DupliKate

After a long weekend of studying for finals, dealing with prom committee, going over the school paper layout, and starting page designs for the yearbook, I was sitting with Paul in the Starbucks next door to our high school.

“This is so awesome it makes me want to kill myself,” I declared, waving his college application essay in the air. “Or at least tear my hair out.” I slammed the neatly stapled sheets down onto the tabletop next to my peppermint mocha. I would have slammed my face down as well, but Paul’s hand shot out in time to stop me. We froze for a second, his palm to my forehead.

“Kate, you’re not going to kill yourself,” said Paul, gently pushing me back to a normal sitting position and taking a sip from his large black coffee. His blue eyes looked at me steadily and a small smile formed at the corners of
his mouth. He spoke with the slow confidence of someone who’s never
not
gotten his way. “You’re going to get into Yale and go there in the fall and do many things to me in my dorm room. Unspeakable things.”

“Wrong,” I said, trying not to laugh at his disappointed pout. I reached up to smooth down a piece of his hair. He hadn’t gotten it cut in a while and a small light brown tendril was sticking out from under his Red Sox cap. “The application is due in two weeks and I still have no essay. Can’t get in without an essay.”

It wasn’t for lack of trying. I’d been dreaming about Yale for three years, ever since Paul and I decided on going there together, so I’d obviously started thinking about the perfect personal statement forever ago. But I hadn’t even come up with anything to write about, much less typed more than two sentences before deciding it sucked and erasing it in frustration.

“You just have writer’s block,” Paul said soothingly. His deep voice was calm as he squeezed my hand across the table. “Once you start I’m sure you’ll write something great.”

“Not as great as this,” I sighed, waving my hand over the most perfect collection of five hundred words I’d ever read. “This is hilarious, but still sounds super smart. And it’s such a memorable story….” Paul and his friends had started a punk band when they were twelve, and he’d got
ten a nasty infection while trying to give himself a tattoo. The essay’s last line was about the scar he still sports, a tiny, paler patch of skin on his left bicep. It’s barely noticeable, but certainly made for great essay fodder. The admissions officers would eat it up.

Meanwhile, I was serving them nothing.

I sighed and leaned back in my chair. I wanted so badly to pack my stuff into Paul’s car and drive down I-95 to New Haven with him next year. But as the application deadline loomed, my already small chances were shrinking by the day. If I didn’t get in, Paul and I would be apart, probably far apart. And when’s the last time two college freshmen survived a long-distance relationship?

Yep, I had to get into Yale.

“I might not get in either,” Paul pointed out. He picked up his essay and tucked it into his back pocket, as if putting it out of sight would put it out of my mind.

“HA!” I said way too loudly. The guy behind the counter and the kid in the corner wearing headphones both looked at me weirdly. “There is a zero percent chance of that. Your dad went to Yale. Both your grandfathers went to Yale. And they all donate. A lot.”

“That doesn’t guarantee anything,” he reminded me.

I leaned forward and yanked on the end of one of his navy blue hoodie strings to even them out. “But you’ve got a 4.3 GPA. You’re the captain of the basketball team. And
you got a 2390 on the SATs. All that legacy stuff is just icing on the cake.”

Paul smiled a little. “Well, if you really wanna play that game, you have a 4.1. You’re the cocaptain of the volleyball team and you got a 2320,” he countered. “Which, by the way, is an awesome score. I have no idea why you’re doing it again.”

“I want a 2370,” I said flatly. I’d gotten that high on practice tests and figured I should give it another shot, even if it meant ending a brutal finals week with a hugely stressful standardized test. “Plus, there are at least five kids with 4.0s breathing down my 4.1 neck. One A-minus on finals and
boom
, I’m not third in the class. I’m eighth, behind six other known Yale applicants.”

“You actually keep track of that stuff?” Paul asked, incredulous. I almost laughed, but then I would’ve had to explain the obsessive-compulsive nerdiness of the spreadsheet I constantly updated on my computer that told me these things.

“When our dream school has never admitted more than two kids from Colchester High in one year, yes, of course I keep track,” I said matter-of-factly “You’re a shoo-in, whereas my shoes are aggressively out. I mean, how long did it even take you to write that?” I asked, pointing at his pocket. “An hour?”

Paul shrugged. “Something like that,” he admitted.
“So? You have your on-campus interview coming up, and they’ll love you. Just like I do.” He grinned at me.

