Smarter, Not Harder

Darnell dragged himself into class on Wednesday. It was the first time in weeks that he didn’t wear a number across his chest. “I failed,” he said.

“That remains to be seen,” Mr. Griffin said. “What is your weight?”

“230.” Darnell slumped into his chair like a wet rag. “Today’s my deadline, and I’m three pounds over.”

“You lost twelve pounds,” Christy said. “That’s remarkable.”

“More,” Jarod said, “you dropped sixteen pounds since Thanksgiving.”

“I still missed my goal. It’s like what Mr. Griffin said to you Jarod, if you hit your goal, you build momentum. You miss it, you lose it.”

“What he said,” Jarod leaned forward, “is that if the deadline passes and you’ve missed your goal, you should still congratulate yourself for all the progress you made. He just told me not to give up before the deadline, which I almost did.”

“I tried to push myself to hit my deadline. I figured if I didn’t drink yesterday I could lose an additional pound or two in water weight. Look where it landed me. The nurse made me drink like a gallon of water, then my mom made me eat when I got home. She said ‘no more of this craziness,’ and she stood over me while I finished everything.”

“Still,” Jarod said, “now’s the time to see all the progress you’ve made. Not to beat yourself up.”

“It’s too hard. I don’t want to keep doing this.”

“Nor should you,” Mr. Griffin said.

Was Mr. Griffin really telling Darnell to give up?

“No?” Darnell asked.

“Absolutely not. It was madness.” Did Mr. Griffin blame himself for one of his students passing out during school? Did he come to realize that all of these steps he was teaching us were misguided?

But what about all of the progress that Christy and Jarod had made? What about my own opening up? What about Darnell losing twelve pounds? Was he really going to throw in the towel now? I called out, “You can’t mean that, Mr. Griffin?”

“I do mean it. Darnell has been on a burnout path for weeks.”

“He’s been doing great,” Jarod said.

Mr. Griffin shook his head. “It was never sustainable.”

“You realized this the whole time?” Christy asked.

“I did.”

“And you didn’t say anything?”

“Of course not. I’m here to teach. Darnell’s just learned a lesson he’ll never forget. He wouldn’t have gotten that if I’d interfered.”

“What’s the lesson?” Christy asked.

“That I’m just a fat guy,” Darnell said, “and that’s all I’ll ever be.”

Mr. Griffin laughed. “No, Darnell, that’s not the lesson I wished to impart.”

“Then what’s the lesson?”

“Work smarter, not harder.”

“Huh?” Darnell said.

“Work smarter, not harder.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Since Thanksgiving, you’ve lost sixteen pounds, all from willpower. Willpower is a wonderful thing, and by using it, you strengthen it. But willpower can only get you so far. It’s not a sustainable strategy.”

“Why not?” Christy asked.

“You burn yourself out. If Darnell hadn’t burned out now, I’m sure he would have done so come exams. There’s only so much we can pile on our plates and continue to will our way through.”

“Then what’s a sustainable strategy?” Darnell asked.

“That’s what you must discover. It will be different in each case. The answers are all within your reach, and if you can’t see them, I’m certain your Mastermind Group will.”

“So what do I do now?” Darnell asked.

“First thing, write a new card. Never let one card expire without replacing it with the next, or you really will lose your momentum. That’s especially true now with Christmas and New Year’s around the corner. You don’t want a repeat of Thanksgiving, do you?”

“No. I never want to go back there.” Darnell pulled out a pen. “OK, fine. I’ll write another card.” He received one from Mr. Griffin. “What should it say?”

When Mr. Griffin remained silent, Christy said, “Maybe you should write a more realistic goal? Like when I aim to lower my lap times, I pick a number that feels challenging but not outrageous. Maybe fifteen pounds in one month is too much to be, as Mr. Griffin says, ‘sustainable?’”

“How much do you think?” Darnell asked.

“Maybe just one to two pounds a week?” Christy offered.

Darnell’s sighed and turned to Mr. Griffin. “Is that what you are suggesting?”

