Marco spent the rest of Wednesday and the following Thursday at Jessica's beck and call, and he had begun to develop a profile on her, viewing her in profile from the passenger's seat. She was magnanimous in her charity, buying Marco all the iced coffees and fruity pastries he could ask for; this charity was explained when she said Jason gave her an allowance since her parents wouldn't, and at once it became clear that his breakfast was bought with Epsilon labor. She was a fussy writer, never quite certain that her commas were in the right place, or that "exuberant" and not "delighted" was the best adjective to describe her emotions upon winning the district badminton tournament. Marco had become the angel on her shoulder in this regard, and also with regard to if her good personhood were sufficiently showcased in her essays. The thought ultimately occurred to him that if he were not a Gamma and she were not an Alpha, he would be paid for this in cold, hard cash and not good vibes.

"You're so good for this, I think you could become one of those private college counselors that charges ten thousand bucks to get people into Harvard," Jessica said, looking up from her laptop screen in the Starbucks at the mall they'd chosen to colonize that day.

"I'd never charge for unqualified labor like this. Counselors like that only promote inequity: the rich get richer, the poor are left to fend for themselves."

"Good point," Jessica mused. "That must be why the club offers free college counseling."

"And can anyone sign up for those classes?"

"Yeah, actually. All ranks are welcome. But no Deltas or Epsilons ever sign up, and barely any Gammas. They can't seem to figure out why."

"And how are you privy to this gossip?" Marco asked.

"They had an open forum on this last night, if you were checking TigerTalk. I called in and spoke about how it was a real shame more Betas and Gammas didn't volunteer their tutoring services. We can learn a lot from Betas, but Gammas like you have a lot to offer—ugh, there's so much latent potential, if only they knew how awesome you were."

This was another point in the profile of Jessica Wu, who had showed up to her first day of high school to discover that her brother was already a celebrity and she was one by association—if the power players could bring themselves to care about a bright Alpha who was so eager to make friends it had taken her the better part of a year to discover some people couldn't be her friends, not because of the color of their skin but because of the color of their armbands. Upon discovering that these people existed outside of her social circle, she had taken it upon herself to uplift them, to teach them how to soar like mighty albatrosses. When her application to join the summer charity trip to Oaxaca was rejected—deemed too dangerous for such a valuable team player—she turned to domestic causes. Marco Aguilar was not quite a domestic cause, and he certainly didn't think of himself as one, but he detected this vein in her speech and in her essay drafts, that had he not been in the room, there might have been an essay about the unexpected life lessons she'd learned from a salt-of-the-earth Gamma who took the bus to school.

"The Alphas already expect so much from us, that we give without ever receiving thanks, that I don't think a lot of people would ever want to volunteer more," Marco said.

"Well that's why you're special: you're an exception. Maybe the reason they're still low ranks is because they're selfish like that."

"Do you ever wonder how many people have submitted college essays about being an Alpha or being a Beta, only for the admissions counselors to laugh them out of the room? They must think we're pretending to be wolves or something."

"Brave New World is a well-known book, I'm sure they'd all be familiar with it."

"But it's a dystopia. The point of the book, Jessica, is that it's a satire: it's not a model for government, any more than something like 1984. And it's not even close to how we live here: if they took the book literally, they'd assume the people here were having..." Marco trailed off with the realization that Jessica certainly did not process that part of the book fully when she read it.

"Is that why you insisted I remove the parts about being an Alpha from my essays?"

"Yeah."

"And what were you going to say, 'people here were having...'"

"Lots of fun," Marco laughed. "Point is, universities want free thinkers, viciously independent people. They want people to be themselves, no matter how nasty. It's nothing like here."

"So why does the club make us do something else, and why do they keep getting into good schools? I'm not saying I disagree, but the evidence seems to say they want vicious people."

"I think they actually give Alphas and Betas a lot of free rein to do what they want," Marco posited, "because what all of them personally want is in the club's best interest. It's only for the lower ranks where they know we'd be seditious if they let us, and so they have to watch what we do more carefully."

"I don't think I want to do what's in the club's best interest, and I'm an Alpha. I'm far nicer than someone like Vice President Cynthia."

"It's intrinsic to your nature as an Alpha that you endorse the club, Epsilon butlers and all. You said that you wanted to be a Beta or Gamma for a day: if you lived like one of us for a day, you'd see it's not all rosy. Let's finish up these essays, I'm starting to get hungry."

"Want to try that ramen place?"

"There's always a line there, but sure, why not."

