Full Ride (18 page)

But now I just scroll the cursor up to the top corner of the page, to the red-boxed
X
. I click.

Close.

My computer, ever cautious, offers me a chance to reconsider. Do I want to save this file? Not save it? Cancel?

I let the cursor hover between the three choices. Do I want to keep such a toxic document? Hold on to so much poison? Why?

To remember how mad you were,
I think.
Even if you never send this to Daddy, you need to keep it. It could help you decide what to do about this scholarship. Are you actually going to go ahead and apply or not?

I groan out loud. Maybe that's why I was holding on to my
anger so tightly: If I blame everything on Daddy, I don't have to make any decisions of my own.

I click save. The computer asks me what I want to call this file. I feel a bitter smile creeping onto my face. I type four words:

“Whitney Court Scholarship Essay.”

All that anger has wiped me out. I feel like I've been run over by a truck.

I tell myself I don't have to decide anything tonight—I don't have to do anything. But giving myself permission to be floaty and vague just makes me feel that much worse. I'm like a ghost haunting myself. I need to eat dinner—that's down-to-earth. That should be easy. But I can't even decide between heating up leftover Hamburger Helper or boiling water for spaghetti. I spend fifteen minutes trying to decide if I want to spend fifteen minutes cooking.

I can't decide, so I don't eat anything at all.

I open my calc book to work on homework, but the formulas that made perfect sense in class today have turned into meaningless knots of letters and symbols. My eyes keep blurring them together, tangling them even worse.

I shut the book.

Just go to bed,
I tell myself.
Go to bed and do your homework in the morning, when your brain works again.

But when I lie down, I can't sleep. My brain shifts into high gear, racing in circles.

I'm trapped,
I think.
I can't dig too much into finding out for sure if the Court scholarship is Daddy's hoax, because that might get him into even more trouble. And if I prove to myself that it is . . . then I really am a criminal if I take it.

But what if I'm wrong about everything? What if being Daddy's daughter makes me see hoaxes and scams where there aren't any? What if I act all high and mighty and refuse to even apply for the Court scholarship and miss out on my only chance of being able to pay for a really good college?

I flip over, then over again. I toss and turn, back and forth, side to side. The sheets tangle around my legs.

I haven't stepped foot inside a church in three and a half years, not since the Sunday before Daddy was arrested. But before that I went to church a lot. (Duh—it was the South. That's what people do.) So, whether I like it or not, I have all sorts of Bible stories floating around in my brain, along with Daddy's lies. The story I can't help thinking of now is about Jacob wrestling with the angel. I remember it the way my overcaffeinated third-grade Sunday school teacher Mrs. Grindley told it, with
g
's dropped from the words “fighting” and “wrestling” and a drawl that got thicker as the story went along. It seemed poor Jacob was alone in the middle of nowhere, and suddenly some other man attacked him. And of course Jacob fought back, even though he didn't know who the man was.

“And then,” I could remember Mrs. Grindley saying, her heavily mascaraed eyes growing wider, as if she was surprised by her own words, “the more they fought, the more Jacob started thinking that maybe it wasn't a man he was fighting after all. Maybe it was an angel. Maybe it was a demon. Maybe it was God. Maybe it was the devil. He didn't know, but he just kept fighting. He fought
all night long
without giving up! And he didn't even know who or what he was fighting! He didn't know
what he was fighting against, and he didn't know what he was fighting
for
!”

I can't actually remember how it all turned out for Jacob after that—maybe some of the boys in the class started flicking glue sticks at one another, and Mrs. Grindley didn't finish the story. That happened a lot in third grade Sunday school.

But I feel Jacob's story in my bones right now. I don't know what I'm fighting, either. Is it my conscience? Is it my fear? Is it Daddy?

Is it God?

Is this how Daddy felt, on the verge of his first crime? Did he debate and wonder and agonize and stew?

Somehow I don't think so. Somehow I think Daddy just did it without a second thought. He crossed the line, broke the law, fooled his victims, ruined his life—and Mom's and mine—without a single backward glance.

Unless . . . what if setting up the fake scholarship for me
is
his backward glance?

•  •  •

I wake up in the middle of the night with four words floating through my head:
You can find out.

I smile drowsily. I am calm, even serene. There is a way for me to find out if the Court scholarship is just another one of Daddy's scams without ruining anything.

At least, there's a way for me to find out if it
isn't.

In the middle of the night, that sounds good enough to me.

I am waiting at Rosa's locker long before school starts the next morning.

“I couldn't figure out that fourth problem in calc, either,” she says as soon as she sees me.

“I didn't even try,” I admit. All my homework still sits untouched in my backpack. I have never come to school before with undone homework. But I'm holding onto my drifty, calm, middle-of-the-night feeling.

Rosa drops her backpack to the floor and spins her combination lock.

“I wanted to ask you about something else,” I say. “Did you check with any other Whitney Court Scholarship winners before Emily Riviera and David Lin?”

This is my theory: If I can confirm that the scholarship was set up before Mom and I moved to Deskins, that will prove Daddy had nothing to do with it.

If David Lin's Court Scholarship two years ago was the first one, that doesn't prove anything one way or another. But I'm trying not to think about that.

Rosa jerks up her locker release and swings the door open.

“Do you
like
making yourself miserable?” she asks. “You want to read every single winning essay that's so good you want to gouge your own eyes out?”

“I'm curious,” I say. “I want to know if they've ever repeated a winning topic.”

Of course I don't tell her that isn't the
main
reason I'm asking.

Rosa grunts as she starts moving textbooks from her backpack to her locker.

“My Facebook sources only go back so far,” she says. “I'll have to check with my sister to see if she knows who won the years before she graduated.”

