The seniors are gathered in the gym for the Game of Life. The teachers have set up tables along the perimeter with signs like INSURANCE and REAL-ESTATE and RETIREMENT. There’s a chapel with a veil and a top hat on stools where you can get married. A hospital to pick up your kids. But first you have to choose COLLEGE or CAREER.

The line backs up. No one’s bypassing College. Your Career options are better with a degree, even if they come with the dreaded Student Loans: one or two white Promissory Notes, 50k for In-State, 100k for Out. Everyone picks In-State, even though they’ve all talked big about going Out, to schools in California or New York. The only ones who will actually leave Kentucky are Liam Goderwis, star of Bates Brook’s musicals—Little Shop of Horrors, My Fair Lady, South Pacific—whose parents can afford to send him to a liberal arts school for acting in LA, and Rachel Kamiya, who just moved from Atlanta for her dad’s job, ends up at UGA, and was really from Georgia anyway.

Mr. Ward, the father of Jared Ward (soon-to-be Valedictorian, Class of 2006) and the counselor who based the Game of Life on his favorite board game, mans the College station. He wears a mortarboard, blows a kazoo, and throws a handful of confetti at every student before handing them their “diploma”—a halved piece of Xerox paper rolled into a baton and tied with a blue ribbon. They also get a stamp on their oversized, car-shaped nametags, hanging from their Bates Brook lanyards. “Graduate of: ________.” They’re told to write down the college they plan on attending in the fall. This sends everyone into a titter about where they’re already accepted. Many proudly fill in University of Kentucky or Louisville, rival state schools which have begun to feel to Jared like his only two options.

“But it’s not fair,” says Shanna Brumfield. “I got a full-ride to U of L. I even get a stipend. They’re paying me to go to college.”

Shanna is Salutatorian and Jared’s only real competition for first in their class. They each have 4.0s. The only thing keeping her from catching him is the weighted GPA—hers 4.69, his 4.75—because he took the required PE course over the summer, which freed up his schedule for an extra AP class.

“Sorry, Shanna.” Mr. Ward hands her the Promissory Note. “Rules of the game.”

Mr. Ward shows remarkable restraint when it’s Jared’s turn. His father is always bursting with pride at his academic accomplishments—Jared is already a finalist for a prestigious scholarship at UK, a full-ride with a stipend bigger than Shanna’s—but has learned to tone down public displays of enthusiasm. No kazoo or confetti for Jared. Just a discreet stamp on the nametag, a nod and a wink (Jared could do without the wink), and he moves on, blushing, to the Career table.

The only person dumb enough to skip College is Earl Blankenship. Jared suspects Earl does this for the same reason he does anything: for the attention. In the superlatives for their senior yearbook, Earl was awarded Most Likely to Eat a Live Tarantula on NBC’S Fear Factor.

“Yeah, boy!” Earl dances out of the long College line and heads straight for Career. “Too cool for school, yo! I’m all about that bling bling!”

“Are you sure you want to do this, Earl?” says Mr. Green, the assistant principal, at the Career table. “You’ll miss out on a lot of career options without that degree.”

This, they all know, is the real point of the Game. It provides an opportunity for the adults to lecture them about their life choices before graduation. Jared’s dad makes a big speech at the end about their future potential, after awarding the winner the penis trophy—the gold plastic topper is meant to be a thumbs-up, but at Bates Brook phallus-shaped objects follow the Gertrude Stein model: a penis is a penis is a penis.

“Hell yeah,” Earl says. “My uncle didn’t go to college and he’s a millionaire.”

Earl’s uncle is a truck driver for FedEx. He’s not a millionaire, but he does well enough. He never had kids and showers Earl with presents—a Tamagotchi, a Nintendo DS, a Motorola Razr—whenever he’s in town.

The jobs are assigned by GPA, via color-coded index cards. Mr. Green fans out the red cards (“Non-Degree, 1.9 or below”) and Earl draws Janitor (19k).

“Aw, this is some bullshit!” Earl flings the card.

“Earl.” Mr. Green gives a warning and makes Earl pick up the card, slip it into the plastic with his nametag, and move on to the Bank to collect his first paycheck.

The majority of Jared’s classmates draw from the yellow cards (Degree, 3.0-3.9 GPA). Paul Arseneau, who will become an accountant, gets Accountant (70k). The Jennys get Teacher (35k), Sales Manager (55k), and Police Officer (60k). Two of them, Jenny Hayes and Jenny Mack, will become dental hygienists; the third, Jenny Phillips, will be a stay-at-home-mom-cum-Mary-Kay-consultant.

