Altruistic Genie

“Do a kindness unto another person for a pain of equal and opposite proportion unto yourself.”

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Part 6

Senior year started abruptly with the Senior Breakfast. Each year on the first day, the seniors got to school half an hour early and mingled while eating food like bagels and coffee provided by the school or generous parents. It was a chance to exchange schedules and swap crazy summer stories. Avery got his fair share of attention with his broken arm, but my friends and I quickly clustered together apart from the crowd. We heard hushed statements like “Only one more year!” and even though we didn’t talk too much that morning, I felt that we had made an implicit agreement to not make too many other friends and to hangout together a lot.

We fulfilled the first condition easily, but the second, to hang out a lot, was broken right away. We were all busy with the research paper and college apps. The research paper was a California state English requirement to graduate. Nat and I had English together, with Ms. De Soto. Ms. De Soto did the research paper as a literary analysis assignment. We picked three books by the same author of our choosing and wrote ten pages connecting the books thematically.

She was a short and sinewy woman with boyish hair and a face that appeared to be constantly sunburned. Sartre’s misanthropic line “hell is other people” was prominently displayed on a whiteboard magnet. But what I first mistook as cynicism, I soon discovered was tough love. She scowled at you when praise was deserved to show you that her praise was hard-earned, and she was willing to stay and heavily critique a college essay for half an hour after the end of school. The critiques were harsh, but they were harsh because she expected better and pushed you to achieve better.

My mom convinced me to choose William Faulkner as my author because she said reading Faulkner was the single most important thing that happened to her to push her to not be racist. I was impressed an author could have impacted her so heavily. “Faulkner gets people.” Is how she put it. My whole life I had never seen my mom putting herself above any individual or class of people. I read Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and As I Lay Dying.

Every day I went straight home and up to my room to work on either my college application essay or my research paper. I was impressed that I could stay focused for so long. My research paper thesis was something along the lines of “Greed makes people use others as objects to achieve their goals,” and I wrote my college essay on how joining the debate team fixed my lisp and gave me a voice.

My proof was that Sutpen believes he is better than everyone else and subsequently uses people in his single-minded pursuit of a plantation and slaves, items I imagined were on Sutpen’s ‘Happiness Checklist.’ I wondered if achieving his goals made him happy or if his experience of disappointment was similar to mine. I read the morning announcements at my school as a representative of the debate team.

I was so focused that I had largely forgotten how I took up space. I parked recklessly. I forgot to put the milk away or clean up after myself. I realized college applications are an example of herding and crowd behavior. People apply to schools with low acceptance rates, increasing the applicant pool, and driving the acceptance rate even lower. Colleges even push students to apply that they would never admit only to help their numbers.

I pictured myself as having the only mind in the world, including college applicants and people on college admission committees, to share. I would control everyone and compel them to hurt their applications or to not apply to certain schools. In this way, I imagined, I would get into Harvard. I would be the only, or one of only a few, qualified applicants, who admission officers, all controlled by me, would accept without hesitation.

I rubbed my lamp one night, forcing Alejandro out and in front of me. “Are you sure,” I asked, “that it doesn’t work in the other direction? That I can’t wish someone to a community college and myself to an Ivy League school? Their pain, my pleasure?”

He knit his hands across one knee. “Some genies have rules that would allow for that wish. I do not.”
“Come on!” I pleaded. “I’m really suffering here.”

“I know. And you will get through it.” My face brightened and my whole mood lightened. “Or not.” Everything returned to its normal state, smeared with the grime of stress. “Is that all?” He asked.

“Yes. You are dismissed.” When I rubbed the lamp and made him come out like that I had to dismiss him to let him go. Like an army general.

I pushed through until the end of September, when the research paper was due and my load lightened. The whole last week of September I stayed up late or pulled all nighters. My load was perhaps lighter in terms of then I had fewer things due, but college applications were more important to me, and the deadlines were approaching. I remained focused, now solely working on my UC apps and my apps to schools in Boston and New York. I still didn’t see my friends a lot. Nat was working hard, mostly on her Berkeley app, but she also applied to Dartmouth and Northwestern. David applied to most of the Ivies and the UCs. Jason applied to schools in LA, and Avery didn’t talk much about college. It always seemed like he had other things on his mind.

I didn’t find out what it was until the middle of the last week in October. The UC application, as well as a few of my early applications were due at the end of the month, so I expected to stay up late or pull all nighters just like I did at the end of the previous month.

Avery called me at 10pm on Wednesday night. I was surprised he called so late, and I almost didn’t pick up.