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

seemed baffled by my continued lead and finally resorted to a dirty trick.
    “Walter,” she said to me, pointing at her card, “I’m having a little trouble with this word. What’s ‘radiate’?”
    “You should use your pocket dictionary.”
    “The print’s too small and my glasses haven’t come yet. I just had an eye exam. I didn’t do well. It’s why I’ve been getting headaches, the doctor said.”
    I didn’t believe her, but the damage was done: I lost my ability to concentrate. An essay on coral reefs that I should have completed in ten minutes took me almost twenty, mostly because I kept glancing over at Karla, who was playing her blind act to the hilt, holding her card at a distance from her face, squinting, then bringing it closer, then moving it back again. I couldn’t help thinking it was a masquerade arising from some intense determination that exceeded even my own.
    I decided to be gallant. I slowed my pace, but by degrees, forcing Karla to struggle to surpass me and granting her a seemingly honest victory. As I’d expected, she gloated afterward, not out loud but in her manner, affecting a strut when she passed me in the hallway and habitually raising her hand in class whenever I raised mine. But I gloated, too—for my chivalrous refusal to dispel her illusion of superiority. What a prince I’d been, I thought, and how noble to bow before those one might have vanquished.
    But then something happened that knocked me off my perch. As we cleaned out our desks a few days before vacation, filling the wastebaskets with pencil stubs and plugged-up bottles of Elmer’s glue, Karla appeared in the aisle beside me holding out a small pink plastic case.
    “My glasses came,” she said. “You want to see?”
    She settled the frames on the thin bridge of her nose and gazed at me through a pair of lenses whose formidable thickness and convexity spoke strongly of optical necessity. A prickly flush spread up my neck; the girl was a visual cripple, she’d told the truth, and the fortitude it must have taken to grapple with the SRA cards was painful to consider, as was the margin by which she would have bested me if she’d had the glasses all along. She knew this, too. She had to. Who’d spared whom? She was a queen, this girl. Moral royalty.
    But then she had to rub it in by telling me what I was, which I didn’t appreciate at all. It didn’t decrease my respect for her—it raised it—but it did guarantee I’d avoid her from then on.
    “Students who read the questions first are only cheating themselves,” she said. “I’m glad I’m not you. I really am. When I realized what you were doing, it ticked me off at first, but then I decided to pray for you instead. It softened my heart. I’m really glad I did it. I just wish you’d pray for yourself sometimes. You need to.”
    I wasn’t sure what a person should say to this, or if he could be expected to say anything.
    “Well, have a fantastic summer,” Karla said.
    “You, too,” I mumbled. She smiled and turned to go. I was struck by an impulse to stop her and apologize—our talk seemed emotionally incomplete somehow—but I wasn’t certain what I was sorry for, because I hadn’t harmed her, it turned out, and the harm that she seemed to feel I’d done myself (finding an angle, and then playing it) wasn’t within my power to give up.

M IDWESTERN COUNTRY SUMMERS, ALL ALIKE, BROAD GREEN immensities of humid tedium, nothing to do but wade barefoot in the river, nowhere to go but to the store for Popsicles, no one to talk to but the dog. By July, I stopped heeding the shrill tornado sirens and couldn’t be bothered to slap the fat mosquitoes drilling my neck behind my ears. There were pickles and mayonnaise on every sandwich, a dying wasp in every cup of Kool-Aid. I built a model rocket. It failed in flight. I sent away for a slingshot. It never came. On weekends, I went fishing with my father, hypnotized by the ripples around my bobber, and