Thanks for the Trouble

  Not until the cash was gone.

  “That’s entirely unreasonable and you know it. I won’t be able to check up on you to see if you go through with it. By that time, I’ll be swimming with the fishes.”

  You said you wouldn’t do that until you got the phone call.

  “Which I did. Nathaniel’s stable, Parker. I’m not just going to sit around waiting for him to die.”

  So now you’re going to do it when the money’s gone?

  “Why not? It seems like a fitting ending.”

  Then I won’t let you spend it.

  “Oh, you dear boy. I don’t need your permission to buy things. I could turn around and purchase fifty more notebooks right now. Shall I?” She took a step back toward FLAX, and I had to sprint to get between her and the door.

  “Then we’re agreed,” she said. “You’ll be applying to college forthwith.”

  But applications aren’t due until the end of the year.

  “So what? Haven’t you ever finished an assignment early?”

  No.

  Zelda rolled her eyes. “Come on. We’re awake and alert. We’re young and beautiful. We’ve even got fresh paper and pens.”

  Well, if I hadn’t believed her before, I definitely would have now: only an idiot or an immortal would think you needed paper and pens to fill out a college application in 2016.

  It’s all online now, I wrote. We need a computer.

  “So where’s a computer?”

  At home, but I’m not going back there right now. Not after what happened between you and my mom.

  “So find somewhere else.”

  I thought about it. I guess I know a place.

  “You do? Then why are you scowling?”

  Because I can’t believe we’re going to school on a Sunday.

  A couple of years ago, my school had enacted a policy to keep the library computer lab open on weekends, so students could come in and do their homework there. Though I’d never gone myself, some kids from Chess & War had mentioned that they’d started going every weekend, so they could play online games together.

  Zelda and I took the train back west and got off at the Twenty-Third Street stop, then walked the six blocks to my school.

  “A bit brutalist, isn’t it?” Zelda said.

  I nodded. The campus was made up of a bunch of cube-shaped concrete buildings with these narrow little slits for windows—kinda like those holes in medieval castles that archers would shoot arrows out of. A parent volunteer sat on a plastic orange chair outside the library, reading a book called How to Make Millions. She looked up at us, tilted the bill of her 49ers cap to keep the glare out, and frowned.

  “Student IDs.”

  “I’m his guest,” Zelda said, after I’d presented my ID.

  “No guests allowed. There’s a lot of expensive computer stuff in there.”

  “I completely understand,” Zelda said, then leaned in with a conspiratorial intimacy. “But I’m Parker’s application adviser, and we absolutely have to start working today. Do you really want to be responsible for this little angel not getting into college?”

  Zelda gestured toward me, and I gave my most angelic smile. The parent volunteer looked back and forth between us a few times, then let out an annoyed little grunt. “Fine,” she said. “But I swear if we catch any more of you kids having sex in the basement, we’re gonna shut this whole project down. Sign here, please.” Zelda entered her name in the log, and we passed through the doors of the library.

  The place smelled like books and boredom and unpopularity. A bronze sculpture of a monkey by the circulation desk was worn down on top where people had rubbed his head for good luck. Sure enough, half a dozen kids from Chess & War were already ensconced in the computer lab, blowing each other’s heads off in Call of Duty. I sat down in the back row before anyone could notice us.

  “What are they doing?” Zelda whispered, taking the chair next to mine.

  Computer games, I wrote.

  “Friends of yours?”

  Not really. Don’t worry about them.

  “Okay. So . . . where do we start?”

  How should I know? I’ve never applied to college before.

  “Well, where do you want to go?”

  My real answer would have been “nowhere,” but I had to come up with something. SF State, I wrote, pulling the name out of the air.

  “Why there?”

  I don’t know. It’s close. It’s not too selective.

  “Those are incredibly stupid reasons. I think we can do better than that. Let’s come at it logically. You want to write, yes?”

  Sure.

  “So who’s your favorite writer?”

