Hacking Harvard

by Robin Wasserman

  Four beers, six beers, eight beers, he didn't know. He just kept making bets and people kept shoving bottles into his hand. And now the world was listing and tilting and he wondered how the balls stayed so still on the table, when he felt like he was about to roll across the room.

  He aimed the cue, commanding his fingers to keep steady. But (he tip bobbed and weaved--unless it was the cue ball that was moving, trying to escape the strike.

  Pull back. Stay smooth, he thought. Take aim. Nice and easy. Make the shot. Now.

  The cue skidded past the ball and slammed into the opposite edge of the table. "Shit!" He whacked the cue against his knee in frustration, waiting for a crack. But there was only a soft thump. And pain.

  "Eight ball, corner pocket," his opponent called. It was an easy shot, and a smooth one, and then the game was over. The beefy guy in the Red Sox cap and the army surplus coat had won.

  158

  Max had lost. For the fourth game in a row.

  "Pay up." The guy had a heavy Boston accent-- Masshole, Max thought dimly--and an open palm. "I gotta get home."

  But Max didn't have the cash; he hadn't planned to lose.

  "IOU?" he said weakly. And then threw up on the guy's boots.

  "Asshole!" The guy took off his jacket. There was more Red Sox crap underneath, a Johnny Damon T-shirt with hand-drawn devil horns and a red X scrawled over the face. The tattoo running thick around the guy's bicep read BELIEVE. "You fucking owe me all right."

  His buddies caught his arms in mid-lunge. "Forget it," one said. "He's just a kid. He doesn't know what he's doing."

  "Look at him, he's harmless."

  "Kids do stupid shit. Let it go."

  Just a kid.

  Harmless.

  Stupid.

  Doesn't know what he's doing.

  They thought he couldn't decide for himself. Just like Maxwell St. They thought what he did--what he wanted-- didn't matter. That he didn't count.

  They didn't see that he was a man. A better man than his father, even drunk, even broke, even screwed, at least he was doing what he wanted to do. He wasn't a kid. He was his own man. And no one was going to take that away from him.

  He burped.

  He stumbled.

  And then he lowered his head, hunched his shoulders, and aimed straight for Johnny Damon's nose.

  159

  "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck!" he screamed, bashing into a wall of flesh. It didn't shake, didn't move. There was a soft oof, and then iron fingers clamped down on Max's arms and the next thing he knew he was launched off the ground, kicking, flailing, cursing-- and then dangling upside down, his ankles locked together in a pincher grip, his arms pinned behind his back. His captor lowered him toward the ground, like a prisoner into a pot of boiling oil, until his face was an inch from the sticky floor. A moment later, a wave of beer crashed down, washing across his face, puddling up beneath him.

  "Lick it up, kid." It was the Masshole, cackling above. "Lick. It. Up."

  Eric didn't get it. Not until Clay emerged from the back, carrying a wriggling Max over his shoulder like a two-year-old having a temper tantrum.

  He'd heard the shouts, the curses, a crack, and a thud, and then, moments later, a scream. He'd seen Clay drop his glass and rush toward the back.

  Running toward trouble, Eric had thought. Typical.

  And then Clay reappeared with Max, storming through the bar, chased by the herd of brutes, their faces bruised and their fists shaking. "And stay the hell out!" one bellowed as Clay barreled through the door. Eric grabbed Schwarz, who'd spent the last hour weeping into his beer and now clung to Eric like a drowning victim. They made it outside just in time to see Clay deposit Max onto the ground--and then grab him again as Max struggled to escape back inside to finish whatever he'd started.

  Clay as hero. Clay Porter as rescuer.

  160

  It didn't compute.

  Eric was the one who saved Max, and vice versa. It's what they were there for. Clay didn't factor into the equation. At least, not on the side of good.

  Except that there it was: Clay had rushed into the fight, Clay had swept to the rescue. While Eric stood on the sidelines, clueless. Worse than that: useless.

  "Let go of me, asshole!" Max snarled, still trying to pull free. "Get the hell off."

