Getting In: A Novel (25 page)

Yoonie studied the cupcake segments and took the smallest one, and when Steve put down the letter she pretended to read it with great interest.

“Mom,” said Liz, taking it from her mother’s hand and folding it in careful thirds. “There’s no point to reading it.” She stood up, cupcake wedge in one hand, mug of tea in the other. “I’m sorry I let you guys down,” she said.

She was halfway down the hall before her father came to his senses.

“Elizabeth,” he called. “All the big envelopes. What were they?”

She answered without turning or stopping. “Yale, Swarthmore, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Chicago.” She shut her bedroom door behind her, and her parents, as depressed as though they had received nothing but bad news, finished their tea and wondered what they would do with the rest of the afternoon.

Liz stacked the acceptance packets on the floor by her desk and picked up her cell phone. She sent a text message to Brad.

“No from Harvard. You?” but he did not reply.

Brad wandered over to Starbucks after school and wasted an hour pretending to read his biology homework, and when Liz’s text arrived he went back to school and slipped into the empty computer lab to find out his own fate before he answered her. He started to open his email once, twice, and closed it both times without reading the contents of the in-box, waiting for the excited tightening in his chest, the flutter of anticipation, that he imagined a senior was supposed to feel. All he got was a tight little tug in his right shoulder blade, which he knew was from hiking his shoulder when
he used the mouse, but which felt like a knot of his father’s gathered expectations.

Enough.

He called up his email and there they were, eight emails lined up like little soldiers at attention, awaiting his inspection. He clicked. He was in at Brown, as though his father would ever let him go to a school with no set curriculum. Click, click, click, in at Penn, at Williams, at Cornell. At Wesleyan and Princeton. With Berkeley, he was batting a thousand, and the momentum of all this good news carried him, click, into the Harvard notification without hesitation, because for a single, sheer, clear moment he felt confident enough not to care what happened.

Brad read the message, read it a second time, forgot completely about Liz, and called his dad on the inside office line. Trey picked up on the first ring.

“Son, I called the house and no one is home. Where are you?”

“I’m on the wait list, Dad. I got the email. I got accepted everyplace else, but Harvard wants to put me on the wait list. Go figure.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Want me to forward the email?”

“I don’t understand.”

“They send out emails. Besides the letters, so I opened mine. They didn’t take me, so what do you think? Penn might be good.” Brad heard the clacking of a keyboard and panicked. “Hey, who are you emailing? Don’t do anything. Please wait until we get home.”

The clacking stopped.

“Who got in?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Well, we’re all sorry, but we’ll get this straightened out. Who got in?”

“How would I know? I’m in the computer lab. Who cares who else got in?”

“I care,” said Trey, who went back to the email he was drafting to the head of the alumni association. “I’d like to know who there has a more attractive record than a fourth-generation legacy who’s going to be valedictorian.”

“A maybe valedictorian,” said Brad, feeling a sudden, small urge to give his father a hard time. “What if it’s Katie instead?”

“Please. Let us not get distracted. Go ask Ted who they took.”

“I will not.”

“Brad, I need you to go ask Ted who they took.”

“You need me…I don’t want to know, okay? Talk to you later. Thanks for all your sympathy.” He hung up and forwarded the email to his father, who called back a moment later. Brad thought about not answering. His friends ignored their parents’ calls, or pled bad reception or a low battery, but Brad always assumed that his father would see right through that kind of fakery.

“Dad, I really don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“Son, is there anyone else in the lab?”

“No.”

“Listen to me. It may be that Roger’s behavior has cast a pall here. He certainly did not do the family any favor by making such a noisy exit.”

“Dad. Maybe they just didn’t take me.”

“They did not reject you. They offered you the wait list, and we’re going to clear this up. In the meantime, talk to Ted, but if you should see one of your friends I see no reason to make a lot of noise about not knowing yet.”

“If somebody asks me I have to say.”

“No, you don’t.” Brad had never heard his father sound so brusque. “You say you’re in. I don’t want to hear any more about this. Talk to Ted and call me back.”

“You want me to lie and say I got in?”

