makes me any better than you? It’s just clothes.”
“That’s not all it is, and you know it. Guys don’t like me. Ever.”
“Guys do like you,” Cass said. “You just don’t realize it. You need more confidence.”
“Great,” I said brusquely. “Maybe Arden can pop into the confidence store and pick some up.”
Cass raised her eyebrows. “What’s your problem?”
“I hate when people act like we can change our personalities, like it’s that easy to become something we’re not,” I said, thinking of all the times I’d been coaxed to be more social, more emotional, more outgoing. As if the personality I was born with was deficient, and if I simply put effort into it, I could be a better person—a person who didn’t resemble my true self.
“Let’s not fight,” Arden said. “Please? Can we talk about something else?”
“Yes,” I agreed. I reached over and grabbed my calculus book from the desk. “Like homework. I really can’t afford to miss more assignments if I want to stay in the running for valedictorian.”
Cass looked at me with a bemused expression.
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t know a ton about MIT, but I’d bet you anything they don’t only accept valedictorians.”
“Well, yes, of course,” I said. For instance, they would probably overlook the fact that I hadn’t been valedictorian if I showed them my brilliant sociological study that was getting discussed worldwide. “What’s your point?”
“I dunno,” Cass said, shrugging. “Maybe do homework because you want to learn something and not, you know, to get some title that doesn’t even mean anything out of high school.”
I frowned. “For the record, forty-two percent of MIT students—”
“Or,” Cass interrupted, “you can forget all that stuff entirely and tell us what that Oz guy was doing here.”
“J. Quincy Oswald is the last thing I want to talk about.”
But Cass and Arden gazed at me raptly and I knew how entertained they’d be by Oswald’s voice of God that became the voice of aliens. So I told them everything. Maybe it was better that I did. We spent most of the evening joking about the extraterrestrial fountain of youth and envisioning the mayhem that would ensue if people at Irving High School were granted eternal life.
I hadn’t realized how much I’d needed to de-stress. How I needed a night of sitting around laughing with friends.
By the end of the evening, I was more amused by Oswald than concerned.
And that should’ve been concerning in itself.
Text Conversation
Participants: Gideon Hofstadt, Ishmael Hofstadt
IH: dude
IH: but what about cow mutilations
GH: I’m sorry, what?
IH: i was thinking
GH: About mutilations? Why? Where are you right now?
IH: in my room
GH: Then why are you texting me?
IH: upstairs is so far
GH: Why were you thinking about cow mutilations?
IH: cause its maybe time to raise the stakes again
IH: and didnt you say cow mutilations are an alien thing?
GH: Under no circumstances are we mutilating ANY animal.
IH: oh
IH: well, we still need to raise the stakes
GH: Yes, I know.
IH: you do???
GH: I’m working on an idea.
Event: Guidance
Date: Sept. 27 (Wed.)
Being that I’d spent the majority of English lit doodling crop-circle designs, I assumed I was in trouble when Mr. Fiore called my name. He’d hated me since the first week of school, when I expressed displeasure that an entire quarter would be spent on poetry.
But all Mr. Fiore said was, “Ms. Singh wants to see you.”
I was happy enough to leave class without discovering how Robert Frost (Robert Frost (1874–1963): an American poet. Once confused by Ishmael with Jack Frost, the personification of winter.) handled the apparently overwhelming choice of diverging roads.
I knocked on the guidance counselor’s door and it swung open instantly, as if Ms. Singh had been waiting. She was young and hadn’t yet lost passion for the job like some of the faculty at Irving High School. I’d met with her once before, at the end of the previous year, and while her eagerness was overwhelming, she was likable.
“Gideon, so nice to see you,” she said, ushering me inside.
Though her office was too small for it, she’d pushed her desk to one side and brought in a love seat and small armchair—using her own money and time, I imagined. A box of tissues sat on a coffee table next to a vase of fresh flowers, and motivational posters adorned the walls.
Ms. Singh gestured for me to sit on the love seat and took the chair across from me. It was so cramped that my knees bumped into the coffee table. I couldn’t imagine how taller people managed.
“I want to check