Daria Gender Flip From Not So Different JTL Version
64. Where You Might Not Expect It
When Sonny had finished elementary school, he'd thought that middle school couldn't be any worse.
On his first day at middle school, with great symbolic aptness, some of the eighth-graders had left a half-brick hidden under a ratty old cap where he was sure to walk past. He'd seen them laughing after he'd tried to kick the cap out of the way.
No matter how bad things were there was absolutely no reason why they couldn't keep getting worse and worse.
He'd probably had that lesson repeated for him an average of once a year all his life. When he'd started at pre-school he'd thought nothing could be worse than having to spend his days in a house with Quinn.
So why should he expect getting into college to change the pattern?
But wouldn't it be great if it did?
If he chose the right college … if it made any difference which college he chose … people seemed to believe it did … that just meant life was setting him up so that when he got to college and his life got worse it would be his own fault for choosing the wrong one … or, just as bad, life was positioning him for the biggest disappointment yet when he didn't get into the college he'd set his heart on … at least that couldn't happen if he didn't set his heart on his choice of college, or on college at all … but if he didn't get into the college he wanted, or any college, there'd still be something else, and there was no reason why that shouldn't be worse ….
He hated this.
An exquisitely artistic detail embellishing the workmanship of the implement with which he was now being tormented was the scholarship question. A dedicated school career of avoiding extracurricular activities should have established his credentials as somebody lacking the well-rounded motivation and involvement in balanced interests that qualified you for most scholarships. Except that, as his mother incisively pointed out, there were scholarships purely for academic achievement. He couldn't honestly tell her that he wasn't expecting to go to college. He couldn't tell her that he didn't want a choice of where he went; he couldn't bear to tell her that he did. So he retreated into silence, suffering with the knowledge of how poor a defense it was in this circumstance. He had no winning cards left when she laid down her top trumps.
'Then promise me', she said, 'you will at least look into some kind of prize or scholarship. Okay? Not for me, not for your father, for you.'
He sighed and conceded the game.
Sonny spent an unpleasant night surfing the Web and reading about scholarships for concert violinists, nationally ranked gymnasts, and published authors (despite what Tom had told him, having an 'encouraging' rejection letter wouldn't come close to scoring the points he needed). The nearest he got to a possibility was a ten-thousand-dollar prize from the Wizard Foundation if you could somehow con them into believing that you embodied the 'Wizard pursuit of excellence'. To apply, though, you had to write an essay about how you'd change the world if you could. Jane helpfully offered to paint mushroom clouds if he needed any illustrations.
It helped to have Jane as a touchstone in a world with Jodie Landon in it. After nearly three years of experience, Jodie was still asking Sonny to take on an extracurricular activity. This time it was filling a vacancy caused by the resignation of one of the editors of the school newspaper. After he had provided her with the needless confirmation that he had not suddenly changed into a completely different person with an interest in extracurricular activities, she asked him what he was going to do about college applications, which led him on to tell her about his exchanges with his mother and about the Wizard Foundation Prize. She wished him luck with it.
'If I actually follow through', he said. 'But I'm hoping to come to my senses before that happens.'
He wasn't sure whether it counted as 'coming to his senses' or not, but he came up with a way of writing an essay for the Wizard Foundation that he was able to square with his conscience. When he'd finished it, he read it to Jane.
'In sum', he concluded, 'my world would be made happier by the simple step of eliminating sexual taboos of all kinds. People with unusual tastes could satisfy them, and be happy without suffering from social pressures against them. Public figures would not have to lie and hide their private lives but could be judged only on how they really benefited people. And, of course, promising young students, such as myself, wouldn't have to spend their time grovelling in scholarship essays, because they wouldn't have to compete with people who were only interested in higher education as an avenue to sexual opportunities.'
"What?"
Sonny sighed and tried again. "Since every one at school thinks I'm gay except for a select few, I've noticed how I am treated. Not actually being gay doesn't matter. If I were or weren't, there are still some things that I've noticed, that shouldn't happen to anyone. Just because they are gay or like leather or any other thing that isn't considered normal they feel they must hide their true selves. If we could eliminate these discriminations against those who don't line up with said..." He noticed the glassy eyed look of Jane.