“I want you to appreciate that this is an error we are going to resolve.”

“Right. See you at home.”

“Call me after you see Ted.”

“I
will.
I said I would.”

“Actually, you didn’t, but now you have. Don’t worry. We’re going to straighten this out.”

This time Trey hung up first, before Brad had a chance to say that he was not worried, that there was nothing to straighten out, that he would appreciate the opportunity to enjoy all the other good news. Instead, he reread the acceptances, tried to feel elated, felt only confused, and shuffled downstairs to find Ted waiting in the counseling lobby, wearing the determined expression of a man who had already been briefed. Brad followed him into his office and fell into a chair.

“My dad already called you,” he said.

Ted nodded.

“I’m supposed to ask you who got in.”

Ted shrugged. In fact, Harvard had offered a spot to a female basketball star who had already been promised a full ride at Stanford and was conveniently on the road to Palo Alto for a visit at that very moment. Ted’s first job in the morning would be to convince his Harvard contact to swap her out for a legacy boy, Caucasian, of no athletic prowess whatsoever but possessed of a dad with profoundly deep pockets, without waiting for the formal wait-list process to begin on May 1. He was already working on the script in his head. It would be tinged, ever so slightly, with righteous indignation—because the officer had implied that Crestview was getting two acceptances and because the disappeared second space obviously should have gone to Brad.

“And he wants me to say I got in because he thinks he’s going to figure out a way to do that.”

Ted squirmed. “I’m not telling you to lie, but your dad has a point. Not that you should say you got in, which is pretty bald-faced. But tell people you have way too much choice, which by the way is true. Or say you don’t have a clue what you’re going to choose, also true. Not really, I mean, you’re getting into Harvard, but at the moment you can say you don’t know, while I get this error resolved. That’s my job now…”

“That’s what my dad said. An error we’re going to resolve. How big a check you think that’s going to take?”

“Uh-uh, stop it. This is where I earn the big bucks, I get on the phone before dawn tomorrow and get this straightened out…”

“That’s the other thing he said.”

“Look,” said Ted. “Your dad loves you, Harvard’s a big deal in your family, you’ve got to let us play this out and then you make your choice. I mean, you can tell people whatever you want, but do you really want to spend the last six weeks of your senior year answering the question, ‘How’s the wait list going?’”

“Not so much.”

“So finesse it. I mean, after all, it’s nobody else’s business. You have to look out for yourself.”

Brad shrugged. “Like somebody’s really going to decide not to go to Harvard and I get the empty slot. You guys do what you do. Maybe I’ll go to Princeton, what do you think? Or Brown. Design your own curriculum. That’d drive my dad nuts, don’t you think?”

“If that’s your first criterion,” said Ted, more harshly than he had intended to.

“Right,” said Brad, who heard the accusation in Ted’s tone.

“Go home,” said Ted, retreating into empathy mode. “Play sick tomorrow. Give yourself a day to think it over.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

Brad laughed a strangled laugh as he got up to leave. “C’mon, Mr. Marshall. The only people who stay home on April 2 are the people who got shot down. If I’m going to bullshit everybody I have to be here.”

Ted sighed. “Stay away from crowds, what can I say?”

He held his breath while Brad said good-bye to Rita and opened and closed the outer office door. He counted to five, got up to close his door, sat down in one of the club chairs and leaned over, his hands clasped at the back of his neck, stretching, pulling down hard, turning his head to one side and then the other, to make sure that his anger did not clot in his carotid arteries and kill him on the spot.

Preston Bradley IV was supposed to be the closest thing Crestview had to a sure thing, a gimme, and Ted had failed to get him into Harvard, had failed to sell those
asshole tight-ass jackass fucking asshole
members of the admissions committee on a candidate who should not have needed selling. He bit his lip to keep from saying out loud what he was thinking to himself. What was that sly smile from the admissions guy back at the NACAC conference—bullshit? Was he, Ted, such a negligible presence? He felt his father standing next to him in his mailman duds, the polyester shirt with its awful slimy sheen, the stupid wide Bermuda shorts that made his knobby legs look like a couple of walking sticks, a cautionary hand on Ted’s shoulder, as though he worried that his son would paint a target on his chest and go looking for a drive-by. Ted was furious at himself for ever thinking that good luck—even informed, researched, strategic good luck mixed with hard work—was the same thing as power.

