Authors: Simon Rich
Tags: #Coming of Age, #Fiction, #Humor, #Literary, #Retail
Elliot Allagash (13 page)
That’s when it occurred to me: I would be leaving Elliot all alone at the third table.
“Hey,” I said. “Why don’t you sit with us tomorrow?”
Elliot stopped in his tracks.
“What?”
“Come on,” I said. “I bet they’ll let you squeeze in. I mean, if I tell them you’re my friend and all, I’m sure I could get you a spot.”
Elliot’s eyes narrowed.
“
You…
could get
me…
a spot?”
“Sure?” I said. “Why not?”
Elliot clenched his jaw and breathed tensely through his nose. I started to apologize, but before I could get any words out, he
spun around and headed for the street. He was moving so fast that I doubt he noticed Ashley, who was standing by his limo, staring at the face in the driver’s seat window.
• • •
“I think it’s just wonderful,” my mom said. “Mr. Ninth-Grade President!”
“You’re going to have a blast,” my father said. “Just remember—power corrupts!”
He and my mother started to laugh, but were quickly interrupted by the ringing of the phone. My mother headed to the kitchen to answer it.
“It might be Jessica,” I said.
My father stared at me, in shock.
“Who’s Jessica?”
“Just a girl I know.”
My father coughed—he had been drinking a glass of water.
“You want to know something?” he said, after he had recovered. “I’m super proud of you. When I was your age, I never would have had the maturity to put myself out there like that. And now you’re meeting new people, making new friends.”
“Lance said I could sit with him at lunch tomorrow,” I said.
“That’s great,” my dad said. “Is he a cool guy?”
I shrugged.
“He’s probably the most powerful person in the grade.”
He squinted at me. We didn’t say anything else until my mother returned and started to clear the dishes.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said, forcing an odd laugh. “It was just…something crazy.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Ashley’s
mother,”
she said.
“What did she have to say?” my father asked.
“Oh, it’s just ridiculous. She thinks you and Elliot arranged some kind of…I can’t even say it, it’s so silly.”
“Arranged some kind of what?”
“
I
don’t know,” she said. “A
conspiracy
or something. Some people are just sore losers.”
She smiled softly at me.
“Seymour, you don’t have any idea what that woman’s talking about…do you?”
My dad looked across the table at me.
“Do you?” he asked.
“No!” I said. “Of course not.”
I grabbed another slice of brisket from the platter in an effort to act casual, but they kept staring at me while I sliced up the meat, with an expression I had never seen before. I didn’t realize until I was about to swallow that I had taken the last piece.
PART TWO
Go to Jail
HARVARD APPLICATION
Name:
Seymour Herson
Place of Birth:
New York City
Current Standing:
Glendale Preparatory School, 12th Grade
GPA:
4.0
Ethnicity:
Caucasian, Native American (see supplement, “Official Genezaro Indian Tribal Document”)
Primary Household Earner’s Occupation:
Associate Professor of Economics, Bishop House Author
Please list your principal extracurricular activities and hobbies in the order of their interest to you. Include specific events and/or major accomplishments
.
Have you ever been found responsible for a disciplinary violation?
No.
Have you ever been convicted of any crime?
No.
Please write an essay on a topic of your choice. This personal essay helps us to become acquainted with you as a person, apart from courses, grades, and test scores
.
“Necklace of Hope”
by Seymour Herson
When people tell me that it’s impossible to make a difference, and that I should give up hope for this world, I just close my eyes and think about the greatest teacher I ever had. He didn’t teach me how to take integrations or write bibliographies. In fact, he couldn’t even read or write. But I learned enough from him to fill a thousand textbooks. His classroom was the street. And his subject? It was life.
To most people, Hal Sagal was just a typical homeless person. A “bum” or “vagrant” to be ignored, spat on, and forgotten. But from the moment I first met him, under a bridge, I knew that a great wisdom lay behind his leathery, rubicund face.
My classmates told me I was crazy.
“Why do you spend so much time with that man?” they said. “He’s just a homeless person.”
Just a homeless person. What did they know about the wars Hal had fought in? Or the animals he cared for, nursing them back to health under his bridge?
It’s easy to grow cynical in this world. And there was a time when I would have listened to my classmates and turned my back on Hal. But that was before he got sick and taught me his most important lesson yet.
I spent three months by his side during that cruel winter, bringing him food, blankets, and, perhaps most importantly, a hand to hold.
“Please let me take you to the hospital!” I begged. “Or at least tell the authorities about you!”
But he just shook his wise head and smiled. At first I didn’t understand. But now I realize: When you’ve lived a life as full as Hal’s, you have nothing to fear.
Just before Hal passed, he took off his wooden necklace and pressed it into my hands. It may not be the most fashionable accessory. But I’ll wear it proudly for the rest of my life.
That’s
my
diploma.
Academic Recommendation
In all my years of teaching French, I have never seen a student undergo a transformation as dramatic as Seymour’s. When he first entered my classroom, as a seventh-grader, he lagged so far behind the other students that I wrote a letter to his parents encouraging them to have him tested for learning disabilities. He consistently flunked his exams, including rudimentary vocabulary quizzes on common nouns.
At some point in the eighth grade, though, Seymour “turned things around.” With an abruptness I still can’t fully understand, he transformed himself from a flunking student into an A-plus superstar.
Seymour has a natural grasp of French that one rarely finds outside of France. It’s not just his test scores—which are
immaculate. It’s his conversational instincts. In oral exams, he seems to know instinctively what I plan to ask him in advance. On several occasions this year, he cut me off with the correct answer before I even finished reading him my question! If that’s not fluency, I don’t know what is.
