Scored (16 page)

“Semantics,” Imani said. “It’s a caste system.”

“It’s a meritocracy,” Diego said. “If you work hard and live according to the rules of fitness, you can ascend. If you don’t, you have only yourself to blame.”

“Yup,” Logan said.

“The score empowers people to change,” Diego said. He looked right at Imani as he threw her words back at her. “That’s the whole philosophy behind the score,” he continued. “A more perfect humanity through technology, which, it turns out, is not about mind control and world domination. It’s actually about fairness.”

The bell put a period at the end of Diego’s sentence, preventing Imani’s rebuttal. As everyone filed out, Mr. Carol congratulated Imani and Diego on their embrace of the opposing points of view.

“That right there is the height of intellectual maturity,” he said to his retreating students. “And I’d like to see more of it in this class. I
expect
to see more of it in your final papers. Okay?”

His students kept walking.

“I know you can hear me!” he said.

Imani and Diego were the last out of the room.

“They heard you,” Imani said.

Mr. Carol grabbed his coffee mug and flopped behind his desk. “It won’t make a dime’s worth of difference.” He put his feet up, uncurled his beat-up scroll, and got lost in the Internet.

As Diego passed Imani, he said:
“Meritocracy.”

“Caste system,”
she said to his retreating back.

“It’s both,” Mr. Carol said. “Run with it.”

“You think?” Imani asked.

He nodded over the rim of his mug. “The Otis people will love it.”

During study period, Imani went to the school library, grabbed a tablet, and began searching. History was filled with caste systems, from the complex Hindu and Indian systems to the two-tier ancient Japanese system of samurai versus everyone else.

After half an hour, Imani was sure she had a topic for her Otis essay. She’d never thought of score gangs as a caste system before, but her argument with Diego in class had convinced her that she was on to something. Critiquing the score from a global historical context would lend the essay depth and substance.

Trolling through stories of the Korean
baekjeong
or the kahunas of Hawaii, Imani saw that humans had been mistreating each other in the same ways for thousands of years. And they weren’t secretive about it either. They left lots of evidence. From the globe-spanning malfeasance of the slave trade to the petty and disgusting antics of college fraternities, the practitioners of caste-based cruelty acted as if they were proud of it. That people didn’t learn from such carefully documented crimes must have driven history teachers mad on a daily basis, Imani thought. It certainly went a long way toward explaining Mr. Carol.

Imani’s favorite article was about the untouchables, who
were the lowbies of India’s caste system, the difference being that they were born into it and there was no way out. One of the ways people justified such caste systems was by asserting a hierarchy of morals. Those on the top were deemed to be of higher moral character than those on the bottom, but it was always the people on top doing the deeming.

Imani saw the pattern in colonial America, as a way of justifying slavery, which was also a two-tier caste system. Africans were judged to be of low moral character and, therefore, unworthy of the same rights and privileges as whites. By going into service for white society, these lowbies could redeem their low moral standing. As with the untouchables, there was no way out. Even emancipated slaves were lower than white citizens, or to put it in her father’s terms, “the man” kept keeping them down.

Once she’d begun looking, Imani found the pattern cropping up everywhere. There were, she knew, many parts of the world where women were still treated as the inferiors of men, with rights and privileges commensurate with their status. And again, there was no way out. In the war-torn wilds of Afghanistan or the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, you couldn’t work your way up from female to male.

But these examples presented a problem for Imani because they cast the score in a positive light. After all, as Diego had argued, at least with the score, you could work your way up. As much as she hated to agree with him, she was beginning to see that the score
was
a meritocracy with borders.

Imani was staring at her tablet, trying to nudge the evidence
into an argument she could use, when she noticed Amber standing a few feet away.

“Can I talk to you?” Amber whispered.

Imani glanced around the library, where other students worked silently. Amber motioned for Imani to follow her, then led her out of the library and into the nearest girls’ bathroom.

