“You know how much this means to your mother and me. We work very hard to send you to that school. You do want to go to Princeton, don’t you?”
She hated when her father talked like that. She switched the phone to her other ear. “Yeah. Of course. Everyone knows, like, you can’t get a good job unless you graduate from Princeton. Daddy, I know all that. It’s just… it’s just… Daddy, I don’t like it here!”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Emily. You’re at the finest prep school in the country. When I was fifteen, I would have given anything to go to a boarding school. Think about how much more independence you have than other girls your age. How can you not like it there? What about volleyball? What about your classes?”
“Volleyball’s, like, the only thing I do like here. And the coach hates me! My classes all suck. They’re way too hard. And my teachers are all assholes.”
Emily’s roommate Mi-Yung suddenly gasped at the obscenity. Emily shot her a glance, upset about being eavesdropped on. She and Mi-Yung had nothing in common, except that neither of them really had friends. But that wasn’t so uncommon at Walker – the academic competition didn’t foster much camaraderie.
Before her father could speak, she added: “I miss my friends, Daddy. I miss Josh. Why can’t I just go to a regular high school back in Hartford?”
“Emily, you’re being a baby,” her father’s voice resumed through the phone. “We’ve been too easy on you for too long. It’s high time you learned a little maturity. A few years from now – when you can get any job you want – you’ll look back at this and thank me. Now get back to your studying.”
“But, Daddy…” she sobbed.
“But nothing,” said her father sternly. “That’s enough from you. You can call us again in two weeks. Goodnight, Emily.”
“But…” she stopped, hearing the line go dead. She sat down on her dorm bed, still cradling the phone to her ear. A tear slowly rolled down her cheek.
Emily tried to remember a time she had felt more lonely. Ever since her father had been forced out of his company’s management track, her parents had decided that she was going to the top school in the country, which to them meant Princeton. Her first weeks away from home had been hard, and as the pressure steadily mounted, things had only gotten worse. She sighed and walked over to her desk. Carefully rummaging around the back of the bottom drawer, she pulled out an old Ziploc freezer bag and gingerly removed the dozen letters and photographs. She found her favorite photo of Josh and stared at it for a long time. Finally, she set it down and began slowly reading his last letter again. It was dated three weeks earlier. She smiled to herself every time she came across the word their – he never could remember when to use their or they’re. She had the same problem with who’s and whose. Her eyes lingered on the signature: Truest Love, Josh. She delicately leafed through the other letters, just to verify that they all ended with the same closing.
She shut her eyes and put the photo to her lips. She could hear him telling her how lucky she was. How she was going to be the only one from Hartford to go to Princeton. How someday she’d be running the country, or at least one of its major companies. All because she had gotten into Walker. Right then she would have gladly traded the privilege with any one of the other kids from her junior high. Surely Brian or Rebecca would have been more worthy. At least they would be passing their classes and not at risk of flunking out. She shuddered – what could be more embarrassing than to blow a chance like she had? She’d be the laughingstock of Connecticut.
“Ah you cwazy, Emiry?!” Mi-Yung whispered in her thick Chinese accent. “Lights out ten minutes ago! You gonna get us in big twouble!”
Startled from her reverie, Emily glanced at her watch: 11:40. Shit! She started sliding the letters and pictures back into the baggie. Walker was one of the few boarding schools that still had lights-out for underclassmen. The last thing she needed was another curfew violation. She looked over at Mi-Yung pretending to be fully asleep. That goody-two-shoes had probably never been in trouble in her life.
She got up to put the packet away.
“Freeze, Miss Graham! Stop right where you are. Do you realize this is your third curfew violation this semester?” The headmistress for her dorm floor stood frowning, her heavy frame filling the doorway.
Emily exhaled and wondered how Walker had found such a humorless woman for this job. “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Walsh. I was just getting into bed.”
“The time for that was fifteen minutes ago, Miss Graham. Now it’s going to cost you. What have you got in your hand? Hand it over.”
“No!” Emily quickly tried to shove her package into a drawer. “It’s nothing, Mrs. Walsh, just some old stuff.”
Mrs. Walsh walked over to her and snatched the packet from her hand. Emily noticed Mi-Yung watching the scene through her closed eyelashes. Mrs. Walsh opened the bag. “I trust this isn’t your trigonometry homework, is it? You have a big test coming up, don’t you Miss Graham? You can’t really afford to mess this one up, can you? Maybe these have been distracting you from your studies. Well, I can put an end to that.”
Before Emily could find words to protest, Mrs. Walsh marched out of the room with her most treasured mementos.
“But you can’t do that…” Emily said softly as Mrs. Walsh jerked the door shut.
