“If you touch my latte one more time,” I tell Hector, “I will end you.”
He lifts the cup to his lips and makes slurping noises while he sips. Laura is rolling her eyes but she doesn’t lift her head from her sketchbook.
“Goddammit, Hector,” I say, reaching for the cup. But he’s got the longest arms and even though I’m tall, I don’t have monkey reach. He is smiling in his sweet and silly way, and I settle back in my chair. I refuse to sulk. I am stronger than caffeine.
“I won’t actually end you,” I say comfortingly, if a little grudgingly. His dimples deepen.
“I don’t know. You could probably take me,” he says.
I ignore that, and ignore my impulse to glance around and see if anyone heard him. I pick up the printed-out pages I brought to class and then toss them back on the table. I’m scooted back with my calculus book open on my knees because linear approximations are still pissing me off and now my midterm is tomorrow instead of two days away and I don’t want to think about personal essays anymore.
“She was up all night, Hector,” Jolene says, looking up from her own printout.
The rest of us are slouching at the big round table, but Jolene sits as if she’s been carefully, gracefully arranged into place. Her hands never stop moving, creasing the corners of her pages. Her small face is serious, but it almost always is.
Hector glances at her, and then back at me, still smiling. He has a gift, and all of it is centered in that dimple on his cheek.
“What were you doing?” he says. Hector’s problem is that he smiles a lot. The word sunny was invented for him. The word cheerful is inscribed across his heart. I feel guilty when he irritates me, as if he is a sweet puppy who should only be loved.
“The essay,” I say. I am speaking so carefully and deliberately. “The assignment that I am very annoyed you forgot about.” I can hear how rough-edged my voice is. It could leave behind abrasions. I close my mouth in case I’m just baring my teeth instead of making an actual smile. He wouldn’t notice, though. Or if he did, it wouldn’t bother him. I am grateful for that, even when it irritates me.
He reaches out and tucks a curl behind my ear. “You work too hard,” he says. “You don’t have to kill yourself all the time, you know. It makes you cranky.”
“Yes, Hector, I am extremely cranky,” I say.
“See, I do learn,” he says. He makes a check mark in the air with his finger. “Gold star for Hector! But you shouldn’t have stayed up all night.”
Laura glances up from her sketchbook and squints at him. She says, “Hector. Honey.” He cocks his head at her. “You remember Harvard, I assume, and I have to assume because otherwise I am worried about your brain capacity and your ability to retain and retrieve essential, life-saving information.”
“Well yeah,” he says. He slips his arm around my back. He is so easy and thoughtless in his gestures and I don’t understand how that works. I wonder how it would be to not have everything feel like a chess game, planning three moves in advance. Especially when, like me, you are terrible at chess.
“I’m just saying. She doesn’t have to work so hard. She’s in. She’s got this. She’s on it. Early admission and a free ride.” He leans over like he’s going to kiss the side of my neck.
“Quit,” I say, ducking, but I can’t quite keep myself from smiling at him. He grins and kisses my temple instead. He flips his pen a few times, tapping it on the pad of paper in front of him, but stops when Jolene frowns at him.
Everyone is writing again, and the whole guidance class is a low-pitched buzz of typing and pen scratching and whispering. Today we’re supposed to be “pausing for a breath.” Writing down all our best qualities, the things that make us unique and interesting and stand head and shoulders above all the other candidates and other handy guidance-counselor phrases. It’s supposed to help us take a fresh look at the draft of the personal essay we’ve already finished. That I haven’t finished. It will help us revise it with clear eyes, Dr. Ellman says.
I am not interested in my best qualities. I am interested in not messing up my calc grade. I look at the textbook in my lap, the wandering numbers across my notebook, and realize I have screwed up this function. I flip to the back of the book because sometimes that’s where the answers are.
Hector goes back to drawing interlocking squares all over his paper. Some people have their heads down and are scribbling away furiously, others finished twenty minutes ago and are now comparing their long lists of best qualities with each other. So many of us have nannies and tutors imported from San Francisco or San Diego, who have spent most of their careers telling us that we are unique in hundreds of ways that the world will appreciate and celebrate, so everyone’s got plenty to scribble down.