Jared gets to pick from the slim deck of green cards (Degree, 4.0). He draws Cardiovascular Surgeon (400k). He knows he should feel lucky, but he can’t imagine a job he’d want less than one that involves sawing through a person’s ribcage. Shanna, who has already mapped out her path to med school, including her specialty—Pediatric Oncology, not Cardiovascular Surgery, but still—begs him to trade.

“Please, Jared, please?” She holds up her green card. Aerospace Engineer (100k).

“Wow,” Jared says. “A heart surgeon and a rocket scientist? They’re not exactly thinking out of the box with these.”

Shanna taps an exasperated foot. “Wouldn’t you like to work for NASA? You’d send astronauts to space! That’s way cooler than working in some hospital.”

Jared gives her a look like, how dumb do you think I am?

“No thanks. I’m good.”

Shanna storms off and Jared proceeds to the Bank.

*

The person Jared would really like to give the surgeon card to, would do it in a heartbeat (no pun intended), is Samarah—Sami—Abadi, the Arab girl in line behind him. From the yellow Career stack, she drew Graphic Designer (55k). Sami is just as smart as Shanna, just as smart as Jared—smarter, probably, because she doesn’t try by half. She has a busy family life, a ton of siblings, including a younger brother she takes care of—not to mention friends. She’s been talking about becoming a doctor since they were in fifth grade together, although she doesn’t know what specialty yet.

Shanna and Sami are not unique in their career goals. Many of the advanced students, ambitious little strivers, want to be doctors. Jared himself is an ambitious little striver, but he doesn’t yet know what he’s striving for. When it comes down to it, he’d trade all his academic talents for a best friend.

A best friend like Brad Dixon and Josh Linville have in each other. Two cut-ups who are “making it rain” after cashing their first paycheck at the Bank. Brad drew Electrician (43k), Josh Nurse (62k). Their friendship has an extra allure to it in that it’s stronger than racial lines—Brad’s Black, Josh white—although Jared knows this is stupid and shouldn’t matter, even though it does. Brad and Josh have lived three doors down from each other since they were eight and will stay friends through college at UK, rooming together in the dorms and then an apartment; they’ll even get back together after Brad sleeps with Josh’s ex; best men at each other’s weddings, sons born a month apart; finally separated when Brad moves away for an Athletic Director position at a university in Utah, while Josh stays in Kentucky as a civil engineer at a local utilities company. They’ll swear not to become just Facebook friends, only to become just Facebook friends, reuniting only at Christmas when Brad is in town to see his parents, promising to make it a yearly tradition (it lasts two years), their catching up at a favorite pizza joint downtown, the conversation petering out one beer in, after updates on wives and children and a few remember-whens.

Josh shimmies his shoulders and Brad showers him with pink (20ks) and white (1ks) paper money like a stripper. An audience forms, cheering them on. Jared moves away, collects his four orangebacks—$100,000 each—and proceeds to the next station to pick up a wife.

*

At the chapel everyone is getting married to their girlfriends and boyfriends. Cutest Couple, Krissy Playforth and Nash Griggs, swap headpieces and pose for the Just Married! photo in front of the backdrop painted by Mrs. Spurlock, the art teacher, to look like a stained glass window. Krissy tilts the top hat rakishly and Nash blows a kiss from behind his veil, much to the amusement of onlookers. They’re attending separate colleges in the fall, have promised to try long distance, but won’t last through graduation.

It doesn’t matter who you marry in the Game of Life. You can’t form an alliance to get ahead like on Survivor. There’s no money pooling. Only one person can win. Posing with whoever you’re dating is just for fun—and mostly to rub it in the noses of your peers. Everyone who wants to get married (it is optional, the single teachers like to point out) gets the same husband and wife—identical little blue or pink stick-figure stickers stuck onto the passenger seat of your car nametag.

Jared dawdles before joining the line to the Chapel, letting people cut, until Sami catches up with her friend Lauren Powell and cousin Fatima Kouri, called Fatty—facetious, of course, the petite girl weighing not even a hundred pounds.

“Guys. I’m, like, so poor.” Fatty flashes the Firefighter card and her measly salary (33k).

“Like mine’s better.” Lauren picked Administrative Assistant (41k). “I’m a glorified secretary, you’re a fire-fighting feminist badass. Plus you’d look hot in a yellow coat.”