Amber checked under the stall doors to make sure no one was listening, then leaned against one of the sinks. “Okay,” she said. “I was going to talk to Connor about this, but he’s been acting weird lately and I really don’t want to make a big mess of this, so I thought I’d come to you first.”

Imani disliked Amber. Her rapport issues were of the kind that induced revulsion rather than sympathy, the way Deon’s did. But something about the way Amber bit her lip just then made her seem vulnerable.

“I think we should boot Deon,” Amber said.

“What? Why? We don’t even get our scores for another week.” Imani went straight back to disliking Amber.

“Yeah, Imani, but dumping him when he’s already dropped out of the sixties is just
expected
. I mean, do we get any score boost from that at all?”

“What makes you think he’s dropping out of the sixties?”

Amber shook her head. “Are you blind or something? He’s practically retarded, you know.”

The statement was untrue, offensive, and wrong in so many ways, Imani didn’t know where to begin. “I like Deon,” she said calmly.

“So you’re just, like, giving up on your peer group issues
completely? I thought when you dropped Cady Fazio you were serious about changing. I was hoping you’d be an ally in this.”

Now Imani understood. Amber was operating under the assumption that Imani would rise now that she’d dropped Cady, and that by forging a bond with Imani through this action against Deon, Amber would benefit by association. It was fairly standard, as gamesmanship went.

“Oh, forget it,” Amber said. “I can organize this without you.” She faced the mirror and wiped away a mascara smudge beneath her left eye. “Jayla’s already said she wants to dump him. I only need a few others. Just don’t say anything to Deon, okay? Or Connor. This is my thing, not his.”

As Amber fluffed her unruly curls, Imani couldn’t help but think about the other things they had in common: freckles over the nose, a sense of panic about their final scores, and a keen sense of the tick of the clock.

“Okay, Imani?” Amber pressed.

“Don’t worry,” Imani said. “I’m sure you’ll get full credit.”

When Imani got home that day, she went straight upstairs, sat on her bed, and spread out the articles she’d printed at the school library. She was hoping for a flash of brilliance, but her research wouldn’t cooperate. Every comparison between the score and the human race’s other attempts to divide each other into groups flattered the score.

Outside her window, she could see her father’s legs sticking out from underneath the Madsens’ sport fisherman. Imani paused to watch her mother, bundled into a giant wool sweater,
squat next to her father, a mug of cocoa in one hand and a wrench in the other. It wasn’t necessary for her mother to be there. Her father could get his own tools. But Imani knew there was nothing else for her to do. When things were slow for her father, he’d hang out with her mother in the bait shop reading catalogs and complaining about the price of everything.

Camaraderie. That was what they had. Life was tough at LeMonde Marina. Though her mother did her best to shield Imani and her brother from the truth, Imani knew they were barely making ends meet. But her mother and father were in it together. That fact might not have changed the numbers in their bank account, but it made the situation a lot less depressing. There was a kind of nobility to it. Theirs was a challenge to be overcome, an opportunity for triumph, resilience, and other fine things.

When Imani glanced down at an article on American slaves, she realized that the slaves too had camaraderie, some of them anyway. They sang songs in the fields and wrote slave narratives describing their lives. By working together with likeminded people, they formed the Underground Railroad. Later, their descendants, who were still the lowbies of American society, forged the civil rights movement.

After rereading that article, she dug out another one, on an organization of Saudi women who were fighting for emancipation. Camaraderie again. These women risked their lives to work for freedom, not merely for themselves but for all Saudi women.

In both of those cases, the lowbies of society worked
together to fight the caste system itself. But the scored never did that. Whenever they fought, it was always against each other. Like Amber and her dirty scheme to dump Deon, the scored plotted and backstabbed in an effort to ascend.
Because they believed they could
.

That was the difference, Imani thought.