I took a deep breath and smiled weakly back at him. I doubted they’d love the shell of a human I was going to be after the upcoming two weeks of finals and SATs. I would have exactly one day to recover before my campus visit, and I was certain that it wouldn’t be enough. One
month
might not be enough. “Thanks,” I sighed.

“And if they don’t,” he said very seriously, grasping my hands and gazing into my eyes, “I will storm the admissions office armed with a tire iron. Or, more realistically, just get really angry and swear a lot.” He grinned at me again, then drained his coffee cup and effortlessly arced it through the air into the trash can twenty feet away. “Ready?” he asked.

I nodded. Our little coffee break had already turned into a much longer study hiatus than my schedule allotted. That happens all the time when your boyfriend barely has to study to be valedictorian.

We put on our coats and walked out into the cold. It was nearly dark already, a typical December afternoon in suburban Boston, and a thin gray drizzle had started to come down. Paul clicked open the door of his black hybrid SUV and took out his phone so we could keep talking as we drove.

“Hey,” I said into my cell as I unlocked the door to my
little blue Civic. As soon as I got in, I hit the speakerphone button, dropped the phone into my lap, and cranked the heat. Since I hate driving with gloves, I pulled my hands inside my coat sleeves and settled in to wait until the car warmed up.

“Okay, how’s this,” Paul continued. I saw his car pulling out of the lot toward his side of town. “You should just screw the essay and write them a letter. ‘Dear Yale, my name is Katerina Larson, and you have to let me in because I’m extremely hot.’” I laughed while Paul kept talking. “‘I’ve got gorgeous eyes and an even better body. Seriously, it’s ridiculous. You know who else is hot? My boyfriend. He’s six three and really jacked, even though he doesn’t work out that much.’”

“You do work out that much,” I reminded him, rubbing my palms together in front of the heater.

“They don’t know that,” he answered.

“Well, if you want to write it for me, be my guest,” I said, easing my car out of the parking space. I drove slowly, since the late-afternoon drizzle was becoming evening freezing rain, making the empty, tree-lined streets trickier than usual to navigate.

“I might have to do that,” Paul agreed. “Maybe then I can squeeze myself into your schedule.” His tone was joking, but I could hear the slight annoyance underneath. Not
that I blamed him—I’d definitely been MIA lately. Over the summer, we’d been together constantly, but after the school year started and my AP classes got more intense, we’d seen each other less and less. In fairness, Paul basically lived at basketball practice and his schedule wasn’t exactly AP-light, but there was no doubt that I was the busier one.

“It’s all for a good cause,” I answered, trying to sound lighthearted. “Next year we’ll have all the time in the world. Plus we’ve got winter break,” I added. Neither of our families had vacation plans. In fact, I was pretty sure my mom had a business trip for part of it—I can never keep track. So I was looking forward to lazing around in front of the fireplace, renting movies, and drinking hot chocolate. I could just
relax
. For the first time in three years.

“So fourteen days,” he said. “Fourteen days till I get my girlfriend back.”

“Fourteen days,” I agreed. “Start the countdown.”

There was a long beat. “One.”

“That’s counting up,” I pointed out.

“Damn, I was hoping I’d be able to trick you into thinking it was already over.”

I giggled as I pulled into my driveway, tapping the clicker that opened the brick-colored garage door. “Nope, but I appreciate the effort. Maybe I’ll write about it in my
essay: ‘My Boyfriend’s Attempts to Convince Me of a Warp in the Space-Time Continuum.’”

“Well, it certainly makes you sound nerdy. I’d definitely let you in.”

If only it were that easy.

TO-DO LIST

Essay!
SAT practice—at least 2 sections
AP Euro flash cards
Bio lab questions, go over project notebook
French vocab, memorize dialogue, extra credit essay
English—get copy of The Sound and the Fury, return Paul’s Crime and Punishment
Physics final—practice problem sets
Prom committee crap (location rental, food/drink ideas, talk everyone out of hiring lame band, etc.)
Volleyball flyer designs
Yearbook superlatives, list possible categories?
Christmas—tree? Presents (Mom, wallet; Paul, sweater??? Mix CD for Kyla et al.)