The next day, all Emily could think of was whether she would ever see her letters again. At the practice volleyball tournament the next afternoon, her mind was only half on the game. They were playing Exeter, one of Walker’s oldest rivals. Emily figured that games against east-coast schools were only warm-up exercises to prepare for the California schools. Her coach disagreed and had been riding her all week.
Walker easily won the first two matches. Coach Anderson managed to rotate every player onto the court except Emily. Early in the third match, Sarah Kane banged her knee diving to recover an Exeter spike. Coach Anderson looked pissed about losing his six-foot star.
“All right, Graham. It looks like you’re up. But leave your attitude off the court and take these guys seriously. If you screw this up…”
“Thanks, Coach,” Emily replied curtly, as she took a front position.
When it was her turn to serve, she aced Exeter out of three points. She had always been an excellent player, and anywhere other than Walker, she would have been a starter. As she threw the ball up for her fourth serve, she began to wonder what it would be like to play for another high school. Exeter returned her fourth serve easily. Slightly bewildered, Emily rotated into a defensive position.
“Look alive, Graham!” shouted her coach from the sidelines.
But Truest Love, Josh was all she could think of. Then came their serve. It was a shot no one should have missed. In junior high, she could have returned it. But for some reason, she just couldn’t make her knees or elbows move fast enough. The ball hit the ground, and Exeter scored. The single point didn’t matter considering Walker’s lead, but Coach Anderson exploded.
“What the hell are you thinking?! Get off the court! Hit the showers, Graham!” He caught his breath and continued: “You’re benched for the rest of the season. I don’t want to see you, even at practice!”
Emily just blinked at him. She realized she had missed the point, but this was ridiculous. From the sidelines, Sarah was puzzled too: “C’mon, Coach. Aren’t you over-reacting a little? Next year, with me and some of the others gone, Walker’s going to need Emily.”
Coach Anderson turned and barked at her: “Look, Kane, I’m the coach and I call the shots here. If Graham wants to play next year, then she can come to tryouts then. But this year, she’s out! Your knee’s well enough – get out there and take her place!”
Sarah patted Emily on the shoulder as she walked passed her. Emily just stared down at her feet and shook her head, trying not to let anyone see the tears welling up in her eyes.
“Please, Mommy!” she sobbed into the phone. “Please! I wanna come home. I hate it here.”
“Emily Samantha Graham, you stop that this instant,” came her mother’s firm voice. “Your father was very clear last night.”
She had never heard her mom talk like that. Asian kids were used to this kind of parental pressure, but for Emily it was too much.
After a moment of silence, her mom’s voice resumed: “Now, I’m very sorry about the volleyball team. But your priorities are your studies. To remain at school, you know you must maintain a 3.0.”
Emily made a decision: “Mom, I don’t want to remain here. I want to come home.”
“You are going to graduate from Walker and you are going to Princeton. That’s the end of the discussion.”
“No, Mommy, I want to come home. I want to be back with Josh.”
“That’s too bad. You have no choice. If you quit or flunk out of Walker, you are on your own. We’ve spent way too much money to have invested in failure.”
Emily could hear the regret in her mother’s voice and wondered how she could possibly be saying these things. A feeling of helplessness began to overtake her.
“You can’t do that, Mom. I’ll stay with Josh,” she said desperately.
Emily’s mom sighed deeply and delivered the final blow: “Emily, you can’t do that. Joshua has been dating Amanda Nicholson for two weeks now. We asked him not to tell you until you finished your exams. But you’ve left me no choice. Your future is at Walker Academy, Emily. Make the most…”
Emily slammed the phone down. She buried her face into her pillow, relieved that Mi-Yung was out taking a shower.
The next day, all anyone in her class could talk about was the trigonometry test. Some kids had stayed up all night studying for the test. Emily had been up all night, too. While Mi-Yung slept as soundly as ever, Emily tossed and turned. A techno beat had been repeating in her head for hours. Unlike her other tests, this time she was probably the only student not worried about the exam. She knew that it was 50% of her math grade, but that somehow seemed irrelevant.
As the exams were being passed out, other kids furiously reviewed their cheat sheets. A boy in front of her tried memorizing a table of sines and cosines in the few remaining seconds. On his hand, she stared at the word SohCahToa. She was nearly certain that yesterday she had known what that formula meant, but for the life of her she couldn’t make heads or tails of it now. The exam landed on her desk. The electric drum grew louder. She looked around the room. Everyone was bent down with their nose to their desk, scribbling furiously with their pencils. She flipped the test over and over in her hands, trying to read it upside-down and then backwards.
Finally, it occurred to her that she’d better start writing. Here was her future. She took out her pencil and read problem one. She recognized that there was a picture of a triangle, but she got stuck when she came to the word tangent. She sensed that this was easy, and that the word belonged there. But it didn’t seem like she was being asked a question. It seemed like the exam had plenty of nice things to say about the triangle, some known and some unknown. Instead of an answer, she took her pencil and started drawing concentric circles spiraling out to the edge of the page. The techno beat completely dominated the room. At six minutes into the test, Emily stood up and walked out the room.
