Full Ride (21 page)

Which means—all of them already know about me.

Did they buy some list from Deskins High School?
I wonder.
Did they get information from the SAT people or the ACT people because last year I was too nervous, taking those tests, to think about checking boxes to keep my information secret? Or because maybe even back then I had already started caring more about going to college than keeping secrets?

The stack of mail is
heavy.
I lift it high, my thoughts swirling. I sort of want to stalk in to Mom's bedroom, hold out the stack of mail, and yell at her, “See? I got all this because my name is already in some online prospective-college-student listing somewhere—and nobody has shown up trying to kill us! So stop worrying! Stop ruining everything!”

But I also sort of want to hide all the letters and brochures.

Because what if Mom thinks she has to take all this away from me too? What if she decides I'm not even allowed to see my own mail?

I try to cram the stack of mail into a more compact pile, because I
am
going to hide it in my backpack before I walk into the apartment. I can decide about yelling about it or hiding it for good later on. But Harvard's brochure is too rigid to bend well; the Ohio State and Michigan letters seem to be refusing to lie side by side. A letter that I missed noticing before slides out and starts fluttering toward the ground. I catch it.

Its return address says “Whitney Court Scholarship Fund.”

I instantly drop all the other letters. I stand there in a blizzard of Harvard and Yale and Chicago and Michigan and Ohio State and Miami and Akron and Kent State and tiny Transylvania all yelling up at me, “Apply now!” “Come be a student at our school!” And I am terrified to open the letter that might make any of that possible.

Ms. Stela said the Court scholarship winner is announced by the
end of December,
I remind myself
. This is only October. It's too early for this to be “You won!” or “Sorry, you lost.”

That gives me the courage to slide my finger under the flap of the envelope and pull out the single thin sheet of paper inside. My hands are shaking—I have to brace the letter against the row of mailboxes to hold it still enough to actually read.

Dear Ms. Jones,

Thank you for your application for the Whitney Court Scholarship. As judges for this scholarship, we have decided we would like to meet with a select group of applicants before making our final decision. Could you please e-mail us with a list of times you would be available to meet with us on October 24 or 25 . . .

It's not a “You won!” or a “You lost!” letter. It's a “You're still in the running, but you need to wow us in person” letter. This is a callback.

I am a finalist for the Court scholarship.

“What if we're missing something?” Rosa asks. “What if there's some reason they're doing interviews this year, when they don't usually have finalists, they usually just announce a winner. . . .”

Rosa and I are sitting on folding chairs outside Room 106. We are both finalists for the Court scholarship. According to the clock on the wall, her interview with the scholarship judges is three minutes away. Mine is eighteen minutes away, but I promised to keep her company ahead of time because otherwise, she said, she might spontaneously combust. I hope it doesn't matter that I'm not exactly listening to her. I think I'm mostly here to give her an excuse to talk and talk and talk without looking crazy or cell-phone obsessed. Both of which could be problems for the scholarship judges.

So should I have refused to sit with Rosa, to sabotage her, so I can win instead?
I think.

I decide I'm not that diabolical. I certainly don't want to seem that diabolical, not now, not when there's a full-ride scholarship riding on my behavior over the course of the next half hour.

Rosa elbows me, either because she realizes I'm not paying attention or because she just figured something out.

“Oh, no!” she moans. “Why didn't I think to analyze the size of the scholarships for the years they did or didn't do interviews?
That
could have been useful data!”

“Rosa,” I say. “Don't worry about it. Just . . . take a deep breath. Or hold your breath, maybe. I think you're on the verge of hyperventilating.”

Rosa starts giggling.

“Thanks for the crystal-clear advice!” she mutters.

I laugh too.

“You want medical advice, next time ask Jala, the future doctor, to sit with you,” I tell her. But Rosa looks so off-kilter, I take pity on her. I put my hand on her arm. “Here, try this. Good air in.” I inhale. “Bad air out.” I exhale.

I work her through a solid minute of breathing in and out. I don't know about her, but
I
feel a little calmer now.

Then the door of Room 106 opens.

“It was such a pleasure to meet with all of you,” the voice of the finalist ahead of us wafts out, sounding annoyingly confident. It's Ashley Stevens, surprisingly enough, a girl from the Shannon Daily mean-girls crowd. “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk with you in person. It was great being able to tell you face-to-face how much I admire Whitney, since I heard so much about her from my cousin Alex.”

Oh, no,
I think, my calm vanishing.
Did Ashley write about Whitney too? And she had some relative with inside information?

Beside me, Rosa pantomimes sticking her finger down her throat and gagging.

Ashley steps out of Room 106 with a man in a dark-gray suit. They're shaking hands. The man has his back to Rosa and me, so I have time to notice that Rosa's bangs are sticking up. I pantomime patting my hair down, and she catches on quickly. She smoothes her hair, then stands up. She gets in a last-minute
straightening of her dress before the man turns from Ashley to her.

“Ms. Alvarez?” the man says.

“Yes. Mr. Court?” Rosa says, extending her hand.

Rosa sounds calm and cool and confident now, too. I feel like I've just witnessed a transformation that goes beyond hair. It's like, once she stood up, she was no longer a high school student ready to beg for money for college. She instantly became . . . an investment. A future professional. A future attorney.

Attorneys,
I think.
Ugh.

Rosa and Mr. Court disappear into Room 106, and Mr. Court shuts the door behind them. I'm left with Ashley Stevens.

“Congratulations on being a finalist,” I say. I don't know that Ashley and I have ever exchanged a single word before, but I've got fifteen minutes to kill, and I can understand how Rosa felt, wanting someone to talk to.

Ashley turns her head and looks at me as though it's just occurred to her that there's another life form present. Even if the life form is roughly equivalent, socially speaking, to a cockroach.