POSSIBLE ESSAY TOPICS

“The Time in Ninth Grade That I Decided to Wear Mismatched Socks for a Month”

“Sophomore Year I Didn’t Have to Wear Nearly as Supportive a Sports Bra as I Do Now”

“Note to Self: Back Up iTunes Next Time”

(Okay, maybe not)

CHAPTER TWO
MONDAY, DECEMBER 3

THE NEXT MORNING MY BEST FRIEND, KYLA
, was camped out in front of my locker, two coffees in hand. “I drank most of mine already,” she said, standing up and handing me a still-steaming cup. “I considered switching it with yours and then pretending to get all mad that Starbucks ripped us off, but I figured it would take too much acting energy too early in the morning. Although now that I’m caffeinated, I seem to have it. See?” She jumped up and down several times, making goofy faces at me.

“Morning,” I answered dryly. We usually traded off coffee pickup days, but I’d been so busy lately she’d taken over. I took a huge swig out of my cup, hoping the heavily sugared liquid would give me the energy to deal with Kyla’s usual rapid-fire delivery. She seemed even more hyper today than usual.

“So what’s this I hear about you going into college app
panic?” Kyla asked, poking me in the ribs with her elbow while flipping her chin-length red hair out of her enviably porcelain-skinned face. “You know you can pull off one stupid little essay. I bet you’re already on the last sentence.”

I yanked my locker open. “First of all, it’s not a ‘little’ essay. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever written. And I haven’t even started it yet.”

“Of course you haven’t—because you’re confident you’ll get it done.” Kyla could make anything positive. She’s one of those people who would be like, “Your boyfriend’s cheating on you? It is
fabulous
that we found out! Now you can dump the bastard and we totally have more time to shop and watch
So You Think You Can Dance
!” It’s a lovely quality, actually. Her other lovely quality is that we’re the exact same size. So even though her clothing taste is on the hookery side, which I can say because she always claims I got beaten with the J. Crew stick, it’s a great way to double our wardrobes.

“Why am I the only one worried about getting into college?” I asked. I slammed my bright blue locker door and my coffee cup splashed a few drops through the sippy hole in the cover. I slurped the spill off the plastic as we headed down the hallway toward AP English (me) and government (Kyla). Around us, the pre-bell rush of kids formed a dense blur of backpacks and groggy faces shuffling in random directions under chilly fluorescent lighting.

“Because,” Kyla answered, stepping quickly to the side
as a gaggle of juniors squeezed past, “I get to go wherever I want since I am a fabulous, heavily recruited volleyball player. Whereas you are only a mediocre volleyball player, which is sad but true, and also something
you’ve
said before, so don’t get mad at me. And the rest of our friends will be happy with state schools. And your boyfriend’s family paid his way into Yale—”

“They’re generous donors. It’s not the same thing.”

“It’s exactly the same thing, but whatever. He’s a genius so he deserves it anyway.”

“Thank you.”

“And finally because you’re turning into a giant, high-strung nerd. Chill out! Smoke some pot. Just kidding—bad message, but chill out.”

We paused at the door of my English class. “I’ll try,” I sighed, as I walked into the room.

“No, you won’t,” Kyla said over her shoulder, as she nimbly sidestepped people and wove her way through the crowded hallway.

At lunch I was hoping to hide in the library with an SAT practice section, but I was waylaid about ten steps from the cafeteria door by my guidance counselor, Ms. Renner. I love Ms. Renner. I respect Ms. Renner. But I also recognized the look on her face.

“Kate! Hi! I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

I winced inwardly but smiled. I couldn’t say no, especially not after all the advice she’s given me on classes and the best summer internships.

“Of course!” I said brightly.

“Fantastic. A couple students need help with their college application essays and I was wondering whether you could proofread a few of them, help them with grammar and things like that?”

Ugh. “Um, sure. I actually haven’t started mine yet, but—”

“Oh, thank you! Don’t worry, they’re not…” She lowered her voice. “These kids aren’t exactly Ivy-bound. It shouldn’t take you too long. Thank you so much!” She pulled a sheaf of papers out of the pile of folders she was carrying and cheerfully handed them to me.

There went my lunchtime SAT practice.

Later, on my way into study hall, I ran into my volleyball coach, who is also the school newspaper advisor and was my English teacher freshman and sophomore years.

