Getting In: A Novel (21 page)

He started sketching little mock-ups of business cards, as his enduring but unformed and underpaid daydream of being a novelist evaporated, replaced by a firm offer of $20,000 for helping a single kid. Fred Ottinger had shown Ted the way out: he could have a client list of two hundred students and a suite of offices with rooms for private consultations. He might even have the architect design a private entrance and exit, like a psychiatrist’s office, so that families could get help while perpetuating the illusion that they did not need any.

He heard Alexandra’s voice in the reception area, heard a timid single knock on his door, and a whispered “Dessert, Ted.” He held his breath, knowing that she would not open his office door unless he answered, not caring if she left the plate with Rita or took it back to the kitchen, unwilling to return to earth quite so soon.

Brad felt like a buffoon. In a giddy, disoriented moment he had ordered a Black Forest Ice Blended, in which coffee was merely the vehicle for lots of chocolate espresso beans and maraschino cherries, all of it blanketed by a pyramid of whipped cream. Liz was sitting across from him with her chaste chai latte, and he had ordered a clown drink. He poked at it, took a small sip, and grimaced, in the hope that she would find the drink dumb, and not him. So much for the scion of the Bradley family and his inherited social graces.

“I have no clue how to eat this thing,” he said.

She smiled.

He could not recall the last time he had had a conversation with a new person, let alone someone who did not go to Crestview. His friends might talk about joining Doctors Without Borders or
studying at the London School of Economics, but they were isolationists when it came to friendship and romance. They rarely ventured outside the Crestview family, and their conversations were studded with incestuous references to what went on at school. Brad was out of his element and wanting to impress, a deadly combination, a minefield. There were probably a dozen things he could say to Liz that would put her off irrevocably, and another dozen that would endear him to her, but he had no idea which was which because he did not really know anything about her, except that he did not know anything about her, which was the allure. It might be safe to talk about celebrities and rehab, or the health-care crisis, or the Middle East, or how about those Lakers, those Dodgers, those eco-terrorists, but there was no way to tell until he opened his mouth and put his foot in it. If this was a preview of life as a college freshman, he might never leave his dorm room.

“So. Can you believe graduation is so close?” Dumb, pale, vague. He sounded like his grandfather, who began every long-distance phone call with “How’s the weather?” because he could not think of anything else to say.

Liz took a sip of her latte and waited, and it hit Brad that she was waiting because she assumed, charitably, that he had more to say.

“You wouldn’t believe the Crestview graduation. Very formal. White caps and gowns, jackets and ties, dresses. No denim. They have a rule, no denim.”

“Nice,” said Liz, with the little smirk he remembered from the financial aid meeting.

Brad abandoned the straw and concentrated on folding the whipped cream into the body of the drink with a spoon, which turned it the color of mud. “It’s no big deal,” he said.

“Right,” she replied. Liz was prepared to like Brad, primarily because he seemed to lack Katie’s snobbishness, but she had her guard up. She expected private school kids to be spoiled unless
they convinced her otherwise—and if he turned out to be one of those entitled kids, then at some point he would be condescending about her life and that would be the end of it. Liz was quick to judge and harsh in her assessments; there was too much at stake to waste time. She had to make a concerted effort to be merely curious.

“Where do you have your graduation?” she asked.

“Soccer field,” he said. “They cover it, set out chairs, the seniors sit on bleachers. In a tent, so nobody sweats too much. You guys?”

“Track-and-field field,” she said, “same deal without the tent, and if it rains we go to SaMo Airport, to the hangar where they have the Barneys sale. It’s packed. Kind of like the cows in
Hud
. Maybe less dust.”

He smiled, lost and not sure if he minded.

“
Hud
,” she said. “Paul Newman’s the rotten son, the cows all have hoof-and-mouth disease, he wants to sell them before anybody finds out, but his father lets the government guy round them up in a big hole in the ground and shoot them. Crowded. Like that.”

“Haven’t seen it,” said Brad, feeling the need to pretend that he did not care.

Liz sat up straighter. “My father got me Netflix for my sweet sixteen,” she said. “First I watched the AFI hundred best films, most of them, not the war ones so much, and then I got more movies with anybody I really liked, and musicals.”