“With a Dalmatian sidekick,” Sami adds.

“You think?”

“Hey.” Jared holds up his Career card. “I got heart surgeon.”

“Good for you, Jared,” Lauren says.

Jared ignores her. They’ve been icy since prom. Jared didn’t even want to ask her, but Sami made him. Lauren, extremely tall at six-five, is the head drum major in the band. Jared would never use the word freakish to describe her height, but teenagers can be cruel and this is the way most talk about her, like she belongs in The Guinness Book of World Records. It’s Lauren’s curse to be blonde, tan, and thin, yet completely undateable by the entire male population at Bates Brook—the tallest measuring in at six-three. Jared comes close, six even, which was why he found himself cornered by Sami, who demanded to know when—not if—Jared planned on asking Lauren to prom.

“I am?”

“Just do it already!”

The sentiment was: Jared should have been lucky to take Lauren. Of all girls in the school, Lauren had the most supermodel potential. In fact, she’ll go on to do some modeling in college, even attend a fashion program one summer in New York, but it won’t catch as a career. When Jared takes to the field with the rest of the marching band, and looks up at Lauren, center podium under stadium lights, conducting in her black gown and long white gloves, hair pinned neatly back in a French twist, he sees not a freak, but a goddess: a vision to behold.

But prom was a disaster. Jared and Lauren were not a good match. All Lauren wanted to talk about was her band friends and Jared hated band. He’d needed extracurriculars for his college applications and band was the best he could do. He was a Senior and last chair in the saxophone section. Lauren had dragged him to Evan Whaley’s house to take prom pictures with the other bandies. Whaley was in drumline (first snare) and the one who Lauren had actually wanted to go to prom with. He was referred to as “the ultimate bandie.” Everyone predicted he’d be a band director one day and he will, after earning a BA in Music Education at UK. He was dating Mikey Cruse, the only girl in drumline (smallest bass drum).

Drumline was basically a fraternity, a brotherhood of drumstick tricks, dirty jokes, and Axe body spray. Jared hated them, but only because he wanted to be them, which made him hate himself more. After every marching practice, sweaty and thirsty and spent, the band sat on the hot blacktop, spray-painted with drill numbers, for the director’s end-of-day pep talk and the drummers all paired up, leaning back-to-back, and this small gesture of friendship made Jared’s heart pang.

Sami wasn’t allowed to go to the prom. The Muslim girls at their school didn’t do that. But Jared and Lauren had stopped by her house beforehand to show off Lauren’s dress—it was aqua and matched the vest to Jared’s tux rental—and the whole time all Jared could think was he’d wish the girls could switch places and he could take Sami instead.

Jared offers the Cardiovascular Surgeon card to Sami. “I thought—since you want to be a doctor…”

Sami doesn’t take the card. Her hands are busy adjusting her hijab, tightening the outer fabric—today’s is white—then repinning it. A gesture she performs at least ten times a day, one Jared is intimately familiar with and still can’t get quite right in his drawings for Cyril & Maddi, a comic that resides in his secret notebook and began as marginalia in his World Civ notes on the Greek myths. The adventures of Cyril, a gangly teenage cyclops at Olympic High, who hides his deformity from heroes (jocks) and gods (teachers) alike; until one day he falls in love with Maddi, an undercover medusa; eventually he wins her heart and the two of them reveal their true natures—she takes off her hijab, he his sunglasses—and he declares her head of snakes the most beautiful sight he’s ever seen with the limited depth perception of his monocular vision.

“That’s okay,” Sami says. “Thanks, though. I’m just not really into this. I mean, it’s kind of capitalist propaganda? Like the only way to ‘win’”—her fingers, pin-free now, form air-quotes—“at life is to amass a fortune.”

“Oh,” Jared says. “Yeah, totally. Like… the pursuit of happiness is not just about money.”

“Exactly.”

“Why don’t you tell your dad that?” Lauren asks Jared.

Jared colors.

Surprisingly, Sami does, too. “Sorry, I forgot. I know your dad worked hard on it.”

