The Latte Rebellion (18 page)

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Trust you because you’ve heard things? Or because you’re involved?”
Uh-oh.
I didn’t answer and tried to appear riveted to my homework. She continued. “Either way, I’d prefer you stayed away from this type of controversy. Even if the views of the club aren’t dangerous, that doesn’t mean some people won’t overreact.”

“Mom, you’re being overprotective!” I slammed my book shut melodramatically. “I’m not one of your elementary school students.”

“Asha, please don’t talk to your mother in that tone of voice.” My dad looked up from the TV briefly.

I wasn’t in the mood for a fight, so I opened my book again with a sigh.

It was already March. Just a few short months until graduation, London … and freedom. I just had to dig my heels in, grit my teeth, and hold on. Of course, my teeth would probably be gritted all the way down to nubs by then.

At least all the time I’d been spending catching up on studying was paying off. I got an A-minus on a major calculus test I’d been stressing about for weeks, and soon after that, I got an A-plus on an English essay. My parents were overjoyed … which made me feel just a tiny bit less guilty that I’d fibbed about the Rebellion. Fortunately for me and my grades, the Rebellion itself had been pretty quiet except for email updates, though I was sure that would change now that we’d been mentioned on national television.

I’d been floating along through life as if everything was just peachy. Then I came crashing down to earth like a lead balloon.

It started with an unexpected B on a physics lab. It was a huge lab that had taken weeks to complete, and I was aggravated because the B was due to the slackers in my group rather than anything
I
hadn’t done. Still, the teacher gave me a disappointed head-shake when she handed back my lab notes, as though I’d been responsible for keeping the three jokers in line and had failed miserably.

Then, at lunch, I made a cameo appearance at the Latte Rebellion club meeting. Miranda went with me this time, and to my surprise, she stood up and cleared her throat to make an announcement.

“Guys, I have really big news. Have you been to the Rebellion websites lately?” Miranda looked around Mrs. Carville’s history classroom, where the meeting (allegedly a meeting of the International Club, of which Maria McNally was conveniently secretary) was being held. Of about thirty people there, only a few nodded knowingly. “Well, the news is,
we are a nationwide phenomenon.
”

There were gasps, and then David Castro asked, “What does
that
mean? Do we get to have, like, a reality TV show?” A few people laughed. I just sat there, motionless, clutching my pen.

Miranda gave him a wry smile. “No, I mean that there are no fewer than
fifty-two
chapters of the Latte Rebellion at high schools nationwide, and about a hundred at colleges and universities. People, this is
huge.
We
are huge.

“And,” she added dramatically, “as you may know, the Latte Rebellion has officially been mentioned on national television.”

Now that was something I
did
know. There was a burst of noise, and everybody chattered at each other in amazement, lunches forgotten.

“—the hostage thing—”

“—think it’s bad press? Like guilt by association, if—”

“—nothing to do with—”

“—said the guy was mixed-race, too, like one of the hostages, but—”

“—I’m tellin’ you, our own TV show.”

“Guys! Quiet down, everybody,” Maria McNally said, in a voice that made me wonder if she’d been a kindergarten teacher in a former life. She pushed her retro-chic granny glasses back onto the bridge of her nose and clicked her mechanical pencil, glancing briefly at me.

“We should decide what we want to do,” she continued, “in terms of damage control. Maybe we should suggest to Sergeant Echo and Field Officer Foxtrot that the website have links to all the different chapters. And we should make a statement on the front page about having no connection to the hostage situation. Faris, take notes.” She poked him in the arm. Faris was her annoying little freshman flunky, though she insisted they were dating.

People were nodding and grinning excitedly. As for me, I was … well, a bit giddy. Kalamazoo? Savannah? Bozeman, Montana? And Blue Sky, Indiana, where the standoff had taken place. I had barely heard of some of these places, but evidently they had enough Sympathizers to constitute a chapter of the Rebellion.

Then something a little unpleasant occurred to me.

“I don’t mean to be a buzzkill, but if we post anything on the website, isn’t there a possibility that it’ll just connect us with the hostage thing in people’s minds? What if people misinterpret it and start protesting against us or something?”

“Oh, I’m a very clear writer. It won’t be misinterpreted.” Maria gave me a small, tense smile and Faris nodded approvingly, floppy blond hair falling over one eye. “I’ll give Sergeant Echo the text we want posted. I’ll make sure there’s no way it can spark any kind of protest. Although a little controversy might not be a bad thing for drawing attention to our cause …” She trailed off, a little alarmingly. But then she turned to Faris and started dictating our PR statement, and, thankfully, she was right about her writing skills—she made the Latte Rebellion’s intentions clear and unmistakable while also managing to make us sound like peaceful do-gooders who spent our spare time saving bunnies and kittens. By the time the meeting was over, I was mostly reassured, but the seesawing tension level left me exhausted.

Then, when I got home and pulled a sheaf of envelopes out of our mailbox, I found that two of them were thin missives addressed to me. From colleges. Small envelopes from colleges are
never
,
ever
a good thing.

I opened them with a sigh. Stanford and Harvard were now definitively out of the running for Future Home of Asha Jamison. I was obviously not destined for an Ivy-League education. Too bad; Cambridge sounded like a great place to live, and Palo Alto would have been pretty close to home. Plus, Stanford had a Social Policy program that sounded really cool. Something else I’d learned about from Thad.

I stood numbly in the front doorway for a few minutes, the screen door swinging in the breeze, trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I’d gotten my first official rejections. It seemed impossible. I’d worked so hard the past couple of months, and it was completely unfair and
wrong
that one semester of grades out of my entire high school career could ruin everything. Not when I’d done everything else right.

