Getting In: A Novel (8 page)

He graduated with a BA in English and an agenda that involved a first novel and a first love, the former about to be written, the latter, he was sure, about to be met. A year later, he had ninety pages of unfinished manuscript, and a year after that, he had barely broken a hundred. Ted could no more step out of his head than his younger self could step off the curb without his father’s permission, so he accepted his parents’ offer to stake him to a teaching credential and got a job at a big public school, where he saw some of his students for the first time on the day he gave the midterm. Three years of that and he answered Crestview’s ad for an English teacher. He told himself it was a temporary move, an advantage, really, in terms of raw material for his novel. Thanks to his parents’ watchfulness, Ted had no serious misfortune to peddle. A detoured life as an English teacher might lack the exploitable depth of genuine bad luck, but it would have to do.

Inevitably, one of the seniors asked him to read a draft of her college application essay, and when she got into Stanford early, she and her parents let everyone know that Ted had made all the difference. He got so many requests for help that the head of school cut his teaching load in half and made him the junior member of what was then Crestview’s two-person college counseling team.

He never wrote another page of his novel. The true love part of his fantasy eroded as well, when his most promising girlfriend broke up with him midway through his first early-decision season as department chair, as though her biological clock could not have kept ticking for a few more weeks, until he saw how the
applicants shook out. He dared to suggest that she was not being reasonable, as his deadline was absolute and hers was not. She stomped out of his place, and he never heard from her again. His acceptance rate that year was 10 percent higher than his predecessor’s had been.

He had a gift for other people’s success, if not his own, so he let the job take up more and more of his time, until it eclipsed his old ideas of who he would turn out to be. Crestview parents generously assumed that he had secrets and occasionally speculated as to what they might be, but in fact he was a lower case enigma. Ted let them wonder, for whatever they imagined had to be more interesting than the truth.

Ted read Brad’s flying essay one more time, wrote, “Nice writing, but let’s get on course” in his notes, and moved it to the bottom of the stack, more irritated than made sense. He read an essay about solving the health crisis in Africa, “One of thousands,” he wrote on his notepad, though when the boy came in Ted would make a flattering plea for something that better reflected the boy’s dynamic range of interests. He read one about a personal epiphany inspired by the discovery, in the garage, of the applicant’s parents’ Pete Seeger albums. “Reed or Hampshire,” wrote Ted, “and change epiphany.” Lots of people rewrote their kids’ essays, even if they swore their children had asked for input and all they had offered were copious notes, but subtlety was key, and “epiphany” was not a subtle word. He read a long essay by a girl who thought that buying only local produce, even if it meant forgoing apples in the middle of summer, qualified as profound self-sacrifice.

Katie’s essay could not possibly be any worse than those. The last draft had been fine, and at this point he was reading only to buy her parents another week to persuade her to switch to Williams. He riffled through the rest of the stack and plucked hers
out. It was always easy to spot Katie’s drafts, because she had scrolled through the font list until she found a sans serif typestyle that she felt better reflected her straightforward personality than the standard Times Roman font.

Ted started to write “parallel construction” on his notepad, and then he stopped, certain that the teacher who gave Katie As in her AP class, despite syntax like this, would somehow manage to catch the error.

At a cost, thought Ted, that would have paid for an entire village of houses.

He circled “Renaissance woman,” which must have come from Katie’s mom.

The last line was new. Ted sang the jingle the Army had used for as long as he could remember—“Be. All that you can be. Da da duh duh, in the Army.”—and wondered whether Katie had come up with the line without knowing its source, in which case she was a natural for a career in advertising, or, worse, if she knew where it came from, in which case she could be the first Crestview student to apply to West Point. For a wicked instant, he was tempted to let her use it, but he wrote on his pad, “Admissions officers probably won’t get the last line.” If she balked, he might call her dad, to make sure he was on record about his reservations. In Ted’s experience, the more enthusiastic and effusive parents were at the beginning of the process, the angrier they got if things did not go as planned. He had to protect himself from accusations down the line.

The remaining essays were from early applicants Ted happened to like, even though he knew that their chances were not as good. The boy with too many Bs from the semester when his dad had the stroke, the girl with a B minus in physics because the teacher was too embarrassed to confess that he had misfiled her supposedly nonexistent homework assignments in another student’s folder, the girl who pulled off straight As but only took APs in courses she actually liked, and the twins who between them were a perfect candidate, one with 2370 on his SATs and the other a basketball star. And Lauren, neither an angel nor an ambulance case, the kind of kid who in any other generation would have had her happy pick of schools. Lauren, who ought to get into Northwestern and probably would not. All these breeding, over-achieving baby boomers; wasn’t anyone with bad SAT scores having
children?