Brad concentrated on flattening his straw wrapper and making a knife crease down its side with his thumbnail. Liz and her movie list, her dad and his map book. He did not know many people who built up extra tasks for themselves like that. In his world, success was defined as the handing off of tasks, not the accumulation of them—the less you did for yourself, the better off
you were. He was hardly going to romanticize ironing, for heaven’s sake, but he liked the idea of inventing interesting projects, and for a moment he wished he had built the balsa wood double helix after all.

He folded the straw wrapper into accordion pleats. “I have this idea for your house,” he said, even though he had none.

“I’m sorry?”

“Your house,” he said, fishing in his backpack for a pad and pen. He drew a rectangle and started filling in walls and doors, and to his surprise, he did have an idea, one he must have been working out since the day he had come by the house with Chloe. His conscious brain might be in an extended coma, anesthetized by uncertainty, but his subconscious was striking out for new territories. He sketched in little boxes to stand for pieces of furniture, and in Liz’s room he drew a shelf and laid in a row of hash marks.

“Know what those are?”

“No.”

“Your DVDs,” he said, triumphant.

She reached over for his pen and drew little lines to connect the tops and bottoms of adjacent hash marks, turning them into rectangles.

“Except we rent four at a time,” she said, “so you left too much space. Now they’re my books.” She put down the pen and studied the drawing. “I like it,” she said, choosing not to point out that her parents rented the place and had to get written permission to install the washer and dryer. “I could live here.”

With a flourish, Brad drew a side view with an exploded roof that wafted two feet above the building.

“There,” he said. “You can do that. Makes the whole place feel bigger, and you can set in a skylight, get sunlight during the day and install shades to make it dark at night.”

He kept his eyes on the drawing.

“Look, you want to go to prom with me?”

A small breath escaped Liz’s lips, a
heh
that could turn out to be surprise or the dry first syllable of rejection. Brad could not tell.

“Prom?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Isn’t it in, I don’t know, May?”

“Yeah. Couple of weeks before graduation.”

“It’s January. Why aren’t you taking a Crestview girl?”

“Look, you can say no.”

“I didn’t say no. It’s fine, I mean, sure, but…”

“So you’ll go. ‘It’s fine, I mean, sure’ is your way of saying yes.”

“Right,” she said. She tapped the drawing with her index finger. “Can I have this?”

“Sure.”

She folded it carefully, put it in her purse, and stood up.

“I have to meet Chloe at five,” she said. “Thanks for the latte.”

“We’re on then,” said Brad. “For prom. I mean, I’ll see you in between, we could—”

Liz cut him off. “Yes,” she said. “I said yes. But I have to go. See you.” She was out the door before Brad had gathered up his things.

Yoonie’s humming began one afternoon after lunch, a thin little scrap of what must have been considered melody in Korea, though to Joy it sounded more like aluminum cans cascading into a recycling truck. She found herself listening too hard, waiting for the notes to resolve themselves in a way that felt familiar to her Western ear, which they obstinately refused to do. Instead, the line of notes embedded itself in her brain, so that at any given moment she was hard pressed to say whether the music was coming from Yoonie or from inside her own head. It got on her nerves.

Jim Arden had held the last slot on the first Tuesday of the month ever since Joy could remember, testimony to his vanity, his hypochondria, and a misplaced belief that diligent examination prevented, rather than exposed, disease. His collected MRIs, viewed in a single sitting, would require popcorn and a large Coke, but a retinue of specialists was happy to indulge him because he never mentioned insurance and always paid at the end of his visit. He was one of Joy’s easiest patients—Botox across his forehead four times a year, a reassuring look at the same mole she had examined a month earlier, and he went home happy.

As Yoonie held out the first of six syringes filled with Botox, the humming seemed to get louder, not enough for Jim to notice, but enough for Dr. Joy to glance over at her nurse, who hesitated, the needle in midair.

“I am so sorry,” Yoonie said, although she had no idea what she was apologizing for. “I thought you were ready for the first injection.”

She reached forward just as Dr. Joy did, their hands collided, and the needle fell to the ground.

“Hey, butterfingers,” said Jim. “Should I let you anywhere near my forehead with shakes like that?”

“It was entirely my fault, and I am very sorry,” said Yoonie, who dove in one continuous arc to retrieve and discard the needle and reach for a replacement, which she handed to Dr. Joy with her other hand. Joy took it with exaggerated caution and held it up, immobile, six inches in front of her patient’s face.

“If you have any concern, Jim, I’ll refer you to Dr. Josephs and he can handle your treatments.”

