Getting In: A Novel (33 page)

He closed the document and yelled, “C’mon in.”

Brad folded himself into a chair and gave Ted the kind of shambling grin he rarely saw before May 1. “Hey, Mr. Marshall. What can you do to wreck my life today? I don’t think my dad has his checkbook with him.”

“Brad, c’mon. You’re going to come back here next Thanksgiving so embarrassed because wait, what’s this, you love Harvard
and you want to say thanks for not letting you do something stupid.”

Brad looked genuinely pained, and Ted wondered for an instant if any private consulting fee was large enough to compensate him for having to deal with yet another set of indulged teenagers and their invented woes. Ted had assumed that Brad would stop grousing once Harvard recalled the enduring, six-figure value of the Bradley legacy, but there seemed to be no pleasing some people, and Ted was frankly tired of complaints from such a fortunate boy. He was even more tired of knowing that Brad probably had a good reason for feeling the way he did, unlike some of his whinier counterparts, and that Ted had failed to figure it out. More than anything, he was tired of thinking that he ought to. It was Ted’s job to get his seniors into great colleges, not to unravel the family dramas that occasionally informed their choices.

Ted waited until he felt himself start to calm down. When he spoke again, it was with his usual matter-of-fact cool.

“Anyhow, look, I have one last assignment for you. Should cheer you up some.”

Brad stared.

“You’re the valedictorian. You get to give the speech.”

“How come you’re telling me and not Dr. Mullin?”

“Because I wanted to congratulate you. Because we hang out more than you do with the head of school.”

“Katie’s valedictorian.”

“Nope, you are. Want to see the numbers?” For the second time in an hour, Ted prayed that a student would not call his bluff.

Brad slumped deep in the chair, as though his bones had turned to sand.

“Who’s next in line?”

“I don’t know.” Ted angled his computer screen away from
Brad and called up the senior class GPA list. Katie first, Brad second by .01, and third, Mike, the boy who had taken Katie to prom.

“It’s Mike,” said Ted, with a conspiratorial smile. “C’mon. You don’t want to hear him go on for fifteen minutes. You do it.”

Brad clasped his hands on top of his head, as though to keep his brain in place, and stared at his college counselor long enough to make Ted squirm. Then he stood up suddenly and held out his hand. Ted got up as well, without quite knowing why, and shook Brad’s outstretched hand.

“Not going to do it, Mr. Marshall,” said Brad. “I don’t have anything I want to say.”

“Your dad’s going to be pissed,” said Ted. “Not just at you. He’s going to call me up and demand an explanation.”

Brad smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry about that. Need me to turn a paper in late or something?” He and Liz had spent a chilly hour looking at the empty seats at their table before they finally abandoned prom, and afterward she had politely declined suggestions of everything from a late-night steak at the Pantry to tapas. They had not spoken since. Katie was out of contention, so there was no longer any need to yield valedictorian on that front, and no reason to hang on to it to impress Harvard, because the wait list was something that happened to other people. Brad was sprung, trolling for a little bit of trouble, thinking that if he was not careful he would turn into his older brother.

“No,” said Ted. “We’re good.”

He spent the rest of the morning meeting with junior-class families who had visited schools over spring break, or who wanted to debate the pros and cons of taking the SATs again in May, having fallen slightly short in April, or who tried to tease out who else was thinking of applying to the schools on their preliminary list so that they could plot a strategy that took into account the twelve other potential applicants at Stanford. By noon Ted was ready to make his move for Lauren. He waited until Rita had left
for lunch, and then he placed the call from his direct line, left a message, and sat and watched the digital readout on his telephone. Ten minutes later, the phone number he was waiting for appeared.

“Bob, thanks for calling back so fast.”

“Ted. How you doing?”

“No pipe bombs, no death threats. Sixteen percent in the Ivy League and only four kids who care about their wait lists, so I’m good. You?”

“I’m okay unless you’re going to beg me about that girl, in which case I’m not at my desk.”

“But you called me back, so you must be interested. Did you look at her file?”

“Yeah. Wait-listed.” Bob chuckled. “You know the odds on wait lists.”

