There’s a thing that happens when you’re kinda smart in public school, and that is, you get fed into a machine that demands that you try your very hardest to make it to college. You have to get the best grades and join eleven clubs and be good at sports and speak five languages and nurse wounded animals back to health. And I fell into it hard.

The whole process of going to college is fucked. First, you have to pass a bunch of tests to prove that you know enough to even be able to go to college. Then you have to know where the fuck you wanna go. Then you have to write approximately seventeen personal essays, and all the example essays they give you are by people who almost died of cancer or cured AIDS in their hometown.

Neither of my parents went to college, and as much as they wanted to help me through the process, they didn’t know how, and it only made my teenage asshole self more resentful and self-entitled. “Fine,” I thought. “I’ll figure this shit out myself. Just get ready to write a very large student loan check every month for the next twenty to fifty years and we’ll totally be OK.”

Making it even worse: my archrival, Alonso Garcia. That’s not his real name, but I want you to know it’s close to his real name, so don’t go thinking I made up some fake-sounding Mexican name just because he was Mexican. Anyway, Alonso was the cooler, multicultural version of me. Besides being a fellow boy genius, he was a college admissions counselor’s wet dream: he was a soccer and volleyball star, he emigrated from Guadalajara when he was six years old and could read and write fluently in both English and Spanish, and he was socially adept enough to be charming with absolutely everybody. I’m sure he cured babies with cancer in his spare time. Alonso and I were friends, but our friendship was infused with a potent rivalry. Who would get a better score on the ACT? Who would get into the better college? And who would be valedictorian? There could only be one and we were both after it. (And by both of us, I mean me, and Alonso just happened to be there, too. I think, in retrospect, he got more fulfillment out of watching me try to best him than from actually winning. But I cared. Oh, did I care.)