  My dad, I wrote on instinct, even though it wasn’t true.

  “Other than him.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin, I guess.

  “I’ve never heard of her.”

  She writes science fiction.

  “Aha.”

  Zelda typed “Ursula K. Le Guin” into Google and hit the search button. She clicked through to the author’s Wikipedia page and read her bio.

  “Uh-oh,” Zelda said.

  What?

  “I was hoping to see what school she went to, so you could apply there, but it turns out she went to Radcliffe.”

  You don’t think I could get in?

  Zelda laughed. “No, but only because it used to be an all-girls school, and now it doesn’t exist. But look, it says here she went to Columbia for graduate school.”

  Where’s Columbia?

  “New York City. I’ve walked around the campus before. It’s absolutely gorgeous. I’ll show you.”

  She pulled up the Columbia website and we began to click through the photos. The place didn’t look like a college so much as a European resort, with huge stone fortresses for buildings and all kinds of well-dressed, smart-looking kids walking around. Zelda found the page for the creative writing program, which talked about all the famous authors who’d studied there and all the famous authors who taught there. I had to admit, the whole thing looked pretty badass.

  Then we found the page that explained what all this luxury cost.

  Fuck, I wrote in my journal. Then I underlined it. Then I put it in a box with stars and dollar signs around it.

  “They give scholarships,” Zelda said.

  Not for me. My GPA sucks.

  “You’re being negative. Today is not about being negative. Today is about being positive. And I am positive that if we fill out this application, something good will come of it, okay?”

  I threw up my hands, surrendering.

  And so we made an account and began to fill in the application. I couldn’t believe how long the thing was—page after page after page of inane questions: What are your life goals? How do you think Columbia could help you reach these goals? Is there anything in your record that you think bears explanation (if so, please provide that explanation in the box below)? What was the single most important experience of your life?

  “Start writing, buddy.”

  I scrawled an answer to the first question as quickly as I could, then tore the page out of my notebook and handed it to Zelda. She typed it into the application site, making changes and corrections as she went, while I set to work on the next question. We fell into a sort of rhythm, and within a couple of hours, we’d finished the whole thing. Or the part we could finish, at any rate.

  “It says here that you need recommendations,” Zelda said. “Who would do that for you?”

  No one.

  “I refuse to believe that. What about a teacher?”

  I don’t even remember my teachers.

  “But I bet your teachers remember you. You’re very memorable.”

  Suddenly Danny Wu’s head appeared over our computer monitor. “Mr. McArthur would do it,” he said.

  Sometime in the past few minutes, the Call of Duty game had ended, and now three of my fellow Chess & War students were standing above our computer, staring at Zelda like she was so
me kind of space alien. Danny was co-captain of the school’s chess team. With him were Maya Leung and Tom Wilson, another couple of standard-issue dorks.

  “Who’s Mr. McArthur?” Zelda asked, but just then Danny was distracted by my black eye.

  “That’s a real shiner you’ve got there, Parker! Did Tyler do that to you? Alana told me that something went down at a movie theater or something, but I thought she was full of it.”

  I began to write a response, but Danny interrupted me.

  “I understand sign language, if you wanna do that instead.” He finished the thought in sign: My little brother’s deaf, so I had to learn.

  Why didn’t you ever tell me? I signed back.

  I don’t know. We don’t ever talk.

  “Did you know the first significant deaf community in America was started on Martha’s Vineyard?” Maya said, interrupting our silent conversation. “I did a whole report on it. They even had their own form of sign language.”

  “So who’s your friend, Parker?” Tom asked.

  Zelda put out a hand. “I’m Zelda.”

  “Really? What an epic name! Have you played any of the Zelda games, like on Nintendo?”

  “Sadly, no.”

  “Bummer. They’re so freaking good. Like there’s this one where you have to save the world before this planet crashes into Hyrule, and you have to keep living the same three days over and over again, and it’s super tense—”

  “Tom?” Danny said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe save the video-game synopsis for lunch?”

