Although she would argue otherwise, my sophomore Honors English teacher had a strange objection to society. Within every book my class read, she managed to find the argument that ‘in order to function in society, you have to follow a certain criteria. If you don’t, you are an outcast. No exceptions.’ This, she claimed, was why McMurphy was in a mental institution, why Holden was depressed, and why the Joads had to leave their land. 

On a side note, Said English Teacher had a rather entertaining way of teaching that ended up leaving my class in fits of laughter by the end of the hour. This was mostly because she provided way too much information on her sex life and at 15 years old, it was still out of the ordinary to hear your teacher say words like ‘penis' and ‘erect nipple’.

Like most High School students, I had adapted to the method of rapid-fire note taking and had never really had an opportunity to fully digest the information I was given from young, society-hating Miss. Charmin.  I simply swallowed the concepts for the test and regurgitated it onto the paper and prayed for an A.

(If there is any argument against society, I believe the above, cringe-worthy paragraph would be it.  Shouldn’t school be more than just memorizing quotes and formulas?)

The summer going into my junior year of high school, I realized that Miss. Charmin and Holden Caulfield had it right about society.  My dad’s business (which was never the Kenyan in the race, but it was doing well enough), slowly started to sink around December of my sophomore year, and by the time summer rolled around there was a giant, gaping hole in his metaphorical Titanic.

“Did you get a contract signed?” I heard my mom ask my dad one night in early July.  They were doing the dishes in the kitchen, the banging of plates against the dishwasher slightly drowning out the conversation but I had been catching bits and pieces of it for the past 5 minutes. The previously mentioned contract had been non-existent for the past two months, and my mom had been on his case for him to bring it to life. An Indian version of Tony Soprano owed my dad $25,000, and from what I had gathered, my dad wasn’t getting it unless it was in writing. Which it currently was not.

“No,” my dad answered, “but he said I should have the money by tomorrow.”

“Chris,” my mom said, in the same tone she uses whenever my brother plays X-Box for over two hours,  “Jen is going to be a junior! She needs SAT Prep and tennis lessons and college camps! We need to be able to pay for that! How are we going to be able to afford college?”

Her voice had risen from a scolding tone to a yell by the end of her rant and my breath caught in my throat as I waited for him to say something back. But he didn’t.

Silence. Just silence.

Sometimes, silence was worse than yelling. At least when there’s yelling, voices fill the air and opinions fly back and forth like heads watching a tennis match. With silence, the atmosphere was just uncomfortable and the tension creeps up on you until you break.

“I know,” my dad finally yelled back, but he was less convincing than my mom. He always was. His voice was almost incapable of yelling, but when he’s mad, it drops an octave and makes you squirm in your seat. “I told you Laura, I’ll get the money!”

They continued fighting, and I couldn’t help but feel guilty. I knew it wasn’t my fault, I’m not the Indian Tony Soprano who wouldn’t pay my dad, but if I wasn’t a junior then they wouldn’t have to worry about SATs and college, so maybe the money thing wouldn’t be so awful. I guess it’s also not my fault that I was born on June 22nd 1998, and by the mathematical phenomenon of counting, making me 16 during the summer of 2014, which coincidently was the summer of the Financial Titanic and the Non-Existent Contract. But it was impossible to shake the guilty feeling. And it only got worse as my parent’s yelling got louder and the silence between the yells got longer.

If only I had failed math harder than I already did in 6th grade. Then the school would have been forced to hold me back a year and I would currently have been a sophomore. And even though I would have had to explain why I was the only sophomore with a license, my birthday was late enough that it wouldn’t be too much of stretch and anything would be better the Giant Orifice of Guilt.

My brother and sister appeared at the foot of my bed and glanced up at me with somber expressions.

“They’re fighting again,” my brother said, as if having my bedroom in the basement somehow made me numb to the affairs going on in the rest of the house.

“I know,” I said. Fine, not my best response, but what do you say to that statement? I patted the empty space on my bed and they climbed on, my sister curling up next to me and my brother choosing to sit on the edge and play a soccer game on his phone.

Jackson and Nicole were 11 and 8 respectively. We were all, I had noticed over the years, opposites of each other. I needed to be in the spotlight, Jack didn’t care, Nicole hated it. I was a brunette, Jack had dirty blonde hair, Nicole was a blonde. We all had the same blue eyes though, and the same small stature. 

As the oldest (and therefore the wisest) of my siblings, I had learned a few things:

1. Siblings are quite possibly one of the most stable things in your life, and if you don’t have any, I strongly suggest either (a) getting close to your cousins, (b) forcing your parents to adopt a baby or (c) getting a dog.
2. Going through tough s*** in life actually makes you stronger. (I had learned this after I almost flunked out of 6th grade, got pissed at life, and then aced the next year. As the resident guinea pig of my parents, we saw this as a win.)
3. There isn’t a problem that can’t be fixed with a good Disney movie.

The thing is, at 16 I could do a lot of things. I could drive (with an adult in the car, but it’s still driving), I was tall enough to go on the scariest rides at Six Flags (barley), and I could drink wine at Passover without my grandparents judging me. However, a lot of things were still out my control, and properly explaining to my siblings why mommy and daddy were yelling and why we hadn’t gone on a vacation since last summer was out of my league.

So, I did the one thing I could do. I pirated a movie.

“Wanna watch Frozen?” I asked, and at the blinding smile I received from Nicole and the smirk I got from Jack, I knew that Olaf was better therapy than any long talk lecture on life I could I have had with them.

“YES!” Nicole exclaimed, bouncing on her knees in anticipation.

“Better question: do you want to build a snowman?” Jack said, setting his phone aside and crawling towards us on his knees.

I smiled and pulled out my laptop, found the movie on the wondrous world of the internet, and by the time the sexual tension between Kristoff and Ana became too much for either of them to deny anymore, Nicole was asleep and my parents had stopped fighting and, from I could gather from the running water, had presumably gone to have make up shower sex.

(Nicole and Jack didn’t leave my room until 11:30 pm. Nights like that one call for it.)

The Night of Frozen Therapy wasn’t the last time that summer I would hear my parents argue about Non-Existent Contracts and college funds. And after a long three months of yelling and lack of SAT Prep, I realized something: society was screwed up. SATs are structured in a way so that allowed the test to become more about methods than actual intelligence. So basically, the Idiot Pot Head from my math class could do better than me, simply because his parents could afford lessons at ‘Education Gone Wild!” And it wasn’t the Pot Heads fault, or my parent’s fault, or Obama’s fault, but society’s fault. Because they set up a system that allowed for struggling people to make their kids struggle. The SATs weren’t a test of intelligence or motivation, but a test of status.  And even though Miss. Charmin and Holden Caulfield clearly had issues that were much deeper than society’s messed up SATs, they got one thing right: if you didn’t fit into society’s criteria of being fancy, rich and the child of a Wolf of Wall Street-type-criminal, it really screwed you over.