“It’s cool.” Jared turns and faces front, where Brad and Josh have cut to the head of the Chapel line and are trying to get married as a joke, which offends several people. Becca Childress for one. Head of Young Republicans and True Love Waits, she finds the idea of two men being pronounced husband and husband repulsive. But it’s also offensive (for very different reasons) to the only two openly queer kids in their grade, Clay Sparks and Simone Jacobs, who are caught swapping pink and blue stickers by Mr. Humphries, the Civics teacher, and are made to return their “gender appropriate” spouses. You wouldn’t think it, but the most troubled is soccer captain Zack Neely, who is as deeply in the closet as he is in love with his teammate Patrick McBride. Brad and Josh grimace through an air kiss and Zack laughs along, brimming with self-loathing and secretly watching Patrick, as he always does when Patrick is nearby: Patrick chortling with the rest of their soccer buds, beautiful, brown-eyed Patrick, slim and sweet and straight as the free throw line beneath their feet.

Jared is lost in thought with an idea for a new strip: Cyril and Maddi take down Principal Zeus’s Olympic Games from the inside. Then it’s his turn to get married. Sami, Lauren, and Fatty pick up their husband stickers after Jared gets his wife. They all skip the Chapel photos.

“I’m never getting married,” Shanna brags, proceeding to the next station. “A man would only be a distraction from my career.”

“Lesbian!” Paul Arseneau coughs into his hand and Nash Griggs high-fives him.

Earl Blankenship swipes a pad of stickers and packs his car with a harem of pink wives.

*

The houses for sale range from mobile homes (30k) and rundown split-levels (40k) to country cottages (100k), Dutch Colonials (175k), and Tudor mansions (300k). Jared’s dad has laminated the real estate index cards with photos of actual houses and lists of amenities. The payday bell (cha-ching!) has only rung once, but already, even after paying off his Student Loans, Jared can afford the Château (400k), complete with hedge maze. He settles instead for the Victorian (275k), with wrap-around porch and symmetrical turrets. Mrs. Salmon, the Physics teacher, tries to upsell him.

“At least go for the Villa. Come on! Why not live in luxury, Jared?”

But Jared is a skinflint. He’s never been good at buying things for himself. Years of birthday money sits untouched in his Statue of Liberty bank at home. His classmates are not as thrifty.

“We have some nice studios,” Mrs. Salmon tells Earl. “Looks like that’s all you can afford right now.”

Earl likes the idea of an apartment, but his eye’s on the Penthouse (150k). He takes out extra loans at the Bank, tears the promissory notes in half, and pockets them. Mrs. Salmon reluctantly sells him the Penthouse card. Earl waves it overhead. “Check out my new crib, yo!”

“This one is so cute,” says Jenny Phillips, admiring the Log Cabin (80k).

“Ew,” Jenny Mack says. “Rustic much?”

The house prices, which Mr. Ward has matched from the board game (with a few additions), are much cheaper than ones on the actual housing market and give the students unrealistic expectations of the affordability of owning their own home. Most will end up in the suburbs: tract housing, cookie-cutter models where the only variation is in the color of shutters and trim. The median price: $250k. Others will land in condos. Many will have to live with their parents long after they or their families are comfortable—these are Millennials, after all—chipping away at student loans, then finally moving out to rent, not own, until they’re well into their thirties.

*

The child station is basically the same as the marriage one—only with a giant poster of a stork and smaller pink and blue stickers. The students line up and place orders for kids like they would fries and Frosties at Wendy’s:

“I want two girls and two boys, please.”

“One of each.”

“Three boys. Triplets. That way you don’t have to worry about them getting pregnant.”

To Jared, the idea of having children is a distant one. More hypothetical than college or a career or marriage. He gets a boy and a girl for the heck of it.

“Just because I don’t want a husband, doesn’t mean I don’t want kids,” Shanna says. “I’ll just hire a nanny for when I’m on-call.”

A fishbowl of free condoms sits on the table. Coach Ousley, the health teacher, has the unfortunate job of lecturing about family planning while doling out offspring. They shouldn’t have their kids until they’re married, their careers are set, their down payments made, etc. The logical progression of a life lived logically. This won’t be the case for many of them. Tiffany Thompson’s already good and knocked up, in her third trimester, and will have the baby come summer. Two of the Jennies and Krissy Playforth will have abortions in college. For many of the girls in the Class of ’06, Plan B will go on the market just in time for their college sex lives. Becca Childress’s first and only child will be out of wedlock. Patrick McBride will divorce three times and have two children with each of his wives before he remarries his first. Starter marriages, low sperm counts, whoopsies!, expensive surrogates, baby daddies. Life is so much more unpredictable, unplannable, messier than the Game of Life would have you believe.