“No, Darnell.”

“Then what?”

Yet again, Mr. Griffin remained silent.

“Why won’t you help?” Darnell pounded his desk.

“I am helping. I’m helping you to realize that between yourself and your Mastermind Group, you have all the resources you need to answer this question.”

Darnell turned to us. “Any of you have anything else to add?”

“I don’t know everything that should go on the card,” Jarod said, “but maybe we can start with what we do have.”

“Like what?”

“Well, the cards have a goal, a date, and the steps. Let’s fill out what we can, and then brainstorm the rest.”

Darnell said, “OK, I can do that. The date is easy. I can give myself another 30 days. Christy, I hear what you’re saying about setting easier goals, and truthfully, I don’t have the strength to do another 15 pounds, not now. But I can’t get excited about one to two pounds a week.”

“Why not?” Christy asked.

“Remember, my original goal had been to lose 70 pounds during this school year. I’m not ready to give up on that yet. If I don’t make real progress now, when I’ve got the support of all of you, I don’t know when I’ll ever do it.”

“I don’t want to see you hurt yourself again,” Christy said.

“Neither do I. So I’m going to put down ten pounds over the next thirty days. That’s half the pace I’ve been on since Thanksgiving.”

Darnell started writing. When he finished, he said, “My card now reads:

There was a long, dead pause. Darnell’s list hadn’t worked so well for him before, and he clearly had no idea what to replace it with. “Anyone have any thought what I should put down as steps?” he asked.

Mr. Griffin still said nothing. He’d been overweight himself, and I felt certain that he could guide Darnell on a healthier, more successful path. Yet, he preferred to offer Darnell another one of his lessons learned the hard way.

When no one came forward with any answers, Jarod said, “I have no idea what you should put down, but Christmas Eve is tomorrow night, so you’ll want to hurry up and get the answers you need.”

I read the terror on Darnell’s face. I could only imagine what Christmas dinner would be like at his house. With his willpower clearly drained, and his mother now firmly against his diet, it was going to be hard to get through it without his waistline ballooning all over again.

I also didn’t have a strategy to get him moving forward, but I felt a strong urge to help him develop one. “How about if I come over after school today, Darnell, and we try to figure this out together?”

The tight ridge in his brow relaxed. “That would be great.”

“Can you believe Mr. Griffin saw you failing and didn’t say anything?” I said as Darnell and I walked back to his house that afternoon. “You could have hurt yourself.”

“I did. I bumped my head when I passed out. It’s still sore.”

“Why didn’t you mention that?”

“Guess I was feeling humiliated enough.”

“People give you hell for it?”

“Yeah, Derek hasn’t picked on me in weeks, ever since Jarod stood up for me, but now it’s like Christmas came early for him. He kept pretending to pass out in front of me at lunch today. He also asked, loud enough for everyone to hear, why I didn’t have the number on my chest. Asked if I’d given up.”

“You’ll wipe that smile off his face when you come back from vacation five pounds lighter.”

“If I come back from vacation five pounds lighter, you mean. Like I said, I can’t keep this up.”

“Mr. Griffin lost all this weight himself. You’d think he’d offer you more advice.” My fists clenched. “From his smug look, it’s obvious he knows where you’re going wrong, but doesn’t want to tell you.”

“He’s right about one thing, though. If I do figure it out, I’m not easily going to forget.” Why was I getting so much more upset about this than Darnell was himself? “And he did leave us a clue,” Darnell said.

“‘Smarter, not harder’ hardly strikes me as a clue. He said himself, it can mean something different in each circumstance.”

“So what does it mean in mine? Come on, Kelvin, you’re the bright one.”

I didn’t like that claim that I was the bright one. Darnell wasn’t stupid, and he showed this past month that his will was far stronger than my own. I wouldn’t have pushed myself until I passed out. No way. Besides, I couldn’t think of an answer.

