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