*

Jared has made a mistake. Why didn’t he give Shanna his Career card when he had the chance? He can’t win the Game of Life now that he knows Sami thinks it’s all one big circle jerk to the Almighty Dollar. If he wins, it’ll be like every academic award ceremony he’s had to endure since middle school.

Climbing the stairs to the stage over and over, red in the face, retrieving his plaques and certificates, his dad cheering him on, the hateful looks of his peers saying: Suck-up. Grade-grubber. Teacher’s pet. It was meant to be an honor, but he was always mortified, any prideful light at his accomplishments eclipsed by a dark moon of dread. In many ways Jared Ward is the opposite of Earl Blankenship: the worst thing you could impart to him is your attention.

But deliberately losing the Game of Life is harder than you might think. Jared goes back to the Housing Market and trades in his Victorian for that Château. He buys a vacation Beach House (325k) on top of it. He spends recklessly, purchasing sailboats and RVs and multiple vacations to Disney at the Recreation table. But that ups his kids’ Happiness Points and lowers the cost of his Medical Insurance and Family Therapy. He donates to Charities, but that gives him a write-off on his Taxes. He signs up for a Midlife Crisis with a sports car, three of them—a Corvette, a Mustang, and a Viper. 65k each. Screw Disney—he scoops up all-inclusive European excursions to Paris, Rome, and London.

But—cha-ching! cha-ching! cha-ching!—that dumb payday bell keeps ringing, and that easy surgeon money keeps rolling in, replenishing his stores.

Reckless spending clearly won’t do it, so he tries the Stock Market instead. He’ll gamble it all away. They’ve set up a WHEEL OF WALL STREET!, the pie pieces labeled with various companies—General Electric, Ford Motor, Apple. He goes all in on MySpace and—miraculously—doubles it. Mr. Komplin, his AP Calc teacher, won’t let him spin again until he goes to the back of the line and waits another turn. He goes with Toys “R” Us this time and—impossibly, frustratingly—doubles it again.

“Are you kidding me!”

“Lucky day, kid. You should play the lottery.”

Final try. Blockbuster Video. Tick-tick-tick goes the Wheel. Tick… tick… it stops on Amazon.com—Jared breathes a sigh of relief—then, just at the last second—tick—doubles his money a third time.

“Jeez.” Mr. Komplin counts out his winnings. “I’m gonna have to refill my tray from the Bank.”

*

Pockets stuffed with cash, Jared heads to a trashcan, but before he can even begin to empty his coffers, his dad catches his eye and flashes an honest-to-God thumbs-up. Jared pretends to throw away some gum, then veers away.

That’s when the Game Over Airhorn goes off.

“You know what that means!” Mr. Ward announces. “Line up at Retirement, everyone. See who made it to Millionaire Acres!”

The seniors herd over to one side of the gym and the teachers spread out at the Retirement tables to count the players’ savings. Jared panics. His bulging pockets aren’t exactly easy to hide. He tries to offer the money to Jenny Hayes who gives him a look like—As if, creeper. Shanna won’t take it either: “I can win on my own, Jared.” Inspiration strikes in the form of Earl Blankenship, three times bankrupt—his Cadillac repossessed, his penthouse apartment foreclosed, his wife and kids destined for the Poor Farm. It’s kind of perfect, actually. Who better to fabricate a surprise victory? A little coup d’état from the least likely of underdogs. Sami’ll surely get a kick out of this.

“Here.” Jared foists the orangebacks on Earl. “Just take it.”

Earl can’t believe his windfall. He raises a skeptical brow. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch. I just don’t want to play anymore.”

He doesn’t have to offer twice. Earl’s pockets are filled with Promissory Note confetti, so he makes a kangaroo pouch of his shirt and Jared drops the bills in.

“Hold on. There’s more.”

Earl’s eyes widen as Jared transfers his accounts. Then Earl waddles over, elbowing his way to the front of one of the counting lines—“Move it! Move it! Billionaire coming through!”—shedding cash like autumn leaves, and dumping the lot on a befuddled Mr. Ward.

“Looks like I won.”

“Where’d you get this, Earl? You rob the Bank?”

“Nope. I won fair and square.”

Mr. Ward shakes his head. And for one long excruciating moment he glances over Earl’s head and casts knowing eyes on his son. Jared looks away.

“You gonna count it or what?” Earl’s throwing a fit now. He snatches fistfuls of legal tender and thrusts them in the counselor’s face.

