Getting In: A Novel (23 page)

She had been having very primitive and definitive fantasies of late, any time she perceived the slightest threat to Lauren’s happiness—and at this point in the process, it was all too easy to confuse a small bad moment with the apocalypse. Her targets, at various times, had included Ted at his most officious, Joy at her most patronizing, even the Northwestern alumni rep, whose only crime was that he took two days to return Lauren’s email about setting up an interview—and now Madison Ames, for the crime of narcissistic inattention. Anyone who did not treat Lauren with the proper respect got a miniature pecan pie spiked with a single drop of cyanide—where would Nora find it?—or a quick jab between the ribs with Nora’s favorite paring knife, even though it was too short to do any lasting damage and she could never remember whether real killers used an underhand or overhand thrust. Faced with a choice between depression and fantasy, Nora chose fantasy, which at least entertained her while she worked.

She wrapped her arms around Lauren, who burst into frustrated tears, leaving the two women who were packing gift boxes to wonder how a mother and daughter lucky enough to live in the same city, no, in the same country, could be so very sad. Nora hung on until Lauren wriggled free, and did not protest when her daughter blew her nose into the nearest prep towel. She simply guided Lauren toward an empty work table with one hand, tossed the
snot towel into the laundry bin with the others, and set out bags of lemons, eggs, and sugar, two cutting boards, and two knives.

“Lemon curd, what do you say?” she asked. “For all those nice people who don’t happen to be in love today.”

For an hour they stood side by side, Lauren cutting and juicing, Nora measuring sugar and separating eggs, Lauren stirring at the double boiler, Nora filling jars, talking about nothing more pressing than whether the lemons were juicier this year than last. The crazier college applications got, the more the bakery hummed. In the comforting and finite world of dessert, a teaspoon was always a teaspoon, never a teaspoon and a half. Melting chocolate seized up if it got wet, cream biscuits were lighter mixed by hand, a pastry crust that spent an hour in the freezer baked up flakier than one that had not been chilled. Baking was reassuringly rule-bound. It was solace for baker and customer alike.

Second semester was an eternity. There were no deadlines, no goals, and homework only mattered if a student had applied to an Ivy or an Ivy-equivalent or stopped turning it in altogether. The seniors wondered how they would fill the empty months that spread in front of them like whatever the name of that African desert was on their tenth-grade geography exam. The teachers, exhausted after a semester of writing recommendation letters and fending off prying parents on top of everything else they had to do, were perfectly happy to spend a week’s worth of class periods watching any DVD that had a tangential relation to their subject. Ted could stroll the English lit corridor and hear dialogue from film adaptations of
King Lear
,
Beloved
, or
The Crucible
, chosen, he imagined, to remind seniors of the larger world and put college apps into context. It never helped. The kids in the bottom half of the class had already perfected an I-don’t-care façade, but the
top students felt as though they were living one variant or another of that awful anxiety dream, the one about waking up late for a test, or being inexplicably naked in public, or the popular Crestview hybrid that involved showing up late and nude for the SATs.

Alliances shifted. Lauren stopped telling Katie anything, because Katie had such a gift for making her feel worse than she already did. Reluctantly, she stopped confiding in Chloe as well, because for Chloe the difference between a closely guarded secret and public information was five minutes, tops. Instead, Lauren said that she needed the
Threesome
DVD for a paper discussing the effects of a stifling status marriage in popular culture and in
The Great Gatsby
, and Chloe believed her. But Lauren needed a confidant, so she told Brad she was going to see Madison Ames, and he promised to say she was at the dentist’s, if anyone should ask.

In return, Brad told Lauren about the parking-lot ambush and Katie’s ultimatum, and she made him swear not to miss so much as a minus sign on Katie’s behalf. He had promised, in the hope that taking a vow would enable him to stop debating. Weeks later it had not, though he chose not to tell Lauren about that part. He told her instead that he liked the coincidence of her interview being at the same time as his calc test, which he was sure was a good sign for both of them.

