Getting In: A Novel (5 page)

The problem with the truth, though, was that it was dire, and decidedly not funny. As Chloe had no interest in being the object of anyone’s pity or sympathy, she made up the business about the divorce lawyers’ children and stuck with it. The line always got a laugh, which was pretty much all Chloe cared about these days—that, and being able for the first time in her life to give her old friends a hard time for being sheltered and spoiled, which was what she tried to convince herself they were.

“You can’t be suffering that bad,” said Lauren. “Your mom doesn’t even work. I mean, if one of my parents stopped working, I’d be at Cal State Wherever.”

“My mom is going to work a couple of mornings to trade for free Pilates,” said Chloe, and she began to giggle. “Big breadwinner.”

“So what’d the counselor say?”

“Haven’t seen her yet. Basically she answers the phone and alphabetizes brochures. I’m not holding out big hope for help there.”

“But when do you pick?”

“Maybe I have,” said Chloe. “Hampshire, Bard…”

“I’ve heard of Bard.”

“Well, now I’m back with the cool crowd.” Chloe regretted the jab immediately. “Never mind.”

“Y’know, it’s not my fault your life’s a living hell.”

“Right. I have my parents to thank for that. Anyhow, someplace where they don’t expect me to take fundamentals of everything before I can have any fun. Oh, but there’s Harvard right there. See that girl? Total perfection. She’s the spoiler. Good thing I don’t want to go to Harvard. Like that was ever going to happen.”

Lauren glanced in the direction Chloe was pointing. There were two girls in line to order drinks, a tall blonde in her Ocean Heights High basketball uniform and an Asian girl who was trying
to pretend that the woman standing behind her was not her mother.

“The jock or the nerd?”

“Nerd, also known as my math tutor. Jock’s getting recruited at Stanford.” She made a polite wave, as opposed to a beckoning one, and got the same wave in return.

“And Harvard?”

“She got 2300 on her SATs, I asked her, straight As, she takes APs they haven’t even dreamed up yet.” Chloe shook her head. “Not a normal childhood if you ask me.”

“Has she cured cancer?”

“Next week. After the violin performance or the track meet, I’m not sure which, or tutoring five kids in South Central. Or saving me from failing calc. You’re taking calc, aren’t you?”

“Like I had a choice.” Any girl who was halfway serious about college had to take more math classes than she could ever possibly need or want. It was the progressive choice. An A in AP calculus carried more weight for a girl than an A in AP American lit, no matter what anyone in the English department said.

“Too bad for you,” said Chloe. “Reading is so yesterday.”

Lauren got up suddenly. “I’ve got tons of homework. I’ll drive you home.” She had gotten out of bed that morning with a list of possibilities, and now all she had were downward arrows, stretch schools, and strategies designed to compensate for what Ted seemed to feel were her shortcomings. The airy feeling she recalled when she first composed the list had congealed into something heavier, an awareness that the future might end just shy of where she thought it would—that it was not quite as vast as she had imagined. She looked at the Asian girl and felt a jab of envy, even though she had no desire to play the violin, run track, or go to Harvard.

She never quite trusted girls who seemed to know exactly where they were headed. Chloe liked to tell people that she
planned either to go into politics or to write fiction, though Lauren’s dad said that choosing the former, given Chloe’s lack of interest in current events, indicated her talent for the latter. Katie told everyone it was Yale and Yale Law, while Lauren had trouble hanging on to a version of herself for more than a couple of weeks at a time. Her parents always said she was not supposed to know if she wanted to be a chef or an architect or a teacher, and she might want to be a psychologist once she got to college and took a psychology class. That was the whole point of going to college, they said, to read and think and figure out who she wanted to be. Lauren watched Ms. Absolute Perfection inch toward the front of the line and wondered, for the first time, if they had any idea what they were talking about.

