A/N: I had to write a satire for English class, so I decided this was most appropriate. It's a little reminiscent of "How to Be Asian". So sue me.

Disclaimer: Everyone knows I am the world's biggest overachiever so don't leave accusatory comments about how hypocritical I am.

"Ode to the Honor Student" By: Midnight

It all begins the day you are born. Eight pounds, six ounces. The perfect weight for the perfect baby. You rarely cry, and by age two you have begun to read and count. Your parents brag to all their friends about you, telling them their baby is the smartest two year old in New Jersey. Their expectations sky rocket and from that day never come down. Their pride is fixed on their perfect overachieving baby.
Kindergarten: the early overachieving days. Your first day of school is momentous. You are the first one up in the house, ready with your shoe laces tied and your lunch packed, sitting on the edge of your well-made bed at 7:00, two hours before you have to even leave the house. In class, you eat your snack the fastest. Your cubby is the neatest. Your finger paintings never drip and you can nap like no other five year old. You are perfect.
Elementary school: you redefine the role of the teacher's pet. There is an apple tree in your backyard just for all your teachers. You have more gold stars than anyone else in your third grade class. Your teachers praise you, compare everyone to you, let you stay in at recess and grade papers for them. You have perfect spelling, perfect arithmetic, perfect penmanship. But no one sits with you at lunch. You are not perfect.
Middle school: you take overachieving to a whole new level. When everyone else's emotions are out of whack and the sweater of the week is causing drama on the high seas, you are not perturbed. Because you have not left the house the entire month. Because you are home. Studying. As usual. Perfect attendance. Perfect grades. You are named class valedictorian. Your parents are proud but not surprised. You do not get a graduation dinner. Nobody listens to your speech. On the last day of school, complete strangers sign your yearbook. They do not vary from: "OMG, you are sooooo smart. See you next year!" You are not invited to any graduation parties. Because you are so perfect. But you have no friends.
High school: the real work begins and hence the beginning of your life as you know it. Life becomes not about being perfect but about getting into the perfect college. After a few months of talking to your guidance counselor and pumping ivy league-bound seniors for information, you realize that the traditional overachieving just won't do. The days of computer nerds, no sunlight, and good old-fashioned studying just don't cut it these days. Your Princeton review book says that colleges want "well- rounded" students. You take out your trusty dictionary and look up this foreign term. You close the book with a sigh. Well-rounded? You are not sure you are up to the challenge of being active and social. And going outside. You bite your nails and skim through the school manual for clubs and activities. You pick out the most well-rounded selection of eight you can find. Stanford, here we come.
And so the work begins. You lose countless hours of sleep slaving away over that completely obsolete chemistry project. Your new favorite drink? Black coffee. Health becomes secondary as Yale moves into the number one spot on your list of priorities. Your father is going in for his triple bypass and is lying in the hospital, but English paper is due! Hold on, Pop. Just one more page! Your favorite thing to eat is sandwiches because they can be held in your hand while you type frantically on the computer. You join club after club after club, volunteer at all the hospitals in the tri-state area. MIT just has to accept you. Every sports team has your name on their roster, every academic competition has a seat reserved for you; you are editor, president, captain of every newspaper, yearbook, council, team! YOU ARE GETTING INTO HARVARD, AND NOTHING'S GOING TO STOP YOU NOW!
In high school, you finally make some friends, but only consequential to the fact that they are exactly like you. They too are number-crunching, GPA-calculating, college-fanatical honors students. But no one is nearly as overachieving as you. You just wouldn't allow that to happen. You will be number one. You MUST be number one. You have deep connections with your closest friends over heartfelt, emotional topics: the English extra credit assignment, the new SATs, the difficulty of the math test second period, and, of course, the most moving topic of all: class rank.
When asked what you received on the most recent French quiz, you furrow your eyebrows and feign deep thought. "One hundred," is your belated reply, a self-satisfying smirk in your mind. "One hundred?" number five in the class answers. "Of course," he says, trying to flatter you. Your inner smile turns to a glare, your full game-face on in your mind, knowing full well this kid is just trying to psych you out. Your so-called friends are all out to get you. Everyone is trying to get at that number one spot on the class ranking list. But you know there is only room for ONE at the top. And it's you.
When your Honors English teacher hands back your last in-class essay, everybody grimaces. "There were two A+'s," he tells you. Your heart leaps and goes into overdrive, calculating your new GPA. Your friends grind their back teeth together. Their eyes shift and the whole class eyes you uneasily. The kid sitting next to you is white-knuckled and breathes shallowly. The Asian girl in the back row passes out. Your teacher hands you your paper. A-. You are crushed.
You don't know how to tell your parents. Just an A-? What does this mean? How can this be? What will you do with the rest of your life? What if Yale defers you? What if you get a 700 in verbal on the SATs? What if at the last second, your parents can't drive you to that final hour of volunteer work in Connecticut and number two in the class gets in an extra five hours??? You reevaluate your life.
You resolve to work harder. You sign up for the last of the clubs, Latin Club and thespian society. Though you take French and can't act, at least Princeton will think you have diverse interests. Over the summer, you fill your heard-earned free weeks with pre-college summer programs, SAT classes, and special internships to edge out the competition. You make sure you take all your math and science classes during the summer, that way you can skip straight to AP next fall. Your competition will never see it coming. Overachieving: not just a disgusting habit, but an art.
When asked what your hobbies are, you hesitate. You scan your mind for an answer; you're in so many clubs (forensics, bridges, literary magazine, science league.), you must actually like something. But you realize your real passion in life is the thrill of opening an acceptance letter from Harvard.
When it comes right down to it, you just don't know how to change. You're not sure if you can or even if you want to. You'd like to not be so inhibited, you'd like to live life recklessly for once. But you just can't. You just care too damn much, and you can't help it. You can't help but feel that this is the only sure thing in your life; you can't help but worry that the only thing you are good at is academia. It's a shame, it's a pity, it's a horrible and terrible truth: you can't change.
Sometimes you wish you led a double life. Sometimes you wish you could party like normal kids, lie like normal kids, slack off like normal kids. You wish that you too could be surrounded by loud and crazy friends and live up your childhood. You wish you didn't have your whole life planned out, down to what kind of dorm room you'll be staying in and what kind of home security network you'll have for your house in the suburbs with your two point five children. You wish you didn't know what was going to happen tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. You wish your life had a little mystery in it, wish you could scream at your parents, wish there was such a thing as taking a personal day. You wish you were not so perfect.
Sometimes in your wildest dreams you wish that as a kid, you had been a screw-up. You wish you could listen to angry rap and get high with the kids in the parking lot. You wish you never did any work and gave an attitude towards all authority. You wish that you too could flunk out of high school and have no direction. You wish you were not this perfect.
Sometimes it feels meaningless. Sometimes you feel like there is no point, no point at all, no real reason you work so hard. It is not because you have a passion for homework. It is not because it is what you want to do for the rest of your life. It is because you are by natural instinct a perfectionist. There is something competitive inside of you that can never be satiated, a hunger to be the best, to be on top. Or maybe it's not even that extreme. Maybe you just don't know what else to do. Maybe you have your regrets but it's not enough to make you change your ways. Maybe you can't remember when you decided to be who you are, don't know when you decided to be this way or why it's too late to change.
You wish things were different.