"It's Gray," Gabriel says. "G-R-A-Y."
The secretary frowns at him and hands him the envelope. It's been two weeks since prom, and the photographer is handing out photographs for pick-up at the school gymnasium. They come in thick manila envelopes, taped shut and bursting at the seams. Gabriel takes his and puts it under his arm, walking back outside.
When he gets home, Gabriel takes the yellow envelope in his hand and shuffles the pictures out: two eight-by-tens, and several wallet-sized copies in long strips. His mother will have to cut them with scissors if she wants to keep them in her pocketbook.
Gabriel takes the pictures and sits on the stoop outside their apartment complex; he's surprised at how good the photographs came out. Looking at the photograph, he sees how the girl's dress shimmers, and her hair falls down in loose curls around her shoulder. Gabriel is standing behind her, smiling wide, his hands pressed around her hips. They're almost like a real couple.
Gabriel's throat tightens, and he shoves the photographs back into the envelope. He doesn't want to be there when his mother looks at them later.
"You've always been a special boy," Virginia said, once. To this day, Gabriel doesn't remember what they were talking about, or why, but he remembers his mother's hands, and how they were caked with flour. "I remember the day you were born, you came right out and grabbed the doctor's hand. Squeezed his fingers--what a grip! No other baby could do that. They never saw anything like that before."
"It's a reflex, mom," Gabriel said. His mother ignored him.
"You were strong," his mother said. "Even then, I knew you were special. Not just because you're my son, but because you had thatstrength. An iron will. Even the doctors could tell."
Strength. An iron will. Whenever Gabriel thinks about that moment, he thinks of the absurdity of it all, the cognitive dissonance. His mother talked about strength, and all Gabriel could see was narrow shoulders and delicate wrists, and how his fingers tapered like a woman's.
Then he remembers how his mother crept up behind him and pressed her hands against his chest. "My strong boy," she said. It took all of Gabriel's self-control not to pull away.
Girls confuse him. The scent of them, the way they travel in packs. They fall over the jock boys, the guys on the football team. He listens to them babble about college, about graduation, what they'll do when they get out into the world. What they don't know, and what Gabriel secretly does, is that they won't amount to anything. High school is where they'll peak, and they'll forever be looking back at this as the best years of their lives. Pathetic. If Gabriel suffers now, it's only because he's destined for better things. Greater things, things of which they wouldn't even dream. He takes solace in this knowledge, wraps it around himself like a warm blanket. They're nothing, he thinks, so why should I care?
He's a shoe-in for Harvard, so he only applies to four schools: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. His transcript is immaculate, and his essays are well-written and precise; not a single word is out of place. The letters of recommendation are somewhat harder to come by.
"You might want to ask someone else," Mrs. Hawkins tells him. "If I write it, I will be forthright. I don't think you're Ivy League material."
"Why?" Gabriel asks.
He watches her face, how her old, thin lips purse before speaking again. "There's a spirit of camaraderie, which you do not possess," Mrs. Hawkins says. "I'm sorry, Gabriel, but to be honest, you haven't made very many friends with the faculty. You'll be hard-pressed to find someone who will vouch on your behalf."
All of the teachers refuse. Gabriel's mind reels. He doesn't see any reason why they should treat him like this. Half of the time, they don't even know what they're teaching; when they tell his mother that he's arrogant, that he doesn't even listen in class, his mother waves her hand dismissively. "They're just jealous, they don't have your talent," Virginia says. "They're teaching schoolchildren for a living, and look at you! You'll probably be walking on the moon!"
Out of desperation, Gabriel asks his gym teacher, Mr. Delores. Mr. Delores is old and paunchy and has a voice like gravel. But Mr. Delores was also kind, letting Gabriel sit on the sidelines while the other boys did suicide sprints on the grass.
"You rubbed them all wrong, I bet," Mr. Delores says, and he takes the application from Gabriel's hand. "They don't know you the way I do. They don't get that you're overcompensating."
"Overcompensating?" Gabriel stares at him. "I'm not overcompensating for anything, they're just ignorant."
"I heard you took Becky Martin to the prom," Mr. Delores says, quietly. "How did that go?"
Gabriel looks away. Mr. Delores touches his arm.
"Gabriel, you're all bark and no bite. And they're just too dumb to realize that. They're just as self-conscious and insecure as you are, and you constantly undermine their authority. You're smart--real smart--but you just don't know when to shut up." He pulls out his reading glasses and squints into the page. "It says here I have to rank your integrity and honesty on a scale of one to ten," Mr. Delores says. He takes his glasses off and pushes the paper back to Gabriel. "I tell you what," he says. "Why don't you fill it out, and I'll sign it for you? How about that?"