Chloe looked as though she had been drawn with a compass
, a source of infinite exasperation to her mother, who had been laid out with a straightedge. Chloe was adamantly, irrevocably round, from her mink eyes to her soup-bowl belly to hips that yearned for the demise of low-rise jeans. A fat halo of russet curls framed her face, despite her mother’s repeated offers to pay for Japanese straightening. Her little cobalt blue toenails were rounder than her mother’s red brick rectangles; she was not so much plump as circular, as unsubtle and unstable as a beach ball. She knew from her mother’s perpetually downturned mouth that Deena resented the way she looked. As long as Chloe was in the house, it was impossible, despite a folder full of legal documents, for Deena to eliminate Dave from her life entirely.

In an intact household, Chloe told herself, she would have channeled her energy into something big, an as yet unidentified career that guaranteed her a closet full of the latest fashions and public appearances where she would be photographed wearing them. Ever since her parents’ argument in the parking lot, Chloe had a darker mission—to retaliate, to punish them for being so selfish that they could not manage to stay married until she left home.

If getting into a great college was going to be the one stellar accomplishment her parents pointed to, to prove that they had not irreparably harmed their only child, then college was going to be the one thing Chloe blew off—just shy of not going, of course,
for she was not that brave. Chloe intended to find a decent school that her parents considered to be completely inappropriate, a private one that cost a lot of money, and to insist that it was the only place on earth where she could be truly happy.

Chloe had sustained damage in the breakup, she just knew it, though she figured it would be years before she understood its scope, and years more before she was willing to give it up as a convenient excuse for bad behavior. The right college might help her get her bearings, but of course losing those bearings in the first place probably guaranteed that the right college would not want her. Other kids might feel like rejects when a school turned them down. Chloe intended to occupy the much cushier berth of the emotional casualty.

If she were being honest, she would have admitted that life before her parents’ split had not been much fun, either, and that in fact there was a certain relief to being able to get through a day without holding her breath. She preferred instead to remind her parents, whenever possible, that she had endured a wrenching detour, one that involved not just the logistical challenge of joint custody but the academic and social demands of a new school—a transition of a magnitude her parents failed to appreciate to this day.

There were so many adjustments to make. At Crestview, she had never carried a real purse, thanks to an informal competition that involved being the senior with the most beat-up but still serviceable six-year-old backpack. At Ocean Heights, girls started babysitting in eighth grade so that they’d have enough saved up for a Kooba or a Tylie Malibu by the time they started high school. They bought their shoes at Payless and their jeans at Target—at Tar-jay, merci—but the purse had to be an important one, even if it was last season’s, even if they ignored their algebra homework to scour eBay and the online discount sites for markdowns.

By the time anyone remembered her name, Chloe was sporting a brand-new Tylie that the other girls would have to dream about until the after-Christmas sales. She banished to the back of her closet the $175 jeans favored by Crestview kids, with their frayed hems, strategic holes, and machine-aged denim, and replaced them with four pairs of pristine, perfectly pressed jeans and two pairs of Dickies khakis that cost the same amount, total, as a single pair of her discards. Private school girls, who saw nothing wrong with calling their tank tops “wifebeaters,” wore them with push-up bras in a contrasting color, but public schoolers called them “tanks” and piled on two or three at a time over bras with transparent plastic straps, so Chloe had to buy some extras, along with the proper underwear. She needed a new cell phone; she switched to a different styling gel. Whenever Chloe felt like stabbing her parents in the heart she speculated, loudly, about how much better she might have done in the two high school years that really counted, if she had not had to navigate the educational equivalent of a move from France to Sri Lanka.

“Salad night, honey.” Deena’s voice from the kitchen interrupted her daughter’s internal rant. “Ten minutes.”

Chloe had made it a policy, since the breakup, never to respond to either of her parents the first time they called. Deena waited for a reply, got none, and blamed Dave for the silence, as she blamed him for everything. Dave, the only man in the known universe who managed not to get rich in advertising, the man who created what was widely considered one of the most offensive television campaigns ever made for an intestinal gas product. The executives who had approved the campaign pretended that they had not been involved and transferred Dave to media sales because they felt too guilty to fire him. Now he told people that he sold time and space for a living, a sure indication of how funny he was not, in case anyone needed proof beyond what Deena referred to as the singing fart commercials.

