Authors: John Goode
I
T
WAS
almost ten at night as I knocked on Jennifer’s door.
Her dad answered after a few minutes. “Brad? Son, you have to know how late it is.”
I nodded as I tried to keep calm. “I know, sir, and I wouldn’t normally bother you, but I need to talk to Jennifer for just a second….”
He didn’t move from the door for a long moment. Finally he arched an eyebrow and asked, “You still gay?”
The question stopped me cold for a moment. “Um, yeah. Last time I checked.”
He didn’t blink as he seemed to scrutinize me like I was a lab experiment. Finally he sighed and took half a step back. “Then I guess I can trust you up there for five minutes. Any longer and I will remind you I have firearms in the house.”
I nodded as I flew up the stairs to her room.
I had wanted to tell Kyle, of course, but there was no way he was answering the phone for me right now. I thought about calling Josh, but since I had never once called him, it seemed like a weird thing to start on a Sunday night. I knocked on Jennifer’s door. She had a robe on as she opened it slowly. “Brad? What the hell….”
I rushed in and took a deep breath. “I had to tell someone before I exploded.”
She didn’t close the door the whole way, obviously knowing her dad had let me up here on a pass.
“Tell someone what?” she asked, concerned.
I handed her the letter and waited for her to read it. Her face paled as she looked up at me with questioning eyes. “Is this for real?”
I nodded.
We stood there for a long time, neither one talking as we tried to figure out what came next.
K
YLE
D
O
YOU
know what the difference between adumbrate and sketch is?
How about evince and express?
And my personal favorite, what is the difference between fecund and fertile?
The difference is your entire life.
See, in one life, where you do know the difference of those words, you score a near-perfect score on your SATs, colleges across the country sit up and take notice, and one of them is kind enough to offer to pay your way to attend their school. You obtain a degree in something that you want to do as a career, you enter the workplace at the very least equal if not ahead of the rest, and if you were very, very lucky, you made some contacts along the way to help you get a job. Because you have a real career, you are free to pursue a lifestyle in which you have more choices than absolutes, more free time than work, and are ensuring that you have a future so when you’re old and tired, you have the luxury of not working.
In the other life, where you don’t know the difference, you score a higher-than-average score on the SAT. If you’re lucky, maybe one or two colleges will offer you a limited scholarship that will reduce the cost of an education but in no way assure that you will be able to actually get a degree. You end up having to take at least one job so you can have such luxuries like food and shelter, and in the end probably end up dropping out and moving back home. You end up working at a gas station while you attend community college, and if you’re lucky, you will one day be able to be an assistant manager at Better Buy. You are stuck in the same town you were born in, and it is most likely where you will die.
What a difference a couple of words make, huh?
This is what had been running through my mind the past few weeks as the final opportunities to take the SAT drew near. I had taken it three times so far, and the best I’d scored was a 2184. I know to most people that would be a great score, but I was not most people. There was no college fund put away for me, least not anymore. If there had been such a stash of money in the past, it had long been spent by my mom to maintain our luxurious lifestyle. Since I had spent the first three years of my high school life being a social ninja, I had exactly zero extracurricular activities on my record, which was the equivalent of a death sentence for most students.
The one thing I could say I had done was blackmail the school into starting the gay-straight alliance, but since we hadn’t even had our first meeting yet, it wasn’t going to count for much when weighing my applications against other people. So I had no money, no fancy activities, I hadn’t been active in student government, and the closest I had been to the school theater program was painting backdrops for
Our Town
the year I was forced to take drama as an elective. The only thing, and I mean only, was the fact that I had an oversized brain. Up to this point in life it hadn’t helped me much, but I was hoping it could come through and pull a rabbit out of that SAT hat.
A 2184 was not a rabbit. It might have been a bouquet of flowers or maybe a dove or two, but it was not a rabbit. And I needed a big, white, floppy-eared bunny, or I might as well get “Resident of Foster, Texas” tattooed on my arm because it was going to be true as long as I was alive.
No one else seemed to understand how important this test was to me, but they decided to fault on the side of caution and just let me be crazy in silence.
I had spent days at the library copying every question in the practice SAT books they had there onto index cards so I could have a portable version of the test on me at all times. Then I broke the questions down into three categories. The first were the ones I knew the answers without thinking. The second were ones that seemed too easy for their own good. These included math word problems that asked dodgy questions, math equations that asked you to solve for more than one variable at the same time, and words that looked too much like other words. The last pile were the ones that were so daunting that if most people ever got that far into the test they would just start picking random answers and hoping that urban myth about picking C was right.
These questions became my own Legion of Doom.
Every spare second I had went to going over my cards, drilling the salient facts into my brain one word at a time. Okay, so not every second, maybe every other second I used to study. The other seconds I saved up and spent with Brad. I could see in his eyes that he thought I was worrying about nothing and that my scores were more than sufficient. He was wrong, and one day, after baseball practice, I pulled out a folder and began to explain it to him.
“Look, I want to go to Stanford, and their average acceptance score is 2150. That is just for them to look at you, not an automatic scholarship or anything. That is like almost forty percent higher than a normal college, and their acceptance rate is seven percent.
Seven
!” He still didn’t seem to get it. “That means even if you have over a 2150 and your application is perfect, out of every one hundred applications they get, only seven people get in.”
“Yeah, but you’re different,” he said, giving me the smile that could melt ice at twenty feet. “They’ll take one look at you and say ‘We need to get that guy in here!’ You know that, right?”
It was sweet he thought getting into college worked like that.
“You do know they aren’t even going to look at me period if I don’t have a much higher score than the one I have now right?”
He just laughed and pulled me across the bed toward him. “You worry too much.”