  "So you can go back in there and get yourself killed?" Clay asked, a trace of a smile creeping across his face. "Don't think so. Not while you still owe me six hundred bucks."

  "Was doing fine until you came along." Max was slurring so much it was hard to understand him. "I'm on my own."

  "Whatever." Clay kept his grip.

  "Fuck off!"

  "Dude, I'm on your side here," Clay said, frog-marching him up the stairs toward the street. Eric and Schwarz hurried after. Not that anyone needed them. "I'm one of the good guys."

  Max laughed, a thick, phlegmy gargle that quickly turned into a cough. He doubled over, wheezing and heaving, though nothing came up. "Yeah, a fucking great guy. Tell it to Eric."

  "Max, shut up," Eric warned.

  "You wanna make me?" Max stumbled toward Eric and gripped his shoulders, his breath hot and sour in Eric's face. "Come on, make me."

  Eric pushed him out of the way. "How much did you drink back there? You're a fucking mess."

  "That's me, right?" Max slurred, flinging his arms out wide. "A

  161

  big fucking mess. Not like you, not like Eric, always does the right thing, always follows the rules, always has to be fucking right and too bad he's got such a fuck-up best friend who's always dragging him down, right?"

  "What are you talking about? You're not a--"

  "Such a freaking hassle for you, right?" Max shouted, stepping blindly into the street. Eric pulled him back just as a car sped past. Max shook him off. "Except you love it, right? You love it that you're better than me, that you get to get up on your high--your--you know--the thing, and just look down, and there's Max, in the dirt, and you get to be right again."

  "That is not what I think," Eric protested.

  "But what makes you so great, huh? You talk all this crap about everything, but you don't do anything, right? It's all talk, talk, talk. Well, talk now!" He pointed at Clay, his wobbly arm drawing zigzags in the air. "Go on, tell him everything, tell him all about what he--"

  "Shut up!" Eric shouted.

  "What the hell's he talking about?" Clay asked.

  "He's just drunk," Eric said. "He always, uh . . . talks a lot of shit when he's drunk." Max, of course, didn't "always" do anything when he was drunk, having never been drunk before in his life.

  "You talk a lot of shit!" Max cried. "Just say what you wanna say. Be a fucking man!"

  "Something you been wanting to say, Eric?" Clay asked.

  Schwarz leaned his head on Eric's shoulder. "Maybe you should tell him," he whispered loudly. "Catharsis is good for the soul."

  "Can we just focus on finding a cab and getting the hell out of here?" Eric snapped. He wasn't a crybaby, and he wasn't a pathetic

  162

  eight-year-old running around with his pants at his ankles. Not anymore. It was ancient history. If Clay didn't remember what he'd done--didn't care--Eric wasn't going to remind him. It had nothing to do with being afraid, Eric told himself. It had nothing to do with being "a fucking man." It just didn't need to be said. "I think we've had enough celebrating for the night."

  "You're so uptight all the time, man," Max said, the anger drained out of his voice. He staggered over to Eric and Schwarz and threw an arm around each of them. "My boys," he said, wheezing a blast of beer-stained breath in their faces. "I love my boys. But you just gotta learn to let go a little. Live."

  And then he passed out.

  163

  Whatever you do about girls this fall, remember that it will end badly They'll tromp on you, boy, they'll pluck your heart out and crack it like an egg. But they mean well, and the fault is yours--you asked for a date.

  --David Royce,
'56, "Sex and Society: Coming of Age at Harvard," The Harvard Crimson, October 8,1955

  Seventeen days passed. Not that I was waiting for his call. I had plenty to keep me busy. A typical November day: Wake up at five a.m. Shower, root around for a sweater that's been worn fewer than three times and isn't covered in cat hair, towel- dry hair because blow-drying takes too long, even if it means wet hair will freeze into mousy brown ice crystals as soon as it's exposed to the elements. Pull on gray peacoat that can't even begin to put up a fight against the November cold, because it looks better than Big Puffer, the red North Face ski jacket with an overstuffed fleece lining that makes me look like a walking tomato. Grab a granola bar--

  164

  the kind with chocolate chips and frosting, even though every week I vowed to ditch the junk and start eating the Healthy Harvest Energy Sticks that taste like mulch. Spend an hour in the library, researching Legal Issues paper on Roe v. Wade, having ditched original topic--early twentieth-century treatment of sex crimes--after discovery that last year's PTA library committee had banned all relevant books as pornography. Meet with debate team for twenty minutes to strategize arguments for next week's topic: "Resolved: Restriction of civil liberties is a necessary element in any free society." Disband meeting prematurely when the cofounder of the philosophers club calls the president of the Student Republicans a fascist, and the president counters by kneeing him in the balls.

