up for the test and—
—A lot of students fall prey to that mistake. It’s not as easy as you thought, so then you kind of check out. You start asking yourself crazy questions about your intellectual abilities.
Daron’s face burned and he looked away.
Then your grades plummet, and you start to wonder if you even belong here, or if it’s a mistake, or if you were a sympathy admit.
Daron looked at his shoes, unable to hold her gaze. He had wandered up to that idea on many occasions, but never explored it at length, treating it like a street he mustn’t cross. Why had Berkeley accepted him? Candice had gone to a small public school in Iowa, but her parents were professors. Louis was Asian, so he possessed the magic membership card. Charlie was black, but he went to some fancy boarding school on a football scholarship. Then there was Daron.
If you were accepted, you deserve to be here.
At that, Daron started to cry, and as he did so, he admitted that he sloughed off for the first couple months of each semester, planning to pull it out of the bag at the last minute, but also thinking that if he failed at least he couldn’t be blamed because he hadn’t studied. He knew it was crazy, and couldn’t explain how he knew, but he knew nonetheless that somehow his ego had tricked him into adopting this strategy so he wouldn’t be disappointed. He had seen this as clearly as a drive-in movie screen against a starless sky, the insight cruelly ambushing a fine Friday-night buzz, and so he refrained from sharing with Mrs. Brooks the specific circumstances surrounding a revelation she deemed preternatural. He told her about high school, which he had burned in effigy shortly after graduation but now missed terribly because he had been on top, at least academically, while here he was average at best. She handed him a tissue. How his entire high school graduating class would jeer—Faggot!—if they saw him all snotty-nosed in California in this black lady’s office, except Jo-Jo, who wouldn’t have laughed at all, who woulda told D’aron, in that regretful tone he used for both bad and good news, I warned you, they ain’t like us. And if Daron didn’t succeed, after flaunting UCB back home, after defying his father’s wish that he become a Bulldog, after applying to Cal in secret, he would never be able to return home to B-ville, and would end up like those homeless kids on Telegraph—wouldn’t he?—with only other homeless kids and mangy dogs for friends, and he saw how people looked at them. He felt idiotic admitting this, especially when she chuckled.
Mrs. Brooks stifled her laugh. Daron, honey, those are not ex-students. Those are people getting an early start on an unusual career. Don’t you worry; no matter what, you’ll never end up like that. You come from a good family.
A line had formed in the hall while they were talking. Mrs. Brooks pushed the box of tissues across the desk. Take a minute to get yourself together. I know it’s hard, sugar, I know it’s hard.
I just want to fit in.
I know, dear. You said they spelled your name wrong?
Yes, ma’am. All wrong.
I’ll take care of that for you. You just focus on your work and let Mrs. Brooks know if you need anything, and remember, you deserve to be here as much, if not more, than everyone else. Repeat that.
I deserve to be here.
That’s right. You come back and see me every day if you need to. In the meantime, there are over one hundred student organizations here at Cal. Whatever your interests or beliefs, you can find a like-minded group.
He left relieved to have learned he was not alone in his anxieties, feeling unburdened of a load he had not fully comprehended the enormity of, much as he had felt after his first real sex ed class (not that makeshift tutorial Quint choreographed wherein a hot dog rousted an unsuspecting chicken). He also found himself wishing, he noted with puzzlement, that more professors were black. He understood them, it seemed, and they him. All the way back to Unit 2, he repeated Mrs. Brooks’s mantra. I deserve to be here. I deserve to be here. I deserve to be here. He also resolved to find a like-minded group. All of this he did while wearing empty headphones so as to appear to be singing.
BACK HOME IN B-VILLE, GA, the 4 Little Indians would stand out like J. Crew rejects, but in Berkeley they were just four friends, four inseparable friends, four constant companions, so close that he wondered if siblings could be closer. No, explained Charlie when the subject was raised. I love my brother and all, but it’s not like we actually talk. We didn’t even do that after my dad died.
That was Charlie, wise beyond his years. But they were all savvier than Daron. Louis taught him hard-learned lessons like the wisdom of avoiding edibles after drinking. Candice taught him that one must never follow white with red. Once a month they did medicinal 420 and communally fashioned quotes such as, How do we know stars aren’t just holes and God hasn’t just thrown a curtain over a cage? Their jointly constructed code word for weed aka grass aka Mary Jane: alien technology. Technology because it made them smarter. Alien just because. (Alien because it make my May-he-can real good, hombre, Louis liked to say.) On their languorous strolls the percussion of Daron’s flip-flops calmed him, and air running between his toes formed fins that climbed his back and combed his hair into lightning rods. And when they sprawled along the water at Berkeley’s Aquatic Park—lungs bursting between breaths, counting ducks as day hushed and short gusts soughed the bobbing grass along the bank, the longer stalks arcing over to nose the lake—passing headlights might brush Candice’s hair, the ponytail resting across one shoulder like a small animal while she absentmindedly stroked it, or sketch Charlie’s profile, his regal nose, his broad back exaggerated in shadow, or highlight Louis’s sneakers worn like slippers, his habit, when in thought, of axing the thin edge of his hand against his forehead, his hand in profile resembling a cockscomb. Daron (and not only at those moments, to be honest) desperately wanted to hug them all, and instead would settle for the huddles between bursts of Frisbee football.
It wasn’t all parties and drugs. There was also sex, or at least the promise of it, which led Daron to hang around the protests. With the exception of the lesbians, and who knew what they did, the women who engaged in protests were said to be the most sexually liberal, their politics freeing them to celebrate their sexuality without shame, supposedly. Daron, though, could never work up the nerve to start a conversation with somebody holding a banner that read EDUCATION IS AN INALIENABLE HUMAN RIGHT or chanting, Harvard had a Moor; we expect more of Cal, and so that second semester, his freshman spring semester, was all fits and starts, and he ended it as he began it, as he had ended his high school career, uninitiated into the mysteries of intimacy, though in the late-night cobalt glow of the bathroom stall he observed scores of demonstrations on his laptop, loading many to his hard drive. He was probably better off, having heard somewhere that herpes traveled swifter than Hermes, or at least that’s what he said to himself, but that’s not how he told it when he went home that summer.
IT’S NOT THAT DARON LIED, or intentionally misled anyone. The confusion was preordained; he didn’t even know it was happening. The other Little Indians tweeted and Facebooked all summer (or tagged and twitted, as Daron’s parents said anytime he was on the hall computer, that old tower that whined and whirred like even powering down was a burden). They begged him for photos, so he sent a few, of the quarry, of a fish his cousin Quint caught, of one of his mom’s cookouts, all, as he knew with tactical embarrassment, much less exotic than his friends’ snapshots, no matter how much they liked the images, liked the way Pickett Rock was frog-shaped unless you approached it from the south, from which angle it resembled an eagle, liked the shimmering bass curled in retreat from the sun, liked the squat sausages nestled on the grill like chubby kids at their first sleepover, huddled against the dark. Charlie was filing cleats at some fancy upstate New York university football camp, followed by an Airstream to Scottsdale with his high school friends. Louis was visiting family in Kuala Lumpur, and had been to the tallest twin towers in the world (Daron skipped that photo). Candice was in Provence with her parents, trying to dread her hair, from the looks of it. It was these pictures he showed his friends at home, and several from the school year: All 4 Little Indians under Berkeley’s famous Sather Gate, in line at Memorial Stadium before the big game against Stanford, in The City at the Golden Gate Bridge. Always places where there were plenty of bystanders