I hunch low in my seat, careful to hide the screen of my phone from the kids around me—no need to give them free arsenic to sprinkle in my tea. I pull on my headphones and crank the volume to Ella Fitzgerald’s “Blue Skies.”

Yes, I’m the only junior who still takes the bus—no wheels of my own, no boyfriend or bestie to give me a ride. This has forced me to punt the smidgen of respect that should rightfully be mine, having survived nearly three years of the hellscape known as Eminence High School. I used to have friends here, but one moved to San Francisco and became cool. The other moved to South Florida, akin to being launched into outer space.

I am the girl who runs an antique shop. And like some odd bird species sequestered for decades on a musty island, I have evolved to be at home among the old-fashioned and passé. My best friends in the world are Basil Stepanov and Agatha Sweeney, both over seventy-five, with cataracts. My ideal wardrobe consists of cloche hats and box-pleated skirts. If I had it my way, the world would go back to communicating by telegram and candlestick telephones. Two years ago, at Holiday Assembly, I tripped on the risers in front of the whole school, and as I fell, I blurted without thinking, “Jeepers!” I also know too much about Humphrey Bogart and the Great Depression for it to be remotely healthy.

I spent years trying to hide my antique nature, to pretend my natural tendency was not toward Parcheesi, needlepoint pillows that read bee nice or buzz off, and high-neck silk blouses in rose, lavender, and powder blue.

But it was a whole lot of effort and stress. And it didn’t even work. Everyone still called me Nana. Now, I hide from exactly no one that I use the word muss in ordinary conversation. As the bus bounces out of the lot, I scroll to the bottom of the internship page—and wish I hadn’t.

429,222

No, it’s not the number of page views or likes. It’s the number of kids who have applied.

To seize my destiny, I’m competing with over four hundred thousand teen geniuses.

I know for a fact they’re geniuses, having wasted an inordinate number of hours not expertly crafting my own application—as I should have been doing, night and day. Instead, I’ve been freaking out over the competition, trawling social media for the thousands of hashtags that have popped up like poisonous dandelions in every corner of the internet ever since the internship was announced a month ago:

#louisianarises
#louisianaforever
#louisianalivesagain

Everyone and their brilliant cousin is applying, literally—from the sixteen-year-old star of the Warsaw Philharmonic to a thirteen-year-old from New Jersey who sold her first AI app to Google for seven figures; from Steven Spielberg’s favorite godson to the tenor who performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” at the White House two weeks ago and made the president cry. Not to mention the girl who invented a sock that will never get a hole in the toe.

If that isn’t enough to make me feel unworthy, the different countries of the applicants scroll relentlessly along the bottom, a simultaneously gratuitous and haunting information feed.

France . . .
China . . .
United States . . .
Brunei . . .
Republic of Belarus . . .

I’m pretty sure what all of this means is that I, Dia Gannon,aka Nana, of Eminence, Missouri, with a GPA of 2.7 on a good day and nothing to recommend me except an embarrassing knowledge of 1930s put-downs, have a better chance of getting admitted to Harvard, Stanford, and Yale as lightning strikes me while winning the Powerball lottery as the #1 USTA Junior Tennis Seed than I do of winning this internship.

Of course, the situation is so “Emperor’s New Clothes” on steroids with a healthy dash of pigs flying that when I’m not fretting about my competition, I am disturbed. Because something is very wrong here…