Nothing kills productivity faster than feeling helpless. That night, I sat at my usual table in the corner of the Burgess common room. My hands were fixed to my laptop, which whirred frantically under my palms in the computer equivalent of death throes. The library had slim MacBook Pros to lend out short-term, but for long-term loans like mine, they apparently leased equipment dating to sometime in the Cretaceous Period.
I pressed my hands closer to the computer, absorbing its warmth. The common room was always a few degrees too cold, a perfect studying atmosphere. Even the thermostats at Kensington knew the philosophy. Don’t get too comfortable. Stay on your toes.
The evening burrowed into night. Stacks of books shrank around everyone else, vanishing from the scattering of cherry tables at teardrop windows, but my work went untouched. I stared up at the brass chandeliers and out the window at the star-strewn country sky. I stared at the seat beside me, which had belonged to Michael every night last year. He’d sat with a hunch that gave him pronounced knots in his shoulders; beneath my fingers they’d felt like stone beads worked deep into bands of muscle. His hands dwarfed his pet brand of mechanical pencil: Pentel Sharp P200, sleek, black, reliable.
In the opposite corner, Sahana Malakar, ranked first in our class, was highlighting her notes. By the gas-jet fire in the hearth, Will Teagle was mouthing lines to himself, brow knitted. These were the kids I’d been comparing myself to for two years already. Kensington was divided into five disciplines—Theater, Music, Film, Visual Arts, and Dance—and the five schools hardly ever mixed, so although we had 1,500 students, Kensington could feel insular, even isolating. We lived with the kids in our discipline, went to every class with them, and spent our free hours on projects with them. “Full immersion in your craft,” Admissions bragged, “and with your partners in learning!”
As my time trickled away, my brain supplied me with the usual helpful spiral of consequences: If you don’t finish this essay, you won’t have time for your English reading, and you’ll never catch up, and by next week you’ll still be on page 200 when everyone else has finished the book, and O’Neill will look at you across the table with his bushy eyebrows doing that knowing waggling thing, and he’ll realize everything you’re saying is bullshit, and you’ll end up with a B, and your class rank will slip, and goodbye Harvard or Columbia, goodbye to your parents being proud of anything you—
I managed to cram in about two paragraphs around the thoughts, as they spiraled into Why do you bother? and You’re never going to make it and Give up, give up, give up.
Finally, mercifully, my phone interrupted. Cheerful music sliced through the common-room ambiance.
The housemaster, Mr. Rollins, squat and well-postured in an armchair across the room, looked up from the play he was annotating. A few studiers shot me disgruntled glances. I mouthed an apology and stuffed notebooks and laptop into my backpack, yanking the stuck zipper so that it chewed black teeth together in an uneven zigzag. I slipped out the door.
The halls of Burgess were a maze of corkboard, colored nametags taped to doors, and embossed silver numbers. 113. 114. 115. I dashed to 119, locked myself in, and took a deep breath before hitting accept. “Hey, Mom.”
I delayed the audition talk as long as possible, but I couldn’t put it off forever. My mother took the news about as well as I thought she would: with a wandering string of Chinese and a lecture that whipped into life like a tornado.
My parents tracked my school performance like baseball nuts tracked the World Series. I never told people about it. A fun side effect of being Chinese is that people assume this about you already. It felt weirdly diminishing to admit it about myself, as if it simplified me to just another overachieving Asian kid with one of those moms, even if I was in fact Asian and did have one of those moms.
I weathered her tirade for a few minutes, cradling my phone between my ear and my shoulder. “Okay,” I murmured halfway through one of her sentences, not thinking. She broke off.
“Don’t ‘okay,’” she said. “It’s always ‘okay’ this, ‘okay’ that. Don’t ‘okay’ me. How about you explain why this keeps happening?” A disbelieving laugh. “It’s every single audition since you’ve gone to that place! It’s not just singing. Why don’t they put you on the, those, the regular plays?” I imagined the agitated fluttering of her hand as she tried to grab the words, put them in the right order. Mom’s English tended to fracture when she didn’t give herself time to breathe.
“Because,” I said tiredly, “mainstage straight plays always have, like, eight-person casts, and the parts always go to seniors.”
“I don’t know, Jordan. I just don’t know. All we get is bad news. What do you expect us to think, ah?”
“Mainstages aren’t everything,” I insisted. “I can find a student-led show in October. And my GPA’s fine, and everything else is fine, it’s just . . .” that you’ve trained yourself to sniff out my weak spots. The sentence I could never finish. Even this much talking back was pushing it. My mother and I had the sort of relationship that operated the most smoothly in silence.
She heaved her knowing sigh. I could picture the slow stream of air between her lips, her mouth framed by deep, tired creases. The sound punctured me.
Silence spread across my room. I’d been one of twenty Burgess residents to draw a single this year. It was twice the size of my room at home. Everything I owned stretched thinly across the space, making it look like an empty model room you might find, three-walled, sitting in the middle of a furniture store. I’d pinned my two posters, Les Misérables and Hamilton, as far apart as possible, thinking that it might make the white cinderblocks look busier. It hadn’t worked.
The only thing I had in numbers were books. They lined up single-file on the shelves, quietly keeping me company. It was impossible to feel alone in a room full of favorite books. I had the sense that they knew me personally, that they’d read me cover to cover as I’d read them.
My mother had always been aggressive about getting me to read, scouring garage sales and libraries for free novels, plays, or biographies. She’d always wanted me to learn more. Do more. Be more. She spent her life hoping for my way up and out.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice tiny, and for a horrible second, I thought I was going to cry. She never knew what to do with that.
I searched the photos I’d tacked to the corkboard above my desk, trying to distill reassurance out of the patchwork of familiar faces. Near the top hung my best friends in San Francisco, the four of us, arms slung around each other’s shoulders. Shanice pandered to the camera, pulling that picture-perfect sun-white grin. Jenna had her eyes crossed and her tongue stuck out, and to the left, Maria and I were in the middle of hysterical laughter, both of us shaded brown by the end of the summer.
I took a stabilizing breath. “How’s . . .” I started, tentative. “How’s Dad?”