“OK,” I said, “we don’t know what the answer is, but we know what it’s not. If Mr. Griffin is right—that willpower is finite—then what I saw on Saturday has got to be a willpower killer.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw everyone eating your favorite foods, while you walked on a treadmill trying not to notice.”

“The worst was when you came over and started eating the nachos under my nose.”

“Sorry about that. It’s not easy to refuse your mom or her cooking.”

“Tell me about it. I go through that every day.”

“It looked like it took all of your strength to keep your eyes on the TV.”

“And then some.” We’d reached Darnell’s house. As we stepped in, he asked, “You want a snack?” Already his mind was on food.

“What have you got?”

“Ice cream, chips, soda. Whatever you want.”

Was Darnell really going to give me crap about eating nachos in front of him and then offer me ice cream? Even if he did offer, there was no way I was going to take it. Not now. “What do you have that we can both eat?”

“Nothing.”

“What about an apple?”

He shook his head.

“You’ve got to have something. Show me.”

Together the two of us went through the fridge, the freezer, the pantry. We found six flavors of ice cream, three kinds of candy bars, four varieties of chips, and three different sodas. The only vegetables I saw were a head of lettuce and a tomato, which Darnell said they put on their burgers. Fruits were completely non-existent, not counting the packets of fruit leather in the pantry.

“Did you tell your mom you wanted healthier snacks?”

“Yeah, that’s why she bought the fruit leathers. But I read the label, and they have almost as much sugar as the candy bars.”

This was worse than I thought. “Remember what Mr. Griffin told Jarod about alignment?”

“You mean with his girlfriend?”

“Exactly. It seems to me that you and your family are misaligned.”

Darnell sighed. “That’s true. And passing out yesterday didn’t help. Now my mom’s convinced that I’m going to kill myself with the diet.”

“That’s right. It’s madness.” Darnell’s mom walked into the kitchen and planted her hand on his shoulder. “A boy like him not eating or drinking for days. What’s that going to achieve? No one can keep that up. And the hours he spends on that treadmill…” She cast a glance at me now. The treadmill had been my idea.

Had the accusations come from a friend, I could easily have responded. But no way was I going to talk back to Mrs. Jones, especially in her home.

Darnell however, had no such compunctions. “I don’t want to be fat all my life.”

“You’re a big boy. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m not just big. Don’t you see I’m unhealthy, Mom?”

“Unhealthy?” His mom threw her hands in the air. “It’s this diet that’s unhealthy. When did you ever pass out after eating a good meal?”

“I used to be out of breath just going to class. I don’t want to live this way.”

“If you want to lose weight go ahead. But you don’t have to be so obsessed about it. It’s dangerous.”

The veins in Darnell’s forehead throbbed. “Mom, not again.”

Suddenly, I had an inspiration and turned to Mrs. Jones. “I completely agree with you.”

Darnell’s head jerked back in surprise.

His mom said, “See, even Kelvin agrees. This diet is nuts.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s the problem we were trying to solve today, how Darnell can continue to lose weight, without doing anything dangerous.”

Darnell’s anger softened. His mom’s brow rose in confusion, as though trying to figure out if she’d been tricked.

“One thing we were just wondering was whether it would be possible to get healthier snacks in the house?” I said.

“Look, I’ve told Darnell, if he wants to do the shopping, he’s welcome to.”

Darnell rolled his eyes. “Come on, Mom, obviously I’m not going to—.”

“Great,” I said. “I’ll come with you.”

Darnell’s mouth dropped open. “You want to do our shopping?”

I always hated it when my mom sent me out to buy groceries, but now the prospect of going shopping sounded fun. “Why not? It can’t be any harder than fasting, right?”

Darnell shrugged.

His mom patted his cheek. “Great, I’ll give you a list.”

She wrote down everything she needed onto her kitchen pad. Darnell looked over her shoulder and said, “But Mom, this is all the stuff we normally buy.”

“If you want to get other things, go ahead. But I’m not going to change how I cook just because you do the shopping.”

Darnell groaned. “Then it’s pointless.”