When Deena had first confessed her dismay at his downward mobility, he said she was being inflexible and lacked compassion. As his income decreased and her spending did not, he complained further that she was grasping, selfish, and unsupportive; he accused her of everything short of having given him the original inspiration for the gas commercial. Deena replied that Dave had failed to live up to his obligations as a husband and a father. Dave, having recently found sympathy incarnate in a twenty-nine-year-old yoga instructor who frequented a deli he liked, agreed with his wife. He had not done a good job. He was resigning his post in the hope that he would do better as an ex-husband, another line he found amusing.

If only it were that simple, if only leaving really meant gone. Deena knew all too well that people did not disappear just because they were no longer around. Her mother, Nana Ree, was getting the biggest laugh of anybody about Dave, and she had been dead for four years, felled by an aneurysm in the porte-cochere at Saks and buried in the navy blue two-piece St. John knit that she had purchased mere moments before. She was sitting in a fitting room in heaven shaking her head and muttering, “I told you so,” because she had recognized in her son-in-law the same fool’s belief in change, not effort, that had drawn Deena’s father away from his wife and daughter for life with a North Beach bartender.

Deena was getting better at not thinking about any of this during the day, but at dusk, with Chloe sequestered in her bedroom and only fresh produce to keep her company, the kitchen filled with unwanted ghosts.

“Stop it,” she said, sawing at a hapless tomato with more force than its pliant skin required. “Everybody out of my kitchen,” she muttered as she proceeded to dice the memory of her mother and her ex-husband into an exceedingly fine chop. She mutilated tomatoes, olives, avocados, and a takeout rosemary chicken breast,
dumped them into a big bowl already half-full of shredded lettuce, and padded down the hallway to knock on Chloe’s door.

“You can come out now,” she said. “There’s nothing left to get ready, so it’s safe.”

“Right,” came Chloe’s voice from behind the door. “Wouldn’t want that lettuce to get cold.”

Deena bit her lip, walked back into the kitchen, and drowned the salad with bottled no-calorie Italian dressing, knowing that Chloe often required a third call these days, knowing that Chloe hated soggy lettuce. Too bad. Salad night was Deena’s thinly veiled attempt to get Chloe’s weight down and make it seem like fun, with a different combination of veggies and protein each time, and all she got for her trouble was sarcasm and resentment. She was not about to sit here and wait until Chloe deigned to appear. Deena piled salad on her plate, poured herself a glass of iced tea, and tried to focus on the first delicious and virtuous bite even as she listened for the doorknob turning.

She took a second helping that she did not really want, to make it look as though she had a good reason for sitting with Chloe while she ate, and worked hard to ignore the melodramatic sigh as Chloe hoisted her first swampy forkful. Deena poked at her food until Chloe’s plate was half-empty, to ensure that her daughter had a healthy meal even if she stormed out of the room once Deena said what she had to say.

“Your father and I had a talk,” she began.

“That always works well,” Chloe shot back.

“Do not use that tone of voice—”

“Any more olives?”

Deena got up to retrieve them from the fridge.

“I’m going to finish my sentence. Your father and I had a talk about these ten schools on your list…”

Chloe smiled, which Deena took as encouragement, though it was in fact amusement. Her parents had managed to have a con
versation about the ten schools on her list without ever realizing that each one of them had a different list, that there were twenty schools, not ten, that so far her search for a school resembled nothing so much as a Saturday afternoon spent on random shoe-shopping sites. It included the top five private schools from the
U.S. News & World Report
list, on the off chance that one of them might consider an applicant with premillennial SAT scores; Berkeley and Michigan, because they were big enough to disappear in; five schools close to big cities from the book about schools that made a difference; six from the deep double digits on the
U.S. News
list, because who was she kidding; and two UCs, in case her parents’ endless arguments about money caught fire.