“Just the person I wanted to see,” Coach Tate said breathlessly, brushing her frizzy gray-blond bangs out of her eyes. “Would you mind sitting in on a few freshman gym classes sometime this week? It’d be great to see if there’s anybody I need to hassle about trying out for the team.”

“Sure,” I said, suppressing the urge to blurt, “For chrissakes, just pick all the tall chicks!” I couldn’t turn down the woman who’d promised to write me the most glowing recommendation in her twenty-five-year teaching career.

“Thank you!” She smiled at me gratefully. “There’s a class right now. I can excuse you from study hall to head over there.”

So much for study hall.

Toward the end of the day, I tracked Paul down by his locker. “You could say no once in a while,” he suggested after I recounted Ms. Renner and Coach Tate’s favors. “But you won’t—that’s just how you roll,” he finished, smiling and shaking his head a little as I threw my arms up helplessly. “And I love that about you.”

“Do you love that I never sleep?” I muttered under my breath.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I sighed. “Also, I just heard that I’m running the yearbook meeting before school on Friday, because Sierra’s out with chicken pox,” I added.

“Sierra Lenz has chicken pox
now?
She’s eighteen!”

“That’s what
I
said.”

“Well, you can handle it, but please don’t forget all this.” Paul playfully gestured at himself from head to toe, and I felt a pang of guilt knowing that I was putting him further down my task list than he should be. I needed a
personal assistant. Or possibly two. Or one of those Harry Potter time-turner gizmos so I could do multiple things at once.

By the time last period rolled around I was in a colossally bad mood. I rushed into AP physics slightly late, thanks to my locker deciding to get stuck open until I violently kicked the door, injuring both it and my big toe. Luckily nobody noticed, because they were too busy applauding our teacher.

“What?” I whispered to Anne Conroy, as I slid into the other seat at her lab table. “Did something happen?”

“Mr. Piper said there wasn’t gonna be a final,” she whispered back, her round face, a contrast to her reed-thin body, still half-turned toward the front of the room. She reached up to re-tighten her already-taut, straw-colored ponytail.

“Shut. Up,” I said. No physics final? Oh my God, all the time I’d mentally budgeted to study was suddenly free! This was just the break I needed! My eyes widened and I stared at Anne, openmouthed, then turned to look at Mr. Piper. His gray hair was even more mussed than usual and he was rubbing his hands together, looking positively gleeful.

“As I was saying,” he said, “this semester, instead of a final exam…”

The entire class suddenly groaned as we all realized that there was a catch—of course.

“There will be a final
project
,” Mr. Piper continued.

Oh no. Oh
no
.

Silence. Somebody in the back row muttered a very small “boo,” decided that it had been too small, and then muttered, “Boo!” again, louder.

“Your partners will be assigned and you’ll draw projects out of a hat,” he went on.

God, this sucked. This sucked
big-time
.

Somebody raised their hand. “Why can’t we pick our partners?”

“I’m very aware that you and your girlfriend are both in this class, Mr. Rosenrock, but I’m sorry. I purposely assigned it randomly. So without further ado…” Mr. Piper started reading names off a list. Bleh. I didn’t particularly care that we couldn’t pick partners, I just hoped mine was smart. I needed that A. Without it, my GPA—and therefore Yale—was shot.

“Kate Larson and Jake Cheng.”

Well, so much for Yale.

I slowly gathered my stuff, but Jake was on his way over to my lab table already. He threw down a beat-up notebook with multicolored pencil and ink doodles all over the cover, then yawned noisily and chucked a physics textbook, also covered in doodles, on top of it.

“Hey Jake,” I said.

“Wow,” he said sarcastically. “Kate Larson remembers my name.”

Oh, so this was how it was gonna be. I checked to see whether his sarcastic tone had been followed by a dazzlingly friendly smile. Nope.

“Of course I remember you,” I said patiently. We’d gone to the same school since kindergarten. “You don’t consider yourself memorable?”

“To the right audience, of course,” Jake said, crossing his arms. He was a few inches taller than me—he must’ve grown a bunch since the last time I’d paid any attention. “To the queen of the school…” He plunked his thin, wiry frame down in his chair, yanked at the collar of his faded Patriots Super Bowl T-shirt for a second, then kicked his feet onto the table and clasped his hands behind his head.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, glaring at him.

“It means—”

“Kate, will you do the honors?” Mr. Piper held out a beaker filled with little slips of paper. I reached in and pulled one out.