“What if we did the cooking?” I asked.

Mrs. Jones looked down the end of her nose at me. “The two of you are going to do all of our cooking?”

I bit my lip. We were in winter break now, so we’d have the time if we wanted to. But did I really want to spend half my vacation cooking? “We’ll do it tonight.”

“You boys want to give me a night off, I’ll take it. Heaven knows I’ll be cooking more than enough the next couple of days. I’ll give you a list of things to buy for me for Christmas dinner, but you’re welcome to buy anything you want to cook tonight.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Darnell?”

He looked from me to his mother. In the end, he shrugged and said, “Deal.”

“Great,” his mom said. “I’ll go get you my credit card.”

Darnell leaned over to me. “You know how to cook?”

“No. You?”

He shook his head. What had we just gotten ourselves into?

It took us almost an hour of walking around the supermarket to fill Mrs. Jones’ Christmas dinner list. It would have taken a quarter that long if we hadn’t kept picking things up, discussing whether they’d be good to make for dinner, and putting them back.

“Pasta?” I asked, holding up a box of angel hair. “It seems simple enough to make.”

“It’s low cal, but high carbs. My uncle Fred always said if you want to lose weight, stay off the carbs.”

“So what does he suggest?”

“Beef, chicken, eggs.”

I’d heard of those high protein, low carb diets. They never sounded all that healthy to me. Yet, if they worked, was that the way to go? We needed to get out of this gridlock. I turned to Darnell. “What would Mr. Griffin do now?” I asked.

“I guess he’d say go back to your goal.”

“That’s to lose weight. So maybe the all meat diet is a good idea?”

“Well, losing weight is what we put down on the card,” he said.

Losing weight was the measurable goal he’d listed, but his vision for himself had been much more than that. “Right, you also want to be healthy and fit. So maybe just eating meat isn’t the way to go?”

Darnell shrugged.

“What about vegetables?” I asked.

“What, like broccoli? It’s also high carb, isn’t it?”

“I have no idea. And I haven’t the slightest clue how to cook it.”

So we wandered around the supermarket, which felt bigger and more daunting the more time we spent. We needed help. “You know what else Mr. Griffin would say? Turn to your Mastermind Group.”

“Christy?” Darnell asked.

“Why not? She’s thin and an athlete.”

“Plus she’s a girl, so she probably knows how to cook,” Darnell gave voice to what I’d also been thinking but hadn’t wanted to say.

I tried her cell phone. Christy laughed when I told her why we’d called. “Happy to help. You guys have both been there for me. I’m just leaving swim practice now. I’ll come meet you.”

When she arrived, Christy took one look at our cart and balked. “You’re not expecting to lose weight on this stuff, are you?”

Darnell explained about his mom and her shopping list. “We really don’t know what to buy for dinner.”

“Or how to cook it,” I added.

“I want to get something low calorie,” Darnell said, “but my uncle says that carbs are bad for losing weight, and we think too much meat sounds unhealthy. So we just froze.”

Christy squeezed in her cheeks to keep herself from breaking into giggles. “If you want to go with one of those fad diets, you’re on your own. All I can tell you is that my family eats tons of carbs. My mom cooks just like her mom and her mom before that. And we’re definitely not fat.”

“Where’s your mom from, anyway?” Darnell asked. “Mexico?”

Christy rolled her eyes. “Not everyone who speaks Spanish is from Mexico, you gringo!”

“I’m not a gringo. I’m black, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“You don’t have to be white to be a gringo, Darnell. You’re just a black gringo.”

“So where are you from?” Darnell asked,

“Colombia. We moved here when I was three.”

“And what do you eat?”

“Food, Black Gringo. Real food. Rice and beans and potatoes and corn. We love avocado, mango, salads, and berries.”

Christy grabbed an empty shopping cart and led us around the supermarket. We practically had to run to keep up as she piled in black beans, rice, yucca (whatever that was), and dozens of other vegetables.

“Kelvin, grab a plantain.” She pointed down a vegetable aisle.