Not me. As I sit here in the hyacinth-colored room in the northwest corner of George Love Academy, I can hear the buzz of the hive. Everyone here is busy, achieving, overachieving. I am not a special snowflake. I know that anyone could overtake me at any moment.
Our school was founded by a disillusioned millionaire oil executive (named George Love, of course) who wanted to drop out and tune in to intellectual rigor and spiritual growth. There are only 150 of us in this place, but we are all moonflower spirits whose great and beautiful gifts are being massaged here under the hot lights of our high-school incubator into greatness that will transform the world for the goodness of all mankind—or at least that’s what the plaque above the door says.
I like to think Mr. George is off in whatever afterlife he imagined, feeling good about his time on earth. But this school is only partly what he imagined.
Rich people move to Santa Ansia just to enroll their kids here—that’s how my best friend, Laura, ended up here. Her dad is a mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures lawyer; her mom is a charity-gala hostess/bon vivant/drinker of coconut drinks in a wide variety of tropical locations. Super important. Super busy. Easier to toss their kid into a fancy school than to pay attention to her, Laura says. Her parents are pretty standard-issue, for this town.
Our teachers, on the other hand, believe very, very hard in their mission. Our Principle (who would be called principal in a normal school) actually says things like, “It’s so essentially vital to me to be a Sherpa to my students. To hoist you and convey you onward into your destiny when you can’t go on your own—to use the popularized Christian vernacular in which so many take true and welcoming comfort. Such a lyrical metaphor. Such magnanimity.” She really says that. All the time.
Principle Simons has been here from the start. She’s the one who wrote the Humanism Handbook that is required reading every year—how to respect your body and your spirit, and the bodies and spirits of those around you. She’s not wrong, obviously, clearly. But all that sincerity gets overwhelming.
Somehow, simultaneous to all this conveyance and respecting and Sherpa-ing, we get written up in national newspapers for our outstanding innovation in educational theories and practice—our alternative physical education program, a fully equipped physics lab, a vegetarian cafeteria, stringent rhetoric and debate and Latin requirements, and a bank of three personal days.
Which means those parent types come in droves, so that George Love Academy becomes this spicy organic vegetable soup of intense competition, and yoga instead of gym, and discussion of chakras, and a question, at the start of each school year, about what your preferred gender pronoun is.
My mother refused to let my brothers go to GLA when she was still around. I wonder how she feels about me being valedictorian of the place. If she knows. Wherever she is.
I picture my mother back home in San Diego. Or maybe she fled all the way to Bogotá to live with the rest of the extended family we never got to meet. Wherever she is, I picture her relieved to be gone.
Anyway. The thing about going to school with the same people for your entire life is that we all know what everyone else is writing. Emily, the new head of the volleyball team, is writing down “upper-body strength” and “winner.” Jared, the school treasurer, wrote “go-getter attitude” and “chocolate-chip cookies.” Morgan, the salutatorian to my valedictorian—and oh, does she hate that—is writing down adjectives as if she’s been waiting her whole life for this opportunity. Brandon, Laura’s twin, should still be writing because he has a ridiculous number of positive qualities, though many of them are external.
Laura and Brandon look so much alike. But where Laura is a bright and bobbing balloon on a windy day, he is currently lounging in his chair like he has all the time in the world, his hand threaded into Morgan’s blunt bob and his eyes half closed in a sleepy, sexy way.
Ace, my boyfriend back in seventh grade, is filling his entire page with the word butts. Hector isn’t writing anything because he’s going to Europe or South America or somewhere instead of college, because his parents think he needs time to experience the world before he finds his place in it or something like that. He hasn’t decided where he wants to travel yet, but they’ll send him anywhere he wants. He is going to write an album about seeing the world, he says. If he remembers his pen.