Ted squirmed. “And you know I don’t push on them. This is a one-shot deal. I need this girl bumped to the front of the line, I need it before the line even forms, and you won’t regret it. She’s a special kid.”

“So’s the boy who’s camped out in a tent outside my office,” said Bob. “And the girl who sent me a ten-minute computer-animated movie, and the kid with a letter from Bill Clinton. That’s the wait-list crowd. How much do you think special matters in the endgame?”

“Bob, come on.”

There was a long silence before Bob spoke again, and when he did he sounded even more exhausted than Ted. “I’m sorry. I sound like an asshole. I am an asshole at this point. I have this kid camped out on my lawn. I have to sneak in and out the emergency door every day and set off the alarm just to keep from making eye contact with him. His parents put him on a plane from Denver. He’s been on the local TV news. Kids from his high school who already go here are wearing T-shirts that say ‘Admit the Commerce
City One.’ And I have to tell you, we’re not going to take him. I’m just hoping he doesn’t set himself on fire when he finds out.”

Ted was dug in, determined to prove that he could beat the odds. “All the more reason to look at Lauren, who would never pull a stunt like that. Read between the lines. I mean it. Listen to me. She is going to turn out to be a real asset. You ought to pay attention. You know I don’t step up for just anyone.”

“True. That’s why I like you. You take rejection well.” He started to scroll through Lauren’s online application, looking for a bit of ammunition he might have missed.

“And you know you took kids who got into an Ivy League school,” said Ted. “They’re going to turn you down. You’re going to have spaces.”

“Thanks for reminding me. Because I really enjoy being Harvard’s safety school.”

“So take her off the list now.”

“I can’t. We don’t even know what we’ve got yet. Maybe not so many got into Harvard this year, you know.”

“Somebody did,” said Ted. “Take her.”

Bob stopped scrolling. “Hey, hey, hey, Ted, before you go to the mat for this kid, are you sure she’s as dying to get in as you say?”

Ted was on alert. “I am. Why do you ask?”

“Because I’m looking at a note here that says that Northwestern is not Ms. Chaiken’s first-choice school.”

“Please. And whose note would that be? The mom or dad of the kid on your lawn?”

“From the alumni interview. Madison Ames. Says our girl didn’t apply early because she wanted to have a lot of choice.”

Ted squeezed his eyes shut, hard, and watched the little colored lights dance on the inside of his eyelids. “Bob, I’m going to suggest that perhaps I have a slightly better sense of Lauren’s preferences
than Madison Ames does. She might have misunderstood. I know this kid wants Northwestern more than anything. More than anything.” He waited to see if he was going to have to bring up the steak incident.

So did Bob. After a long pause, he said, warily, “I’m not saying there’s anything I can do.”

“I didn’t say you did. But keep me posted.”

“I have to wait to see who commits on May 1.”

This was still not heading in the direction Ted wanted to go. “No, you don’t, and you know it.”

“But if I can’t make it happen?”

Ted was surprised at how quickly he replied. “If you don’t, I won’t sell Northwestern when I go private next year. And if you tell anybody what I just said, I’ll deny it, and then I really won’t sell Northwestern.”

“You’re quitting Crestview?”

“I’ve got two dozen kids from all over town whose parents have a spare $25,000 they’d like to spend to have me help them get their kids into the college of their dreams,” said Ted, exaggerating his confirmed clientele, as well as his average fee, because there was no way for Bob to know he was lying. Besides, he was not lying, exactly; he was forecasting. Families would be beating down his door once he handed in his resignation and sprang his new clients from their vow of confidentiality.

“I’d like to put Northwestern on some short lists,” he said.

Bob might as well have been a dog standing in front of a butcher’s case. Two dozen kids whose parents had enough expendable cash to drop $25,000 on a private consultant, which meant that the parents had money, which meant that they were not prone to foolish investment, which implied that the kids must have enough sterling attributes to make them competitive candidates. And these were students who did not need financial aid, always a plus. Beyond that, who knew? If someone was prepared
to spend that kind of money for advice, they might be prepared to endow a wing of a building or put the university in their wills. These were premium candidates, and Ted was offering to help elevate Northwestern’s image in their eyes, to present it as the single member of the newly formed midwestern chapter of the Ivy League.