The plantains looked like giant bananas and came in two equally unappetizing varieties, green and hard, or a soft yellowish-brown with black splotches.

I must have stood debating which ones to get for some time, since Christy came up behind me and chose a green one.

“Good choice,” I said. “I’ll take unripe over rotten any day.”

“White Gringo, this is how they’re supposed to look. The brown ones are sweet, the green ones savory. And before you make another gringo remark, you eat them cooked, not raw.”

She stormed off, but I caught her grinning to herself. Far from being upset, she was thoroughly enjoying bossing us around.

By the time we checked out, we had two full shopping carts worth of food, and the price at the register was astronomical. Yet, the items Christy picked out came in at a tiny fraction of the cost of what we bought for Darnell’s mom.

When we reached Darnell’s, Christy had us put all the groceries away and clear the countertops before we began. “I can’t work in chaos,” she said. Cooking brought out her Latin side. She pulled up a Carlos Vives album on her phone and swayed her hips in rhythm as she set the rice to cook, adding some spice that turned it orange. It took all Darnell’s focus to stick to his assigned tasks rather than watch Christy at work.

Darnell chopped onions, which got him all teary-eyed, and I peeled and cut the plantain into chunks, but neither of us performed to Christy’s standards. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you Gringos how to use a knife?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “First off, get rid of these puny little things. Haven’t you got a chef’s knife?”

“What’s a chef’s knife?” Darnell asked.

Christy groaned. “Just get me the biggest knife you have.”

Darnell pulled out a monstrous knife that looked brand new. Christy took one look at it and said, “oh good, you do have a chef’s knife. Now pay attention.” She took Darnell’s cutting board and put the tip of the knife near one edge, leaving the back near the pile of onions. “Now, see where the knife is curved? That’s the pivot. Place your left hand there, and rock the knife back and forth.” Her right hand rose and fell like lightning, leaving the onion diced into a hundred tiny pieces. She lifted the cutting board over a pot and, with a flick of her wrist, pushed the onions in with the back of the knife. Christy handed me the knife, “Now you try it with the plantains.”

I tried to duplicate her motions with little success, though, awkward as I was, I still cut up the plantain far faster than I had with my ‘puny’ knife. When I finished, she pushed the chunks into the pot with the black beans (we used canned, even though Christy said you should always buy dried beans and soak them overnight. She acted like a cappuccino lover forced to drink instant coffee). She sprinkled spices into the pot and brought it to a boil.

Darnell looked around at all we were preparing. “Wait, don’t we need a protein?”

Christy smacked him on the forehead. “Beans and rice have tons of protein. You don’t know anything about food, do you?”

Darnell’s shoulders rose to his ears.

“It’s time you got yourself an education, Darnell.” She used his real name rather than calling him Black Gringo—Christy was no longer joking around. She looked him square in the eyes. “How else are you going to lose weight while staying healthy?”

“You’re right.” Darnell nodded. “Smarter, not harder.”

“Smarter, not harder.”

“I guess getting an education should be the first step on my card. I’m just not sure where to start.”

“I’m going to call my mom and tell her I’m staying for dinner,” I said. “It smells like Colombian food might not taste so bad after all. Then what do you say we all sit down and brainstorm ways you can learn what you need to know?”

“Sounds good,” Darnell said.

“Christy?”

“I’m in, Gringos.”

The Sunday after Christmas started out clear, then snow started falling in late afternoon and didn’t stop.

By the time I woke on Monday, December 28, we had eighteen inches of new snow, and guess who was assigned to go clear the driveway so Dad could get out?

I bundled up against the cold, which kept me snug for the first few minutes on the snow blower, but soon enough I was wiping sweat off my forehead.

After about twenty minutes, I’d made minimal progress on the driveway and had already pulled off my jacket to keep from overheating. I turned off the plow for a quick break—the noise of that thing is enough to set you on edge—and I heard a honk. A truck pushed through the slushy streets, flashing its lights.