My eyes stung. I went straight to my room, closed the door, shut the blinds against the spitefully gorgeous spring day, crawled under the covers, and cried until my throat was raw. Sure, I was disappointed, but I also felt ashamed and humiliated because I knew I could have done better, should have done better. I’d always taken it for granted that I was a good, even an outstanding, student. It was simply a fact, part of my identity. I’d been ranked third or fourth in my class ever since starting high school, and I never really had to worry about staying there.

That’s because you never had a
life
before
, said the nasty little voice in my head, back with a vengeance now that I didn’t have a cheering crowd to drown it out.

Was the choice really between having a life and having scholastic success? I didn’t want to believe that. My academic cred was as solid as a rock regardless of what else I was doing. Or it had been. Now, it felt like the slightest tremor could bring the whole thing crashing down.

Part of me wanted to call Thad, to ask him whether he thought that was any kind of a choice. But the other part of me won out—the part that wanted to pretend today had never happened. Because then (a) I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore, and (b) my parents would never find out. I’d just have to wait until I got an acceptance somewhere else, and pretend like that was the only one that had ever mattered to me. Pretend my ass off, until I believed it myself.

After a little while I fell asleep, tears drying on my face and throat aching. I had fitful dreams about running, stumbling up a steep slope, trying to get to the top of a mountain because I knew something horrible would happen if I didn’t. Only I could never get there. The earth kept quaking underneath me. I was wearing a really ugly swimsuit and a paper bag on my head, and I kept falling and skinning my knees. When I fell, the bag came off, and, as it hit the ground in front of me, it turned into a towel.

I woke suddenly to the sound of the garage door opening and my parents’ voices in the hallway. I sat straight up and the whole day came flooding back in an instant. I also got a pretty intense headrush, but I shook it off and threw the covers back, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed. In the process, the rejection letters went fluttering to the floor, so papery-thin and innocuous but holding my fate in their pages. I hurriedly gathered them up, envelopes and all, and stood in the middle of the room, undecided. The dirty clothes hamper? No, I might forget they were there and throw them into the washing machine, though “accidental” destruction was certainly one way to hide the evidence. My underwear drawer? No. Too shallow and easily emptied. I started to panic.

“Asha! Come help me put away groceries,” I heard my mom call from the kitchen.

“Coming!” Frantically, I hauled up my top mattress, practically wrenching my right arm out of the socket in the process, and shoved the rejection letters as far as possible toward the center. I let the top mattress drop and pulled up the blankets so it didn’t look quite as disheveled. There was
no
way my parents were allowed to know about this. No way.

Later that night, Carey called me. Before I could vent to her about my horrible afternoon and how difficult it was to maintain a stoic, normal façade in front of my parents—before I could even say
anything
, in fact—Carey let out a completely unintelligible string of half-screamed words that sounded like “ohmigodicanbleveigottin!”

“Can you slow
down
? What did you do, take a No-Doz?”

“Asha!” she said breathlessly. “Today I got my Berkeley letter! My
acceptance letter
! They said I’m being considered for an alumni leadership scholarship! I
can’t believe it
!”

“I can believe it,” I said, my heart sinking despite the fact that I knew I should be happy for her. “I knew you’d get in. Colleges will be falling all over themselves to get you to go there.”

“That’s not all! Stanford said yes, too, but I don’t know yet about their scholarships.” She sounded slightly muffled, like she was bouncing up and down.

“Are you
dancing around
?”

“Um … sort of,” she said. I could
hear
her grinning. “This means your acceptance letters should be here any day now, too, you know.”

My heart sank a little further. I hadn’t gotten anything from Robbins or Berkeley yet, but if Carey had already gotten her Berkeley acceptance … that wasn’t a good sign. I bet they waited longer to send out rejection letters. It surely wasn’t their top priority to correspond promptly with the unwashed, unaccepted, intellectually inferior masses.

“Well,” I said, knowing it was the right thing to say, “we’ll have to celebrate this weekend. Wanna go into the Bay Area and do something?” I felt like I was forcing the words out; I wasn’t in much of a mood for celebrating.

“
You
just want to go visit Thad,” she teased.

“I was thinking no such thing,” I said, virtuously. “Besides, we’re just friends. We connect
intellectually
.” I cracked a smile; I couldn’t help it.

“And I’m sure that when you kiss for the first time, it’ll be a real
intellectual
experience,” she said, laughing.

“I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen,” I said, but I kind of hoped it would.
Kind of?
Definitely
, I thought, picturing those intense blue eyes and his lean frame. Then my heart sank, and all the tension of earlier that day came flooding back into my brain. I didn’t have a chance. I’d been rejected by Stanford and Harvard, and Berkeley was probably going to reject me, too. And Thad? Sure we’d talked a few times, but he was a college student. Why would he ever be interested in dating
me
when he had all those intimidating, smart Berkeley students to choose from, like some kind of brainy buffet? No, I was destined for some knee-socks-wearing, dorky, shrimpy engineer wanna-be, or perhaps I was doomed never to date at all. I’d be single and a virgin forever—a junior-high-school librarian, or a scientist hunched over the microscope that was my only friend in the world.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Carey said, into the long silence I’d just left. “You’re thinking about how you’re going to end up an old maid, alone in your science lab or whatever, married to your Bunsen burner.”

“I’m about to graduate from high school and I’ve only ever really dated
one person
, and that was a disaster,” I said. My voice sounded hoarse.