“Nice for you,” said Bob, carefully. “But y’know, I have to give her a hard look just like everybody else.”

“Sure you do,” said Ted, feeling instinctively that he had made some progress.

Dave faltered for a moment when he first saw the financial
aid letters. He had made the mistake of thinking that his stint as the family’s voice of doom would end once all the letters arrived. In fact, he had to continue to be the grown-up—the voice of doom label was Deena’s—as he tried to make sense of the money offers in the weeks before the May 1 deadline. The consensus among the financial aid people was that Chloe required less help than Dave or the government had calculated. Worse, all of the offers were for loans in combination with work-study stipends that Deena did not want her to take her first year, or ever, for that matter.

“Need-blind?” he said when Deena called to give him the news. “More like need-nearsighted.” She did not laugh, and for once Dave could not blame her; clearly, the benefits of living with Mom had not paid off as well as either of them had hoped. Sending Chloe to a private college was going to be like taking out another mortgage with no house to show for it. As long as Deena insisted on staying put and Chloe insisted on going wherever she felt like going, Dave was stumped. He did not see a way out.

Deena did because she had to, because it was either that or move to Palms. She came up with what Dave had to admit was a clever solution: offer Chloe a new Prius if she went to UC Santa Cruz instead of to a private school; spend $23,000 on a car to save over $100,000 they did not happen to have. Chloe embraced the
idea immediately. She wanted a red Prius with leather seats, great sound, and Bluetooth, “so I can call you guys when I drive home without getting a ticket for holding my cell phone.” Deena wanted the navigation system. Dave wanted the cheaper Package 2 model, which had cloth seats, no tweeters, and no Bluetooth unless he spent $600 more. The dealers, who had squandered their karma drawing up waiting lists and charging $1,500 over sticker back when people could get financing, were ready to sell anything to anyone who could qualify for a loan. It was a buyer’s market—but Dave was looking for a low-end model in a market that still skewed toward the high-end customer. It took him three weeks of daily phone calls before he found a dealer a half hour on the wrong side of downtown who swore he had a red Package 2 coming off the truck the very next morning. Dave could have it if he was there at noon.

He and Deena and Chloe left before eleven, which would have been plenty of time back when rush hour implied that there were non–rush hours, dependable windows of opportunity when traffic sped up from a crawl to a flow. Dave pulled onto the dealer’s lot a half hour late, ready with a line about time and traffic standing still, and was relieved to see a couple of guys wiping dust off a red Prius.

Chloe saw it, too. “Look! I bet that’s it. See the red one with the door open? I bet that’s mine.”

“It’s a nice red,” said Deena.

“Okay,” said Dave, eager to assume his role as master of the universe. “We do the paperwork, I write them a deposit check, and in an hour or so Chloe gets to drive off the lot in her new car.”

“Do you have your license?” asked Deena.

Chloe shot her a withering look.

Dave strode toward a knot of salesmen standing in the doorway, all of them wearing the neckties and white dress shirts they had adopted at the height of the hybrid stampede to lend dignity
to thievery, outfits that on the downslope evoked instead a funereal pall. Deena and Chloe waited at a respectful distance, but Deena could tell almost immediately that things were not going as planned. One of the salesmen guided Dave away from the group for a private chat, and as they started to talk a flush crept up the back of Dave’s neck. He made a choppy gesture with his right hand to emphasize whatever point he was trying, and failing, to make, a gesture Deena recognized from all the arguments they had ever had. When he turned away and walked back to his family, he did not look happy.

“They sold the damn car,” said Dave, who wondered why none of his wistful fantasies of family life ever lasted as long as they were supposed to.

“But we’re here,” said Deena.

“Someone else was here an hour ago. Every salesman has a list to call. First come, first served. That’s how it goes,” said Dave.

“I wonder whose red one that is,” said Chloe, eyeing the car with its door open.

“Ask him about that one,” said Deena, lighting up. “Go ahead, will you?”

“Sure,” said Dave, “but I guarantee you it’s taken or he would have mentioned it.”