Ted did not run the show, and he had been a fool to think that he did. He straightened up in the chair and walked over to slam the desk drawer shut. In the morning he was going to sell this kid and his dad and their blank check until he seduced the admissions committee into changing its mind. He was going to deposit the
$5,000 he had in his wallet, Fred’s down payment on his son’s future, and more checks like it. Rita had commented that very morning on the increase in calls from junior parents, and he was not about to let Brad’s angst get in the way of what those calls promised.

No, no, no, not, not, not, the slamming of doors along an
endless hallway, despite an array of linguistic devices designed to soften the blow: rejection letters never referred to an applicant’s limitations, preferring to follow the bad news with an inevitable and empty phrase about the terribly competitive landscape. They often sounded far too much like acceptance letters, except for the presence of the word “not” and the absence of “Congratulations!” Worse, thanks to overzealous spam filters and postal workers capable of confusing Chaiken on Forest Street with MacDougall on Third, the agony of notification dragged on for almost two weeks. A large school mailed its letters in stages, leaving parents to speculate about whether they were sorted alphabetically or by zip code or type of news. A small school’s new email notification system failed to work. Parents in limbo checked the digital readout before they picked up the phone, rather than talk to someone whose child had already received good news. Seniors who had not yet heard studiously avoided seniors who looked happy, and seniors who got bad news avoided everyone. One boy Brad barely knew accosted him in the cafeteria line to ask if he had been accepted at Brown, and when Brad said that he had, the boy yelled, “Well, fuck you,” and stormed off.

Lauren stopped going to the cafeteria altogether on the day she saw Katie gleefully bouncing up and down with one of the other Northwestern applicants; she could not bring herself to ask
if the girl was happy about Northwestern or about someplace else. Every day or so she received an email or a thin envelope containing a rejection from a Stretch, which caused her father to say something empty and philosophical, or an Even Odds, which caused her mother to bake. A wait-list form arrived from Skidmore, which put the entire family into a cold sweat. Chloe had gotten into Skidmore.

They broke discipline and called Ted, who insisted that Joel put him on speaker phone so that Nora and Lauren could hear what he had to say first-hand.

Ted said exactly what he had already said to four other families and would repeat to five more before the end of the day, that a single rejection was in no way indicative of a trend, that even multiple rejections were a set of unrelated coincidences, that Best Chances were putting highly qualified applicants on wait lists to protect their yield, because a highly qualified kid might prefer to go somewhere else. Ted said there would be what amounted to a second acceptance season in June, when schools tallied their commitment letters and saw how many empty spaces they had to fill, as though the opportunity to wait for two more months was good news.

At this point in the process, Ted’s life was defined by the crisis card he kept in his wallet, a short list, updated nightly, of the things he absolutely had to fix. Right now, Brad and Harvard held the top slot, and the trustee’s daughter with the lowest score any Crestview student had ever received on the math SAT rounded out the list at number seven. Anyone who was not on that index card got the appropriate canned speech—particularly someone like Lauren, who had yet to hear from her first-choice school. Ted was a counselor, not a magician, and if he was going to be effective he had to establish priorities and keep to them.

He was distracted and he knew it, so he relied on a proven second-tier strategy. He offered to make Skidmore happen, bank
ing on the Chaikens’ common sense to keep him from having to try when he had more pressing problems to solve. They came through: there was no need to spend his energy pushing for a school Lauren did not care about, merely for the sake of having an acceptance. They would wait to hear from Northwestern. In gratitude, he reminded them again that nothing had anything to do with anything else, as far as envelopes were concerned.

“Northwestern knows it’s your first choice by far,” he said. “The other schools didn’t hear that from you, so maybe they don’t want to take the chance you’re going to turn down their offer.”

