Page 39 of Charm City Rocks
Justin:Just open it ffs!!
Shin-Soo:Yeah…DO IT.
Caleb:I will. Shut up!
Caleb is messaging with his friends Justin and Shin-Soo from his laptop. Among the academic top 10 percent in Ruxton Academy’s senior class, Justin, Shin-Soo, and Caleb are the only males. Junior year, Justin tried coining the nickname “the Bro-Brain Triumvirate,” but it didn’t stick. Among their classmates, the three friends are mostly just known as the nerdy dudes who sit together at lunch. Caleb is the tall one. Justin has glasses. Shin-Soo breakdances at pep rallies to uproarious applause. He’s inexplicably good at breakdancing and has more than fifteen thousand followers on TikTok.
Justin sends a GIF of a robot twiddling its fingers:We’re waiting!Shin-Soo highlights the GIF with an exclamation mark.
Caleb looks at his phone on his desk, which is open to his email inbox. If it were a letter—sent on actual paper like in the days of yore—he imagines the corners would be as sharp as throwing stars, weaponized.
He doesn’t want it to say yes, but he totally wants it to say yes.Caleb has decided that he’s staying in Baltimore. He’s never actually said those words aloud, but he’s committed to them in his mind. Either way, it’d be nice to be wanted. To know that he’d been invited in.
Shin-Soo:It’s totally gonna say yes. It’s time a straight white guy finally catches a break in this country.
Justin:Hahahhahaa
Plus, there’s the element of competition. The other two bro-brains both got into Ivies last week. Shin-Soo is heading to Yale and Justin to Penn, the bastards. Fine, Stanford isn’ttechnicallyan Ivy, but pretty damn close.
Caleb shifts the chat box on his laptop and goes to his browser, where he opens the Stanford site. He looks at the same students/models he’s been cyberstalking for months. He knows all about impostor syndrome. Everybody does. Still, despite his Hoops Compendium app and his GPA being legit great, everyone on the screen looks smarter than him—better looking, too. Does Stanford give extra points to prospective students for hotness?
He hasn’t been rejected from a university yet, so he’s not sure how the email would start.Dear Caleb, we regret to inform you…Dear Caleb, we’re sorry to report that…Dear Caleb, go fuck yourself.
Regardless, it’d be nice to have the decision made for him—to have the Stanford door slammed shut. Yeah, it’d be a body blow, but he’d recover. He’d claim his blue jay stuffed animal from Mr. Butler. He’d buy a cool Hopkins hoodie and start the next part of his life: the college part. He and his dad could watch rock documentaries together and poke around under the Champagne Supernova’s hood for years to come. A couple of weeks ago, before accidentally getting stoned to bejesus and emailing a rock star, Caleb thought about how sad his dad would be if Caleb left. Caleb is smart enough, though, to know that he’d be just as sad.
He tentatively explained this to Justin and Shin-Soo at lunchearlier this spring. They were respectful, because they think Caleb’s dad is cool and all, but: “Come on, dude,” said Shin-Soo, “Cali is insane.”
“Yeah,” said Justin. “You could sell your app to the Golden State Warriors for like five million dollars and date Olivia Rodrigo. Pull your head out of your ass.”
The little flatscreen TV on the other side of his bedroom is set toSportsCenteron ESPN, which Caleb isn’t paying attention to.
Justin:Working Theory: You need to go where the most nerds are. Among nerds, you’re a solid 8. In gen pop tho with all the hot people, you’re a 5 at best. This is just math. Don’t hate.
Shin-Soo:TRUTH!
Caleb picks up his phone. “Here goes,” he says, tapping the email from Stanford.
Across the room, the ESPN announcer says, “And now, finally, it’s that time of night. Time for Today’s Best.”
It’s Caleb’s favorite part ofSportsCenter:when they count down the ten best moments in sports for the day. The first one is some crazy header goal from a soccer match in France. An MMA punch is next—an act of pure violence. He’s too busy to deal with sports, though. This is his life, after all.
There are so many words in the email, hundreds, arranged in neat lines and stacked in paragraphs. Only one word registers, though—the only one that matters.Congratulations!
“Motherfucker,” says Caleb.
“But enough about cricket,” says the announcer. “This is America, right? Slow news day? Maybe. But for number one, we take you to beautiful Camden Yards in Baltimore, Maryland, where, along with the smell of crab cakes, romance was in the air.”
Caleb looks up at the TV. The announcers riff.
“You remember the aughts, Tina?”
“Eh. I mean, I was alive.”
“You have the Internet, though, right?”
“I do indeed, Bobby.”
“Well then surely you’ve been following this story out of Charm City.”