  Tom grinned. He was famous for his ability to jabber on endlessly about anything, and also impossible to shame. “Deal. You’ll get the whole franchise history.”

  “Nice to meet you, Zelda,” Danny said. “I’m Danny, and this is Tom and Maya.” Everybody shook hands. “So what are you guys doing in here?”

  “I’m helping Parker with his college applications,” Zelda said.

  “Really?” Maya said. “Where are you applying?” She craned her neck around until she could see our screen. “Columbia? That’s Ivy League! Do you really think you can get in there?”

  I shook my head emphatically.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Danny said. “I mean, you are a minority. And a good one too. Like, I’m Chinese, which is basically useless. Nobody in Stanford admissions is sitting around thinking, ‘I wish we could finally find some academically successful Chinese kids,’ you know?”

  “I hear that,” Maya said.

  “Hey, you don’t know struggle until you’ve tried being a white man in this country,” Tom said. “Even if I get a job, I’m only going to make, like, thirty percent more than a woman. Just twenty years ago, I would’ve made double.”

  Maya rolled her eyes. “Hilarious, Tom.”

  “Danny,” Zelda said, “you mentioned a teacher who might write a recommendation?”

  “Yeah. Mr. McArthur. He taught our ninth-grade English class.”

  “Do you remember him, Parker?”

  Of course I remembered him. He was pretty much the only teacher I’d ever had that I actually liked, the only one who’d assigned the class science-fiction and fantasy books to read (most teachers treat that kind of stuff as if it’s all crap, because they’re too stupid to question what they learned as kids). It was Mr. McArthur who got me started inventing stuff, instead of just journaling, with this vocabulary exercise where we had to write stories using one new word in every sentence.

  That was three years ago, I signed.

  “So what?” Danny said. “I still remember the stories you wrote. Zelda, Parker wrote the best stories. Most of us just ended up with gibberish, because we had to use words like ‘Brobdingnagian’ in every sentence.”

  “Brobdingnagian,” Tom recited, “meaning ‘gigantic,’ from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Now where’s my gold star?”

  “But Parker,” Danny went on, “he actually wrote real stories. There was this one about a spaceship that got lost and ended up orbiting the moon until everyone on it was dead. Mr. McArthur read it aloud for the whole class.”

  “So you think he’d write Parker a recommendation?” Zelda said.

  “Definitely.”

  She clapped with excitement. “Perfect! Let’s call him now.”

  Wait, I signed.

  But Tom was already on his way out of the room. “I’ll get a directory,” he called over his shoulder.

  We don’t need to do this right now, I wrote.

  “No time like the present, darling,” Zelda said. Tom came back in with the directory and found Mr. McArthur’s name. Zelda made the call.

  “Hello, is this”—she checked the directory—“Edward McArthur? Oh good. My name is Zelda Toth, and I’m the application adviser for a student named Parker Santé. Is this name familiar to you?” She smiled at me. “Oh, it is! Wonderful! So I was hoping you might be willing to write a recommendation for Parker. He can’t ask himself because . . . exactly. Really? You, sir, are a hero! Thank you so much. I have your e-mail address right here, actually. I’ll send you the form in a few minutes. Yes. Yes, thank you. All right. Goodbye.” She hung up the phone. “Ta-da!”

  As Danny and the rest of the chess crew applauded, Zelda suddenly gave me a 6.8-on-the-passion-scale kiss. Tom hooted, while Danny and Maya carried out a brief dialogue of raised eyebrows. In the last five minutes, I’d gone from a nobody slacker with a speech disorder to a secret Casanova with a mega-hot girlfriend and hopes of attending an Ivy League university.

  “So we were all going to get some lunch over at the Embarcadero,” Tom said, once the applause died down. “You guys should come with.”

  “Sure,” Zelda said, speaking for both of us. “Just give us an hour. I think we should get started on at least one other application, don’t you, Parker?”