“See?” said Joel, after they had hung up. “He’s saying all of this could be good news. They know they’re not your first choice, they know you’re good enough to get into your first choice, so they cut their losses and take someone who isn’t as strong. Skidmore knew you weren’t going to settle.”

“Then how come Brad got in everywhere?” Nora whispered, as soon as Lauren had left the room. She held up her hand to keep Joel from answering. “Never mind,” she said. “What’s going to happen is going to happen. I just wish it was over.”

Nora had been driving home at lunchtime for a week without telling anyone, wolfing yogurt at red lights from a container wedged into the cup holder, so that she could be around when the mail arrived. She had known about every single thin envelope before Lauren got home, which meant that she always knew first, for Lauren was not about to risk exposure by checking her email during school hours. The day after the conversation with Ted, Nora was in place when the mailman delivered yet another sheaf of letter-sized envelopes along with the standard batch of Realtor and insurance solicitations. She riffled through them, and there, second to last, was an envelope from Northwestern—but not quite
a skinny one. Not bulging, but definitely not skinny, definitely full of something more than the single sheet required for a Dear Reject or a Dear Wait List letter.

She went inside, dumped the rest of the mail on the kitchen table, and held the Northwestern letter up to the light, in case the afternoon sun happened to illuminate the word “please” or “welcome,” or the infinitive “to accept,” although that was a less dependable clue, since it could conceivably follow the phrase, “We are sorry to say that we have decided not.” All she could make out was the university logo and “Dear Lauren.” The rest was a slaw of all the letters on several folded pages. Try as she might—and she turned the envelope from front to back and upside down—she could not tease out the opening line.

In a giddy instant, she knew what this was. Clearly, Northwestern was concerned about the environmental waste involved in sending a four-color glossy brochure to every accepted candidate, as some of them would choose another school. Clearly, Northwestern took its carbon footprint seriously—really, what a great choice for Lauren—and chose to send out the good news in a couple of pages. After May 1, the members of the freshman class would get everything else, the pamphlets, the campus map, the move-in checklist, the calendar of welcome week events.

She called Joel.

“Northwestern’s more than one sheet.”

“You’re home?”

“I was near the house—”

“So you stopped by to weigh the mail.”

“Joel, it’s more than one page.”

“Wasn’t Skidmore more than one?”

“No. One page, sign at the bottom and we’ll put you on the waiting list. You don’t think that’s what this is, do you? It has to be three or four pages. I think it’s a yes, and all the paperwork
comes after she says yes to them.”

Joel was silent.

“You don’t think I’m right.”

“I don’t think you’re wrong. Is it more than two pages? Can you tell?”

Nora sighed. The man she depended on to evaluate the universe was no longer moored to the steadying dock of reason.

“Oh, it’s four easy,” she said.

“Good,” Joel replied, trying to reclaim his role as final arbiter. “I think that’s good.”

“Good,” said Nora. “Try to get out of there early.”

She jammed the mail back into the mailbox in case Lauren got home before she did, drove back to work, and spent the rest of the afternoon making buttercream frosting because she could do it in her sleep, mindlessly separating eggs and unwrapping bricks of butter, slitting vanilla beans and scraping out the tiny seeds. She left work early, but so did Joel, which meant that they had far too much time to waste waiting for Lauren to get home from the graduation choir rehearsal they had forgotten about, until she called at her break to remind them. They retrieved the envelope from the mailbox and held it against the reading light in the living room, the illuminated magnifying mirror in the bathroom, the light on the ventilator hood above the cooktop. They discussed briefly the ethics of steaming, as opposed to merely looking, and tucked the letter back into the middle of the stack in the mailbox for Lauren to find.