“Calm down, Earl.”

“This is some bullshit! I owned you! I owned all of you!”

The delight Jared felt at the havoc he’s wreaked—maybe Cyril and Maddi could rebel against Principal Zeus’s athletic games by releasing sheep into Olympic’s gym and/or turning the hero-jocks to stone?—quickly disappears when Earl swipes an arm across the table and sends a rainbow of banknotes flying. In a domino effect not unlike a food fight, the seniors in line nearby toss their own scratch overhead and suddenly it’s like a piñata exploded and the entire gym is a blizzard of colored paper.

In the ensuing chaos, Earl evades Mr. Ward and runs off, scooping handfuls of trampled wealth and showering bystanders with the dough, shouting, “For the peasants! The peasants!” Brad and Josh get in on it—they avail themselves of the family planning fishbowl, flinging condoms: “Control your birth, you plebs! You worker bees! You proletariat scum!” Nash Griggs and Paul Arseneau have detached the Wheel of Wall Street! and are rolling it back and forth to each other across the gym floor. Liam Goderwis begins to spontaneously perform Willy Loman’s monologue from Death of a Salesman.

“But you still got my total, right!” Shanna yells at a frazzled Mrs. Vole, her retirement savings counter. Many of the teachers are trying to manage the brouhaha, but Couch Ousley throws up his hands, leans against the wall, and chews a stick of jerky.

Taking refuge in the Chapel, Jared finds himself next to Sami. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

Sami merely rolls her eyes. “I can’t wait to graduate.”

Earl has the penis trophy now. Mr. Ward chases after him, demanding he return it. In the struggle, the penis topper snaps off. Earl is finally wrangled with the help of Mr. Green and Mr. Humphries. The bell rings—the actual bell, marking the end of the school day—and the Game ends without a winner or Mr. Ward’s annual speech about their futures. Everyone stampedes out to the parking lot to go home.

Why does he like giving that dumb speech anyway? When Jared has to give his valedictorian speech four weeks later, it will be painfully full of clichés and pop song lyrics and met with tepid applause. That summer he won’t be able to leave the house without cars honking at him, shouts out the window: “Hey—new beginnings!”

No matter. Jared will soon be off to college. He’ll win the scholarship of course, take the full-ride, and end up at UK. He’ll succeed in college academically, because that’s what Jared does, that’s what Jared’s good at—and continue to fail abysmally at making friends. While others in his dorm are losing their virginity or going to keg parties, Jared is locked away in his room, studying; or holed up in the library, studying; or camped out at a campus coffee shop, on a date with a pretty girl. Just kidding. Studying.

He finds the pre-Med curriculum robotic—a bunch of memorizing then purging memorized information to memorize new information for the next test. He still pines after Sami, who commutes to UK—her strict Muslim parents won’t let her move out until she marries. She’s in all his classes and even a few study groups. Nothing will ever happen between them, but Jared soon finds another love.

It happens in a class on The Graphic Novel. He chooses it strategically, because it looks like the easiest way to fulfill his English requirement—books that are more pictures than words—but, from the very first reading assignment, it sends a jolt through him: Wait. What? This exists?! Later, after he’s read every graphic novel he can get his hands on, he’ll consider that first reading list to be a bit mainstream, although that doesn’t prevent him from loving every book on it: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. He rushes home and unearths his cyclops doodles. They’re pathetic, laughable really, but holding them in his hand, he feels the strange sensation of his life changing. A train shifting tracks. His advisor asks him three times if he’s sure he wants to switch his major to… ah, Drawing? and three years later he’s accepted into the MFA program at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Hartford, Vermont. (“Cartooning?” his dad says. “They have a degree for that?”) He’s warned by many against it—including his art professors at UK: “You could still go to med school, you know. Draw on the side. It’s a good hobby.” There’s no Career Card for Graphic Novelist. But Jared doesn’t care. He’s besotted with the form. He dreams in panels now.

The artists in Vermont are much more talented than he is and his professors say he’ll have to work really, really hard if he wants to make it. Those two years of inky fingers and feverish nights bent over his light box with his T-Square will be the best of his life. Heartache soon follows. His thesis, an autobiographic comic series he describes as “a metafictional black satire on suburban discontent,” called Ambitious Little Strivers, earns him a degree, but no publishing prospects. At least, he finally got laid.