He headed back toward the building, and this time his salesman escorted him to a desk inside. Chloe and Deena stood, transfixed, trying to make sense of all the pointing and nodding and shrugging, the scribbling and crossing-out, the appearance of the salesman’s pocket calculator. After several computations, Dave headed back to his wife and daughter.

“Do they have one?” asked Chloe.

“Not really,” said Dave. “That red one’s a Package 5. Loaded. All kinds of stuff you don’t need.”

“But it’s available,” said Deena. “Is it available?”

Dave had the same pained expression on his face that Deena
remembered from their aborted dinner at Sisley’s. “Somebody’s coming in at three to do the paperwork,” he said.

“Then we could have it now,” said Chloe, “just like somebody else walked in early and got ours. Let’s do that, and then we could go have lunch like you said.”

“Ladies,” said Dave, “that car is about $7,000 more than the Package 2, for lots of stuff we don’t need or want.”

“I want leather seats,” said Chloe. “I bet it has leather seats included.”

“And this way Chloe would have the navigation system, which I know you don’t think is necessary but can be very helpful, from what I hear from people who have them.” Deena had a closet full of rationales. When it came to making instant gratification sound sensible, there was no one better this side of a pre-rehab addict.

“I repeat,” said Dave. “This car is $7,000 more.”

“I read an article,” said Chloe, and Dave froze, wondering how long Chloe had been collecting ammunition for whatever she was about to say, “and it said that these cars are at a premium because the factories can’t make them any faster. I bet if we end up having to wait a month, the car you want is only going to end up costing more. So if you look at it that way, this car today might only end up being $5,000 more than the one you want for me by the time it finally shows up. Or maybe they won’t get what you want before school starts and we’ll have to get this one, which by then will cost even more. Which makes it a bargain today, when you think about it. I mean, if you add up all the extra stuff we get. And don’t the leather seats cost extra on the cheaper one?”

Dave had never intended to pay extra for leather seats, but his daughter seemed to have forgotten that in her frenzy to have a red car right this minute. He appealed mutely to his ex-wife, whose smile told him she was allied with her daughter. Deena was
probably very proud of Chloe for having figured out how to turn a $30,000 car into a steal.

To Dave’s surprise, Deena took his arm and leaned close enough to squish her right breast against what bicep he had left. Her lips were within range for a kiss; it was a remarkable semblance of intimacy.

“Dave. It’s her graduation present, and I feel better with her so far away knowing she has a computer to keep her from getting lost. We’re still so far ahead it isn’t funny. You know there would’ve been an extra $7,000 for college, someplace,” said Deena, gaily, “so isn’t it just a wash?”

“A whole lot cheaper than Hampshire, Dad, and it is such a cool car.”

Dave felt his will give way. Seven thousand dollars was a small price to pay for not having to argue with his wife and daughter. A real dad, a good dad, a providing dad, would have bought the fancier car in the first place. As for the three o’clock who was going to drive all the way out here to find that his car had been sold, too bad. Someone had pulled the rug out from under Dave, so Dave had no problem disappointing the next buyer in line.

“Yes, it is a cool car,” he said, gently disentangling himself from Deena. “I’m going to go buy it.” Chloe threw her arms around him for a moment, which was nice, before she grabbed her cell phone to text Lauren the good news.

Less than an hour later, they were done. Dave was in debt another $25,000 after the down payment, Deena was as ebullient as she always was after a big purchase, and Chloe was deep into her artsy urban fantasy self. She was secretly relieved to be going to Santa Cruz in a new red car. She imagined that she would be the coolest girl there by a long shot, with no competition from true city sophisticates, the way there would have been at the East Coast schools. Chloe might have picked one of those schools to show her parents that she could do whatever she felt like doing,
but the red car had provided an excuse to pick her first choice without looking like someone who had settled.

Best of all, her mom was going to be late for Pilates unless they left right away, so there was no time for a family lunch. Chloe made great show of adjusting the seat and the mirrors before she pulled out at a ridiculously reasonable rate of speed, which she maintained because she could see her parents in her rearview mirror. Did they intend to drive right behind her all the way home, her own personal crumple zone? Her dad hung on her bumper until he turned into a gas station right before the freeway entrance, and Chloe, set free, hit the gas and headed for Lauren’s, or Brad’s, or even Katie’s. She intended to drive by everyone’s house until she found someone to make a fuss about her car.