He didn't get quite the reception from Jane he'd hoped for. Of course he didn't want her to be enthusiastic. He wanted her to call it the way she saw it. But she seemed too ready to explain to him how the system worked. He'd written the essay with sincerity, as much as that was within his repertoire, but Jane seemed to think that was quixotic and naive (she pretended to look around for his 'born yesterday' umbilical cord). They didn't get any deeper into the discussion because they were interrupted first by his mother and then by his father. It was a bad day when having his family interrupt a conversation with Jane was a good thing.
Divergent as his essay had been from what Jane (and, to be honest, he himself) had expected the Wizard Foundation to want, it wasn't divergent enough to stop them from selecting him as a finalist although, so as to keep him from feeling too flattered, he was only a dime-a-dozen one of a hundred finalists.
The next blow, just to make things worse, he could only blame himself for. He'd done a bad day's work for himself when he told Jodie Landon about the scholarship, because she'd gone and applied for it too. Naturally she had got into the finals. So too had Upchuck, but for that circumstance Sonny could place all the blame on the general malignancy of life. He himself was not even indirectly to blame, because Upchuck had not heard of the contest through Jodie: she had figured out at once that the way to improve your chances was to reduce the potential pool of competitors by not telling people about it.
'No hard feelings, right?' she said to him.
'Why would you have any?' he replied.
Sonny sat in the school cafeteria explaining to Jane how the cards were stacked against him. He didn't know how he could be expected to compete, in a contest like this, with Jodie Landon; and Upchuck, having discovered that Wizard CEO Mark Straum had set up a small business importing exotic candies while still at school, had done the same himself. He had offered Sonny an opportunity to invest in his dot-com as an incentive to compare notes on their applications and interview plans (he had also offered a wasabi gummy-fish of the kind flavored by Straum). Sonny couldn't imagine how he'd been able to turn Upchuck down.
He hadn't exactly expected sympathy, as such, from Jane, but her reactions suggested that she was preoccupied by something which was bugging her on her own account. Before Sonny could figure out what it was, Jodie came up to their table. Sonny's sarcasm about the way she'd used the information he'd given her had elicited some kind of remorse. She tried to make it up to him by sharing information about an interview coach her father had found out about. Sonny had already heard of this same Dr Danada from his mother. Hearing Sonny and Jodie talking, Jane echoed, unknowingly, the sentiments Sonny had expressed to his mother when she first made the suggestion, about the unfairness of any advantage that might be provided by interview coaching. Jane's sarcasm made Jodie remark that she sounded almost like Sonny.
Sonny said, 'Does that mean I've been sounding like you?'
At that moment Brittany chanced to pass their table and gave them all one of her perennially insufferable sunshine greetings.
Sonny said, 'If any of us start to sound like her, it's time to panic.'
The ultimate horror of the competition for the Wizard Foundation Prize was revealed to Sonny by Stacy, who had come over to help him practice for his interview. Somehow (did the place her father got her a part time job at leave corporate annual reports lying around the house for the family's light reading?) Stacy had found out that Wizard had a hideous record of employment discrimination. After a little routine sarcastic sparring she laid out the facts for Sonny. Sonny wondered whether Jodie knew, remembering the experience of working with her on Mrs Bennett's 'real-life economics' project.
Stacy was surprised by the calmness of Sonny's reaction. 'That's it? They discri, discri, they don't hire girls or gays or blacks. No protesting of sexism and racism and stuff? This is where, like, we should leap up and swear we won't allow this. This is bad and bad stuff shouldn't be allowed.'
'Yeah, it is bad.'
'So why aren't you leaping and stuff with me?'
'Um, my foot's asleep.'
When Sonny had digested Stacy's information a little, all he could think of to do was share it with Jodie. He figured that if he was going to act on Stacy's implied advice and take a stand against Wizard's iniquity, that stand might be minimally more effective if he made it in conjunction with at any rate one other person. He went round to the Landons' at once.
He'd just finished explaining to Jodie what he'd learned from Stacy when her father happened to walk in. It turned out he already knew all about Wizard from reading an interview with CEO Straum, whom he described as one of 'your redneck billionaires'. But his view of what to do about the situation was different from Sonny's (or Stacy's). He figured that the best thing to influence Wizard to change would be for a brilliant young black woman to win the scholarship. The way to make a difference was not to boycott the competition but to win it.