They packed their belongings and left, this time with Jessica leading. There was a slight spring in her step, and Marco speculated it came from her self-reflection and self-absolution through the essay process. It was easy to forgive Jessica, since the bar was so low at Heller that even charity given out of a misguided savior complex was charity regardless. The club was outwardly charitable: they organized food drives and volunteering events, some of which stemmed from when the club was truly just a group of bright young minds in Mr. T's classroom and not an entity that had largely supplanted the real school administration. A true charitable mindset would look within before looking outward, else it was a mighty castle built on a rotten foundation—Marco recalled an Audre Lorde quote, that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

They had gotten to the ramen place early enough that there wasn't yet much of a line (if a line could be expected on a sultry Thursday afternoon), and a few minutes later they were ushered inside.

"Why are we even getting ramen today? It's so hot," Marco asked.

"Hot food helps you on hot days. It makes you sweat more, which cools you down when it evaporates," Jessica explained. "It's why you're supposed to eat spicy food. And you're also supposed to eat spicy food on cold days."

"Do you like spicy food?"

"I can't handle it at all," she admitted.

"I don't like spicy food as much as my family," Marco admitted. "I bring shame to my ancestors."

"And so do I," Jessica laughed. "A fist-bump for bringing shame to our ancestors," she offered.

They fist-bumped and finished their overhyped ramen, then returned to the Starbucks where they had begun their day feasting on pumpkin bread that was really more of an indeterminate "pumpkin spice" than could be tied to anything gourd-related. That pumpkin spice latte fiasco came to mind again for Marco, and he had a searing realization that his inner meditations on Heller would be great for a college essay, one that addressed how his idiosyncratic experiences had shaped his moral compass—and there was a chance that in a distant world, one looking upon him would see him as the world-wise narrator of a phantasmagorical quest. But to summarize Heller was like squeezing juice out of an orange: only the pith remained, and in the pith there was no flavor. While Jessica's essays may have been bland in their own way, they had in their lack of true insight avoided leaving any thoughts half-finished.

An hour or so into their afternoon session, they were interrupted by a familiar voice:

"Marco? Jessica? What are the odds?" Isaac asked, clutching his pair of ivory-white and ebony-black dice.

"Come sit and join us!" Jessica said. "We're working on our college essays."

"I really can't, I gotta run once I get my drink," Isaac said, taking his place in line. "I was working on mine earlier today, and I thought I was way ahead of the game."

"What are you writing yours about? Maybe Jessica could get some ideas," Marco asked.

"You're the one helping her? I'd have assumed the other way around—what are the odds? But yeah, that's a good question... I'm still tossing some ideas around. My counselor told me today that a really strong idea would be my personal adversity, and how the club and all its self-help made the person I am today."

"I've never liked self-help books: they're written by white men for other white men," Jessica declared. "And this entire idea that you need some loser in a book to tell you what's right or wrong doesn't sit with me. Vice President Juliet once advised me that, if she had anything at all to criticize about the club as it stood then, that it was how there wasn't enough focus on internal drive. She claimed that many Epsilons were Epsilons only because they were waiting for someone to tell them how to not be Epsilons, instead of actively seeking the solution for themselves."

"President Frank is a white man," Isaac said in solidarity. "I think a lot of his advice is silly, but you have to remember he wrote all that his freshman year. Precocious, I know—but don't you think that in the time that's passed, he could have revised How To Be A Good Person just a tad to fit modern trends?"

"It's kind of like our Bible. It's a foundational text, but so much has been built upon it that it doesn't really matter where we started, if it got us to where we are," Jessica said.

"A book written by white men," Marco said.

"Jesus was Aramaic," Isaac corrected. "And Jewish. Now I'm more of an Old Testament guy myself, but he had a few decent ideas. Was he a messiah? No. But he was what my grandpa would call a good mensch."

"What does that mean?" Jessica asked.

"Like a good person."

"Oh, so Jesus would have been an Alpha?"

"I think the club would have told Jesus that he had to stop turning water to wine because alcohol impairs judgment," Marco laughed. "Now that would be a good joke for a talesfromheller post. You haven't been sending us those lately, Isaac. My meme quota is running low."

"I don't think any of their recent jokes have been good. They're running out of content—and besides, over the summer, do we really need to be ruminating on all that?"

Isaac left this thought unfinished, since it was his turn to order. He came back a second later.

"Marco was telling me that, about your college essays, adversity stories aren't trendy anymore. He sent me this example of one some girl wrote about a Costco. I thought it was fun."

"I didn't like that one," Isaac said. "You're really telling me some experience she had as a two-year-old shaped her entire life? That's even more absurd than President Frank writing How To Be A Good Person as a freshman."

"I didn't give it to Jessica as an example of what to write, just that, I don't know, there's potential for a bit of creativity. It did get her into five Ivy Leagues." Jessica snapped her fingers in approval.