Jarod pulled up in his pickup, now outfitted with the snowplow on front. “Get out of the way,” he told me.

I hauled the snow blower back to the safety of the garage. Jarod lowered his plow and drove right up the driveway, pushing a mountain of snow off to the side. It took him three passes—and no more than five minutes—to clear the entire driveway.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Hey, I owe you.” Jarod shook my hand. “You won’t believe what’s going on.”

Before he could tell me, my neighbor from across the street opened her front door and came out with a jacket pulled on over her robe. She waved, and I waved back, a little confused, until I realized she wasn’t waving at me; she was frantically trying to get Jarod’s attention. He signaled to her that he would be over in a minute, then said, “There’s another one. It’s been like this all morning.”

“How many have you done?”

“I’ve lost count. Hey, why don’t you grab your jacket and come with me? I could use the help. I’ll give you $20 an hour.”

“I can’t drive your truck.”

“You won’t need to. I’ll do all of the driving.”

I had nothing else to do, and Jarod had already saved me an hour’s worth of work on the driveway. I ran into the house, told my father that the driveway was all clear, grabbed a bagel from the breadbox, and was back out by the time Jarod had finished the neighbor’s driveway.

She handed him $40 and said, “Are you sure you can’t do the walks?”

“The driveways have to take priority for now, but once the snow stops and the driveways are all clear, I’d be happy to come back and do the walks for you. Here, take my number and call me the day after the snow stops.”

When we got back into the truck, Jarod said, “Dealing with her took me almost as long as plowing the drive. From now on, that’s your job. That, and answering my phone.”

“Who will be calling?”

“I honestly have no idea who most of them are or how they got my number.”

The phone rang, and I stared at it—Jarod hadn’t told me what to say.

“Just put it on speaker for now,” he said, and then called out, “Hi, Dr. McCauley.”

“Jarod, I heard you’ve gotten yourself a plow.”

“That’s right, how can I help you?”

“Any chance you can come by and do my parking lot?”

“Absolutely. You have what, 12 spaces?”

“18.”

“That’s not a problem. It’ll run $200 if you’re interested.”

“That much?”

“I can do it for $100 tomorrow if the snow stops. But today it’s all emergencies.”

Dr. McCauley hesitated, then said, “all right.”

“Wonderful. I should be in your part of town early this afternoon.” Jarod shot me a wink, clearly thinking back to the advice Bill had given him. I knew the location, which was less than two miles away.

There was silence on the line. Finally, Dr. McCauley said, “I’ll make it $300 if you can come right now.”

Jarod shot me a huge grin. “On my way.”

Before we finished Dr. McCauley’s parking lot, two adjoining business managers came over and asked us to do theirs. The snow didn’t stop falling until 3 pm, and we didn’t stop plowing until nearly 10 pm. The phone hardly stopped ringing all day, and by the time Jarod dropped me off at home, I’d left him with a list of bookings for the following day. About half of them were driveways or parking lots, the rest were walkways that he hadn’t gotten to today.

I made a couple of hundred dollars for a day of light work. But my earnings were nothing next to Jarod’s. He hit his entire monthly earning goal and managed to cover most of the cost of his new plow all in one day.

I babysat Megan again on New Year’s Eve while our parents went out with friends. “You seem different,” she said to me.

“Different from who?” I asked as I stirred a bowl of brownie batter.

“From how you used to be.” She looked into the bowl and winced. “Those are going to be totally disgusting by the way.”

“Darnell told me about the recipe. He said he tried it last week and it turned out pretty good.”

“Brownies out of black beans? That sounds so nasty.”

“I know. Can I let you in on a secret?”

Megan leaned in. “What’s that?”

“I wanted to try it because Darnell said they were good. But I also bought a junky chocolate chip cookie mix in case these turn out as revolting as they sound.”

Megan laughed. “How come you changed so much?”

“Oh come on, I haven’t changed that much.”

“You have. You barely talked to me at all before.”