"You talked about integrity, and now you're offering to let me fill out my own evaluation?" Gabriel says.
"Nothing on here says I have to be the one to circle the numbers," Mr. Delores says.
"And what about the letter?" Gabriel asks.
Mr. Delores shrugs. "Well why don't you write that, too? I'll sign it. You know your strengths better than I do."
Gabriel leaves his office. When he steps out of the hallway, he catches the faintest whisper of perfume hanging in the air.
He sends the applications in, and to no one's surprise, Gabriel gets interviews to all four of the schools. And again, to no one's surprise, Gabriel manages to screw things up. He's too intense, too serious. The interviewers crack jokes and Gabriel misses the punchlines. They shake his hand and leave. The rejection letters start coming in the mail.
"Mom, there's something I have to tell you," Gabriel says.
Virginia looks up, the grey pewter light catching her face. "What?" she asks. She wipes her hands on her shirt dress.
"I didn't get into Harvard," Gabriel says.
His mother's brow furrows. "What do you mean, you didn't get in?"
"I got rejected," Gabriel says. He shows her the form letter. Virginia snatches it from his hands.
"How could you not get in Harvard? You're top of your class," Virginia says.
"I don't know," Gabriel says.
"Well what about Princeton? Have you heard from them?"
"I was waitlisted," Gabriel says. Virginia frowns.
"I don't understand," she says. "You have all A's. Your SAT scores are in the 99th percentile..."
"Maybe I wasn't good enough," Gabriel says.
"Nonsense! Of course you're good enough," Virginia says.
"No, I'm not," Gabriel says. "Guys at Harvard and Stanford and Yale want popular kids, guys with lots of friends who played on the football team or did research or did volunteer work in Africa. I didn't do anything. I wasn't even on the chess team."
"Gabriel that's ridiculous," Virginia says. "There's probably a misunderstanding."
"They hated me when they interviewed me," Gabriel says.
"How could anyone hate you? You're too bright for that," Virginia says. "This is just a setback. We'll learn from our mistakes. You didn't apply to enough schools, that's all. If you don't get into Harvard, we'll apply next year, and we'll apply to more colleges. Don't you worry. It'll work out, I promise."
She presses his face in her hands. "It's a blessing in disguise," Virginia says. "At least now you won't be far from home."
Gabriel runs out of the apartment. Blindly, he stumbles his way back to school and onto the football field. Daylight is already starting to fade, and the football team does calisthenics under the stadium lights. Mr. Delores isn't there. Gabriel rushes inside the building. He's not in his office. He hears talking in the teacher's lounge and he follows the voices echoing in the hallway.
"He's had it rough, you shouldn't be so hard on him." Mr. Delores' voice boomed, sharp gravel scratching on black chalkboard. "He's awkward and self-conscious and he compensates by pretending he's better than everyone else. You just don't mess with kids like that. It's people like him that go postal. You don't want to put him in a corner."
"His mother is a lunatic," Mrs. Hawkins says. "It's classic folie a deux, shared psychoses. Neither of them are quite right in the head. I feared for my safety, I really did."
Gabriel can't breathe. He feels his chest collapse on itself. He can hear the laughter in the teacher's lounge, and Mr. Delores' voice booming like thunder. Gabriel wants to throw the door open, wants to stand and shout and throw the furniture on the ground. But he doesn't, he sinks to the ground instead. And when Mr. Delores opens the door, he sees Gabriel leaning up against the lockers, curled up into himself and shaking like a child.
Gabriel thinks back to the conversation he had with his mother, about how strong he was, and how he gripped the doctor's hand when he was born. "There's simply no one there to nurture your talent," his mother said, and she fluffed his hair. "People don't understand because they're ignorant. But not my boy. My boy will grow up to be something. A flower among weeds has to be strong. Has to fight for the sunshine and for the soil around him. Roses are delicate, but people don't see them for the thorns." Gabriel protested, "I'm not a flower, mom," and his mother hugged him, tight. "You're right," she said. "You're my son."
Now Gabriel stands and stares at Mr. Delores, and he sees the wrinkles in his face look deeper under the fluorescent lights of the hallway. There's sorrow in his eyes, but Gabriel can't tell if it's a trick of light, or if it's genuine. They stare at each other for what seems like years before Mr. Delores steps around him and walks outside.