  Eight forty a.m., homeroom in the yearbook office, approving layouts and trying to ignore the student life editor who wants my job muttering "bitch" when I veto his spread. Then four AP classes before lunch, with a quick nap while our alcoholic French teacher shows La Gloire de Mon Pere for the fourth time so she can nurse her hangover in the dark instead of teaching us le subjonctif A quick peanut buttet and jelly sandwich by my locker, with a Twix bar for dessert--again, in spite of repeated resolutions to be healthy and satisfied with nonfat yogurt--then back to class for AP chem lab. Three more AP classes, two tests, one pop quiz on a history chapter I hadn't bothered to read. Two forty p.m., key club committee meeting to discuss fund-raising for upcoming convention, along with much debate over who will room together, in which I stay silent and hope not to get stuck with Shirley Penn, who doesn't wear deodorant.

  Four to five p.m., read to the blind. Six p.m., cold pizza at the

  165

  joint student council/senior class council prom planning meeting (pushed back until the evening so the jocks could shower after practice without missing a single scintillating moment of the ongoing "Some Enchanted Evening" vs. "Boogie Nights" theme debate). Seven to midnight, write a response paper on constitutional arguments for and against separation of church and state, read the chapter on Prohibition and discover all my wrong answers on the pop quiz, copy calculus homework answers from the back of the book with just enough scribbling and equations to make them appear legit, conjugate thirty French verbs, and translate a passage from Les Miserables. Then bed, and five hours of sleep--or two hours of nightmares, three hours of lying awake, worrying about the next day, the day after that, SAT scores, AP tests, finding a date for prom, and, now that Katie Gibson was out of commission, writing a valedictory speech and convincing the rest of the school that I hadn't traded the vice principal a blow job for the honor.

  I drank a lot of caffeine in those days.

  On the eighteenth day, I called him.

  "Hey. It's Lex."

  "Hey." He didn't sound surprised. Or particularly pleased. "What's up?"

  "You mean, why am I calling, or how am I doing?"

  "Pick one."

  "I'm calling because you didn't."

  There was a silence on the other end of the phone. "Was I supposed to?"

  166

  I wasn't sure what to say. Yes? Of course not? Only if you wanted to--which you obviously didn't? "So . . . how's it going?"

  "You know. Busy."

  "Busy doing . . . ?"

  "You know. Stuff."

  I hated myself for calling. "Okay, well ... I should probably go."

  "Wait!"

  I waited.

  "I really have been busy," Eric said quickly. "And I didn't think . . . anyway, uh, how's it going with you?"

  "You want the official answer or the real one?" I lay back on my bed, stretching my toes out the way I used to do when I was a kid, pretending to be a ballet dancer. Someone told me once that my feet had great extension, whatever that means. I thought it meant I should be a dancer. My parents thought I was too clumsy, so I took piano instead. And then chemistry.

  "What's the difference?"

  "Official is what I'll tell the family at Thanksgiving next week. It involves a lot of fake smiling. Real is what I don't tell anyone."

  "But you'd tell me?"

  "No." I smiled, glad he couldn't see me through the phone. "I just wanted to hear which you'd pick."

  "So, Jupiter is pretty close to the earth this week," he said.

  "Should I be bracing for a collision?"

  "I thought, maybe, you'd want to see it. With me."

  "In your spaceship?"

  He laughed, haltingly, like he wasn't sure if I was teasing him or

  167

  making fun of him, but wanted to make it clear, either way, that he got the joke. "I know a place. Uh, Friday night?"

  "That's a time," I said. "Not a place. Genius."