At the sound of the front door opening, they got busy looking busy, Joel pouring ice water, Nora arranging and rearranging three chicken breasts on a small platter. Lauren walked into the kitchen and dropped her purse and backpack so that she could sort through the mail. When she got to the Northwestern envelope Nora turned away, as though a meal designed to survive neglect might require further attention. She knew, in the moment
before she really knew anything, that she had misinterpreted every sign, that the zeal with which they had pursued the perfect school had made them crazy enough to believe that such a place existed, and worse, crazy enough to ignore every cautionary comment, to hurtle toward this single moment propelled by the belief that Lauren was going to get what she wanted purely because she was beloved. Nora heard the swish of paper being pulled from the envelope and unfolded, and it was all she could do not to grab the pages from Lauren’s hand and feed them to the garbage disposal before anyone could read a word. They were wrong to care so much; she and Joel had made a complete botch of this even though they had tried always to do what seemed right and reasonable. They had gotten caught up, and in a millisecond they were going to pay for it.

She thought all of this in the time it took Lauren to open the envelope and read the first sentence of the first paragraph on the first page of four.

“Wait list,” said Lauren, tossing the pages onto the kitchen counter, “and then there are some more pages to explain the wait list and a sign-up form. I don’t have the energy for this.”

“Honey…”

Lauren stalked out of the room. Nora reached for a sponge and wiped down all the kitchen counters, and Joel decided not to point out that she had done so only ten minutes earlier. He picked up the pages.

“Formal notice, two-page explanation of the waiting-list process, a little bit of don’t give up cheerleading but no promises, and the do-you-want-to-be-on-the-wait-list form. Due May 1.”

“The hell with them.”

“Look, that’s how you feel right now, but it’s three questions on a form, I mean, maybe it can’t hurt. In for a dime, in for a dollar.”

“They can’t have her,” said Nora. “Her heart’s broken, can’t
you see that? Where is she going to go to school?”

“She got into Santa Barbara and Irvine.”

“But that’s not what she wants. Where is she going to go to school that she’s happy about?”

“I don’t think we know that less than a minute after the big letdown. Or maybe not a letdown in the long run, but we have to talk to Ted, don’t we? And then maybe we have to figure out a way to be happy with what she’s got, which, let’s face it, is not the end of the world. I don’t know. Let’s eat and let it sink in.”

“I’m not hungry,” said Nora. She leaned against the kitchen island and pulled shreds of chicken from one of the breasts.

Joel filled up his dinner plate and sat at the empty table, immobile, until he realized that he had lost his appetite, too. He wanted nothing more than to spend the evening with his family—but as the point person for emotional restraint in that trio, he knew that he dare not confess to such a need. It would only make Nora and Lauren feel worse.

Before he could figure out what to say, Lauren appeared at the bottom of the stairs and announced that she was going to sleep over at Chloe’s.

“You know, maybe she’ll loan me an acceptance someplace.”

“
Lauren
.” Nora’s tone was so sharp that they both stopped what they were doing and stared at her. “Please, honey.”

“Sorry. I’m sorry,” Lauren said. “This is just all so creepy. Please, can I go to Chloe’s and we can talk about it more tomorrow?”

“Sure,” said Nora.

Just like that, the house was silent, but in an unstable, aggressive way, and belligerently empty. Joel took to the couch with the
New York Times
, and Nora sat down next to him because she had no idea what else to do.

“What’re you reading?”

“Obits,” he said. “Looking for a correlation between where
people went to school and how happy they were. Not finding one.” He held up the page and jutted his chin toward a death notice that ran almost an entire column in length. “This guy? Everybody loved him. Renaissance man, philanthropist, took up skiing at seventy, died in his sleep at ninety-four. Went to Covered Wagon U before Iowa was a state.”

Nora stood up with the kind of sigh that a less-distracted Joel would have recognized for the storm cloud it was, and walked into the little extra bedroom where they kept the desktop computer.

When Lauren was in first grade she had taken Joel’s visiting college roommate and his wife on a tour of the house, and had explained to them, with a great seriousness of purpose, that PC stood for Parents’ Computer. Those were the days, thought Nora, when the simple ability to link a letter to a sound to a word was accomplishment enough. The memory only made her feel worse. Living in nostalgia’s swamp was not going to be easy. They might have to get a dog.

A moment later, she called out, “Hey, come see what I found.”

Joel folded the newspaper slowly, hoping that whatever it was had nothing to do with college, knowing as he walked down the hall that it did. She edged over so that he could pull up a chair, and she started to read aloud.