Meanwhile, I am keeping a secret.
When in January I’d opened the envelope containing my first quarter grades, I saw a B, a C, and a D on my transcript. My 2.0 GPA was the proof I’d been expecting all along that people like me—Black, female, from the Midwest—in fact did not belong at a place like Stanford. To add insult to injury, the D was in Communications 1—the stereotypical “easy” class at any college.
If my grades get even a hairsbreadth worse, I could flunk out of Stanford.