I know Jolene has written “prevailing” somewhere on her list and she has leaned forward over her paper, a wing of her blond hair curving along her cheek. She’s chewing on her lip and tapping on the table and making faces at the paper and shaking her head at herself because she can never quite be still. Laura has written “arty” and then filled the rest of the page with tiny, intricate sketches that bleed into each other and make the page look like it is a thousand miles deep. She’s going to set the Rhode Island School of Design on fire—and then the rest of the world. Right now she’s just sitting with her heels up on the chair and her sketchbook propped on her knees and her afro of rough-velvet curls framing her face.
Jolene and Laura—I could take both their lists and add a thousand more entries for them.
As discussed, I haven’t written anything.
I write out the next calc equation and frown at it. I dislike approximations. Math should have solid answers with no wiggle room.
Laura looks up from her sketchbook with big eyes. “Ooh!” she says, waving her pencil. “An idea, I have an idea. Okay, what if everyone brought their own food?”
“For what?” I say.
“Your birthday party,” she says.
“A party? I don’t have time for that,” I say.
“Liar,” she says. “You’ve been devising intricate plans and writing lists for three months. I know it because I know you and I have seen how you write endless lists when you’re planning and I don’t even understand how they don’t give you panic attacks.”
“I like to be organized,” I say.
“So, my idea,” she says.
“So what you’re saying is everyone brings their own food to eat?” I ask. Jolene laughs.
“Well, that would be an incredible cost savings and possibly also net you some easy clean-up with a tradeoff for the environmental damage factor with all the disposable plates and things. But no!” She slaps her sketchbook down on the desk. “We assign everyone a country and they bring a food from it.”
“We’re inviting the entire class,” I say. “Are there that many countries?”
Laura rolls her eyes at me.
“And are we that organized?” I say.
“I know you are,” Laura says.
“The real question is, do I want to be?” I counter.
Jolene says to Laura, “I would rather not organize a global buffet.” She glances up as Dr. Ellman strolls by. “Organizing buffets is not my strongest skill,” Jolene says innocently.
Dr. Ellman stops at my chair. “Psst,” she says, leaning over my shoulder. “One of your best qualities is conviction.” She winks at me and then strolls away with her hands behind her back. Her oxfords are very shiny.
“I don’t even know what that means,” I say. “Why is she telling me this?” I throw my pen down and it bounces across the table and then slides onto the floor.
“I think your best quality is self-assuredness,” Jolene says.
“I think it’s your eyebrows,” Laura says.
“I think it’s your chili,” Hector says. He is not wrong.
“Also,” Laura says, “feather boas and tiaras! And beads and scarves and masks and dancing.”
I blink. “What?” Those don’t sound like qualities.
“For the party?” she says. Sometimes it is hard to follow in her wake. Everything looks easy and effortless for her and Brandon. And they both seem to understand how the world works. They know how to survive outside of this little hothouse of a town. I suspect the rest of us are going to find out the hard way.
“Yes of course for the party,” she says.
“Will there really be tiaras?” I say suspiciously.
“You do love tiaras,” Jolene says to me. She’s smiling. Her eyes are the frostiest blue and her skin is pale and freckled, so she always looks like she is dappled with sunlight. Her bob is a bright knife-edge along the line of her jaw. Laura always says someday she’ll be someone’s yuppie dream mom, in tailored shirts and cuffed shorts and perfect, unscuffed flats.
“I don’t mind tiaras,” I say. “They’re kind of whimsical.” I pause. “My best quality is whimsy.”
Hector raises his eyebrows at me. “I don’t think you should write that one down.”
“What do you mean? I am filled with humor and light!” I argue.
Jolene is laughing because she knows when I’m joking. Laura frowns at me because she worries when I joke.
“What about pizza?” Hector says.
“No,” I say.
“You never listen to me,” he says.
“So why start now?” Laura asks.
“Hector has a point. Everyone likes pizza,” Jolene points out. She picks up the pen and writes “PIZZA” all in caps.
“Yes, but it’s my birthday. I care about what I’d like,” I say.
Jolene crosses it out again.
Dr. Ellman is suddenly at her side. “Your best quality is pizza?” she says. She cocks her head.
“No,” Jolene says. “I just had another idea.”