The American slaves
couldn’t
ascend. There was no possibility of working your way up from black to white. The same was true for those women in Saudi Arabia. No matter how hard you worked, a woman could never become a man. Slavery and sexism were not merit-based caste systems. You couldn’t work the system, so the lowbies had no choice but to take the system down.

Finally, Imani’s research was working for her. As she stared out the window to where her mother slid a set of pliers to her father, still wedged under the Madsens’ boat, she couldn’t suppress a victorious chuckle.

ON TUESDAY, MR
. Carol gave in to the curriculum Nazis. After a brief resumption of his discussion of the collapse of the middle class, he abruptly turned his attention to the material he was “under contract to cover.” Namely, the Great Recovery, which he didn’t believe in but which Imani and her fellow students would be tested on at the end of the year.

Everything he said was downloadable from the Massachusetts curriculum website, so there was little point in paying attention, and Mr. Carol went at the material like a bored carnival barker hawking the same lousy stuffed animals. Imani took notes, just to keep her mind—and her eyes—off of Diego, who she could tell was stealing glances at her again. She wished he’d stop.

After class, Diego followed her into the hallway. When a
cluster of freshmen blocked her way, Imani stopped suddenly, and Diego walked right into her, his chin grazing the back of her head.

“So sorry,” he whispered. He slid his cool hand down her arm, pressed the folded paper into her hand, and whisked away in a rush of air that smelled of honeysuckle and something else Imani couldn’t place. There was an eyeball directly overhead, and it intrigued Imani that Diego believed he had fooled it. Perhaps he had. But once he was out of sight, she opened the note right in front of the eyeball. She had nothing to hide, after all. This was part of her mission to extract information on behalf of the score.

Imani’s peers rushed past her as she read and reread the address, the letters towering like the location they described. In all likelihood, Diego was a millionaire’s son. Perhaps, she thought, that was the source of his outsized self-confidence. He was the only Corona Point resident at Somerton High, which meant that he was, by a wide margin, the richest kid in school.

But all the money in the world didn’t change the fact that he had just unknowingly invited a spy to peer into his mother’s files. Ms. Wheeler, Imani thought, would rejoice.

That night, Imani told her parents she was meeting her gang again at the library. To keep up the ruse, she rode her bike halfway down Marina Road, tucked it into the marsh reeds, and snuck back to the marina. She paddled Frankenwhaler far enough down the river to be sure they wouldn’t hear, then started her up and sped for Corona Point.

The tide was coming in, but it was still low enough to make the river a minefield of dangerous shallows. With the muddy banks looming even higher, forty miles per hour felt like sixty. Her father would have killed her for taking the curves so steeply, but Imani couldn’t resist. There was no traffic to interfere with the sweet hum of her motor, no other wakes to interrupt her own. The air felt cleaner when there was no one else breathing it and Imani could imagine that the river was fertile again.

Speeding up at Goodwell’s Fish House, where the river made an S, Imani reveled in the deep turns that brought her so close to the mud flats she could smell the rot. As the lights of Somerton faded from view, she aimed for Corona Point, the frigid air lashing her face. Once into the rough waters of the channel, she searched for markers of the old marina. Only a few rotting pylons and some warped dock fragments remained. With help from the sliver of moon, Imani steered around them, then cut the motor and drifted onto the fringe of beach.

After pulling the boat onto the sand, she trekked through low bushes and reeds until she found the steps that led up the cliffs. The steps had been built when the land was publicly owned, but after years of neglect, they were loose, overgrown with weeds, and, in some cases, missing. It was a treacherous climb, but if the bottles littered about were any indication, the off-limits signs were being ignored.

When Imani made it to the top, she found herself in someone’s giant backyard. It took a few minutes to get to the front of the house, then another five minutes down a long woodsy driveway to Corona Point Road. There she found a wooden sign with WHIMSY written on it. Imani rolled her eyes and thought of her dad, who had once joked that the people of Corona Point gave their homes names because numbers weren’t good enough for them.