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 some 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