Dr. Ellman leans in. She looks thoughtful and serious and compassionate. She taps a short, ragged fingernail against her narrow lips. Jolene shoots us a wide-eyed, panicked look. She knows what happens when teachers put on that face.
“Have you considered the power of your story, Jolene?” Dr. Ellman says. Her voice is pitched low and intimate.
Jolene is the third person in our school to come out as transgender, so no one really blinked when she did it in the fourth grade. But teachers like to remind her that they’re open-minded and accepting, and that she is special. This backfires. All they really remind her of is that they have no idea what they’re talking about.
“Yes,” Jolene says. She flips her paper over.
We initiate Distraction Technique C—the Everyone’s Got Their Something maneuver.
“Dr. Ellman, is it too much of a downer to discuss my abandonment as a child in my personal essay?” I ask. At the same time Laura says, “Dr. Ellman, would the admissions board be rocked by the power of my quest to become a female designer or maybe an artist in a male-dominated world?”
Hector is glancing back and forth between us and Jolene just sighs, but Dr. Ellman’s mouth is opening and closing like an aquarium fish. There’s too much to affirm. Too much to validate. Dr. Ellman is immobilized. A moment later she is distracted by an argument in the corner about what constitutes a “quality” as opposed to an “ingrained behavior” and squeaks off in her oxfords.
I have wondered myself what Jolene’s essay will be. She does not often talk about her parents, their anger at her, her conviction that has had to turn into bravery too often. She wore a dress to the first day of fourth grade—a dress my grandmother bought Jolene because her parents wouldn’t listen to her, refused to listen to her, slammed doors on her for a year. Jolene asked everyone politely that they call her Jolene please and not everyone has been polite all the time, not always, despite the Humanism Handbook, and the other kids who came before her. People get curious. They ask her prying, detailed questions about her body. Jolene does not like it when I’m angry for her.
There’s a moment of silence after Dr. Ellman’s retreat. Then Jolene calmly says, “Not pizza then.”
“Grandmother hates pizza,” I say. “If she even tries to eat it she just tears off all the cheese and toppings and then has a couple of bites of the bread and then she dabs at her lips with a napkin and throws it all away.”
“That’s terrible,” Hector says.
Jolene says, “Maybe she just thinks it’s too greasy.”
Laura thumps her feet down on the floor and leans forward, pushing her sketchbook across the table. The page of heavy, curving interlinking lines is geometrically beautiful and a little dizzying. “I don’t understand your grandmother,” she says, and I look up from the sketchbook. “She’s so strange about that stuff.”
“What stuff?” Hector says, but Laura’s not stopping.
“And I don’t get the whole birthday bribe every year because what is she trying to say exactly and why doesn’t she realize that she’s just out of her mind?”
“She’s not out of her mind,” I say.
“She’s kind of out of her mind!” Laura throws her hands in the air and her pencil goes flying. “It’s not her business. Your body isn’t her business.”
Laura lives in a world where she doesn’t have to answer to anyone, especially not her dad and stepmom. She can disappear into San Francisco for a weekend without a word. My father says, Jesus, don’t they ever keep an eye on those kids? but then he goes back to his romance novels and eating entire bags of home-baked granola, totally ruining his dinner.
“Laura,” I say. “She wants to help.”
“The weight-loss coupons,” Hector says, a furrow between his eyes.
I shake my head at him, trying to signal please stop talking, but he says, “How are they helpful? I think they’d probably make someone feel bad about themselves.”
“I don’t feel bad about myself,” I snap.
“You shouldn’t,” he says, surprised.
“Well I don’t,” I say, and slap my calculus book shut with a bang that makes Laura jump and frown at me.
Jolene says, “I think she doesn’t know any other way to help you with your future. It’s logical to her.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I say. I flip open the book on my lap again, hard.
“Hey, you could write about that for your essay,” Laura says. “Unique and powerful topic that reveals a facet of your personality, check. I bet ‘my grandmother is wildly bribing me to diet’ is not in your transcript.”
“No.” I can hear the anger in my voice and I flinch at it.
Laura just looks at me. “But she’s trying to help,” she says mildly, and I hate it when she’s smug.
