My name is Anthony Chan. I was born at Mount Sinai Hospital on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I am two and a half years old. My father, Henry Chan, is a partner at the law firm of Plimpton, Carlson, Brown, Goldwater, Bernstein, Phillips, and Roth, LLP. He never married, and as far as I’m aware has never felt the touch of a woman.

I have no mother. I was brought into this world via in vitro fertilization using my father’s sperm, and eggs from an American woman. Her name is unknown to me, but I’m told that she had, at a minimum, a 145 WAIS-IV IQ, a 1590 on the SAT, and a 178 on the LSAT. She attended Harvard for undergrad and Yale for Law School. My father paid $85,000 for her eggs, and another $40,000 for the use of a healthy young low-income woman’s womb for surrogacy.

Every moment since I was born, and even before that, has been dedicated to one purpose and one purpose only: getting into an elite Manhattan private preschool.

Julio, the pre-school admissions consultant my father retained in my surrogate’s first trimester for an annual fee of $20,000, was hired to give me extensive pre-preschool preparation and get me exclusive networking play-dates with other top admissions candidates. We began with flashcards of colours, which he would show while pronouncing them slowly standing just above my crib. My first word was “green.”

My father did not himself attend any of the elite Manhattan kindergartens and so legacy admission was out of the question. I also have no siblings, and so didn’t have the advantage of already being connected to the schools by blood for sibling admission. All I had were my wits, my willpower, and my perfect genetic material.

The networking events organized by Julio were where I first encountered my only friend and fiercest rival, Augustus Liu. His situation is nearly identical to mine, down to our White-Asian admixture, though he has a single mother rather than a single father. Of course, we are in competition for the same limited and prestigious pre-school seats, but we have a cordial rapport. There, in the various play-pens of gilded age townhouses we discuss the competition, the who’s who of upper Manhattan’s elite pre-preschoolers, and of course our studies for the T&E—the “thinking and engagement” examination for pre-school entrances.

By the time I took the real test I had already done hundreds of practice tests with Julio. It would be ridiculous folly to leave such things to chance. The test itself involves a strictly controlled environment, a laptop, and mandatory headphones to block out noise. The actual content of the test involves verbal and spatial reasoning, language understanding, problem solving (such as fitting shapes into the correct holes), matching colours and so on and so forth. It is essentially an IQ test for 2-4 year olds. My average scores were in the 97th percentile, which was not quite good enough. However, Julio’s analytics told me my scores had been trending upwards, and I was certain that on the real test I would score in the 99th.

Augustus averaged slightly higher than me, 98th percentile. In our discussions he claimed that he would be a better fit for the Mayflower school, by all metrics the most prestigious of the lot, and that I would be more likely to get into somewhere respectable but not quite in the same rarified air, such as York House or Windsor Academy. Of course, each of these schools is almost entirely filled with legacies and sibling admits, leaving precious few seats for strivers like Augustus and myself. This is why we spent our days ingratiating ourselves with the idiot children of the old elite. Look at them, babbling cretinous ignoramuses. Inferior genetic material. Their parents matched purely out of sexual attraction, or, worse, “love.” They don’t know how good they have it. I politely pass them the crayons when they ask me.

The actual day of my T&E exam went precisely how Julio and I had rehearsed it. The test administrators and invigilators watched in awe as I matched the shapes, fixed the elementary grammar, and continued the patterns of coloured dots. So confident and swaggering was I walking out of that exam room, that I did the unthinkable and asked my father for ice-cream as a reward. Of course, he said that was out of the question—far too much sugar, you see—but he nonetheless gave me a pat on the head, a rare distinction.

You will imagine my shock, and my father’s anger, when I received my results and only scored in the 95th percentile. A complete bomb. My entire future was jeopardized. Immediately father went into damage control. First, he called our doctor to produce a note claiming I was sick on the day of the test. After that he began working the admissions offices of our top three choices. He got desperate and perhaps offered things he shouldn’t have… I remember making eye contact with him in his study while he was on the phone with an admissions officer and saw the desperation in his eyes as he got up and slowly closed the door.

It did work though. Just under a month later we received the call. Congratulations. I had gotten into the Mayflower school. It was, undeniably, the best day of my life. My peak. My father even allowed me ice cream for the first time. I texted Augustus from my iPad. He had been waitlisted at Mayflower but was accepted at York and Windsor. Victory tasted unbelievably sweet. Julio would later tell me it was a “bloodbath” this year. There are no admissions numbers released publicly, but the whisper networks of Upper East Side mothers on Facebook estimated below 3% for non-legacy admits.

I could only bask in the glow of success, however, for a short while. It all began to fall apart when father received a call from a New York Times reporter, working on a story about elite pre-school admissions. It began harmlessly enough, inquiries about the process, what it’s like for a first-generation family, and so on. Then he began to inquire about me. My genetic origins. Asked if there was a mother in the picture. Soon he revealed that he knew about a certain gift that the admissions officer of Mayflower had received, one brand new Mercedes-Benz S 63 E Performance Sedan in Obsidian Black, the registration of which traced back to Father.

When the story came out it was clear that my life was ruined. At just two and a half years old my prospects were completely dashed. The life path that was set out for me—the most prestigious preschool to most prestigious elementary school to most prestigious high school to ivy league university, and finally into consulting, banking, or law, evaporated in front of my eyes. Father is of course livid with me, and next year I will face the disgrace of having to attend Windsor Academy with Augustus.