“Brains are beautiful,” I said.
For me, Curt was a regular inoculation against Matt. With the physical delights Curt was teaching me, I could harden my heart against the daily hurt of seeing Matt with Vivian.
It was a brilliant autumn day, cold for that time of year, and Curt and I were sitting huddled together under the bleachers of the stadium. After the first time, I didn’t get stoned with him again, because I didn’t like being so dazed in my normal life. My cheap jacket was much thinner than his and he’d wrapped his long cashmere coat around the both of us like a tent. I was rubbing my finger against his bottom lip.
In between little kisses placed on my fingertip, he asked, as casually as always, “How come you’re not in love with me?”
I didn’t want to hurt him. “Curt, just about every girl in school’s in love with you.”
He held my finger still and started sucking on it. In contrast to the chilly air, the warmth of his mouth was incredible. “Except you.”
“True,” I sighed, closing my eyes with pleasure.
“Is it because of before?”
“What do you mean?”
“Because I went along with Greg teasing you. In seventh grade. You remember.”
I opened my eyes and looked at him then. “That wasn’t very nice.”
“I know. I was a little shit. I’m sorry.”
“It’s been a long time. People change.”
“So you’re not still holding that against me?”
“No. And you stood up for me with that Tammy incident.”
“So, what is it, then?”
An image of Matt drifted into my head but I pushed it away. “I guess I’m only in love with your body.”
Curt burst out laughing. “Well, I guess that’ll have to be good enough.”
And we left it at that.
Dr. Weston, the guidance counselor and psychiatrist for the school, called me into her office.
“Where would you like to go for college?” she asked.
I responded without hesitation. “Yale.” Annette and I had talked about colleges. Unlike me, she had ordered dozens of catalogs and read thick books of college guides. In the end, she’d chosen Wesleyan as her top choice. My selection was much more random. I knew Yale was a top school and I loved the photos of Yale in her catalog.
“Good. Let me see your application before you send it in and I’ll give you my comments.”
“Do you think I really have a chance?”
Dr. Weston stared at me with her little eyes. “Kimberly Chang, if you’re not the type of student who gets into Yale, then who is?”
I typed out my application on the typewriter at the library, and Dr. Weston hardly made any changes to it. I asked her if it would be possible to waive the application fee. She wanted to see a copy of our tax return to see if I qualified, and when she took a quick glance at it, her face became still. Then she’d immediately given me the waiver.
When I told Ma what I had done, she was appalled. “Why didn’t you pay the fee?”
“It’s a lot of money.” This was the same month that we had finally managed to pay off our old debts to Aunt Paula. Our financial situation was much better than it’d ever been, especially since I was still working extra hours at the library. But if we were ever going to move, ever going to change our lives, we needed to continue to save every cent we could. I understood this. Even without debt payments, our income was paltry.
“But maybe they won’t consider your application. Why would they read it when you didn’t give them money for it?”
The next day, Ma brought home a stack of cheap china plates she’d bought.
“Here, throw these on the floor,” she said.
“Why?”
“Breaking china brings good luck. It will help you get into college.”
I didn’t believe in these superstitions but I broke them anyway. If I didn’t get into a college with a need-blind financial aid policy, I wouldn’t be able to go at all. We couldn’t even afford a state school.
I began to worry even more when I heard about what other students had put in their applications. Julia Williams’s family kept a Steinway in a soundproof practice room for her. Julia practiced five hours a day and had competed in international piano competitions since she turned sixteen. Chelsea Brown sang in the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus.
The jocks were a group unto themselves. “Speedy Spenser,” as he was called, won every race with his long spider legs, and Harrison’s field hockey team took the title in our region. Alicia Collins qualified for the Junior Olympics in gymnastics. Once, when a few of the football guys challenged her, she’d dropped to the floor and matched them in one-handed push-ups until the guys fell off in exhaustion. The jocks were just as serious as I was.
Most of the kids had had lessons in something, like dance or violin, since they were seven. If their standardized test scores needed a bit of boosting, they received private tutoring. They could write their college essays about picking grapes in Italy, bike tours of Holland, sketching in the Louvre. Often, their parents were also alumni of the schools they were applying to.
What were my chances? I was just a poor girl whose main practical skill was bagging skirts faster than normal. Dr. Weston’s confidence in me gave me some hope but not much. I was good at school but so were many of the other kids, most of whom had been groomed since birth to get into the right college. No matter how well I did in my classes or how well I managed to fake belonging to the cool circle, I knew I was not one of them. A part of me believed the colleges would sense this and shut me out.
Mr. Jamali thought Annette had learned enough to be cast as Emily, the lead in Our Town.
“I can’t believe it!” Annette couldn’t seem to stop jumping up and down. “You have to come see the play the day it opens.”
“I will!” I clasped her hands in mine.
“You swear?”
“I do. No matter what, I will be there.”
But later, when she told me the date of the opening and I checked my schedule, I saw there was a problem.
I told her in the cafeteria. “Annette, I have my naturalization exam that afternoon.”
She bit her lip. “No. But you promised.”
“I know. I’m so sorry. I can’t do anything about this. If I don’t get U.S. citizenship, I won’t qualify for most financial aid.”
“Why can’t you take it on another date?”
“This is the first time I can take it after I turn eighteen. So I can’t take it any earlier. And if I take it later, I won’t be able to say I’m an American citizen on the financial aid forms for colleges. I’ll come see your play the very next show.”
“I know.” Annette’s eyes were still downcast.
“What’s the matter, then?”
Now she looked at me. “Kimberly, I don’t mind if this is really true, but is it just another one of your excuses?”
I’d given her so many false explanations over the years, I couldn’t blame her for doubting me. “Of course it’s true.”
Annette said no more about it.
Every time Aunt Paula gave us one of my score reports, she would come by a day or two later to complain about some aspect of our work. We were careful not to let her know how good my results were, but she must have guessed anyway. If we hadn’t done something at the factory perfectly, we had to redo it. If a shipment was going out, she would come days in advance to harass us about completing everything on time.
“If you send this out late, I cannot be responsible for the consequences,” she said one day.
“We’ve always been on time,” Ma had answered quietly, but I saw the sorrow in her eyes that her sister was treating us like this.
Aunt Paula pushed past Matt at his steamer and then was gone.
He walked over to me. His hair was spiked and dripping wet from the steamers. “What kind of a problem does she have?”