Read Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) for Free Online Page A

Friday I’ll be one card back from Brian, but by the end of next Monday I’ll be past him. Then it’ll be just you and me.”
    I showed no reaction, which took great effort. To behold one’s least noble traits in someone else, and in a refined and concentrated form, is a piercing, destabilizing experience.
    “It’s not like I want to prove I’m better,” said Karla. “I just think it makes it more fun if it’s a contest. You look mad at me.”
    “No, I don’t,” I said.
    Because we’d been forced from our desks by the custodian, who’d set up a ladder in our row to hunt for a leak that had warped some ceiling tiles, Karla and I were sitting on the floor, our SRA kits open on our laps, our bodies positioned hip to hip but at an angle to give us privacy. When she piped up about her game plan, I was extracting a fresh card from my kit. My reflex was to push the card back down so as to hide its number and color, but I thought better of the move. If observed, it might make me seem uncertain, and Karla might try to play on my anxiety.
    A war of nerves ensued. I wasn’t prepared for it. If I’d given some thought to Karla’s situation as the poorest kid in class but also one of the cleverest, I might have expected such a challenge, but the problem was that I, like most of us, rarely thought about Karla much at all. Why should we? Her clothes were drab, her skin was dull, and her habit of responding with a vague chuckle to virtually anything anyone said to her—greeting, insult, request, or knock-knock joke—made it impossible to gauge her moods. I barely knew her, I realized, but I was starting to. She was like me, but slyer, more calculating, and whatever she said about “fun,” I strongly sensed that she wouldn’t be gracious in victory but vicious. This year, next year, and all the way through school.
    I vowed to stick to my program, to stay calm. I set my SRA card on my knee and skimmed a couple of paragraphs on icebergs, ignoring three-quarters of the text in order to focus on the dates and numbers, the quotations and proper nouns, which usually formed the answers to the questions printed underneath the essays. This process involved neither reading nor comprehension; it was more like sifting sand for seashells. Karla seemed not to notice. I peeked at the card on the floor in front of her—its topic was bird migration—but I couldn’t remember any of its points despite having read it only days before.
    The contest intensified but I stayed cool, convinced that I had a natural mental edge. Color by color, with Karla at my back, I acquainted myself with the world that IBM seemed to deem most deserving of comprehension. It was a world of technology and optimism, of aviation and antibiotics. Research submarines scoured its deepest oceans for valuable mineral deposits. Radar dishes in the arctic guarded the North American continent from sneak attacks by enemy bombers. The world was steadily improving. The descendants of slaves were attending top colleges. Women were taking seats in Congress. Birds that were thought to be extinct had been spotted mating in the wild. There were problems, too, of course—smog and drug abuse and cancer—but the essays implied that they’d be solved soon.
    The race began to tighten. Karla passed Brian, just as she’d predicted. He rallied and almost caught up to her, but then slipped back a few days later. He didn’t seem to care. He read for the reasons I only pretended to read—for understanding, out of actual interest—and sometimes he looked up from his cards as though he were truly reflecting on their contents.
    Once the race had narrowed to Karla and me, I tried to move more swiftly through the cards by reading the questions at the bottom first and circling back to the essays to find the answers. This trick worked so well that I wondered if IBM was really the marvel people said it was. From January until the grass turned green, I stayed a full color ahead of Karla, who