may think If is a usage error, and that it should be When, but that's actually a factual error. As in: "When you screw up on the SATs.")

  2. D (This is a sentence fragment. And also a lie.)

  3. E (This sentence is 100 percent accurate.)

  I had taken the test three times already. Once sophomore year, for practice. Twice junior year, each time scoring higher than the last but neither time attaining my goal. The elusive, mythical perfect score.

  It wasn't the golden ticket. I got that. Every year, Harvard rejects hundreds of students with triple eight hundreds. But it's

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  what my parents were expecting, and it's what I was expecting. So I was taking it again.

  This was my last shot.

  The week before, it was all anyone could talk about. I'd heard rumors that somewhere, there were clumps of seniors who honestly didn't care, maybe even some who weren't taking the test, for whom Saturday was going to be just another day. But if there was a subset who wasn't obsessed with test scores and college applications and planning out every detail of the future before graduation hit, if they weren't just a rumor, some mythical species like unicorns, dragons, or bad boys with a heart of gold, they were staying out of sight.

  Everyone I knew was scarfing Adderall by the fistful or coasting on a Red Bull high. And then, of course, there was the couldn't-care-less crew who were playing it cool and pretending that one test couldn't determine the course of their entire life, an attitude that, if you ask me, was more dangerous than a bottle of Ritalin and about as genuine as my father's ten-dollar Folex watch. My drug of choice? Preparation. Test-prep books, to be specific. And I'd just about overdosed.

  They called it drill and kill. Practicing day and night, until you'd seen every type of question that had ever appeared on any version of the test, until you'd developed an allergy to dangling participles, you'd drowned in hexagons and octagons and pentagons and the formulas for determining the volume of any and all regular solids, and you'd memorized all eleven hundred potential vocab words along with the statistical likelihood of their appearing.

  I turned my nose up at the classes. Let the masses sweat their way through a Princeton Review course, jotting down the ramblings of some BU freshman like they were gifts from the College

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  Board gods. The classes were a crutch--an annoying one that dug into your armpit and gave you a rash. I'd decided to go it alone.

  Just me, my brain, my number two pencil. . . and a six-foot-high stack of practice books, each promising the top-secret, copyrighted, foolproof technique for outsmarting the SATs. It was unclear to me why colleges would put so much stock in a test that, according to the books, bore no relation to any form of learning, problem solving, or information processing that any normal human being would need to use in any other stage of life. But that's one of the first things the books taught you:

  Don't question.

  Don't try to understand.

  Just accept the instructions.

  Just do it.

  It wasn't just a test-taking technique. It was a way of life.

  Schwarz crunched down on his Twix bar--a necessary nightly ritual when you weighed ninety-six pounds and the dining hall food tasted like rat poison--and turned up the volume on his computer. On screen, admissions officer and 24/7 surveillance target Samuel Atherton III was leaning back in his desk chair, his feet propped on a trash can, complaining about his wife's cooking. Atherton had been assigned to handle all the applications from Wadsworth High--and Schwarz had been assigned to handle him.

  It was like the world's most boring reality TV show, and yet Schwarz watched it compulsively, putting it on in the background whenever he was in his dorm room, ostensibly to learn as much as he could about the admissions process, but actually because he'd grown addicted to

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  watching the officers scurry back and forth, trash-talking their bosses, picking their noses, sucking up, sneaking cigarettes, and doing whatever else it was they did when they were supposed to be working.

  This is what normal people are like, he told himself. This is what they do.

  There was something familiar about the feeling, something that took him back to his childhood, and the worn red Star Trek jumpsuit he'd worn to school every day for a year, pretending he was an alien observer of human life. Let Eric have his misguided Battlestar Galactica obsession--for Schwarz, it had always been, would always be Star Trek, without question. BSG, as Eric insisted on calling it, may have had the superior special effects and may have, as Eric argued, captured the messy realities of human frailty, but Schwarz wasn't in the market for messy. The Star Trek universe was clean, it was rational, it was law- governed, all actions and interactions overshadowed by the Prime Directive--it mad
e sense. Vulcans acted like Vulcans, Klingons acted like Klingons, and Captain Picard (for it was only the Picard Enterprise that interested Schwarz, never the shabbier original ship commanded by the lusty and increasingly bloated Captain Kirk) always had the perfectly pithy prescription for how the conditions of humanity should be fulfilled. Picard understood humans in a way that the ship's android, desperate as he was to blend in, never would. Poor Data watched, he emulated, he smiled when it was time to smile and frowned when it was time to frown and assumed that if he watched long enough, the rules would become clear. Schwarz was no robot, but that was behavior--observation, fascination tinged with desperation--that he could understand. Because, like Data, he had watched.

  He'd watched--just like he watched now--trying to figure out

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  why people said the things they said and did the things they did, trying to come up with some theory that would explain away human behavior the way the Navier-Stokes equations turned the chaos of fluid flow into an elegant, predictable, comprehensible system. He'd done what he was told, assuming that everyone else must have known what he didn't. He'd watched, he'd obeyed, and he'd waited for his overgrown brain to figure it out. To finally say, with the same satisfaction that came with penning in the QED at the end of a proof, This is why they do what they do.

  And then he'd discovered Kurt Vonnegut--and suddenly it all became clear. "All people are insane," the master wrote. "They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons." Human behavior would never make sense, Schwarz realized, because humans never made sense. They were inherently flawed, inherently illogical, inherently broken. It was why---except for the occasional vacation in electronic voyeurism--he preferred numbers. Numbers and photographs. Beauty distilled, perfection trapped on the page. Vonnegut taught that humans would always disappoint--but you could only be disappointed if you allowed yourself to set expectations.