Sonny figured that Mr Landon might be excited about the possibility of Jodie winning the prize, but he wouldn't be so excited about Sonny winning the prize—Sonny was, after all, neither black nor a woman, and anyway, he didn't think Mr Landon liked him. But nevertheless, unintentionally, the man had given him the germ of an idea. He wasn't sure he wanted to discuss it with Jodie, but the issue didn't arise, because she had to rush off for her coaching session with Dr Danada.
At his own session with Danada, Sonny let the words wash over him and relied on reflexive sarcasm for his end of the exchange. Most of Danada's spray was marketing-speak of a kind Sonny was already familiar with, except it was even more distasteful when he himself was being treated as the product. When he responded to Danada's suggestion about a 'million-dollar smile' by saying 'Squander my million-dollar smile on a ten-thousand-dollar prize? That's crazy talk', the mighty brain he was dealing with leapt Sherlock-Holmes-like to the conclusion that he was 'giving off mixed signals', and asked him whether he really wanted the scholarship.
For a moment it seemed as if they might be on the brink of a serious conversation about what it said about your own ethics if you were competing for a prize offered by a company with ethical problems (problems which Sonny would have described to Danada if he'd shown the slightest interest).
Instead Danada suggested they discuss the clothes Sonny would wear to the interview.
Sonny bitched to Jane at length and in detail about his session with Danada. He figured that a good bitching session would dissipate some of the strain their bond had been under. Instead it just seemed to aggravate whatever it was that had been eating Jane up from the inside like a parasitoid wasp. She didn't approve of Sonny's 'sucking up' (from his point of view his problem was that he wasn't sucking up, and he protested as much to her); she didn't approve of interview coaching; she didn't approve of applying for scholarships at all.
'It's all part of buying into the system', she wound up, 'and buying into the system is another way of saying sucking up.'
'Who made you the Chicago Eight?' Sonny said. 'This isn't the way you usually think.'
'What do you know about how I think?' Jane ranted. 'Just because a person doesn't go around applying for scholarships and using every ten-dollar word they know, it doesn't mean they're stupid', she said, and walked off and left him.
Sonny stared after her.
As if he needed anything more to brood about (not that he needed specific occasion to brood at all) …
He brooded a good deal more before the time came for the interview with the Wizard Corporation man (and of course it was a man, and a white man, and dollars-to-doughnuts a straight white man). He knew he was going to give the interviewer some truth, but how much truth? and at which point? The interviewer—his name was Brower—met all three Lawndale High candidates at once, and Sonny felt uncomfortable about going for maximal disruption of proceedings before Jodie and Upchuck had their chance. He'd told Jodie what he knew and she'd taken a different point of view about how to respond. Of course it was a completely mistaken point of view, he was right and she was wrong, but still … if he objected to the way Wizard Corporation treated women and minorities …
So for most of the interview process he didn't make too many waves. He just let the interviewer's stale, stupid, stock questions wash over him. While Jodie and Upchuck supplied over-earnest stock answers (mixed with occasional flattery for the interviewer's line of patter or his general presentation), Sonny limited his own contribution to tersely wising off. The interviewer showed no signs of appreciation for that, but Sonny did notice that he showed no greater appreciation for the ways Jodie and Upchuck variously tried to suck up to him: his face kept getting longer and longer. So it went, that is, until the end of the question-and-answer routine. Then the interviewer demonstrated that he had powers of observation and deduction almost in the Danada class: he suggested that Sonny had an attitude problem and asked whether he was trying to sabotage himself.
'Sabotage myself', Sonny repeated without question mark or other inflection. 'I've answered all your questions truthfully, and I suppose you'd pretend that's what you want. But if I were really trying to sabotage myself, don't you think I would have made a point of emphasizing from the beginning how gay I am? With the CEO Wizard has, I don't suppose you're any more interested in encouraging faggots than you are in encouraging women or minorities.'
'Oh', said Brower. He looked down at his notebook and flipped up a couple of pages. 'That essay of yours wasn't a light-hearted spoof after all, then.'
