Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [50]
Sara isn’t the only one in honors who is so devastated by the lost scores.
“Um! I’m never going to get! Um! Into Cornell!” yelped Len at my locker in between classes.
Len did well when he took the SATs last March, but 1480 just wasn’t high enough for him. So he took them again last May but was so convinced that he did worse than the first time that he walked right out of the classroom and called the testing service to cancel his scores. Being the academic head-case that he is, he took them again this month.
“Now I’m going to have to take them again! I have to get at least! Um! Fifteen hundred to guarantee that I’ll get! Um—”
“Len, you’ll get in with fourteen-eighty,” I said, cutting him off.
“Easy for you to say. Um. Miss Fifteen-forty.” He gulped.
“Okay. It is easy for me to say now, but I was just as freaked out as you were last spring. Everyone was freaked out because our school had done zippo in helping us prepare for them.”
“I wasn’t, like, freaked out,” said Bridget, who had come up behind us.
“That’s because you didn’t care what your scores were because you had this insane idea you weren’t going to college, anyway,” I replied.
“I’m, like, still not going to college,” she said.
“YOU’RE NOT GOING TO COLLEGE?” Len simply didn’t have enough bandwidth to process this information.
“She’s going to college,” I said. “She’s just being dramatic.”
“I’m, like, so not going to college. I want to be an actress,” she said.
“And if there’s anything I learned at SPECIAL this summer, it’s that no one can teach you, like, how to be an actress. So why pay all that money?”
Len was practically flopping on the floor and frothing at the mouth at the very notion of an honors student not going to college. He cleared his throat. Ahem!
“Pineville High’s college matriculation rate is already the worst in the county. Only eighteen percent of the senior class, comprised almost entirely of our honors group, will go on to a four-year institution of higher learning. Another ten percent will attend two-year junior colleges, in most cases, Ocean County College. If honors students cut short their education, Pineville High’s academic standing will sink even lower than it already is, making it even more difficult for serious students like myself, or my younger brother Donald, who currently has the highest grade-point average in eighth grade, to get into top-notch schools like Cornell. What will happen to future generations of Pineville scholars?”
And then, at the point in Len’s one-sided sermons when he usually keeps on going until someone mercifully interrupts him, he stopped himself. I couldn’t help but stare. That was the first time I had ever heard Len complete one sentence, not to mention an impassioned oration, without stumbling over his words, or babbling on forever. It was as if he had swallowed Paul Parlipiano. Or Haviland, the traitor.
“She’s going to college, Len. She already applied.”
He turned back to me and said, in classic Len style, “Um. Huh? She. What?”
Bridget didn’t miss a beat. “I applied to UCLA to get my dad off my case. But I’m, like, totally not going.”
I know Bridget is going to college, so I don’t even bother getting all riled up. I have to admit, though, that the more she says it, the more it starts to concern me. Bridget does not lie, which means she really has herself convinced that she isn’t going. I figure the best way to make her change her mind is to just agree with her and get the conversation moving. I needed to calm Len down. He’s the only EMT I know, which wouldn’t be much help in the event of his own apoplectic seizure.
“Okay. Besides Bridget, who doesn’t count because she isn’t going to college”—I said those last five words with just enough singsongy sarcasm to make my point—“everyone else, myself included, was freaking