Brad always took math tests the same way: he read a test from start to finish to make sure that he understood each problem, and then he went back to the first page and worked straight through to the end. He rarely found a problem that stymied him, but if he did, he worked it first, out of sequence, to get it out of the way. There were no surprises on this calculus test. Brad finished the first five pages before class was half over, so he took a break before he tackled the final page, and scribbled some notes on his scratch paper.

Under the heading Tank, he wrote:

No legacy?

No valedictorian

No Katie trouble

No Liz

Under Ace he wrote:

Legacy

Valedictorian

Katie trouble

No Liz

He could blow the test and risk never seeing Liz again because she would be at Harvard and he might not make the cut, in which case buying Katie’s silence hardly mattered, because there would be no relationship to protect. Or he could ace the test and see Liz every day next year, maybe even be in the same dorm, except that she would refuse to talk to him because Katie had filled her head with lies about his nonexistent promiscuous past, out of concern for Liz’s happiness, of course. He wanted to think that she would see right through Katie, but this was his worst-case scenario, so he scratched out “No Liz” on both lists. He liked the idea of Liz better than Liz at this point, anyhow, as he barely knew her. It would be crazy to make a decision about his future based on a relationship they did not yet have.

No, the lasting impact, in either case, would come not from Liz but from his dad’s reaction—either his rage and disappointment, if Brad missed the cut at Harvard, or his belief that Brad finally had come to his senses, if Brad got in. He worked the last page of problems on the scratch paper, got all the answers, and turned in the test at the bell with the sixth page completely blank,
which had to be good enough for a C, possibly even for a written progress report that would have to become part of his official record. As he walked down the hall toward his locker to grab his other books and head home, he felt a hazy little thrill, a disoriented sense that only someone who had been a good boy for eighteen years, with minor infractions, could appreciate.

By the time Brad got to the parking lot, his calculus teacher was standing by the security guard’s kiosk, brandishing a sheaf of papers that had to be the calc test. Katie said that all they had to do to get straight As was stay awake and turn in the work, but she had underestimated the school’s commitment to its stars. From the look on Mr. Winter’s face, a candidate for valedictorian could stay awake, turn in the work, leave an entire page of problems blank, and get away with it.

“Brad, Brad, I’m so glad I found you before you went home,” said Mr. Winter, his face pasty with fear. He was a first-year teacher whose sole ambition was to be a lifer at Crestview, and he was not about to draw attention to himself by costing Preston Bradley IV his near-perfect GPA. He had just opened escrow on a pillbox condo an ungentrified mile from the wine bars of Culver City, and in forty-five days he and his PhD were finally moving out of the garage apartment behind his parents’ bungalow. There was too much at stake to be done in by a careless boy. He put his hand on Brad’s elbow to make sure he did not get away.

“I don’t know how this happened, but your test, your copy of the test, look at this, a page missing, everyone else had six pages and you, you, look at this, page six is missing. I am very sorry. I don’t know how this happened, but we’re going to set it right, right now if you have fifteen minutes. Ten. C’mon.”

Brad took the test and noticed two tiny punctures below and to the left of the current staple. In his haste to remove the original staple and the blank sixth page, Mr. Winter had failed to align the new staple over the old staple’s holes, not that Brad could call him
on it. Mr. Winter was trying to save Brad. He could hardly accuse his teacher of lying and confess that he had intended to leave the whole page blank.

That, he realized, was his mistake. If he had left one problem blank on each page, Mr. Winter would have had no choice but to deduct those points from his total score. The whole page gave his teacher a way out—and Brad had never stopped to consider that Mr. Winter’s determination to save Brad from himself was as strong as Brad’s desire to cut himself loose. Stronger. He sighed and patted the man on the shoulder.

“Y’know, Mr. Winter, I wondered how I got it done so fast. I mean, I get the material…”

“Which is why I came looking for you.”

The teacher herded Brad back toward the math wing, relieved at how willingly the boy went along with the charade, pleased that he had found a way for Brad to redeem himself.

“Here we are,” he said, opening the door to his classroom and putting a blank sixth page on the nearest desk. “I’m going to sit here and give you ten minutes, which is what I budgeted for this page when I made up the test, so you finish up, it won’t take you that long, and that way no one will come down on my head for failing to give the valedictorian his whole test.”

