He dreamed of being perfect.
Of the 2 million-plus students who took the ACT college readiness exam in 2016, only about 2,200 got a perfect score. That’s about one-tenth of 1 percent. Still, he set out to do it. He took ACT prep. He tried to relearn punctuation. He fretted over grammar.
Since his earliest days, his mother remembers, he had always chased perfection.
But what is perfect, really?
Austin Brotman was once a 15-year-old kid, a muscular swimmer at JSerra High, an academic whiz kid with the grades and the drive to set his sights on medical school.