Satisfying Chloe was a relatively straightforward process, as long as the manufacturers of cars and oversized handbags and ankle boots and makeup reminded her at every opportunity that personal fulfillment was a credit card swipe away. Finding contentment was trickier for Katie, who already owned the original version of every knockoff Chloe lusted after, frequently in multiple units, for any truly great pair of shoes was worth having in more than one color. She was not profligate. She did not have a pair of peep-toe knee-high boots in her closet, as Chloe did, because it did not take much common sense to figure out that peep-toes were for good weather and boots were for bad. She did own everything that met her standards.

Mere stuff was like aspirin, though, strong enough to get past the normal headaches of daily life but no match for the last few weeks, which were the equivalent of a migraine. Katie required a stronger ego boost than any of her current possessions could provide, so she turned her energy to becoming the most breathtaking senior at the Crestview graduation. Anyone could get a manicure
and a pedicure, a haircut and a blow-dry, and she would, and everyone was stuck having to wear a plain white dress under her graduation gown, and hers would cost more than the other girls’. These were familiar thrills, even with new shoes thrown in. Katie wanted to set herself apart, so she asked herself, What resource do I have that nobody else has?

Her mom.

Katie went into her bathroom, flipped the makeup mirror to the magnifying side, turned on all the bathroom lights, and looked for trouble, which even an eighteen-year-old could find under wattage more appropriate to an operating room. She convinced herself that there was a furrow between her eyebrows and went downstairs to look for her mother, who was sitting on the patio, trying to compensate for a tanned adolescence with a layer of SPF 45 sunscreen and a wide-brimmed SPF 25 hat, under a patio umbrella big enough to shield her entire office staff. Katie’s mother was always on her guard when she was out of doors, but she always sat on the patio for an hour on the weekend, fully dressed, exposed face and hands slathered, because it struck her as something a hard-working professional woman ought to do.

“Mom.”

“Hmm.”

“I want you to Botox my forehead.”

Joy glanced up.

“Why?”

“Can’t you see?” said Katie.

“Not really.”

“I hate it when you don’t take me seriously.”

“Let me take a look,” said Joy, who lately felt the need to ask permission before she made physical contact with her daughter. She stood up and placed a professional thumb and index finger at the inner tips of Katie’s eyebrows, pulled the skin taut, counted to 5, and released it. On a forty-year-old forehead, the pull flat
tened out the furrow, but the release brought it back. With elastic teenage skin, there was nothing to flatten in the first place, nothing more than the slightest hint of vertical tension between Katie’s brows. If the forehead had belonged to anyone other than her own daughter, Joy would have recommended stronger sunglasses to prevent squinting and delayed intervention until the patient was in her late twenties. But Katie already wore sunglasses, and there was nothing wrong with Botox if you knew what you were doing. Joy emphatically knew what she was doing.

“My professional opinion is that you don’t need it,” she said. “You might not even notice the difference by graduation.”

“But if you say ‘the difference,’ then you must think there’s going to be one,” said Katie.

Joy smiled. “Got me there. Fine. It certainly never hurts. I’ll give you the family discount.”

“Right. After school Monday, then.”

Katie disappeared before Joy could think of anything more to say, or at least that was what Joy told herself. She decided that this was a positive sign. A mother who no longer had an issue to broach was clearly a mother who had done a good job, and a daughter whose needs had dwindled to erasing a nonexistent wrinkle was a daughter who had benefited from that good job.

Dr. Joy liked to group her forehead appointments in a block whenever possible. She walked into an exam room, appraised a forehead, and double-checked the solution levels in the syringes that Yoonie had laid out in advance, even though there was no reason to do so. She asked the patient to frown, hard, and marked a pattern of injection sites with a blue washable marker. A half-dozen Botox injections, the standard warnings about not lying down for an hour and no rubbing the forehead, and she was on her way to the next exam room to do the same thing. By the time
she got done with the patient in room 3, there was a new patient ready to go in room 1. She ran laps all afternoon.