The other students gasped when they saw her leaving. Her teacher looked up and called after her. She didn’t even turn around. The world looked hazy, and all she could hear was the rapid, synthesized beat.
Emily stared down at the asphalt 80 feet below. Sitting out the window ledge next to Mi-Yung’s desk, she looked at her shoes dangling above the open space. How cool and inviting the air in front of her looked. She would be just like a bird, weightless and free. All her loneliness and failure would disappear, left behind in the eighth-story dorm room she despised. Mrs. Walsh would not be able to yell at her any more. Mi-Yung would never again get on her nerves with her zealous study habits. She would not have to listen to English pop songs badly translated into Chinese. Or hear her clicking into the phone to her friends or family back home.
The techno rhythm droned on. She bent forward, careful not to slip off, and removed her socks and shoes. She loved the way the cool breeze felt between her toes. She imagined that her backpack was a parachute rig. She lowered out a few inches, keeping just one hand holding onto the sill. Then she switched hands and relished the tiny moment of weightlessness in between, while nothing held her. Finally, she let go.
The drum pattern suddenly returned to its deafening volume. She had been tricked. The fall was neither peaceful nor calm. There was no feeling of freedom. Instead, the wind howled in her ears and against her cheeks. The ground raced up to meet her fifteen-year-old body. She screamed until her voice gave out, yet the shrieking music beat continued. Finally, her body went limp.
She thought about her classmates in the trig test. What must they all have thought of her abrupt departure? What could Mi-Yung be thinking of her roommate’s bizarre behavior? She wondered how Mi-Yung was doing on the exam. She was the most uptight girl at school and math was her weakest subject. Ha! Weakest subject. That meant she might have to settle for an A-, or even, heaven forbid, a B+! Emily wished she could see the look on Mi-Yung’s face when she discovered what had happened. She was sure it would be the first time she’d ever seen blood, let alone a dead body. Everyone would want to talk to Mi-Yung. She’d be instantly popular. Everyone would want to know the girl whose roommate had committed suicide.
Wait! That meant Mi-Yung would automatically get straight A’s. A guaranteed 4.0. That meant… But then everything went quiet. Blackness was all Emily could see. After a few minutes, she slowly opened her eyes. Her knuckles were white and her fingers were wrapped tightly around the windowsill. Her bare feet still dangled in the wind, but there was no more music, no more droning in her head. She smiled at the change. She winked down at the ground, still 80 feet below. Then she swung her legs around and climbed back into her room.
In the cafeteria later that evening, Emily thought the food looked surprisingly tasty. Her standard garden salad appeared greener and the mashed potatoes seemed fluffier. With her plastic red tray, she walked into the dining hall with her head up. Kids from her math class snickered as she walked passed the first few rows. She instinctively headed for the volleyball team’s usual table. As she got closer, she realized she might not be welcome there. In fact, her normal place was occupied by a girl she didn’t know. Sarah glanced up and motioned that Emily could sit next to her. But Emily shrugged and decided to keep going. She walked over to the corner table, where Mi-Yung and two other nerdy kids quietly ate their dinner. Emily sat at the unoccupied end of the table and ate, pretending not to listen to the occasional conversation. They seemed to be intermittently arguing about whether it required three years or four years of political science experience in order to work for a senator. Mi-Yung spoke in Chinese to another Asian girl sitting at a table behind her.
After dinner, Emily wanted to call her parents. This would be the third night in a row. They would definitely not be happy. After only one ring, she hung up. She wondered whether they would see the Caller-ID and recognize her call. Who cares? she decided.
That night, Emily slept fitfully. Around 2:00 am, she was vaguely aware of getting out of bed and walking across the room. In a daze, she walked over to the door but then stopped. She turned around and walked quietly over to Mi-Yung’s bed. She thought about waking her to tell her she had had a nightmare. Mi-Yung had the slightest smile on her lips as she slept.
Emily dreamt that she was shaking her, but Mi-Yung slept soundly. Then Emily began to hear laughter. Shrill, Chinese-accented laughter. That bitch! Mi-Yung was laughing at her. Her faint smile turned cruel and she continued cackling. Emily had a slight sense of sweat seeping down her forehead. Mi-Yung’s snoring began to sound like a drumbeat to her, gradually becoming more and more rhythmic. Emily shook her head desperately to wake up.
Then without thinking, she carefully lifted Mi-Yung’s small sleeping frame and hoisted her onto the windowsill. She paused a moment, then gently pushed her out.
Apparently, Emily was gonna go to Princeton after all.