Seymour is such a talented linguist that I worry sometimes that my class is stunting his progress. He has confessed to me in private that he feels uncomfortable speaking spontaneously in class, because he doesn’t want to embarrass his fellow students with a show of his superior fluency. I hope that at Harvard he will find an environment better suited to his gifts.
Sincerely,
Mr. Hendricks
Outside Recommendation
I like this one.
—T. Allagash
I certify that all information submitted in the admission process—including the application and the personal essay—is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented
.
Signature:
Seymour Herson
DECISION: ACCEPTED
.
• • •
“Hey Elliot? What does rubicund mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a nonsense word.”
“Come on. It’s got to mean
something.”
Elliot polished his cue and knocked in a bank shot.
“You want to know what rubicund means?” Elliot said. “It means, ‘I know what rubicund means.’
That’s
what it means!”
“I can’t believe they fell for that essay. It couldn’t have been more ridiculous.”
“What do you expect?” Elliot said. “The college application has become nothing more than an exercise in self-degradation! A groveling apology from a liberal middle class that feels guilty for a power they only
think
they possess! Anyway…congratulations.”
I walked over to the dumbwaiter.
“Want a drink?”
“I already have several,” he said.
I nodded and sent down for a Scotch, in a tall glass with lemon.
“Hey, Elliot, can you get me a single next year? Those dorm rooms in the yard look tiny.”
“I’m pretty sure they’re assigned randomly.”
“Randomly?”
I laughed. “Come on Elliot, there’s got to be an angle. What about disability? We could always say I have Crohn’s.”
“I think they’d notice when you arrived at school without the disease.”
“If I got caught, we could blame it on a faulty diagnosis! Pay some doctor to say he mixed up the tubes!”
Elliot smiled proudly.
“What’s the game count?” he asked.
“I think we’re tied,” I said.
“How about that?”
The dumbwaiter creaked back up with my drink, as well as a large basket of pastries.
“That damn chef,” Elliot muttered. “He’s the biggest bootlicker my father ever hired.”
I grabbed a croissant and bit into its warm, flaky shell. A jet of malted fudge oozed into my mouth. It was so rich that I had to sit down. I’d known Elliot for four years, but I was still occasionally shocked by the luxuries that surrounded him.
“New chef?” I asked.
Elliot sighed.
“It’s a long and ridiculous story.”
I took another bite of the croissant and waited for Elliot to tell it to me.
“Last year, after Terry’s second heart attack, his doctors pleaded with him to appoint a full-time personal trainer. He eventually hired some German to get them off his back—a former Olympian named Dolf. But on the same day, he hired Passard.”
“Who?”
“Jacques Passard. He is arguably the greatest pastry chef of his generation.”
“Jesus,” I said, my mouth full of crumbs. “Do these guys know about each other?”
“Are you kidding?” Elliot said. “Terry’s favorite hobby is pitting
them against each other. They
live
in the same apartment. No more interruptions.”
I finished off the croissant and grabbed another.
“Terry pays them a modest base salary,” Elliot explained. “But the bulk of their income comes from performance-based bonuses.”
“What do you mean?”
“Every month, Terry goes to their apartment and writes out an enormous check. Then he steps onto a scale. If he’s lost weight since his last visit, he gives the check to the trainer. If he’s gained weight, he gives it to the chef.”
“So they’re constantly at war.”
Elliot nodded.
“You should see the look on Dolf’s face when Jacques makes meringue. His cheeks turn bright red and the muscles stand out in his neck. Those two men hate each other more than you could possibly imagine.”
As Elliot racked up the next game, it occurred to me that he had never mentioned either of his father’s heart attacks. I wanted to ask him how serious they were, but of course I knew better.
I offered Elliot a pastry and he waved me off with his usual flick of the wrist. I wondered if Elliot had his own team of doctors. If he did, he certainly wasn’t listening to any of their advice. Every time I visited him, he seemed smaller and weaker than ever. For a while, I assumed it was an optical illusion. I was going through a drastic growth spurt, and everyone in the class seemed to be shrinking. But no one was shrinking as dramatically as Elliot. He
usually wore a new outfit every day, but occasionally I recognized a pair of pants from two or even three years ago. And once, I could have sworn that I saw him sporting the same pair of boat shoes he had worn on his very first day at Glendale, back in the eighth grade. It was possible, I thought sometimes, that he hadn’t changed at all.
Elliot turned around to break, and I took the opportunity to jot down the word “rubicund,” so I wouldn’t forget it. At some point, toward the end of eighth grade, I had started to carry around a thick red notebook in my pocket. Elliot always knew about Mr. Hendricks’s pop quizzes in advance, and I wanted to have the dates on hand so that I would know when to study. Before long, I was writing down the questions, too—and from there, it didn’t take me long to move on to the answers. I didn’t feel guilty. French was obviously a useless language. If anything, cheating at it was
improving
my capacity to learn by allowing me to focus on my other, more worthwhile classes.
By tenth grade I was cheating in every class, including, somehow, pottery. And by senior year, I was filling the notebook with information that had nothing to do with school. There were summaries of books I was supposed to have read, meanings of paintings I was supposed to have created, spellings of diseases I was supposed to be trying to cure, and a shockingly long list of homeless people whom I had supposedly befriended. The notebook became so incriminating that I developed a habit of frisking my pocket every couple of minutes to make sure it was still on my person. I wanted to destroy it, but I couldn’t: There was too much to keep track of.