"You might be right. College essays are boring, I've talked about them enough today. Oh, did you two hear the gossip about President Timon and Vice President Cynthia?"

"Try us," Jessica said.

"So you all know how President Timon is a bit soft-spoken, maybe a bit timid, not very assertive... a decent speaker when he's called to speak but not, like, the sort of fire-and-brimstone we've all been taught works to be persuasive. Well, apparently this past year, President Haneul and the others have been planting it in his head that he should go after Vice President Cynthia, because they'd make a 'power couple' or something—"

"You're a few days late on this, Isaac, Priya told us all the details," Marco said dismissively.

"But you haven't heard this part yet, it's fresh today. Apparently Vice President Cynthia has secretly had a crush on... on..."

"Who?" Jessica asked.

"Me. It's unthinkable, you know, an Alpha and a Beta, but it would be just like Romeo and Juliet, a forbidden romance. I must've really impressed her when we were lab partners for that AP Physics project!"

"Is that why you built the Rube Goldberg machine?" Marco asked with a sneer.

"I think she was impressed by that, but it was more of the 'wow this kid has really lost his marbles' impressed and not the good kind. Anyway, apparently club security found out about this from TigerTalk, and they've been holding it over Vice President Cynthia's head because if she ever tries to usurp President Timon, this would ruin her credibility. I never thought I would be the center of a political controversy."

"Actually," Jessica said, "you're a high-ranking Beta who's only not an Alpha because of a few too many incidents like that Rube Goldberg machine. Everyone knows you're a good Beta. It wouldn't actually be the end of the world if Vice President Cynthia had a crush on you and people knew it, and if anything, it might make people think she's less of a sourpuss. But I don't believe it. I don't think she'd have a crush on you. People like her don't have crushes. They're points of weakness."

"Both of you are missing a crucial point: Isaac, do you like her?"

Isaac shrugged and opened his mouth to say something, but no sound but a prolonged "um" came from him at first. "I don't dislike her. She's always been a bit mean to me, but she's always been a bit mean to everyone. Even toward Vice President Juliet she always felt a bit two-faced. It had to have been one of the first few weeks of school, when I was still an Alpha and we hadn't yet learned decorum, I overheard her saying to someone that she could do Vice President Juliet's job far better than that 'dumb cheerleader.'"

"Dude, she sounds terrible," Marco said. "Nothing good could ever come from liking her. And there's no way she likes you anyway. You look like if Santa lost his facial hair and did the DBZ fusion dance with a chipmunk. No offense."

"Hey!" Isaac said indignantly.

"Chipmunks are cute," Jessica said. "It's a compliment."

"The insults to my ego aside, you two have a point. I don't know, I keep seeing you two and Priya and everyone else having so much fun together, all I wanted was to bring some gossip of my own. It's unlikely the rumor is true, but who knows what's in the cards for me. Maybe Lady Luck has my side."

"You're always welcome to join us," Jessica said. "We hang out so much during the school year, of course we aren't trying to exclude you. You're always busy. That's why."

"That's the summer before senior year for you."

A barista called out Isaac's name, and Isaac waved goodbye and went to take his drink.

"Isaac's been acting weird lately," Jessica said. "He's never been this, what's the word..."

"Well-adjusted?"

"No, that's not it. Focused. That's it. Since when would he be meeting with a college counselor over the summer and not playing video games?"

"He could be doing both?"

"I don't get it. You lack the intuition I have to know something's wrong, but there's something wrong. Anyway, I was thinking that for my MIT essay, I could say that their pirate certificate really appeals to me because when I was a kid... Marco, are you listening? So I had this cute Halloween costume..."

Marco persuaded Jessica that there was no need to make their afternoon work session too lengthy—one could only have so much fun in an evening—and they began their quest home, across the freeway to the boring part of town. By now, Jessica didn't need her phone's GPS to find Marco's house: she knew exactly which house with the well-kept garden next to all the other homes with well-kept gardens was his.

"So, same time again tomorrow?" Jessica asked.

"We've been working really hard on these essays, I feel like I've been spending too much time in one week. I want to stop before I see Costco shopping carts in my sleep. Let's take a break."

"Okay then, if you say so."

"Did you ever plant those flowers you were talking about?"

"Oh, the flowers? That would be fun! I'll go to Home Depot and buy some seeds."

"Plant them when it's evening," Marco advised, "when the sun's lowered. If not for the flowers, for your own comfort."

"Sounds good, see you next time!" Jessica said, and she drove off. For his own evening, Marco decided he'd go on a walk, and return by the time his parents did. The mornings were beautiful, but morning walks in excess made for an unbalanced health regimen, like all other sorts of excess.