“Nor you to me,” I said. “Baking dessert tonight was your idea.”

“I guess, but you’re so much more approachable now.”

A month ago, if anyone asked, I would have said that Megan preferred to be on her own. Had she just felt rejected by me?

“So what changed?”

“If I tell you, do you promise not to laugh?”

She agreed, but within a minute she’d broken her promise. Yet, rather than getting upset, I found myself laughing along with her.

“Generosity Man?”

“Oh yes, I’ve even got a spandex outfit I put on when I read it. Want to see it?”

She laughed and said yes. I ran upstairs, but of course, I had no spandex outfit. Instead, I threw on a pair of green pajamas and, taking a page from Darnell’s book, used tape to put a giant ‘G’ on my chest.

Megan cracked up when she saw me. “These brownies are going to be so disgusting. Why don’t we just make the cookies now?”

I agreed. While she mixed in the fluorescent yellow ‘flavor pack,’ I said to her, “Would you want to try the notecards? I can help you create your own set.”

Megan shrugged. “That’s OK.”

I didn’t push. The desire had to come from her.

We ate our desserts while watching the countdown to the New Year. Shockingly, we liked the brownies more than the cookies. We ate a chocolate chip apiece for each of the final ten seconds. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

“Happy New Year!” Megan leaned over and planted a kiss on my cheek.

“Happy New Year, Megan.” I hugged her. “Now what do you say you get ready for bed?”

“Fine…” She rolled her eyes, then shot me a grin and headed upstairs.

Once I’d finished the dishes, I went to my room. I knew that Megan was struggling socially, and though she wasn’t ready to make a notecard, that didn’t mean there was no way I could help her. While I normally emailed if I had anything to write her about, this time I pulled out a piece of stationary and a good pen. I wrote:

I slipped the letter under her door and returned to my room. I’d had the best New Year’s of my life, but now that I was no longer occupied with my sister, I found my mind wandering back to my classmates and their New Year’s parties.

Had I told my parents that I wanted to go to one of the parties, they could have easily gotten a babysitter. Yet, the truth was that I knew I wouldn’t be so welcome. Even if they had let me in, I probably would have just sat in a corner on my own, just like Jarod predicted.

I thought over Mr. Griffin’s question: what would I be willing to do to fit in? If smoking a cigarette would make it easier to be accepted by others, would I do it? What about drugs? At what point would I back out? Drinking and driving?

Mr. Griffin had called drinking and driving an example of the wrong end of Asymmetrical Risk/Reward, with high risk and little reward. But sitting alone in my room at 1 am on New Year’s Eve, I found myself falling back into all too familiar patterns of thought and wondered, was the reward really so low? I must be pretty close to the oldest person in the high school to never have a relationship. If I could finally have a girlfriend, wouldn’t that be a pretty amazing reward?

Of course, that was just the upside of fitting in. That did nothing to diminish the risk side of the equation. Just thinking of drunk driving brought up thoughts of Christy’s coach. A mother of a nine-year-old. Struck down.

Funny how the reward side of the equation would be all mine, but the risk gets spread around. Christy’s coach got no benefit from the alcohol. She was just driving home to be with her family. She died, but I heard the drunk driver survived. As my eyes grew drowsy, I found myself wondering what benefit he’d gotten from drinking. Was he also doing it to fit in? Or was it an escape?

Drunk driving. Fitting in. Christy’s coach. The words floated around as I drifted closer to sleep.

Christy. Drunk driving.

Somehow, at 1:15 am on New Year’s Eve, those ideas fused in my mind. Just thinking of drunk driving, the image that came to my mind was Christy’s face.

Not her coach. I’d never seen her coach. Never made it to a swim meet.

Christy. Drunk driving.

Drunk driving. Christy.

And then, as if some cosmic hand was behind the whole thing, my cell phone rang, slapping me fully awake.

I sat up and looked at the number.

It was Jarod. Why would he be calling me now? I looked out the window—there was no snow. “What’s up, Jarod?”

And then he told me the news.