In the single most profitable consequence of her parents’ separation, she had a Jet Blue American Express card from her mom and an iTunes Visa card from her dad, so she could charge half the applications on each and perpetuate the illusion of thoroughness, not wantonness. Her mom shopped to fill the vacant space that was her life. Chloe shopped, in this case, to pave the road away from home. She saw this as a crucial distinction.

Deena reached over to pat Chloe’s hand. “And we wondered why you’re not applying early to some special school. If it’s a reasonable choice you could get all of this over with before Christmas, and not have to spend time you don’t have on all those essays.”

Chloe stood up so suddenly that Deena flinched.

“That is so insulting,” said Chloe. “What you really mean is why don’t I pick someplace easy that no one else wants to go to. Why don’t you just say so? Let’s sign me up for City College and spare ourselves the disappointment. And spare you and Daddy all that money. I ought to bug the house, and then if you and Daddy ever decide to worry about my self-esteem, which I doubt, but if you ever do, you can just listen to the things you say to me. Then you’ll know why I don’t have any.”

“Chloe. I was just asking. If we can’t ask simple questions…”

“But they’re not simple questions. I picked out ten schools because I thought they gave me a really good range of options.” Suddenly she recalled something useful Ted had said at the one Crestview college workshop she had attended in her sophomore year. “Some of us aren’t really ready to make a decision this early, and the six extra months gives us time we need to mature. I’m a different person today than I was last year, right?”

“Right,” allowed Deena, wondering what trap she was stepping into.

“Then I’ll be a different girl when the letters come out next April than when the early ones come out in December, right?”

“I guess so,” said Deena, although she had no idea if she really believed it. At some point the apocalyptics of growing up steadied into a more manageable rhythm—in Dave’s case, they had congealed into an infuriating sameness. Why not assume that Chloe would still essentially be Chloe next spring and go for early decision? Deena had no patience for the subtleties of a real college strategy, but she understood dating. Schools wanted to say yes to kids who definitely would say yes to them, not to kids who might have their heads turned by a more handsome suitor. That was what early decision was all about, at least at schools where an average student like Chloe might stand a chance.

“Excuse me?” said Chloe. “You guess so?”

“I’m thinking about what you said.”

“Yeah, but while you’re thinking I’m not getting my homework done.”

Chloe retreated to her bedroom, closed the door, and sent Lauren an instant message to see if she was home. Before the parking-lot argument, Chloe had had friends over all the time, but once she moved to Ocean Heights she had started inviting herself to other people’s houses. It made her parents feel bad, which never hurt, and it reminded her friends of how drastically Chloe’s life had changed, which was always good for a little attention.
Lauren’s parents only minded company during midterms and finals, and occasionally on the night before a big test or paper, which, happily for Chloe, this turned out not to be. As soon as Lauren messaged back, Chloe threw her laptop into her bag along with her calculus binder, cell phone, a twenty, and her driver’s license. She ducked into the bathroom and rubbed her face with a dry towel until her cheeks and forehead colored up, and she ground a fist into each eye socket to make the whites redden, just a bit. She stood for a moment behind her bedroom door, as generations of actresses have stood in the wings before a big entrance, and then she rushed into the kitchen, looking suitably distressed.

“I can’t believe it,” she said to her mother. “My calc binder is at Dad’s.”

“How can that be?” said Deena. “Honey, you really have to—”

“It’s not my fault. Daddy always double-checks, or he said he does, I don’t know, oh, Mom, I have to go get it right now.”

Deena dried her hands and tossed the dishtowel on the counter. “I’ll drive you over. This has got to stop. I’m going to talk to him, sweetie, really, we’ll figure this out for you…”

Chloe startled her mother by wrapping her in a hug. “Oh, Mommy, you are the best, but you don’t have to drive me all the way to the Valley. I’ll talk to Dad. Really. I have to learn how to take responsibility for myself.”