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you should be embarrassed.”
    But I love her. She’s the only one who gets my sarcasm. And the only one I don’t have to pretend to about “how hard these tests are.” Some of the capital B’s at our school aren’t so forgiving.
    “I heard she doesn’t even study!”
    “The spine of her U.S. History book isn’t even cracked.”
    “Mr. Harley gave her a 98 on her last blue book. The second highest score was a 77.”
    “That skank is throwing off the curve!”
    Or something to that effect. That’s a mash-up of the greatest hits I heard in the hall freshman year or in the girls locker room before field hockey practice. By tenth grade, I learned to fake it. I’d crack my books and spill coffee on the pages, letting them dry in the sun. Then I’d highlight all the assigned chapters (randomly, while watching “Friday Night Lights”) and show up on test day with ink stains on my fingers complaining about another all-nighter cramming.
    But Emily didn’t care. She never saw me as competition. Because for her, I wasn’t. That girl was always naturally smart and she worked like a beast. She’s had one of the highest GPAs in our class since they started keeping track in seventh grade. Plus we have the same size shoe.
    “Damn, Rani—what’s an Indian girl doing with such big feet?” she said to me before gym class in sixth grade.
    “What’s a Korean girl doing with shoes the same size?” I said right back. “I thought you all had to bind your feet in wooden boxes from birth.”
    Emily cackled that wonderful throaty laugh and I think that’s when we actually cemented our lifelong friendship.
    But lately, she’s gone a little crazy, even for her. Sure, it all started with the other Emily Kim, Stanford-E.K., my Emily’s self-proclaimed nemesis. But it’s more than that. As our senior year approaches, she has a drive that’s beyond getting into Harvard. It’s like she wants to attack Harvard. Put it in a pillowcase and beat it against a wall, then cook the bashed-up bits into a pie and eat it. It’s vicious and aggressive and it’s starting to get on my nerves. But I roll with it. I let her vent and complain like she did today at Pinkberry. In three or four months she’ll get that Early Action acceptance letter and this will all be over. And deep down I wonder how much we’ll remain in each other’s lives after that.
    A soft knock on my open door startles me. I deftly shove Horse and Rider under some college brochures, careful to leave Yale and Brown on top, and attempt to appear unfazed.
    “Hey sweetie,” my mother says, standing in the doorway. Although she’s been a vehement stay-at-home mom ever since she had kids, I’m always surprised to see her at home in the middle of the workday. She never gave off the “homemaker” vibe. She’s too elegant for that, resembling a slightly older Aishwarya Rai (the Miss India and Miss World winner-turned-actress) but with a cutthroat personality.
    My parents, Mira Iyengar and Douglas Caldwell, met at Wharton and moved to New York right after graduation in 1986. He landed a job at Drexel Burnham. She was a strategy consultant at Bain. But when she had my sister Morgan at 29, my mother dropped her high-octane career and opted to be a fulltime mother. Instead of making headlines in the Journal for advising Fortune 500 companies, she made them by organizing the first ever “nurse-in” on Wall Street. After I was born five years later, my dad cofounded a multi-strategy hedge fund in Fairwich, and our family reluctantly left the 900-square foot Charles Street apartment for a 5,000-square foot colonial in the boonies. My mom quickly made her presence known in the neighborhood by staging a Titanic -themed fundraiser for Trevor Green (Morgan’s ridiculously overpriced Pre-K–2’s program). Why a school swimming in money needed a fundraiser is beyond me, but the event raised nearly $200,000. When I was finally “of age,” I was admitted without any sort of