The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(31)

Dave shook his head.

“You must score over 2100 if you expect Berkeley to consider you.”

“I am aware of this,” Dave said.

“What is this attitude?” his mother said. “UC Berkeley is a very fine school.”

“For some people,” Dave said. He didn’t know why. He opened his mouth to insert another string bean, and the words fell out. He knew nothing about Berkeley, really. It was as if he’d suddenly decided to have a vehement opinion about artichokes, which he had never eaten, and now he’d have to explain the opinion and defend it.

“What does that mean?” his father said.

“I went to Berkeley,” his mother said. “Your father went to Berkeley.”

“It was a privilege,” his father said. “Our parents didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. Our parents had nothing. And when they gave us something, we appreciated it.”

“I do appreciate it,” Dave said. But he sounded unconvincing even to himself.

His father clattered his fork on the glass. He leaned over his plate. “It’s not easy to go to college when your parents work in factories,” he said, stabbing the knife toward Dave’s mother. “It’s not easy to become a doctor when your parents are strangers in this country, when your only path is hard work and scholarships and loans.” This time he stabbed toward himself.

“I know,” Dave said.

“You do not know. You do not know anything, because we have given you everything. You don’t know that you are exceptional—we tell you and tell you and yet you refuse to see it. When are you going to see it?”

Dave cut a cube of steak and chewed. The meat was salty and rare. His brain groped for the Most Commons to describe the reddish flesh that quivered on his plate. It was florid, querulous. It extenuated. These words sounded right to him although he sensed that their meanings were wrong. He swallowed, raised his head. He knew that already he had gone too far, yet he couldn’t stop. He said, “I do want to go to a good college. It’s just, I was thinking, maybe I should take a gap year first.”

“What is this, a gap year?” his mother asked.

“It’s like…I don’t know. Time off after graduation. To, like, think, travel, whatever. Like a vacation, I guess.” Dave immediately regretted the word. It was not what he meant. In those dinner table conversations he never said the right thing; it was like trying to remember the Hundred Most Commons when the proctor started the timer in the fourth hour of the SAT. Hopeless.

But Dave’s father did not yell. Instead his face brightened and relaxed. He laughed. “Your whole life is a vacation.”

—

Dave was aware that the only thing holding him back was himself. His father was a vascular surgeon at UCSF Medical Center. His mother, who had stayed home to raise him, had been prelaw at Berkeley. Dave was their only child. He was everything.

Dave’s parents believed he took after his father. It was true that they looked alike. Both were tall and slim with skin that showed the webs of blue-green veins at their temples and wrists. Dave had his father’s heavy-lidded, almond eyes, sparse brows, and nose whose broadness made him a little less than beautiful. The long neck. There was even a small mole, flat and black, above his lip that exactly resembled the mole on the ridge of his father’s cheek. But this was where the similarities ended. He was not like either of his parents, really.

He was unremarkable. He had no diagnoses. No dyslexia or numerophobia or even ADHD, which at least would have earned him time-and-a-half on the SAT. According to the official records, he had a normal attention span. Average math skills. A moderate interest in history and science—he was in chemistry now and felt a quiet fondness for the periodic table printed on the inside cover of his textbook. There was an order to it, a totality, that reassured him. He hated English, which was all opinions and loose ends.

At school, he was well aware of all the ways in which he was not enough. For example, in history class it was not enough for him to know the basic components of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. He was expected to grasp its nuances, its causes and implications. More than this, he was expected to have an opinion—to be like Abigail Cress, who could articulate a fully formed thesis about any topic imaginable. He had heard her debate the New Deal, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Sunnis and the Shi‘ites, evolution versus creationism, the proper technique for dissecting an earthworm, the literary merit of Harry Potter, and the superiority of Lanc?me mascara. He was in awe of her, and a little afraid. He knew that in his parents’ eyes he ought to be like her. If only he would work a little harder.

On his report card, it was not enough to have that hard-won column of B-pluses; in his parents’ eyes he might as well have failed. In group presentation projects, it was not enough for him to do exactly his share of the work (three slides, two references, two minutes on the Key Components of the New Deal) and no more. Yet this was what he did. He left it to the Abigail Cresses and the Nick Brickstons to show off—Abigail did this by making seven extra slides with historical photos from an expensive Internet archive and delivering a memorized speech aided by color-coded notecards, Nick by patching together a single slide with nothing but jokes about President Roosevelt’s wheelchair and Mrs. Roosevelt’s horse face and then charming their teacher by stretching his allotted two minutes into six with what could only be described as a last-chance audition for an improv troupe, as Abigail seethed behind him.