“That’s a pretty good idea,” Hector says.
“Hector—” I start, and I’m not sure what I’m about to say and I am guessing I’ll regret it but I can’t seem to stop and so I guess I should be grateful when a knee knocks into my temple.
“Goddammit, Ace,” I say, grabbing at my forehead. “That hurt!”
“Sorry! Sorry!” he chirps, looking down at me. He’s climbed up on his chair, holding a piece of notebook paper over his head and away from Morgan. He is probably the only person in school who would need to stand on a chair to be taller than Morgan. Dr. Ellman turns to see what’s going on.
Morgan has her field-hockey face on, the one that makes opponents terrified of her as she lunges after them. She is many things: current class president, having beaten me this year for the first time, the most popular girl in school by many metrics (though the Humanism Handbook rejects notions of social peer ranking). Morgan thinks gossip is the smallest unit of personal connection and “essential for the social lubrication of groups of every size,” which I know because she did a paper on the topic in the Communications and Linguistics class we had, but also because she just wants to know all the worst things about everyone.
We don’t dislike each other. Not liking someone at all is very different from disliking someone. I did not like her long before she started dating Brandon. I did not like her from the day in second grade when she told me I would splash too hard and empty the pool if I tried to jump in. And then I pushed her in.
I felt bad after, because that’s no way to deal with someone who sucks. But to this day, every time Morgan makes a snide remark I remember that moment and her big eyes as she fell backward and it is still satisfying.
Jolene says Morgan is like a shark. She’s more scared of you than you are of her. Jolene watches a lot of Animal Planet. I say she’s exactly like a shark and every time I see her teeth I know something bad is going to happen. Jolene says I don’t understand sharks. I do understand Morgan, though.
She is small and awful and right now she’s getting louder as Ace dances away from her.
“Help, Dr. Ellman,” Ace says. “She’s going to kill me.” He’s jumped off the chair and is backing away around the table with that notebook paper in his hand, and Morgan is stalking after him.
“Morgan is going to have an aneurism!” I say. I can hear the delight in my voice.
“This is the best,” Laura says.
“He is going to hurt himself,” Jolene says, as Ace backs into Emily’s chair.
“Give it to me right now,” Morgan says.
“But I’m not finished reading it!” Ace says, still backing away. “‘Dear diary,’” he reads, squinting at the paper he’s holding out and away from Morgan’s grasping hands.
“Ace Valentino Farber,” Morgan growls.
Dr. Ellman seems to be trying to speak in measured tones, which no one can hear. Brandon is poking at his phone. Morgan rushes at Ace and there’s a horrible tearing noise. Ace says, “I’m sorry, Morgan. I’m really sorry, Dr. Ellman.” He’s holding up a crumpled, shredded piece of paper. Morgan has the other half. His expression is contrite.
“He’s not sorry,” Morgan says with her teeth gritted. You can only do that when you’re really mad; otherwise you sound like you’re trying to talk with your mouth full. She waves her half of the paper at him. “I was working on that.”
“I’m really sorry,” Ace says.
“You will be,” I say quietly, and Jolene laughs.
“Everyone sit down,” Dr. Ellman says. “That’s enough adrenaline. It’s time to breathe. You,” she says to Ace. “You sit down here.” She taps our table.
“Oh come on,” I say. I know what’s coming.
“Ashley,” Dr. Ellman says, “You sit at Ace’s table.” She surveys Morgan and me. “Valedictorian and salutatorian. There we go. Nice and peaceful.”
Laura makes an attempt at a save. “But, Dr. Ellman, I was just about to ask Ashley’s advice about my essay. Because we are both persons of color I think it’s important to address our intersectionality.”
But I think Dr. Ellman’s reached her limit for the day. “Just. Write,” she says.
Morgan smiles sweetly up at me as I pull out my chair and drop my notebook on the table. Brandon winks at me, which is awful because it is so very cheesy, and because he looks far too cute when he does that.
“Oh god, Brandon, don’t wink,” I say.
“I had something in my eye,” he says, and then he winks again.
“Please stop that,” I say, but I’m smiling at him.
