Frat Girl. Kiley Roache

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СКАЧАТЬ was picked from among thousands, and the interview rounds went better than I could have dreamed. I was one of two finalists left and would be pitching my project to the board, including Stevenson himself, in a few days.

      I wasn’t terrible at public speaking, so I wasn’t too stressed about presenting my idea.

      The problem would be not having one.

      “I’m so fucked,” I say, sitting at my desk and scrolling through Facebook, like I might find inspiration there.

      I turn to my best friend, who is sitting, her ass halfway out my open second-story window, chain-smoking Marlboros.

      “What’s the other person doing, again?” she asks.

      The official emails didn’t tell me who my competition was, let alone what they were doing, but I searched Twitter for the name of the scholarship, and, lo and behold, my competition is the type to Tweet his every movement, from trying out a gluten-free diet for fun to humble bragging about how #blessed he was to be a Stevenson Award finalist.

      Two hours of stalking instead of working on my project later, and I knew he was a CS major from San Francisco who’d already created two moderately successful social media apps. I also knew waaaay too much about his cat, Ashby.

      “It’s got to be another app, right?” I say.

      “Well, I’m assuming it’s not poetry,” Alex says, swinging her combat-booted foot, casting a shadow on my baby-pink walls.

      I pull out my phone and turn my whole body toward her, sitting cross-legged on my desk chair.

      “He Tweeted yesterday at 11:06 a.m. ‘working on a new project’ and then two hours later ‘coding by the pool. Could I be more #SiliconValley #California!?!’”

      Since the fund is run by Stevenson’s charity, not his company, they supposedly invested in all sorts of projects, but there was a clear favor toward the technical, money-generating kind.

      “So he’s the same idiot that school is made up of.” Alex takes a long drag and blows smoke out the window, toward the quiet suburban street below. “You’re something different. Sell that.”

      “Yeah, I’ll just tell them I want to do something different. I don’t know what, but different.”

      “Welcome to being a humanities major.” She shrugs.

      Alex and I have been best friends since the Model UN conference I attended freshman year, when I was waiting for another young Republican in a suit to give the opening remarks and instead she bounded onstage: pink-haired, tattooed and brilliant.

      She’s a year older than me and the only person from our town to go to an elite school before me. In fact, she’s at the school I’m so desperately trying to find a way to attend: Warren University.

      Before college she went to the giant public school with metal detectors at the entrances—the same school my parents paid the archdiocese an obscene tuition to keep me safe from—where she got straight As in all APs and tried every drug ever invented. “God, imagine how smart she’d be if her brain was fully functioning,” our friend Jay once said.

      Dirt-poor and knowing equally about ’shrooms and Sophocles, she didn’t exactly scream typical Warren University student. But she was everything they want to be. They dress like her at Coachella, but she’s been going to the thrift store since fifth grade, when her dad was laid off, not since vintage came back.

      We’ve been at this all week, spitballing stupid ideas fueled by coffee (me), cigarettes (Alex) and rosé (her all day, me once I give up).

      “What’s up, nerds?” Jay leans against the door.

      “I’m watching my future slip away from me,” I say, putting my head in my hands.

      “Ugh, drama much?” He flops down on my bed. “Just be like me. Go to IU and have blonde girls with Delta Delta Gamma tank tops stretched over their double Ds try to claim you as their very own gay best friend while you fuck their closeted football-player boyfriends behind their backs.”

      I wish I could. Well, at least the attending-IU part. I had messed up pretty royally when it came to applying for schools. My mom hadn’t gone to college, and my dad “didn’t have the time to waste” on helping me, so it was just me and a guidance counselor with three hundred other students to help.

      So when I went to college night and the Warren representative stood up in his gold-and-blue suit and said they meet 100 percent of financial need, I believed him. I applied early, and when I got my acceptance, I saw no reason to try anywhere else.

      But then the financial aid letter came. And the people who sat in a boardroom in California saw meeting my need in a different way than me and my mother did, bent over bills in our cramped kitchen. They included the restaurant franchise in their assessment of what my parents “owned,” but it wasn’t like they were about to sell it to meet my tuition.

      By that point, it was too late to apply anywhere else.

      But I don’t want to talk about all that right now. I turn to Jay and roll my eyes. “My gender and orientation prevent this plan, but thanks for your input.”

      “Yeah, I think that’s just you, Jaybird,” Alex chimes in from the window.

      He rolls his eyes. “It’s overrated anyway.” He props himself up on his elbows, swinging his feet up and down alternately. “Is angst-y time over? Because I’d like to enjoy one of our last nights together before we all grow up and our souls die, Wendy Darling.”

      “He’s right—not thinking is when I think my best. C’mon, bring the wine.” Alex steps up on the windowsill and pulls herself onto the roof. We grab the bottle and follow.

      Lying on the roof of my parents’ compact house, we stare at the stars and city lights. We listen to trains go by and point out planes coming into the airport a neighborhood over. We pass around Two Buck Chuck Rosé and sip from the bottle. And I try to think about anything except for getting out of here on one of those planes. About the pitch in three days that will decide my fate.

      I take a sip. “Seriously, though, the school’s in goddamn Tech Town, USA. What gender and sexuality studies project will make them happier than a million-dollar app idea?”

      “A million-dollar app that just allows people another way to socialize?” Alex takes the bottle from me, takes a long pull and continues. “I mean, I like socializing, but, please, like the best and brightest people in the world don’t have better things to do?”

      Jay snaps his fingers in agreement.

      Alex pauses just long enough to nod at him. “I mean, I’d prefer world-class minds to be endeavoring to understand who we are and why we are here and what this place—” she waves her hands, sweeping into her sentence the suburb around us and stars above us, and almost spilling the pink wine “—means, not creating apps that make it easier for eighth graders to send each other tittie pics.”

      I take the wine back and think about this as I sip the hypersweet concoction.

      “You could start some sort of nonprofit for girls in tech,” Jay says.

      “I looked it up—there are СКАЧАТЬ