For a moment Sonny was taken aback. Had he been short-listed for interview because they'd liked his essay when they thought it was a light-hearted spoof? He recovered.
'No, Mr Brower, it wasn't. I'd really like to see a world where people are judged only on the content of their character—not on their colour, not on their chromosomes, and not on the kind of company they like to keep, intimately speaking. If the Wizard Corporation isn't comfortable with that kind of world, I say so much the worse for the Wizard Corporation. If you feel queer about giving your scholarship to a queer, then I think you're the ones with the attitude problem.'
Neither Jodie nor Upchuck got the scholarship either.
The three of them sat on the footpath sharing the misery. Jodie lamented the possibility that her answers had been too pat. Upchuck lamented the possibility that he'd relied on the wrong kind of wasabi gummy-fish (neglecting the possibility that Brower didn't have to like something just because his CEO did).
They all knew why Sonny hadn't got the prize. But Jodie added, 'That wasn't a bad speech you made in there, though.'
'Yeah, well, I talk a good game. But all my high and mighty posturing about integrity wasn't enough to stop me from going to that phony coach. I did want that scholarship. In the end I figured out that I didn't want it badly enough to turn fake, but I wanted it badly enough to get mad at you for applying. Sorry about that.'
'Sorry I didn't tell you I was going to apply. I can't believe I didn't. I can't believe I sucked up to those racist, sexist goons at Wizard, either.'
'Me neither. Who would have thought we'd be able to pursue excellence and scumminess, both at the same time.'
Upchuck burst into another lament at his own failure to get the scholarship, but this time, as he did it, he did them both the favor of getting up and walking away.
Sonny stood up too and tried to flog sincerity into his voice as he said to Jodie, 'Nothing personal, and no offense intended, but I think I'd rather be by myself for a while, too.' He turned and walked back into the school.
With complete normality, his fellow-students left him alone, until later when he was sitting at a table in the cafeteria and Jane came up to him. She'd heard about what had happened from Jodie and had come to commiserate with him, but what he wanted to know was the explanation of the attitude she'd been taking.
'No reason', was Jane's answer to his question. 'Except maybe … seeing the big brains compete for a prize based on their academic achievement—well deserved, don't get me wrong—might possibly have made little Janey feel a bit … I don't know.'
'Left out?' Sonny scratched behind his ear. 'Like a gay black woman hoping for a promotion at Wizard Corporation?'
'Like somebody who isn't an academic achiever seeing what the people who are get in return. I'm good at the things I'm good at. Grades aren't one of them.'
Sonny gave Jane an eyebrow flash. 'Envying me my experience of ritual humiliation?'
'Are you willing to admit yet that you're more competitive than you thought?'
'We never used to think about things like this. What's happened to us?'
'I don't know.' Jane sighed. 'Selling out?'
'I'm not exactly ready to jump the fence into changing who I am, just to get ahead with Wizard Corporation.' Sonny sighed too. 'But I am feeling how it's hard to resist being co-opted.'
'Maybe we're just getting older.'
'Yeah, I felt a twinge of arthritis when I woke up this morning.'
The real end of the story didn't come until a few days later, when a letter arrived at the Morgendorffer house addressed, strangely, to 'Mr Jacob "Sonny" Morgendorffer, Jr'. Sonny realized he could only resolve his puzzlement at the superscription by opening it. The letter inside read as follows.
Dear Sonny,
Of course you were right about my not being able to recommend you for the prize—especially when I imagined myself trying to answer some of the questions I might have been asked about why I was recommending you. Wizard Corporation, as you guessed, is not an environment in which there is a welcome for people who are openly like you—or like me.
I won't ask you not to think too harshly of me—I can see that would be futile. I will only say that I wish you the good fortune which will ensure that you never find yourself forced, as I have been, to accept employment which is implicitly conditional on constantly concealing your identity.
It was signed 'R. N. Brower'.
Sorry flipped the letter over a couple of times. "Huh. Once again I feel like an ass for pretending to be gay." He sighs. "Maybe I should stop." He thinks of Stacy. "Except it might hurt her if I did."
He walks up the stairs to his room to do what Sonny did best, think.
Some dialogue from 'Prize Fighters' by Neena Beber
