Full Ride (7 page)

The second or third time she apologized for “everything else,” I said, “Okay! I heard you! Just forget about it, all right?”

And that's how we left it.

But before, in that cold, dark, ashen place that was my life freshman year, I thought about all the things I could do just to serve Mom right—to serve both my parents right. Anybody who spent more than five minutes at Deskins High School could tell who the drug dealers were; even in the honors and advanced classes I heard about parties where kids stayed drunk all weekend long. I heard about kids who went joyriding in stolen cars, kids who hooked up with anybody they could find, kids who walked away from school and just never bothered coming back.

I did none of those things. I made geometry my drug of choice; I drowned my sorrows in
Rebecca
and
The Great Gatsby
and
Things Fall Apart,
in the League of Nations charter and the laws of thermodynamics
.
I piled up golden A's around me like I was building a fort.

Did I really have to work that hard just to prove Mom wrong? (Or . . . right? Which was it?)

So, anyhow. It's the start of my senior year, and I'm sitting atop three years of those shiny, hard-earned A's. I'm number four in my class. I will be number three if Stuart really does drop or flunk AP calc, but I know he's not going to do either of those things. And I'm sitting at a tableful of my fellow high-ranked seniors, and everyone's eating and laughing and talking. And even though Stuart still has ketchup on his hand, I'm sure that anyone watching from afar—say, a timid, insecure freshman who doesn't know anyone yet, the person I used to be—would think we act like we rule the universe. The people I'm with have that confidence built into their marrow, that air of assurance that everything's going to go their way. It's like they're genetically engineered to succeed.

And I'm good at faking it.

Clarice taps my arm and asks, “What about you, Becca?”

“Huh?” I say, ever so eloquently.

Rosa playfully jostles against me.

“Earth to Becca! Earth to Becca! What is wrong with you today?” She appeals to the rest of the table. “She was zoned out the whole time we were in that assembly, too.”

“I think that's a sign of advanced intelligence,” Oscar says, and I blow him a kiss.

There is nothing romantic going on between me and Oscar. We just goof around like that all the time.

“Focus, people!” Stuart scolds us. He trains his green eyes on me. Really, Stuart isn't bad looking—until he opens his mouth. Then he's so obnoxious you forget what he looks like.

Unfortunately, Stuart talks a lot.

“The question on the table,
Becca
,” he asks, smirking a little, “is what would you do, if you had to, to go to your dream college? What laws would you break? What moral dictates would you toss aside?”

And, yes, he really does say “moral dictates.”

“Would you sell your soul?” Clarice asks.

“Would you sleep with Mr. Dingleheimer?” Oscar asks.

Mr. Dingleheimer is one of the physics teachers, and he weighs four hundred pounds. I'm guessing Mrs. Dingleheimer probably doesn't even sleep with him.

“Would you pay someone to take the SAT for you if they could guarantee perfect scores?” Rosa asks. “Would you rob a bank? Would you sell state secrets to the Chinese?”

“Hey!” Oscar says. His family came to the United States from China, like, three generations ago, but sometimes he acts like it was yesterday.

“Would you hack in to Harvard's admissions system and sabotage your competition?” Stuart asks.

I am still a little off today. It isn't until I hear the word “hack,” that I realize what started this whole guessing game.

That article about Daddy and what he did,
I think.
They're just laughing at it.

I can feel my legs and my hands start to tremble. I slide my hands under the table and hold on to my knees.

Fake it fake it fake it fake it . . .

I put on my sweetest smile.

“I would practically kill myself to get an A in AP chem,” I say. “I would spend four Friday nights in a row taking SAT practice tests. Oh, wait. I already did those things last year! I'm all set!”

I turn toward Oscar, because I'm sure he's going to put his hand out for me to high-five—he's so nerdy and predictable like that. But he's just sitting there, gazing at me sadly. He shakes his head a little.

I look back at the rest of the group, and they're all wearing the same pitying expression.

Do they know something?
I wonder.
Did one of them figure something out?

“Oh, Becca,” Stuart says, appointing himself spokesperson for the group. “Becca Becca Bec.”

“What?” I say. Or screech, actually.

“What did you do all summer—hide under a rock?” Stuart asks. “Didn't you work on college stuff at all?”

“I worked at Riggoli's,” I say. “You know—making money for college? Do the math: Every minute I spent shredding mozzarella or slicing pepperoni earned me point-oh-eight seconds in a college classroom.”

I know this group: They won't let a ridiculous statement like that stand unexamined. I didn't actually do the math myself, but Rosa will. She'll pull out her calculator. She'll ask how much I make, and then she'll figure it all out: How much time my summer of pizza making would earn me at a private school, a public school, a community college . . .

I'll have them distracted in nothing flat.

But all of them are still staring at me.

“You'll never earn enough for college working at Riggoli's,” Stuart says flatly. “That's if you even manage to get in anywhere
good. Grades and test scores aren't enough. Do you know, there are people with almost-perfect SAT scores who still don't get into Georgetown? Georgetown! It's not even the Ivy League!”

“Stuart, you have got to stop looking at collegedata dot com,” Clarice says. “It's making you crazy.”

“And stop texting me about it!” Rosa adds, waving her peanut butter sandwich at him for emphasis. She sees me looking confused and seems to remember that I don't have a cell phone, so I haven't gotten any texts. “Collegedata's this website that tells you your chances of getting in at any school.”

“And where kids like you got in last year, and what kind of aid they got,” Stuart adds. “Though everyone says this year's going to be even tougher. . . .”

