Of course, Alonso was always ahead. He scored higher on the ACT, got into all the best schools, and was our valedictorian. He gave some beautiful, bilingual valedictory speech that I probably would’ve remembered if I hadn’t been so busy seething in anger at the time. He’s married now with kids and a job and everything, and I’m just here writing about how I hate children. But at the time, Alonso kept me on my toes, and I was determined to nerd out as hard as I could.

So, in addition to taking every class I could, I insisted on joining every club there was, which, according to most kids and also movies about high school, is only a thing that high schoolers do when they want to take long trips to state tournaments so they can stay overnight in hotel rooms with other high schoolers and also do dirty stuff on the bus ride there. I, not surprisingly, was in it for the game. Yes, I was a mathlete, and yes, before you ask, I was indeed our team’s MVP. I was also editor of the school paper and, for good measure, treasurer of the Art Club, which was actually just a bunch of closeted gay children who spent their afternoons pretending they were simply eccentric and not also homosexual.

Perhaps most illustratively, though, I was president of the Science Club, a group whose primary purpose was to give nerds like me a place to escape getting beat up after school. We spent half of the year building what’s called a Rube Goldberg machine, which is basically the game Mouse Trap, a ridiculous contraption that takes a thousand ridiculous steps involving marbles and slides and falling shoes and buckets that all happen one after the other like falling dominoes. Each year, there’s a national Rube Goldberg competition, and nerdy engineer-lings in science clubs across the country gather their pimply faces together to build a dumb machine that does a dumb thing. And you better believe our nerdy asses were in the game.

The task this particular year was to build a machine that could assemble a simple hamburger: a (precooked) patty, lettuce, tomato, ketchup, mustard, and pickles, with a bottom and top bun. Now, to remind you again, we were a science club in a public school in Chicago. Well, technically the suburbs, but still. We weren’t working with titanium steel or precious oaks and marbles. We could afford a box of rubber bands, a pile of toothpicks, and a heap of rotted wood someone’s dad left at the side of the garage. Somehow, we had to turn this into a working structure that could assemble an edible hamburger.