Chapter 36: Only Money Makes You Stronger
Autumn
Senior Year — Grade 12
There was a specific reason why Sheldon Cooper, who would later casually mention to Penny that he'd completed high school in three years, had left for the University of Texas at Austin before finishing a full fourth year. The reason was that high school had run out of things to offer him, and everyone involved had quietly agreed it was time.
Emmett walked the campus with a mood that matched the weather.
Sheldon was gone. The Hard Candy band had essentially dissolved in practice if not in name, and somehow nobody seemed particularly bothered by this except him.
Adam had been spending his free time with Jennifer, ostensibly studying Transformers lore and automotive mechanics and actually, from what Emmett could tell, genuinely studying both of those things, which was somehow more annoying than the alternative would have been.
Juno had become increasingly difficult to locate, and when Emmett did see her, she was usually with Lauren — walking close, talking quietly, sharing the specific comfortable ease of two people who had figured each other out. This development confused and slightly offended Emmett on multiple levels he couldn't fully articulate.
Senior year had its own particular pressure. Students who were serious about college had started the process in earnest — SAT prep courses, campus visits, the grinding construction of applications that were supposed to somehow represent a full human life in a few pages.
The last time Emmett had stopped by Adam's house, he'd found him at the kitchen table with SAT practice materials spread across half the surface and Jennifer across the other half with a car manual, both of them working in comfortable parallel silence.
Emmett had stood in the doorway for a moment, taken in the scene, and felt something complicated.
Respect, mostly. Also a specific kind of envy that had nothing to do with Jennifer.
If that had been him in that situation, there was no version of reality where the SAT materials stayed open.
He sighed and kept walking.
His own situation was less clear. His grades weren't going to open Ivy League doors, or most other doors. His family's finances meant that even a state school required a plan he hadn't fully assembled yet. He played drums well, but not scholarship well. He danced, but the same problem applied.
The American university system, he'd come to understand, was built around a pyramid he hadn't been told about until he was already at the bottom of it.
The top of the pyramid worked like this: families with generational wealth had been donating to elite universities for decades before their children were born — funding buildings, endowing chairs, buying institutional goodwill. When those children applied, the word "legacy" opened doors that grades couldn't touch. It didn't matter what they'd done in high school. The relationship had been established long before high school was relevant.
Below that: families with significant but not dynastic money who donated strategically, joined endowment committees, bought the kind of access that turned a borderline application into an accepted one.
Below that: families who couldn't write those checks but could afford prep schools, private SAT tutors, elite summer programs, and the niche extracurricular activities — sailing, equestrian sports, golf — that admissions offices had learned to read as indicators of a certain background. These activities weren't offered at public high schools. The equipment alone was beyond most families.
By the time all of that had been accounted for, and by the time spots had been reserved for the genuinely exceptional — the Sheldons and Paiges of the world, admitted because institutions wanted the reflected glory — the number of seats remaining for everyone else had become very small.
The SAT existed to handle that remaining population. An academic aptitude test. A meritocratic solution, in theory.
In practice, it was one more thing you could pay to get better at, and families that could afford professional tutoring consistently outperformed families that couldn't.
No standard, Emmett thought, was the most powerful standard of all.
County High School — Front Entrance
Adam and Jennifer walked in together, mid-conversation, in the relaxed way of two people who had spent enough time around each other that silence didn't require filling.
They ran into Juno and Lauren near the entrance.
"Hey, Juno. Hey, Lauren," Adam said, smiling.
Jennifer looked at Lauren.
Then looked again.
Lauren was wearing a red hoodie. The same shade as Juno's.
Jennifer's smile didn't disappear exactly. It just stopped moving.
When, she thought, did that happen.
She'd been absorbed in the Transformers project, in the mechanics work, in the novelty of actually caring about something academic for the first time in her life. She'd let a month go by without really checking in on Lauren, which she now recognized had been longer than she'd realized.
And in that month, Lauren had apparently found someone.
Jennifer looked at the two of them — the matching red hoodies, the easy body language, the way Lauren's shoulders were down in a way they weren't always down around Jennifer — and felt something she wasn't prepared to name.
Two Little Red Riding Hoods, standing together at the school entrance like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Jennifer kept her smile in place and said nothing.
End of Chapter 36
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