Jessica Loh, sitting next to him, has turned pink and started giggling into her notebook as if he were talking to her. She has always seemed to get contact highs from boys.
“So!” Morgan says. “What were we talking about over there?” She leans forward and looks at my notebook. “Oh honey,” she says. “Pizza? You’ve really written down pizza. Well, I suppose there are clichés for a reason.”
“Morgan, was that supposed to be a fat joke?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Do you feel fat?”
“I feel like your material needs some work,” I say. I slap my notebook shut and smile at her big. “Speaking of! How’s your essay going?” I nod at the wadded ball of paper in front of her.
“Just fine,” she says. “I’ve already applied for early admittance to NYU. I’m not worried.” Of course she has. Of course she isn’t.
“That will give you plenty of time to finish your other application to clown school,” I say. Makes devastating comebacks is not on my transcripts either.
Jessica is yearning at Brandon. She looks like she is made of cotton candy, swathed in acres of fluffy sweater and fluffy skirt and heart shapes instead of pupils. He’s ignoring all of us, still staring at his phone.
“Don’t worry. I won’t get my acceptance in time for your birthday party,” Morgan says. “That’ll be my gift to you.” She shows me her shark teeth.
“That would be hard to wrap,” I say.
“But what about your other gifts?” she continues. “I heard your grandmother’s getting you something special this year.” She widens her eyes and leans forward when she sees me stiffen. “She was at the dealership a couple of days ago. Talking to my father. You know, as they do. Just talking . . . about everything.”
“I’m sure,” I say. My grandmother is good at small talk. I am picturing the Volvo showroom three towns away, my grandmother glancing around at the dumpy little cars and frowning because she has never understood why I liked them. Thinking about the coupon she’s probably already written out. That is sitting on the writing desk in her office.
“She didn’t tell me she was going to the dealer,” I say before I can stop myself.
“Well, it’s a surprise, isn’t it?” Morgan says. “She tries to get you something surprising every year. Doesn’t she?”
I stare at Morgan, her sharp little nose and her wide-set eyes and the smirk on her face, and glance over at Brandon and Jessica. What does Morgan know exactly?
“That’s how birthdays work,” I say slowly.
Morgan glances away when Dr. Ellman claps her hands, and I breathe for the first time in what seems like minutes.
Behind us Ace is arguing that butts could be an abstract quality instead of a concrete noun.
“Okay, people,” Dr. Ellman says. “We’re just about done here. We’re going to stop, and we’re going to breathe through the chime, which is—” She pauses for a moment, then glances at her watch. “Well, almost now. In just a second. There it is,” she says as it chimes over her voice.
Brandon stretches when he stands, and his shirt lifts, showing an expanse of his smooth skin. I’m not staring. Or I shouldn’t be, anyway.
“No more winks,” he says to me. He slides his arm around Morgan while she’s shuffling her papers into her bag and she is distracted by the way he looks down at her. They’re out the door ahead of me and Ace is at my elbow.
“Did you enjoy chatting about your future with Morgan?” I ask.
“Did you know that Morgan thinks she has no ‘best’ qualities because all of her qualities are equally superior?” he says.
“You’re joking,” I say.
“You’re exaggerating,” Jolene says, slightly scolding.
I’m annoyed that something Morgan said actually amuses me.
“If only I were. But alas, Morgan keeps living up to our expectations.” He sweeps away ahead of us.
Laura says, “Why is she so awful? I don’t understand why anyone would be so awful for no good reason. It’s like she takes awful pills and washes them down with awful juice and then rolls around in awfulness.”
“She doesn’t mean to be,” Jolene says. “She just is.”
“She was trying to scare me, I think,” I say. And I realize that’s exactly it, this feeling like gravity has stopped working inside me—fear. And a tiny flare of dread that I have worked hard to stomp out. That no one else is ever supposed to see.
“Scare you?” Jolene says. “With what?”
I don’t answer.
“There’s nothing she can scare you with,” Laura says. “She’s being ridiculous. She’s being—”
“Awful,” Jolene says.
“Right,” I say.