The years after his MFA are the worst of his life. Forget a career, what comes next is a series of gigs—when lucky, jobs: pizza delivery guy, box office clerk, bartender, cater waiter, night baker (the most consistent of the lot, but the graveyard hours left him too tired to draw during the day). He’s acutely aware of the wasted potential his father sees in him when he has to ask, yet again, for another loan to help him make rent.

“You know people go to med school in their thirties all the time.”

“I like to draw, Dad.”

“I know you like to draw, but you got to eat, too.”

Jared does eventually go back to school, but not to become a doctor. He negotiates a path with himself, one that makes him feel the least like a sell-out, and enrolls in an online program for educators, earns a teaching certificate, and becomes a high school art teacher. At least he’ll have the summers to draw. The Game does play out: he marries a colleague, a Math teacher, and they have three kids—two boys and a girl. He’s eventually tapped to be an administrator, promoted to assistant principal. His art will be relegated to a web comic called Principal Poseidon, about a principal-cum-swim coach. Lots of aquatic hijinks. Mostly trafficked by his students, trying to figure out if any of the characters are based on them.

Sometimes he feels like a winner. A marathon drawing session when his wife takes the kids to her mother’s for a week and he’s in the zone and time just disappears and he finishes the “Titans vs. Olympians Swim Meet” strip and gets the tentacles on Scylla just right. Christmas shopping with his wife, she frowns at a splashy new graphic memoir, highly abstract: “You draw better than that.” Comic-Con with his kids, where he gets to meet Chris Ware, and that’s not even the best part: it’s when his daughter spends all her saved allowances on the new Wonder Woman. He feels so lucky to have discovered this thing he loves and to share it with his children.

Other times feel distinctly like the land of Loserdom. The endless conferences with parents of delinquents who refuse to discipline their kids. Playing the bad guy when dealing with budget cuts. A teacher spitting in his face after a negative evaluation. An invite to a book launch—a beautifully minimalist watercolor fantasy—from one of his MFA cohort.

But all of that is ahead of Jared, here in the debris-littered gym, rapidly clearing of students. On his way to the exit, he feels guilty passing Earl, who’s being harangued by Mr. Green in the corner.

Earl, like the Game predicts, will become a janitor. Right out of high school, for Lexmark, a printer company, where Zack Neely will also eventually work as a Service Tech and meet his future husband in the Finance Department. But Earl will only be emptying trash for a brief stint. He’ll consider becoming a truck driver, like his uncle, will even accompany him on a few cross-country runs to see what it’s like, but the peripatetic lifestyle isn’t for Earl either. His breakthrough will come in the form of Blue Grassers, Patrick McBride’s cousin’s landscaping company. Earl loves the outdoor work: the steady vibrations of the electric trimmers, the deafening power of a leaf blower, the summer-vacation smell of freshly cut grass. His yard gloves become soft and worn, a second skin. No beer tastes better than one earned by a day’s labor in the hot sun. He makes good money—not billionaire money—but plenty for food and rent, with enough left over to spoil his nieces and nephews with toy drones and Nintendo Wiis and the latest iPhones. Mowing lawns in the burbs, he often sees businessmen in their suits, shlepping their briefcases in and out of their McMansions; he remembers nights spent under the fluorescents, in the artificially-cooled air, wheeling his can cubicle to cubicle—and considers it time served. Nods to Joe Corporate, tilts his head up to the bluest of skies, and zips off on his standing John Deere, thinking—Sucker.

Back in the gym, Earl glares over Mr. Green’s shoulder as Jared rushes past. Jared’s so relieved to get out unscathed that, in his hurry, he almost misses Sami, hanging back to help his dad pick up the paper money, unwilling to leave it for the janitors. And he feels sick to his stomach for what he’s done. So he sticks around, too, feeling shameful.

Sami, his first love, who will die in a car accident while driving home from med school, who Jared will never profess his love to, knowing she doesn’t feel the same, wallowing only in the unrequited when it would have felt good just to say it. It would have been such a relief to tell her, to put the words outside himself, off the page, out of their distorted form in a comic about teenage monsters. Real words to a real girl, who stayed back after school and helped his dad, who cleaned up Jared’s mess, who would have been a great doctor.

They might talk big, act jaded, disillusioned with what the adults want to teach them, but they are actually still filled with promise in that moment, crawling on the gym floor, with the hope of what’s ahead of them. Their success might not be measured in dollars, but they still want to win. They have yet to experience the senselessness of life lived, life lost—that which cannot be reduced to a contest, a competition, something to be won.