“Oh, no,” she snaps. “Don't think you can get me to tell you all the questions they asked in there! I'm not going to help you! You're on your own!”

Then she turns on her heel and stalks away.

Okay, then.

I'm tempted to shout after her, “You think you can rattle me with
that
? After everything I've been through—even death threats!—you think you can throw me off with just a little random meanness?”

I don't say anything, of course. If I were still the kind of person who prayed, I would also be tempted to pray,
Oh, please, God. Even if I don't win the Court scholarship, please don't let Ashley win either.

And then I kind of am praying,
Please, please, please, let me win this. Let me get the full ride. Let things work out for Rosa, too—let her get a lot of scholarships and financial aid so she can go wherever she wants. But please let me win this one . . . so there's not even a question of me having to apply for financial aid. So I can go to college without upsetting Mom.

I remember that Mom got upset just by the thought of me going to any reasonably decent school, or anyplace that someone we knew in Georgia three years ago might possibly go. That knocks out pretty much every school I might want.

And . . . when I win the Court scholarship, please let it help Mom stop being so afraid, and not be so crazy about keeping everything about Daddy secret.

Now I'm sounding crazy. I can't think about this now, right before my big interview.

I remind myself that I'm not the type of person who prays. Not anymore.

I look at the clock: I still have twelve minutes before Rosa comes out and I go in and whatever I say determines my entire future. I can't sit here for twelve whole minutes, panicking at the momentousness of what's going to happen twelve minutes from now.

I stand up and walk down the hall to the drinking fountain outside Room 112. Bending over to get a drink, staring down at somebody's chewed-up gum spit into the drain, I have an odd sense of déjà vu. This is the same drinking fountain I fled to during freshman orientation three years ago, when I fake-coughed to avoid Shannon Daily's question, “Where are you from, Becca?” And Room 106, where the scholarship interviews are taking place—that's where we had freshman orientation. The room I was brave enough to return to only because Jala was beside me.

That doesn't mean anything,
I tell myself.
It's just a coincidence. It's not symbolism or foreshadowing or anything like that. This is real life, not AP lit. And, anyhow, it doesn't matter anymore where you're from. It matters where you're going.

Somehow that thought freaks me out even more.

I start shuffling back down the hall, trying to make it take eleven minutes to walk fifty feet. Someone taps me on the back.

“Tag, you're it!” Oscar's relaxed, comical voice calls out behind me.

I whirl around.

“You could have given me a heart attack, sneaking up on me like that!” I accuse. I don't think my words carry much sting, because I can feel myself beaming at Oscar.

And he's beaming back.

I have to stifle the impulse to wrap my arms around him and cry out, “Thank you for not making me spend the next eleven minutes alone! Thank you for not being another mean person like Ashley Stevens!”

“Are you the next victim after me?” I ask. “The Court scholarship finalist who goes in at three forty-five?”

“Nope,” Oscar says, shaking his head and shrugging. “I didn't make the cut. But Rosa said you were keeping her company before her interview, and she was feeling bad that nobody would keep you company before yours, so . . . that's why I'm here.”

“I
love
Rosa,” I say. I'm about to add, “I love you too”—it's the kind of thing I've jokingly said to Oscar a million times before. But, I don't know, there's something a little odd about the way he's leaning toward me, like he can't wait to hear those words.

I can't handle odd right now.

I lean away and say instead, “Thanks. I mean it. I was about two minutes away from needing a rubber room. This whole scholarship thing is making me crazy.”

“College, scholarships . . . it's making everybody crazy,” Oscar says glumly.

“Yeah, well, some of us really need the money,” I say. I instantly clap my hand over my mouth. “I can't sound that desperate in the interview, can I? I sound like I'm about two
seconds
away from grabbing a gun and holding up a bank.”

“You just sound like it's really important to you,” Oscar says gently.

I blink. I've barely seen or spoken to Oscar since that day we all went for ice cream. Avoiding Stuart has kind of meant avoiding Oscar by default, because they hang out together so much.

How can he
still
be so nice to me?

“Can you just spend the next ten minutes telling me stupid jokes?” I ask him. “I'm not sure I can take anything serious right now.”

“Okay, um . . . ,” Oscar says, as we both sit down on the folding chairs outside Room 106. “You know that thing about how you're supposed to handle an interview situation, don't you? Where you imagine interviewers in their underwear? I've always had a problem with that, because what if they can look at you and tell that you're thinking about their underwear? Like, doesn't that make you some kind of a pervert?”

He's actually starting to blush. But he forges on.

“So here's the Oscar Wong solution,” he says. “I try to figure out, when those interviewers were little kids, did they wear Superman Underoos? Or were they more of a Spider-Man briefs kind of kid? Or Batman?”

“You mean, by thinking about them in little-kid underwear, that makes you not a pervert?” I ask skeptically. I roll my eyes. “Doesn't that make you
worse
? Like, a child predator wannabe?”

Oscar's blush deepens.

“No, no, no!” he protests, waving his hands like he's trying to
erase his own words. “I didn't mean it like that! Not like a child predator thing! More like, just, what superhero did they prefer when they were little? Like it's a clue to their personalities! Not anything, um, sexual?”

Oscar buries his face in his hands, then peeks out sideways between his fingers.

“You know how, sometimes there's nothing you can say to make something better?” he asks.

Oscar is such a nerd. I guess for him, just saying the word “sexual” in a female's presence is humiliating beyond words.

For some reason it's making me blush too.

I laugh, trying to make him feel comfortable again.

“I think you have officially gotten me over thinking about how nervous I am,” I say. “Leaving out the underwear connection, what was it for you?”

“Huh?” Oscar says.

“Who was your favorite superhero when you were a little kid?” I ask. “Superman? Batman? Spider-Man?”