Efrain's Secret by Sofia Quintero Page B

on this mess as it takes to finish all my other homework combined. I jump up and toss open my bedroom door. “S’up, kid?” I say.
    “It’s an everyday struggle, yo,” Chingy says. He always cracks me up with that line. When does Chingy struggle with anything? He hands me my last paycheck, bounds over to my desk, and switches on my computer. “Damn, E., Barney Rubble had a faster computer than this thing.” It’s true what Nes said about Chingy being spoiled. For his last birthday, his parents bought him a new laptop. For my birthday, my mother gave me a card with twenty bucks that immediately went to pay my library fines for overdue SAT prep books. At almost nine o’clock that night, Rubio finally cornered me in the bodega and asked me what I wanted. I answered him by walking out, leaving the candles I was buying for the cake Yannis’s wife baked me on the counter.
    “Tell me something I don’t know,” I say, putting the check into my backpack so I can take it to the check-cashing place tomorrow. “You done your physics homework yet?” Chingy nods as he hits the button on the disk drive to my computer. “Then give a brother a clue ’cause it’s kicking my ass.”
    Chingy snickers. “All you gotta do is choose the right formula, plug in the numbers, and, bam, you got the answer.” He slides a CD into the tray and closes the drive. BK’s roommate at Morehouse is a deejay, so he’s always sending him CDs of underground hip-hop mixes. They’re usually fire, and I’m down to listen but after I’m free from physics.
    “Nah, son, I have
no
answer, never mind
the
answer.”
    “You think too much, cuz.” Chingy turns on my monitor. “But a brother’s gonna hook you up with this here birthday present I made for ya. Sit down.”
    I grab my extra chair and pull it up next to him. “My birthday was over three months ago, kid.”
    “And what’d I give you?”
    “What you give me every year. Nothing but a hard time.”
    Chingy laughs as he clicks the mouse. “Well, happy belated birthday, E.”
    The hourglass on the screen bursts into a giant spreadsheet with a dozen columns, each headed by the name of a school I’m applying to. For each school, there is a list:
GPA, SAT, Class Ranking, Interview
, and other things colleges consider when weighing someone’s application. “What’s this?”
    “This here is the Rashaan Perry College Admission Probability Calculation System,” he announces. “You enter the data, right? Your grade point average, your SAT score, or whatever, and the system calculates your odds of getting admitted.”
    “That’s dope! Slide over.” Chingy moves aside, and I drag my chair in front of the monitor. Under
Harvard
, I enter
4.0
for
GPA
and
2400
under
SAT
. Pure fantasy, I know, but I’m curious. The last cell in the
Harvard
column flashes a number:
95 percent
. “You could make mad paper selling this.”
    “I proposed this as my final project for my advanced programming class thinking it’d be easy, but man …” Chingy whistles.“My teacher says if I can get it to work, I should enter it into a few competitions. Get my scholarship on. I figured you’d be my perfect beta tester.”
    “No doubt.”
    “In order to be as accurate as possible, I couldn’t just develop one code. I had to create a unique algorithm for each and every college.”
    It takes me a second to grasp his point. “Because Hunter College may place more emphasis on your class ranking than your SAT score than, say, Harvard might?”
    “Exactly! And there’s no way to really assess that unless you talk to someone at every admissions office or, better yet, compile statistics on incoming freshmen.” I get a kick out of seeing Chingy so serious about something. “Plus, let’s say an interview is optional. Whether it should increase your odds depends on how well it goes, right? That’s mad subjective, yo, so how much weight should the system place on it?”
    “Still,” I say, “this program’s