I guess Rosa's sister graduated the same year as David Lin. It's funny to think that Rosa has this whole other person attached to her that I barely know anything about—a whole family, actually. I always steer conversations away from family talk, because I don't want anybody asking about mine.

But now I say, “It won't make your sister feel bad, since she didn't win the scholarship?”

Rosa snorts.

“Lily won't care,” she said. “I don't think she even applied. She was majoring in boys her senior year. She thought David Lin was hot—that's why she remembered him winning.”

Rosa swings her locker open wider. I've never been the type to hang out at my friends' lockers, so I've never seen the pictures inside her door before. Where other girls might hang pictures of their boyfriends—or hot celebrities they wish were their boyfriends—Rosa has photos of various colleges and universities. The pictures are perfectly matted, precisely labeled: Yale. Stanford. Georgetown. Washington University. Northwestern.

Rosa sees that I'm looking.

“Yeah, that's the wish list,” she says with an embarrassed
shrug. “Don't tell me they're out of my league. Stuart already has.”

I am suddenly almost as furious with Stuart as I was last night with Whitney Court, her family, and my father.

“I think some of these schools are
beneath
you,” I tell Rosa. I touch the Georgetown photo and do a snobby imitation of Stuart: “I mean, Georgetown? It's not even Ivy League!”

Rosa laughs and shuts her locker.

“Don't forget about asking your sister,” I say.

“I won't, but I hope you're not in a hurry,” she says. “Lily's not too fast about answering messages. Unless there's testosterone involved.”

Rosa starts rushing toward her first-period class. I glance at the clock and veer toward the guidance office instead. I
am
in a hurry, and Ms. Stela might be organized enough to remember what year the Whitney Court Scholarship started.

But there's a sign taped to the guidance office door:

ALL GUIDANCE OFFICE STAFF IN MEETINGS THIS MORNING. WE WILL BE OPEN FOR
URGENT BUSINESS ONLY
THIS AFTERNOON.

That's about how the rest of the day goes too. We have a pop quiz in gov that I would have aced if I'd spent three minutes looking at the book last night. (But I didn't.) At lunch Stuart goes on and on and on about needing commitments from everyone who wants to go on his Southern college tour at the end of October. For some reason, he's nagging me most of all.

“I'd like to see Vanderbilt,” I admit, and this feels horribly brave, like walking into a room with only a bikini on when everyone else is fully clothed.
Do I still want to see Vanderbilt? Do I still want to go there, or has Daddy ruined it for me?

I can't think about that right now.

“But Emory?” I say, putting maybe a little too much scorn into my voice. “Ugh. Why not combine Vanderbilt with someplace else instead—Wake Forest, maybe? Duke?”

Stuart bristles.

“Emory is the Harvard of the South!” he says.

“No,
Vanderbilt
is the Harvard of the South!” I correct him.

There's something really ugly between us. I hate Stuart right now because he doesn't have to worry how he's going to pay for college visits or college itself. And because he made fun of Rosa and because he doesn't have to wonder if his father has set up a hoax that could turn him into a criminal too. I don't know why Stuart hates me right now, but it's clear that he does. His eyes are little and squinty, his face is flushed, and his mouth is snapping open.

I can feel the wave of vitriol about to come toward me, and I am not ready for it.

Clarice sticks her phone between us, with its voice app activated: “At least six different universities have been called the Harvard of the South. Shall I list them?”

The bell rings just then, and even though it would probably do us good to sit there listening to a calm computer voice, we all flee in different directions.

In calculus class the last period of the day, I discover that I got a 68 on last week's test.

I sit there staring at the lowest grade I've ever gotten and think,
This is what happens to other people.
It's other people who get bad grades because they're distracted by boyfriend or girlfriend problems, or they party too much, or they just don't care about school as much as other parts of their lives.

And weren't you distracted by the Court scholarship?
I ask myself.
Didn't you break your laser focus on getting good grades?

It's totally unfair that trying to get the money to go to a good
college should make me mess up the grades that were supposed to get me
in
to that good college.

It's totally unfair if one of Daddy's schemes has ruined this part of my life too.

“All right, everyone,” Mr. Hattimer says from the front of the room, a million miles away. “The world did not just end.
None
of you did well on this test. Neither did my morning class. In fact, the highest grade in either class was a 68.”

A 68?
I think.
I got the highest grade of anyone?

“So there'll be a thirty-two-point curve?” Lakshmi asks in a wobbly voice from across the room.

“No, Ms. Patel,” Mr. Hattimer says scornfully. “I am not just going to
give
you all better grades. You need to know this material for the AP test at the end of the year. You need to know this material for college. And if any of you are going to become civil engineers or architects someday, you need to know this material so the bridges and buildings you design don't fall apart and kill me or someone I care about. Or anyone! There is no curve in real life!”

He's been on a big kick lately about how calculus isn't just theoretical and that it can have real-life consequences beyond grades. Whatever. With half the girls in the class on the verge of tears—and maybe some guys, too, though they're hiding it better—today his lecture just feels like bullying.

“So we all fail?” three kids wail almost in unison.

Technically, I think 68 is some kind of D, but I don't think I should point that out.

“No,” Mr. Hattimer says. If anything, the scorn in his voice has thickened. “Because high school is evidently another name for preschool nowadays, I am going to reteach this material, and then you will be retested. But that pushes everything in the course back a week, so we're going to have to pick up the pace
after this. And remember, once you get out of this playpen, you won't get do-overs in real life. If you're a surgeon, you can't kill your patient on the operating table and then say, ‘Oops, can't I start that over again?' If you're a pilot, you can't crash your plane and then say, ‘Hey! Let me have another chance!' If—”