I let him draw me into a hug because I needed one. “Stanford costs on average fifty-two thousand dollars a year. Four years is over two hundred grand. I have to worry because I don’t have that much money.”
He twisted one of the drawstrings of my hoodie around his finger as he teased, “Have you thought of doing porn? That’s easy money.”
I nudged him as he laughed out loud. “You gonna do it with me?” I teased back. “Because I refuse to have you pimp me out on the side.”
“Aw, but I wanted a huge purple hat and a cane!” I turned around and pounced on him as he burst out in hysterics. “I could be all ‘Bitch, where’s my money!’ and I could get a big ole boat of a car to cruise in.”
“You’d do that to me?” I asked him, pinning him to the bed.
“Nope,” he said with a bright smile. “I don’t share you with anyone. No matter how much money they offer.”
I leaned down to kiss him. “Good answer.”
Just as our lips were about to touch, he added, “And I didn’t even need a stack of cards to come up with it.”
I pulled back and looked down at the smirk on his face. “You are so dead,” I warned him.
Turns out I didn’t get any studying done that night at all.
T
HE
NEXT
day I spent studying to make up for lost time.
I had less than twenty-four hours before the test, and I needed to cram as much as I could in that time. Thankfully I was caught up in my classes, so I could afford spending a period or two going through my cards over and over. At lunch I spread out my books to go over some of the hardest questions and made notes on my cards to help me out. Brad put a Pepsi down next to me, which I downed in one gulp because I needed the caffeine in a serious way. If there was an intravenous way to ingest caffeine, I would have long ago hooked one up to my arm and forgone sleep altogether.
They were talking about me and my obsession with getting a better score. I kept one ear listening as I tried to look up if “upbraid” meant what I thought it did.
I heard Brad sigh as he said, “No, he has scored a 2100 three times and thinks he can do better.”
“I got a 2184.” I said, not looking up. “I want a 2200 at least.”
I found “upbraid” and cursed whoever came up with such an incredibly lame word as Jennifer asked me, “What’s a perfect score?”
“Max is 2400,” I answered as I wrote a definition on my card.
They kept talking about their scores, which was when I zoned them out. I shouldn’t have let Brad lure me away from studying last night. I was going to have to go over the math all night, and that meant little to no sleep.
“Kyle,” Jennifer asked, drawing nearer to me, “you do know your score is great, right?”
I might have answered her in a more hospitable way if I wasn’t so damn tired of explaining this to everyone around me. “Great isn’t enough. I need perfect. I need outstanding. I need to have the best SAT score in the school if I even have a chance of my colleges looking at me. Minus starting up the alliance, I have zero extracurricular activities, and I would need Hillary Clinton to write me a recommendation to make a difference, and I don’t know Hillary Clinton. Do you?” She shook her head. “Then I need a better score.”
I went back to my notes, hoping it was the last question I got on this for a while.
I’m not sure how much time had passed, but when Brad called my name to get my attention, most of the quad was empty. I looked over at him, and he had a worried look on his face. “The second bell just went off. You’re going to be late.”
“Fuck,” I swore as I began to scoop my books up and throw them into my bag. “If they insist on making our entire life depend on this fucking test, the least they could do was give us time off to study for it.” The cards fell out of my hands, and I let out a cry as they fell to the earth, their order forever lost as they hit the steps and went everywhere. It was like looking at my future crumble into ashes as I saw the wind snatch a few of them and swirl them across the quad.
I dropped my bag and went racing after them. It was a metaphor for my entire life in one idiotic gesture.
I began to scoop up the cards on the steps when the wind gusted again and took more of them into the air. The cards flew higher and higher, out of my reach, and I mentally gave up. The imagery of my life literally blowing away from me just caused something to short circuit in my brain. I made the same sob a drowning cat would and sank to the steps. Who was I kidding? I was never going to get out of this town. This place was worse than
The Matrix,
because if I was in a computer-generated reality, at least I’d have cool superpowers or something. Instead, I was a nobody teenager in a nowhere town doing nothing.
“I got as many as I could.” I looked up and saw Brad with a handful of my cards, out of breath. His face was flushed, and he had the same smile I would imagine on a really happy golden retriever if they had human faces and liked chasing things as much as Brad did. “Don’t be sad anymore. Please?”
He was the best thing that had ever happened in my life.
“You don’t give up, do you?” I asked him, taking the cards.
He sat down on the steps and leaned close to me. “I refuse to surrender on two things. Baseball and you.” He looked over, and I saw the green in his eyes flicker as his bangs fell into his face. “And if you want to know a secret, baseball is a distant second.”
I was late to fifth period. I didn’t care.
A
FTER
SCHOOL
, I met him by the locker room like I always did before practice.
“You wanna go somewhere when I’m done?” he asked, nodding to one of the guys as they walked past us.
“I can’t.” I saw the disappointment in his face, and I hurriedly added, “I only have tonight to study, and all I am going to be doing is freaking out over this stupid test, and I don’t want to put you through that because I will be—”
He shut me up by kissing me. My whole train of thought got derailed, and he said, “I’ll pick you up for school tomorrow, then.”
“You’re not mad?” I asked, trying to regain my equilibrium.
“You can make it up to me.” He had an evil look on his face, and I understood exactly what he meant.
“You are going to want a back rub,” I said rather than asked.
“No,” he answered, looking innocently at me. “I am going to want a lot of back rubs.”
That made me laugh. “Okay, fine, go play ball and stuff. I’ll text you if I get a break in studying.”
“Text me even if you don’t take a break.”
I nodded, and he jogged into the locker room. I had a long night ahead of me, and none of it was going to be fun.
A
T
SOME
point I passed out.