He pawed through the stack, skimming first lines, more African health care crises, more personal awakenings, a Habitat for Humanity from Fiji, and a note from Lauren:

When Ted first became a college counselor, his more experienced colleague had advised him to arrange the office furniture so that his back was to the door, to buy a moment to compose himself before he had to face a teary kid or an angry parent. Five seasons later, he no longer needed the hedge. Ted had calloused up. He could wrap a consoling arm around a devastated senior’s shoulder while he debated privately whether to have the mozzarella and tomato on a baguette or the deli meats on a ciabatta roll for lunch. It was what made him a success. He had learned to fight for every senior who had a chance, and yet not to care where they ended up, or rather, not to care in terms of a teenager’s broken heart. They mended, even if they did not know it yet.

All that mattered was the list of college acceptances that appeared in the annual report, the list that parents of prospective students compared to similar lists from competing schools when they were deciding where to send their seventh-graders to school. He reminded himself of that, sternly, when he looked up and saw Brad—saw Harvard—in the doorway. He beckoned the boy in and made great fuss of pulling his essays from the stack and turning to the proper page on his writing pad.

“So,” he said, hoping that the delay might make Brad just
uncomfortable enough to tell the truth, “Mr. Preston Bradley the Fourth, would you like to tell your hardworking college counselor what the agenda is here?”

“I’m sorry?”

“No, you’re not. If you’re sorry you would have given me a final draft of what I saw last time, like everybody else did.”

Brad sighed. “Do you like either of them?”

“I like the first one fine,” said Ted, “but not for a boy who’s headed to Harvard. I only like the second one for a boy who’s determined not to go to Harvard, which would not be you. So we need to straighten this out.”

“Mr. Marshall, can I close the door?”

Back when Ted was Brad’s age, he had used that very line on the day he told his father that he intended to major in English lit and become a writer. He had said, “Dad, can I close the door?” in the irrational hope that a sealed room would somehow contain his dad’s disappointment, which it did not, as his father’s definition of success for his son included regular hours, an office, and benefits. Bad news—the betrayal of a family plan—inevitably followed a request to close the door. For a wild moment, Ted wondered if he could prevent whatever was about to happen by insisting that the door remain open.

“Sure,” he said, and nodded. After about a hundred years, Brad sat back down.

“Mr. Marshall, we have something like attorney-client privilege, right? I mean, I can tell you something and you won’t tell my dad.”

Ted felt himself smiling in terror.

“I don’t want to go to Harvard,” said Brad. “I mean, I really don’t want to go to Harvard. You think if I send in one of these essays they’ll turn me down? Or at least wait-list me? That would buy me some time to figure out what I want to do. Buy my dad some time to get over it.”

“Isn’t it a little late in the game to change your mind? Where would you go instead?” Ted had applicants lined up at all the other Ivies, and he did not want to be in the same county as Trey Bradley when he found out that his boy had been relegated to the Big Ten, or, even worse, the Pac Ten. Trey sneered at Columbia and Penn, as though there were two distinct tiers within the Ivy League, and he had lately let it be known that he was debating whether to endow Crestview’s new science wing. There was much more at stake here than Brad’s mysteriously revised notion of collegiate happiness. Ted waited while the boy scooped a handful of paper clips from a bowl on the desk, arranged them in the shape of a bird, and sat back to consider his creation.

“Brad.”

He looked up, startled and abashed, and Ted saw in the boy’s guilty expression a glimmer of opportunity.

“Brad. You understand how close you are to making this happen. You understand the advantage you have, I know you do, so you have to explain to me why you would turn away from this.”

Brad dismantled the bird and dumped the paper clips back in the bowl. “I just think I’ll be happier somewhere else. Maybe I ought to go to art school.”

Ted saw the science wing vanish.

“I just don’t want to be the fourth anything.”

Ted pounced.

“Hey, that has nothing to do with where you should go to school,” he said. “It’s like the girl I had last year who was thinking about Barnard until somebody said the Columbia kids look down on the Barnard girls, and all of a sudden she’s not going to apply. Not going to let anybody tell her she was second class. I asked her, if some nitwit said they looked down on the surfers from southern California, or they looked down on the Jewish kids, what would you do? And she said I’d write that person off, never speak to
them again. Okay, if that’s the case, then you have to ignore the person who looks down their nose at a Barnard girl. Not you, Brad, but her. But she got so caught up in what people were going to think that she didn’t even apply, ended up at Wash U in St. Louis. That’s not you. Your job is, anybody who treats you like the newest branch on the family tree, you ignore them. It’s their narrow-minded problem, not yours. You’re not the fourth anything. You’re the first you.”