“No, butterfingers, I meant the nurse. Not you.”

Yoonie took longer than usual cleaning up after Jim left, but when she came out of the examination room Dr. Joy was waiting in the hallway.

“You’re humming,” said Joy.

“Oh,” said Yoonie. “I disturbed you, again, I am sorry, I will not do it again.”

“Yoonie.”

“Yes, Dr. Joy.”

“Come in my office for a moment.”

Yoonie followed her but did not sit down.

“You never hum.”

“No.”

“But now you hum. Why is that?”

Yoonie mistook irritation for interest.

“Liz is going to the prom and I am very happy for her, so today after school and after work there is a dress she found that she wants me to see.”

“Prom? Well, someone must be crazy about her to invite her so early, perhaps you’ll want to keep an eye on this. Prom. When is the Ocean Heights prom? And where? In the gym?”

“I do not know. Liz has been invited to the Crestview prom. To your prom. In fact you must know, do most of the girls wear long dresses or short? The one to see today I think is short, but I say she ought to look at long ones. What will Katie wear?”

Joy was instantly disgruntled, doubly so, at Yoonie for having a reason to be happy that Joy did not yet have, and at herself for caring that Yoonie had a reason.

“Katie hasn’t decided who she’s going with yet,” said Joy. “And of course once she sees what group she’s going with, she and the other girls will probably decide what they’re wearing. I expect she’ll want a long gown, but some of the girls do wear short.”

“Ah, groups,” said Yoonie. “I do not know if the boy who asked Liz mentioned a group.”

“How did she meet him? What’s his name? I bet I know him.”

“His name is Brad. Like Liz he hopes to go to Harvard.”

“Good grief, he’s one of Katie’s best friends,” said Joy. “He’s a
very popular boy. Plenty of girls at the prom are going to hate your daughter, let me tell you.”

“She cannot help it if they are jealous. He asked her. He did not ask them.” Yoonie had no patience for, no understanding of, the envy that drove some girls into a cruel frenzy. To her, worrying about beating another girl at anything—better grades, a more popular boyfriend, being the first to acquire whatever the magazines said a girl had to acquire this season—seemed a tremendous waste of energy. She and Steve always told Liz to challenge herself and to ignore everyone else, because the victory was excellence, not comparative excellence. She was surprised at Dr. Joy, who in turn was a bit surprised at the flinty tone in Yoonie’s voice.

“True enough, he did not ask them,” said Joy, sitting up a bit straighter and pretending to consult a patient’s file. When she spoke again, she did not look up. “I’ll be ready for Joan in a minute.” Yoonie was dismissed.

$11,565.

Steve wrote the number at the top of a blank sheet of paper and let it sit. He had driven to work as usual but circled back an hour later, once Yoonie was at work and Liz was at school, to finish the single aspect of the college application process that he refused to share with his wife and daughter—the financial aid forms, which he had completed a month before the government deadline, because he wanted plenty of time to prepare for whatever the computer said to him. He reviewed the online application one last time, clicked on
SUBMIT
, and within seconds the computer spit back the Changs’ Expected Family Contribution. Steve needed to find a minimum of $11,565 toward Liz’s $49,000 freshman year, and Harvard was supposed to provide the rest: $37,435. He would not allow himself to think about what he would do if Harvard gave her
any less.

He had seen the headlines about Ivy League schools starting to offer even more financial aid, but he worried that it was aimed at more comfortable families than his, at people who had cars and a mortgage and still could not absorb the cost of a college education. He worried about shrinking school endowments and the dwindling supply of loans. He had pored over the list of websites that Liz brought home from school, including one that promised to search for appropriate private scholarships if the applicant filled out a basic questionnaire. Steve completed it without telling her, but the results were meager. Liz was not related to Emily Dickinson or the Plains Indians, nor was she of Slavic descent and a serious bowler. She did not have the time to write a three-thousand-word essay on freedom for the chance to compete with ten thousand other students for $1,500. The members of her immediate family did not work at a Coca-Cola bottling plant or belong to the Elks. She had just found out that she was a finalist for a National Merit scholarship, but to Steve’s dismay, not all of the finalists got money, the ones who did received only $2,500, and there was nothing Liz could do to affect her chances. It was up to Steve to find $11,565, and more to bring her home on the holidays and buy her books and give her spending money.