“Oh, Mr. Winter, nobody was going to come down on you. I can survive a C. Teach me some humility.”

“No, no, not on my watch, I don’t think so. Let’s save the life lessons for after you graduate.”

Brad rooted around in his backpack for his pencil case, his eyes squeezed shut. The boardroom in his brain was getting crowded—not just the Bradley men but Ted and Katie and Liz and Lauren and, now, his math teacher. He blinked hard, sat up, and held a pencil aloft to show that he was ready. Mr. Winter looked at his watch, pointed at Brad, and said, “Now.” Five minutes later, Brad handed him a complete and completely accurate
page of answers, guaranteeing both his GPA and his math teacher’s ability to keep his new job and pay his new mortgage.

Brad got in his car and turned right out of the school driveway instead of left, meandered in the shadow of the 405 until he got to Olympic Boulevard, and headed west toward the ocean, knowing that every block guaranteed him another deadlocked rush-hour block going east, toward home. He did not care. He drove all the way down to the beach, looped around past Liz’s street, and pulled into the parking lot of a little art supply store, where he bought some single-ply cardboard, a tube of Zap-a-Gap and an Olfa knife, and a set of fine felt-tipped pens. Satisfied, he headed over to Olympic, turned his back on the setting sun, and took his place in the five-mile-an-hour slog toward the center of the city.

Deena got up from the built-in desk in the kitchen and wandered the house with increasing frequency—what started as half-hour breaks, when she first sat down after lunch, had increased by dusk to a lap every ten minutes. It was hard enough collecting all the bank statements that Dave had asked her for, but every time she went online to find a missing page, the website chastised her for printing what she needed. All around the world, trees were falling over dead because she was trying to get her daughter some financial aid. This should have been Dave’s job; this was Dave’s forest toppling to the ground. But getting him to do it would have required letting him back into the house, so she printed, and fumed, and took another break.

She walked toward Chloe’s deserted room and told herself she was looking for enough dirty T-shirts on the floor to fill up a load of laundry. Deena had no agenda beyond the vague curiosity of a derailed mom who thought she ought to know more than she did, and when she found a black elastic-bound notebook she had not seen before, wedged behind a boot box behind Chloe’s laundry
hamper, she took it out, vindicated, certain that it contained information she needed to know to be a better parent. She would take a quick glance and put it right back.

To her disappointment, it was not a journal but a sketchbook, page after page of pencil drawings of clothes, not on stick-figure mannequins but on shorter, rounder, more Chloe-like figures. She closed it quickly and put it back behind the boot box, far less pleased than a mother might have been at the discovery of an only child’s unexpected talent. Deena was not focused on the possibility that Chloe had a skill she could use to get a job someday. Deena was stuck on the news that her daughter had a secret life. Most parents who snooped feared discovering evidence of drink or drugs, random sex or Facebook shenanigans. Chloe’s big news was that she could draw.

Deena corrected herself: the news was that Chloe continued to draw. For a long time, the house had been a minefield of color: fat, greasy crayons, finger paints, watercolors, chalk, until Dave sat down in the wrong chair and stood up to find a peach-colored line across the seat of his good khakis, pastels but only in the kitchen after that, cunning metal trays with six Caran d’Ache wet-or-dry colored pencils, with twelve, with forty, drawing pens with tips so fine they made a dry scratching sound against the paper. But by sophomore year, Chloe’s output had dwindled to the occasional napkin doodle, and her parents assumed that she had lost interest.

It seemed instead that she had gone underground. She had shut her mother out. Forget Dave, whose definition of fashion involved a clean T-shirt, pressed jeans, and athletic shoes that had never seen a sport. Deena knew something about style, and yet Chloe had never once confided in her about so much as a stand-up collar. She backed out of the room, climbed into her own bed, wrapped herself in Nana Ree’s sunburst-pattern crocheted afghan, and started to cry. No cloudburst, no drama, just the thin leak of reflexive tears that usually came only during a sad
movie or that commercial about the two sisters whose dad had Alzheimer’s.