India actually worked it out during geometry her first month of high school. Seven hours a day, five days a week, four weeks a month, nine months a year for four years worked out to 5,040 hours of high school. Think of all the other things she could do with that time.
She was pleased with herself for this calculation—not the calculation itself, which was just multiplication and anyway she did it on a calculator—but for thinking to do it like that, all big and epic and sweeping in scope. Unfortunately she made the mistake of presenting it to her mother at work. This was her own fault because she knew better. At home, her mother was sometimes relaxed and laid-back and wearing sweatpants and weary of legal logic. At work was another matter entirely.
Every day after school, India walked to her mother’s office because it was too far to walk home, and she was obviously not going to stay after school and do sports. Because the school year coincided with the rainy season in Seattle, because Seattleites did not believe in umbrellas despite having a nine-month rainy season, she usually arrived damp and dripping. But her mom did important lawyer work for immigrants, which meant India could not be cranky about the long, wet hours she had to wait for her and which also meant she spent a lot of time in the break room eating the snacks that were always around and revising essays and solving geometry proofs and making study cards.
Except for the snacks, this was a waste of time.
“Five thousand forty,” she walked into her mother’s office and announced without even saying hello first. In the elevator on the way up she’d taken all her books out of her backpack so she could drop them with a dramatic thud to the floor.
Her mother swiveled her swivel chair toward her but did not turn her eyes from her computer screen. “Five thousand forty what?”
“Hours of high school.” India bent to gather up her books.
“Till what?” Her mother still wasn’t looking at her.
“Not till anything. Total.”
Not because she was compelled by what her daughter was saying, but only because her daughter was not making sense, her mother finally turned first her body then her face then her eyes to India. “What are you talking about, darling?”
“High school is five thousand forty hours,” India said. “Think of all I could do with those hours if I didn’t have to go.”
Her mother took off her glasses. “What could you do with those hours, India?”
Another rookie mistake, thinking she was building an argument for her mother when what was really happening was her mother was dismantling hers.
“I could see the world. Instead of taking French, I could move to Paris, get a job in a café, learn to make pâtisserie, take a train to Saint-Tropez and sunbathe topless.”
“If your argument is that you don’t need to go to high school to learn how to show your tits to a beach full of tourists”—her mother put her glasses back on—“so granted.”
India was undeterred. “Or it doesn’t have to be France. Think how much more I would learn about ancient Greece actually in ancient Greece instead of in history.”
“Long plane ride to ancient Greece,” her mother said to her computer screen.
“You know what I mean. Greece was the birthplace of theater, so obviously I have to go there. Plus, I could do geometry at the actual pyramids instead of ones on graph paper. I could meet real people instead of high school students. I could learn life skills instead of all this crap which I am never going to use in the real world and you know it.”
Her mother turned back toward her, removed her glasses again, leaned the seat of her swivel chair backward, and propped her high-heeled feet on her desk. “Let us examine the skills you’d require to move to Cairo.”
“Cairo?” India said.
“You’d need some geography to help you determine where the pyramids are. Egypt is not in ancient or even present-day Greece. And Egypt is a big country. The pyramids I assume you reference are at Giza in the desert outside of Cairo, yes?”
“Yes?” India guessed.
“You’d do well to know some Arabic.”
“Arabic?”
“The official language in Egypt.”
“What about Egyptian?”
“Not a language,” her mother said. “It would be good to have some history. Do you know any Egyptian history?”
India had been to a seder one Passover at her friend Mark’s house, but that was about it.
“Or modern Middle Eastern history? Or current Middle Eastern politics?” her mother mused.
“But high school’s not teaching me any of that,” India cut in. “But high school’s taking up valuable brain space I could be using for all those things you just said.”
One of her mother’s life theories was any argument had to have two buts. One objection wasn’t going to convince anyone. If you were going to change your mind or someone else’s, you had to have at least two, and they both had to be rebuttal-proof.
Which these two, apparently, were not. “High school teaches you skills you will later apply to, to take your example, living abroad. Critical evaluation of texts, analysis of cultural bias, negotiation of challenge, synthesis of diverse skills and knowledge sets, to name but a few.”
“I’m not learning that in high school either,” India said.
“Give it five thousand forty hours,” said her mother.
“You don’t need a high school education to become an actress.” India wasn’t sure if you were supposed to say “actor” instead of “actress” because of feminism, but she guessed feminism’s point was something like she could do anything she believed she could, and she believed she could—in fact, had to—become whichever term she was supposed to use. “You have to learn about the world by living in it. You have to learn about other people and their lives by overlapping yours with theirs. You have to learn about the entire universe so you can convincingly portray some small corner of it on the stage.”
“‘The universe’ seems ambitious,” her mother said. “And if you don’t go to high school, how will you go to college?”
“I’m not going to college,” India reasoned. “I’m going to be an actor.”
Her mother swiveled to her bookcase and pulled out a book that proved, when India received it, to be called The Oresteia, however you were supposed to pronounce that. “Are you planning to understand Aeschylus by overlapping your life with his?”
“Um. No?”
“What will you do if your agent calls to offer you Clytemnestra, and you have to decline because you don’t understand the plays?”
“Will they teach me The Oresteia in college?” India asked.
“If you pick the right one,” her mother said. “But you have to get accepted. But the best programs are naturally the most competitive and will require an excellent high school performance record.”
India’s guidance counselor said she was only a freshman, and it was too early to start picking colleges. He said it was premature to have settled on a major. He said she didn’t need to be worrying about any of this yet and should focus instead on having fun, trying new things, and making friends. He said to come back and see him in two years.
So India had to figure out about college on her own. She only looked at schools with top-ranked theater programs. She only looked at schools with top-ranked theater programs in New York City because that’s where Broadway was. She wrote each school down on its own index card. On the back she wrote down what you needed to do to get in. Then she set about getting grades to match her cards.
She bought more index cards and used them to make flash cards for French vocabulary. She used them to make study cards for history. She used them to arrange facts for her research papers. India ran the numbers on her index-card habit and concluded it would take at least two hundred dollars’ worth to get into the college of her dreams.
Her guidance counselor was wrong. She did not need friends or fun or new experiences. She did not need a love life, sexual experimentation, popularity, or memories to last a lifetime. All she needed were good grades and index cards.
She proved herself right about that for three whole years.
Then she found out she was completely, exactly, entirely wrong.