He does look a little wild-eyed. Maybe this conversation hasn't exactly been a joke. But then, Stuart's the kind of person who walks out of an exam moaning about how this time he's sure he's failed, he's ruined his life forever, he'll be lucky someday just to get a job emptying Porta-Johns. And then it will turn out that he only missed one question, and with the curve, he's got 100 percent.

“You'll be fine,” I tell him. “You've got a million extracurriculars. Marching band president, remember? Aren't you senior class president, too?”

Stuart shakes his head violently.

“That's not enough,” he says. “There's a senior class president at every high school in America. Do you know how many spaces there are in Harvard's freshman class? One thousand, six hundred and fifty-seven. A certain percentage of those are legacies; a certain percentage has to be international students—you break it down far enough, I'm probably competing with ten thousand other kids for just five spots!”

“You like competition,” I say.

“But how is that fair, when the odds are so stacked against me?” Stuart asks. He stabs his fork a little too hard against his cafeteria tray. “It used to be, if you were a decent student, you did okay on the ACT or SAT, you could go anywhere you wanted.”

“If you were a white male,” Rosa mutters. “And rich.”

Stuart ignores her.

“But now it's like, if you haven't already discovered the cure for cancer as a high school student, forget it,” Stuart says. “You don't have a prayer.”

“So discover the cure for cancer, already,” I say. “You've got a couple months.”

I look around—surely Oscar will high-five me for that zinger. But he and both the girls are slumped down. Stuart has them all stressed out now, worrying about college. He's discovered something, all right: insta-depression. He could market it to people with bipolar disorder, bring them down from their moments of euphoric mania just by talking.

“Or, I know,” I say. “You could take your gloom-and-doom act on the road. Go around telling high school seniors everywhere just how screwed they are. You'll be famous, and that's what will get you into Harvard. Then ten thousand senior class presidents will murder you because they don't appreciate the irony.”

“Very funny,” Stuart says.

Then, to my horror, he picks up a stack of papers from beside his tray—the packet Ms. Stela passed out in the assembly. Stuart flips it over to the last page, to the picture of Daddy.

“This guy,” he says, and he puts his finger right on Daddy's face. “He stole millions of dollars, right? You don't actually need that much to pay tuition. I bet he was going to buy his kid's way into Harvard. That's what I would do, if I had that kind of money. That's what lots of people do. It's like, nowadays, you have to cheat to come out on top.”

I'm standing before I even realize I've moved. Now everyone is staring at me again. Kids at neighboring tables are staring at me too.

I've made a huge mistake. I need to turn this into a joke, make it seem like I planned it and I'm just setting up another punch line. But there's not a single funny thought in my mind right now. Every cell in my body has switched over to “dead serious” mode.

The setting right before “And now we cry.”

I have to say something before that happens.

“I'm not going to let you ruin my senior year,” I fling at Stuart.
Not bad,
I congratulate myself. Except my voice sounds like somebody else's, like it belongs to some robot I may or may not be able to control. And I'm still talking. “You want to know what happens to cheaters? Cheaters get
caught.
They go to prison. They
lose
in the end.”

I barely stop myself from saying, “Like that guy did. Like Daddy.”

Bring it back to Stuart,
I tell myself frantically.
Stop talking about Daddy.

“So . . . if you're going to be a cheater . . .” My voice wobbles, but I have to go on. “Or if you're just going to be all negative and nasty all the time . . . then . . . then . . . I'll eat somewhere else.”

Okay, that was acceptable,
I tell myself.
Nothing that Oscar and Rosa and Clarice wouldn't have wanted to say too.

I turn around and walk away, feeling oddly triumphant. I've abandoned my unopened lunch sack and I left my gov book behind, but someone else will get them for me. I just need to make it to the girls' bathroom and calm down.

I'm halfway there when I hear Stuart calling after me.

“I'm only telling the truth, Becca,” he says. “You can't run away from the truth.”

I just finished a summer reading list of the classics. I bet I'm the only person in AP lit who actually read the whole of
Moby Dick
, instead of just skimming the SparkNotes online. But even with all that supposedly great literature sloshing around in my brain, somehow the only words I can think of are from a children's story:

Run, run, as fast as you can

You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man.

The words in my head are in Daddy's voice. The way he always told that story, nobody ever caught the Gingerbread Man. He didn't fall for anyone's tricks; the fox didn't gobble him down. He never met his deserved end. He just kept running and running and running, the happiest Gingerbread Man around. He could run away from anything.

How am I supposed to handle any truth? My head was filled with lies from the very start.

I pretend I don't hear Stuart. I keep walking. I shove my way into the girls' bathroom, and it is blessedly empty. God still loves me, after all.

Debatable,
I think.

I can't bear to consider
that
issue right now. And I can't count on the bathroom staying empty. I enter the stall at the far end and bolt the door, guaranteeing myself eight square feet of privacy. I lean against the concrete block wall, which is probably exactly like the concrete block walls imprisoning my father.

Vanderbilt,
I think.
Vanderbilt University.

If my father really had stolen all that money for me, it wouldn't have been Harvard he'd try to buy or bribe my way into. It would have been Vanderbilt.

If.

He wasn't actually stealing all that money for you,
I tell myself.

But it's too late. I'm plunged into some alternate-world fantasy based on another “if”:
If Daddy hadn't been caught . . .

If Daddy hadn't been caught, I would still live in Georgia. He and Mom and I would have spent the summer visiting various
college campuses, maybe with groups of my giggling friends, all of us imagining glorious futures for ourselves of frat parties and sorority formals and midnight pizza runs. . . .

We would have saved the trip to Vanderbilt for a special day. Maybe it would have been just the three of us; maybe I would have picked some truly beloved friend to marvel with me at Daddy's tales of
his
days as a student at Vanderbilt.