  This time, his laugh was louder. "Ten o'clock. Should I pick you up?"

  "Well, I can't meet you there," I pointed out. "Since I don't know where there is."

  "Okay. Ten o'clock. See you then."

  "This isn't a date," I said quickly, before he could hang up.

  "Of course not," he agreed, faster than I might have liked. "Just ... an astronomy lesson."

  "Ready to tell me why we're here?" I asked Eric. He'd spent the whole ride babbling nervously about our AP government teacher, who'd recently given someone a detention for daring to suggest that the U.S. lost the Vietnam War. Since we'd arrived on campus and begun our long, cold walk through the silent Harvard Yard, he hadn't said much of anything.

  "Not yet," he said.

  "How about a hint?"

  "How about a kiss?" he replied, and before I could react, tossed me a Hershey's Kiss. I fumbled it. Which was convenient, because if I was scrabbling around on the ground for a piece of chocolate, he wouldn't see me blush.

  I popped the chocolate in my mouth and took a closer look at the wrapper, which glittered under the yellow sodium lights. "Are those . . . polka dots?" I asked, squinting at the dark blue smudges scattered across the silver.

  168

  "Jewish stars," Eric admitted. "They're leftover favors from my cousin's bar mitzvah."

  I sucked on the Kiss, wanting to take my time and savor the taste, slightly bitter and, at the same time, a little too sweet. Just the way I liked it. "I didn't know bar mitzvahs came with chocolate," I said. "I should've had one."

  "Bat," he said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Bat mitzvah. It's what girls have."

  I knew that. Of I should have known that. Seventh grade had been bat mitzvah madness--despite the fact that I was neither Jewish nor, in even the loosest sense of the word, popular, it seemed like every other weekend I was slipping into a ruffled dress, sitting through three hours of incomprehensible chanting, and then posing for a caricature artist while the rest of my class limboed across the dance floor and begged the DJ for a pair of oversize gold sunglasses or giant inflatable shoes. "But you didn't have one," I pointed out. Or at least I hadn't been invited.

  "I'm not a girl," he said. "In case you hadn't noticed."

  "I mean a bar mitzvah, obviously. You didn't. Did you?"

  "Sort of. My parents thought the whole party thing was a 'gross commercialization of sacred tradition,' so instead we went to Israel for a week and I read my Torah portion by the Western Wall. Then we had a falafel dinner with my grandparents. Tons o' fun."

  "That sucks."

  He shrugged.
"Not really-- a party would have sucked. Dancing?" He shuddered. "Besides, that was back during my dad's religious phase, so at least he bothered to show up. When Lissa turned thirteen,

  169

  they threw this whole black-tie thing with a band and these hideous Rockette type dancers--and my dad walked out in the middle to deal with a Japanese stock market crisis."

  "What happened to the 'gross commercialization of sacred tradition?

  "Like I said, a phase. Guess they grew out of it."

  He was staring at the ground as he walked, and when I glanced over, I noticed the way his right ear stuck out a little from the side of his head. And the way his thumbs were hooked into his pockets while his fingers tapped out a rhythm on his jeans, like he was playing an invisible piano. I told myself to stop staring. I told myself there was nothing cute about his squarish black glasses or the way the corner of his mouth twitched right before he smiled, like an early warning system for his face.

  I didn't look away.

  "What about you? Did you grow out of it?" I asked, just wanting to say something, because if we went back to that comfortable silence, I would have too much time to think. And watch.

  "I was never in it."

  "You didn't go to Hebrew school or anything?"

  "For a while. Max--my friend Max--"

  "I know Max," I said, trying to keep the disdain out of my voice.

  "He kind of got me kicked out."

  "Max is Jewish?"

  Eric shook his head. "No, but he used to come meet up with me after class, and one day . . . well, it was his idea, but I guess I . . ." He looked like he couldn't decide whether to be embarrassed or proud. "It was kind of dumb, but basically, we, uh, rigged the sound

  170

  system to start playing 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' during the Hanukkah service--and also we, uh, snuck into the sanctuary the night before and stuck antlers and Santa hats on top of the Torahs."