“Robotic catapult,” I read.

“Excellent!” Mr. Piper said. “Trajectories and precision of movement will be fun for you two.” He walked off to the next table as Jake rolled his eyes. I rolled mine too as I sat back down.
Fun
wasn’t exactly the word that came to mind.

“It means,” Jake said, finishing his thought from before Piper’s interruption, “that you used to be normal and chill,
and now you’re all hard-core and ‘eeeehhhh!’” He spastically waved his hands back and forth as he made that high-pitched last sound, clearly demonstrating that he thought I was some sort of neurotic academic supernerd. “Like I can already tell you’re gonna be all gung-ho about getting an A on this thing.”

“Of course I want an A,” I said evenly. “Actually, I need it.”

“Exactly. Whereas I’m cool with a C.” Jake raised an eyebrow at me as if daring me to say something.

“Well that’s great,” I said, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice. Maybe my essay could be a detailed account of plotting and carrying out the cold-blooded murder of my lab partner. Why was Jake being so annoying?

“So,” he asked conversationally, “how pissed is your boyfriend gonna be that we’re lab partners?”

Oh, right. That was why.

“He’s not gonna be pissed,” I said with forced patience.

“Oh really? The guy who told you to quit hanging out with me three years ago?” Jake narrowed his dark, almost-black eyes.

“Oh my God, that is
so
not what happened,” I said fiercely. Jake and I had been really good friends as kids. But in high school, I was put into all accelerated classes while he’d taken an artsier route, so we’d kind of naturally started hanging out less. Then Paul and I had met in honors bio and he’d gently pointed out that playing video games in
Jake’s basement all day wasn’t really going to get me into an Ivy League school. It wasn’t like Jake and I had suddenly stopped talking—it had been more of a gradual fade.

“We drifted apart, Jake.” I shrugged. “It happens when people get to high school. I mean, we’re not friends with Erica Kirk anymore either.”

“Of course we’re not—she’s a total bitch.”

“I know,” I agreed, smiling. But Jake’s angular face remained stony. He stared into space, absently running his hand over his close-cropped black hair for a moment. He then picked up a silver Sharpie and started drawing a little cartoon vampire on the dull black surface of the lab table.

“I saw that, Mr. Cheng,” said Mr. Piper, walking toward us. “Detention.”

Jake swore under his breath and stopped drawing as Piper threw our project folders onto the table with a thunk. I picked mine up and flipped through it quickly, wincing. Charts. Graphs. Statistics. Instructions. The assignment described building a contraption that would roll over to a Ping-Pong ball, pick it up, and throw it at three different targets. I didn’t have the first idea on how to begin. Neither did Jake, as he hadn’t even bothered to open his folder. He was busy drawing a mutated, frothing-at-the-mouth gerbil on the front cover.

I looked around the classroom. At every other table, people already had rulers and calculators out and were jotting down notes with their partners.

The hell with it. “Look,” I said to Jake. “It’s not your fault we haven’t talked in three years, but it’s not totally mine either. So quit being so annoying.”

He stopped drawing. “Less than three years, technically,” he answered. “I said hi to you in the hallway once and you just walked on by.”

“Did not,” I retorted. “Or if I did, it’s because I didn’t hear you.”

“Of course. You were probably too busy hanging out with the cheerleading squad.”

“Volleyball team,” I corrected him.

“Same difference,” he answered.

“It’s actually extremely easy to tell those two groups of people apart,” I snapped.

“Oh, right,” he said, “volleyball’s got that seven-foot lesbian on it.”

“No, that would be the cheerleaders.” Well, she was technically six one and not a lesbian, but she did have extremely short hair. She would definitely be on the bottom of the pyramid if our cheerleading squad ever did pyramids. Mostly they just do booty dances.

“Sorry, guess I’m not as clued in to the inner workings of this school as you are,” Jake said. “Some of us didn’t sell out as soon as we got to high school and started dating Mr.”—he made his voice into a dopey-sounding singsong—“HarvardPrincetonYaaaaale.”

“I don’t give a damn what you think of me, my boyfriend, or this school: I just wanna make sure I’m not working on this by myself,” I said, stabbing my finger toward one of the robot diagrams.

“You won’t be,” Jake shrugged. “You just might not be getting an A.” The bell rang and he got up and left, not even bothering to take his project folder with him.

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