Chapter Four
After school, I drop by my guidance counselor’s office. Mrs. Lombardi waves me in. She’s rocking this fuchsia blazer with a chunky gold necklace. For an old person, her drip is always on point.
“Charise!” She gestures at the chair across her desk. “How can I help you?”
Here we go.
I sit down. “I want to quit the webmaster job.”
Her eyebrows rocket up so fast I think they might escape her forehead entirely.
“But you’ve been doing great! Mr. Horowitz has spoken about how helpful you were in getting rid of that virus he downloaded.”
Mr. Horowitz, our librarian, gets scammed by these pop-up ads that claim there are “sexy singles in your area.” An obvious lie, since we live in Chinook Shore.
“I think, um, my family…” I trail off, because it isn’t like Michael straight-up told me to quit.
But working feels pointless now. All those hours, all that cash, just poof, gone.
And now that Michael knows about the job, I’d have to fork over whatever I earn.
But I don’t want to get into this with my guidance counselor. “I’m just busy.”
She nods. “Everything okay at home?”
“Splendid,” I lie. I don’t even know where that comes from. It’s probably the first time in my life I’ve said that word out loud.
A pause. I can’t tell if she believes me.
“Charise, it’s April of your junior year. You got a perfect score on your PSAT, a first in our school’s history, and you have straight A’s,” she says. “Have you given any thought to college?”
College isn’t the obvious path forward for Chinook Shore kids.
Lots of people end up in farm or factory jobs, since our county has a major agricultural presence.
Others go into timber. Some of the overachievers head off to a four-year university like Oregon State, and a few years ago the valedictorian—his name was Zach or Zane—went to a fancy school on a full ride.
“I was probably going to apply to some local places,” I say.
“Why don’t you consider going out of state?”
I shrug. It’s not that I don’t want to make out with an entire frat house or drink until I piss myself or whatever it is you’re supposed to do in college. I’m not actually sure what people do there. I’ve heard they also attend classes and learn things, but that might be a myth.
But I don’t see how I could afford elsewhere. “I don’t want to take out loans.” I don’t want to owe anybody anything. My mom took out student loans for grad school and look where that got her.
“Did you know that private universities often offer financial assistance? Especially for families like yours.”
Families like yours. I try not to wince at the subtle diss.
“I don’t think I’m scholarship material.”
“You never know until you try.” Mrs. Lombardi rummages in her desk drawers, then slides a pamphlet over. “We got this in the mail. You should apply. The deadline’s tonight.”
I pick up the pamphlet. In blocky print, it says, Alpha Fellows: An all-expenses paid, highly selective summer program for high school students. Building the next generation of tech leaders. I’ve heard of it before. Some of Silicon Valley’s top founders and engineers attended as teens.
An incredulous laugh escapes from my mouth. “I’m not going to get in.”
When I was in ninth grade, I stumbled upon this forum, College Confidential, where these teenagers masturbate to their own SAT scores.
They write unhinged rants about how they won’t get into Harvard unless they cure cancer or solve world hunger or sleep with the admissions committee.
And, of course, they have endless amounts of money for stuff like trombone lessons and mission trips to Bolivia.
These are the kids who are attending a program like Alpha Fellows.
Mrs. Lombardi doesn’t seem to be the type who lurks College Confidential, and I don’t know how to break all this down for her. So instead, I say, “I barely know how to code.”
“Char. You helped the administration so much last year with that cheating situation.”
Last year, someone blasted an anonymous email to the entire school with test answers stolen from the AP Chemistry teacher’s desk.
Colossally stupid way to cheat. The principal asked me to bust them, so I built a script that, once downloaded by the anonymous person, used browser fingerprinting to identify their ass.
“That was a simple script. Their security was really bad.”
“And you’re the webmaster for our school?”
Webmaster is a pretentious way to say I get paid minimum wage to maintain our school’s website. “It’s just static JavaScript. Almost all client-side. There isn’t even a database…” I stop talking because Mrs. Lombardi’s eyes are glazing over.
I pivot tactics. “Besides, I don’t even want to go. I have summer plans already.”
I’m supposed to work at the Lucky Panda with my mom. Mother-daughter duo. We even wear matching qipaos. Tourists eat that shit up.
Plus, Lola is convinced that Taylor Swift is going to drop a new album sometime in June. Something about Mercury being in retrograde.
So, you know. Big plans.
Mr. Lombardi picks up the pamphlet and shakes it.
Actually shakes it, like I’m a puppy and she’s teasing me with a bag of treats.
“Let’s make a deal. Get this application in tonight.
Put me down as a recommender, and I’ll write about everything you’ve done for our school.
I’ll mention that we don’t offer any computer science courses.
This could be a big opportunity for you. ”
Ugh. “I have a first draft due tomorrow for AP Lang…” Four hundred words left to write about Jay Gatsby and his hard-on for a green light. Spoiler alert, Gatsby dies because he gets too ambitious and tries to overcome his poor, small-town origins. Seems relevant.
My excuse withers on my lips when I see that Mrs. Lombardi’s eyes are brimming. Whoa, okay. I didn’t think she felt that strongly about my English essay.
“Char, your stepfather is Michael Saunders, right?”
I nod, still freaked out by her tears.
“Did I ever tell you that I taught him?”
Wow, plot twist. I know I called her an “old person” earlier, but I meant like regular-old, not old-old. I do some quick math in my head. Maybe Mrs. Lombardi has an incredible skincare routine?
“I was a student teacher,” she explains, as if she knows what I’m thinking. “I was, I dunno, twenty-two or twenty-three, and he was in the geometry class I was shadowing. He was one of the brightest students.”
Michael was smart once? Yikes, wonder what happened to that.
“Then I joined the staff for real and I taught him calculus, too, his senior year. He was on the honor roll, great kid. Instead of college, he went to the army like a lot of his classmates did. The military recruiters would come to our school and make all these promises to teenage boys who were mad as hell—sorry, heck—about 9/11 and Al-Qaeda and didn’t have anywhere to put that rage. ”
I nod, even though I already know the TL;DR of this story.
“Well, he suffered a lot during the war, and you know how he is now—” She purses her lips. “Char, you’re too smart to waste your life.”
“Um. Thanks?”
“Promise me you’ll try for this program.”
It doesn’t actually matter. It’s not like Alpha Fellows will admit me. I’ll just rush through the application in an hour or two, then forget about it.
I grab the pamphlet and stand up. “Fine. Yeah.”
“Forward me the confirmation email when you’re done.”
“Sure.” I’m dying to bounce.
Only a few minutes later, as I’m walking out of the building, does it hit me. I totally failed to quit my job.