  I nodded, but it was a few seconds before I realized I wasn’t pretending anymore. Mr. McArthur had agreed to write my recommendation, and none of the chess kids had treated me like I was crazy to be trying for a good school. So why not go for it?

  Just no Ivy League this time, okay? Somebody here has to be realistic.

  “Really?” Zelda said. “But why?”

  LUNCH OF THE NERDS

  APPARENTLY, THIS WHOLE UNDERTAKING—a few hours of Call of Duty followed by lunch down by the water—was a weekly occurrence for the Chess & War kids, and had been since the beginning of the year. But I was still surprised to see Alana waiting for us when we got to Mad Pizza. She sat before a congealed slice of pepperoni and a pile of soggy pool-noodle fries, acknowledging us with a barely perceptible head nod. With everything that had happened between me and Zelda in the past twenty-four hours, I’d almost forgotten that Alana and her boyfriend had broken up yesterday, and in spectacular fashion.

  Zelda and I sat down across from her while the others went to order.

  “What are you doing here?” Zelda asked.

  “I come every week,” Alana said in a self-consciously tragic monotone. “I thought it would cheer me up.”

  “And?”

  She shook her head. “My food tastes like shit.”

  I picked up one of her fries and crammed it into my mouth. Tastes fine to me, I wrote in my notebook, then spun it around so she could read.

  “It’s a manifestation of my sadness, dumbass. Fries stop tasting good.”

  “Obviously,” Zelda said.

  “I think it’s one of the classic stages of grief. Like stage two, maybe. Or whichever one comes right after the stage where you delete every Facebook photo of you and your ex and right before the stage where you sneak into his house in the middle of the night and set his dick on fire.” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again. “Nice Moleskine, by the way.”

  “I bought it for him,” Zelda said.

  “Of course you did.” She pointed an accusatory fry at Zelda, punctuating each word with a little fry-thrust. “Because you . . . don’t . . . suck . . . ass.” She squeezed th
e fry in her fist until its potatoey innards ran out between her knuckles. “You know what Tyler always bought me? Flowers. I fucking hate flowers. What kind of asshole buys you something that you have to take care of? ‘Here you go, person I supposedly love, here’s an additional responsibility for you. And if you fail in your duties, you’ll have a flowery corpse on your hands. You’re welcome!’ That’s the opposite of a present. That’s a fucking unpresent!”

  She was panting now, her face red and her hand covered in fry guts. “All I’m trying to say is hold on to this one, Parker. She’s the real thing.”

  Yeah, I wrote in my journal, you’d never just disappear on me, would you, Zelda?

  “How can you even ask her that?” Alana said. “Of course she wouldn’t.”

  Zelda gave me a meaningful look, but she didn’t say anything.

  The rest of the Chess & War kids returned to the table. Danny, Maya, and Tom were now joined by Gabrielle Okimoto, Narun Vasher, and Steven Wong. I didn’t know any of them particularly well (aside from the fact that I was better at chess than Narun and Steven, and significantly worse than Gabrielle), but none of them seemed surprised that I’d shown up for the pizza party.

  “So how did you two meet?” Tom asked. “I’m always amazed when anyone from our walk of life acquires a lover.”

  “He tried to rob me at the Palace Hotel,” Zelda said. “Then I told him I was immortal. We’ve been inseparable ever since.”

  There was silence for a moment, and then Steven piped up. He was a small kid with thick hipster glasses, famous for scoring a perfect 2400 on his SAT.

  “Like the hydra,” he said.

  Zelda scrunched up her forehead. “The what?”

  “The hydra. It’s kinda like a jellyfish. Never ages, as far as anyone can tell, and if you cut it into pieces, the pieces grow into whole new hydras. And there’s another one that can do this rad Benjamin Button thing where it grows into an adult, then turns back into a polyp and grows up all over again.”

  “Sea urchins don’t age either,” Maya said. “Or lobsters, I think. Or clams.”

  Tom made a face. “I hate clams. They taste like ocean-flavored snot.”