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“Good grades and all that stuff,” Jimmy said. “I might not have a chance, so I can just apply for fun, you know? And if I get in, I get in.”

Blue told Jimmy he wanted to major in entrepreneurial studies at Berkeley.

“I’m trying to get into Berkeley,” said a girl who had scored straight 5s on her AP exams.

Another girl asked what her GPA was. “4.3,” she said. “What’s yours, Jimmy?”

“4.0,” he said.

The girl looked at Blue, who was finding this conversation more eye-opening than he’d expected. “I have a 2.6,” he said. Everyone in the room stared at him in amazement.

“What?!” exclaimed one of the girls.

“What?” Blue said. He knew what. He knew they assumed that smart geeks got good grades. And he had. He used to have a 3.9.

“Nothing,” the girl stammered. “I just assumed . . . you were really . . . I don’t know.”

“Let’s just say, some things happened,” Blue said casually. Meanwhile, his mind frantically compared GPAs, whizzing through statistics that hadn’t seemed meaningful until now. Jimmy is going to live out my dreams, he thought. The bubble of denial in which Blue had been placidly residing slumped suddenly as if to suffocate him.

Blue was not going to get into Berkeley. He hadn’t realized until now that it was too late to restore his once-stellar GPA, which had tumbled precipitously last spring because of a host of issues that erupted at once. He had skipped AP Language, the traditional junior year AP English course, to take AP Literature because he was excited to analyze books. As the only junior in a class of seniors, he did well at first. But as the months went on, Blue realized that the analysis he expected wasn’t going to occur. The class had more nightly homework than any other class he’d taken. By second semester, unless Blue thought that an assignment would either teach him something valuable or challenge him, he didn’t do the work. Other than French and autotech, easy classes with few homework assignments, and Ms. Collins’ AP U.S. History class, which he aced, Blue barely managed Cs. He failed AP Lit.

It might not have been coincidental that Blue’s grades dropped when he was pouring most of his energies into Arwing and practicing Call of Duty for gaming tournaments that would bring money and publicity to the club. But at the same time, Blue’s relationship with his mother had deteriorated. Blue had had family issues for as long as he could remember. On three separate occasions in elementary school, child services nearly put him in foster care because he had been left home alone so often. After his parents divorced when Blue was a toddler, his father moved to France, where Blue’s older brother now lived. Usually, Blue talked to his father only when his mother made him ask for money.

Blue’s mother refused to pay for college, although she could afford to. Student loans were not an option, she said. If Blue could not find a way to attend college for free, then she would make him join the military. When she pressured him to buckle down academically, he gave up, unwilling to allow his mother to take credit for motivating him when he couldn’t motivate himself. “So I always get off-track because it feels like I’d do things for nothing,” he said.

Recently, while driving to the mall, Blue had told his mother that he wanted to go to Berkeley. She began another version of her usual lecture. “You have to start getting serious about school! Don’t expect a fucking dime out of me. I’ve been raising you eighteen years and I’m done with it already. I’m emailing your teachers every day asking for your work and grades and future assignments. And you have got to apply for every scholarship. And you need to consider the military. You like money, don’t you? These officers, they buy new BMWs in cash their first year!”

Blue’s guidance counselor had inquired about his falling grades, and some of his teachers allowed him to make up work. While they were vaguely aware of his situation at home, Blue didn’t want to admit “I’m not doing my work to be rebellious.