Getting In: A Novel (14 page)

There were two little adhesive notes attached to the application. The first one, in her mother’s handwriting, reminded her that she had volunteered at the public library the summer after tenth grade, a comparatively insignificant achievement but worth including. The second one, from her father, requested that she count the words in her essay one last time, to make sure that the added phrase they had discussed the night before did not take it over the five-hundred-word limit. They had heard that some schools simply lopped off the overage and then penalized the applicant for a sentence fragment.

Liz was sure but never smug, so she reached for a pencil and counted one more time, tapping each word in turn as she whispered, “one, two, three…thirty-eight, thirty-nine…four ninety-four, ninety-five, ninety-six.” Four hundred and ninety-six words. She reread the essay to make sure she did not have a four-word thought she wanted to insert—and then, as though the counting had made the room too warm, she hopped off the chair and strode into her room, turned on her laptop, added the business about the public library, checked her name and email address, and clicked
SUBMIT
, all in one single, heady rush. She jumped up again, spun around, ran back down the hall, and flung open the kitchen door. If she had been one of the heroines in any of the movies she had watched during her American musicals phase, she would have burst into song, or at least lip-synched to someone who could carry a tune.

Gone.

Liz closed her eyes and saw herself arriving at Harvard for the start of her freshman year. It was a well-worn image, one that had been her secret companion since ninth grade. She was standing on the sidewalk in front of a beautiful, redbrick dormitory, flanked not by her parents but by two effusive, welcoming Harvard undergrads, one boy, one girl, each reaching to help her with a suitcase. There was a light, clean, refreshing breeze, nothing at all like the bully Santa Anas that set the southern California hills on fire every fall. It was, as she envisioned the scene, a Saturday. She had traveled all this way on her own. Her mother had quit Dr. Joy and started working in the emergency room at St. John’s. Her father, who now drove a town car for a private firm, had with great fanfare made her his first fare of the day, before he started shuttling celebrities back and forth to a charity carnival in a park in Beverly Hills.

That was as far as she ever got. Liz’s imagination had only a supporting role in the private drama known as getting into Harvard; aside from being activated to complete the occasional creative-writing assignment in English class, it was a marginal presence, not quite up to the task of daydreaming on such a grand scale. Harvard’s catalog and website provided Liz with a detailed sense of the physical setting, enough information to create an opening scene—but she had little idea of what she would do once she got there, beyond continuing to excel in class.

She wandered back into her room and opened the application again, to the screen that contained her essay.

She closed the file without reading the rest, suddenly disgusted by how stuffy—how dull, how trite—she sounded.

“Could you be any more predictable?” she muttered to herself, hoping that Harvard had some kind of remedial class for the children of driven immigrants, one that might help her to develop a sense of humor.

A west side teen with any self-respect stayed away from the beach in the summer, rather than be mistaken for a tourist and have to endure the indignity of an Iowan leaning across the sand with presumed familiarity to ask, “Where you girls from?” A west side teen knew that the best time to go to the beach was between Halloween and Thanksgiving, when the ambient noise was a self-satisfied purr, not the liberated squeals of normally landlocked visitors, when the beach had everything going for it but too many people. Los Angeles rewarded its full-time residents with an exclusive treat: late fall at the beach felt like late summer in all the places where less fortunate people lived.

Lauren and Chloe arrived at the beach at eleven o’clock sharp, knowing full well that Katie would be late because she liked to make an entrance, even when the only onlookers were a formation of seagulls watching the tide. Everyone had a girlfriend like Katie, whose biggest crime in elementary school had been the need always to be first in line, first to speak, teacher’s pet, in the front row at the assemblies. She took her pals with her, in those days, to form a flying wedge of energy, and year after year they melted the hearts of adults who got pushiness and independence confused, particularly when it came to girls. Parents approved of their daughters playing with Katie, back then, because Katie was a girl who never let anyone stand in her way.

It took middle school and puberty to expose the ruthless edge to Katie’s selection process, as girls who had always been at her side suddenly found themselves replaced by girls with prettier hair, any breasts at all, and money to spend on makeup and clothes, as long as none of those assets were competitive with Katie’s. She ditched friends who did not measure up and acquired new ones who did. Her single saving grace was that she did not engage in the kind of high-profile, mean-girl shenanigans that marked a girl for eventual vengeance, or at least she had not so far, though the business about her pretend sex life with Brad had made Lauren wary, in case it signaled a downward spiral. Katie cut and culled her girlfriends using more of a CEO model, refining and improving her associates’ group profile without ever making the rejects feel rejected or the new hires feel temporary.

Chloe made the cut because she was a goofy mess, and Katie’s notion of alpha-girl perfection required that she have one sidekick who was living proof of her compassionate nature. Lauren survived because she was fun and smart and pretty enough, but not a direct threat in any way. They hung around with Katie, in return, because they always had, and because at this point there was no reason to change. College would take care of that.

Chloe caught Lauren looking at her cell phone for the third time.

“Well, c’mon, her time is so much more important than ours,” said Chloe. “Except really she hates herself, that’s what they say about people who are late, you know, she’s so insecure she has to be late, to prove to herself that she matters.”

“Where did you read that?”

“My mom did. Someplace.”

“Or maybe she just said it so you’d be on time.”

“Nice. There she is. Hey, Katie. Katie.”

Katie ambled across the sand slowly enough for the cute boy in the wetsuit to have second thoughts about leaving the beach so soon. She stopped to pretend to check her cell phone, but when he failed to pursue her, she dismissed him as gay and sped up.

“You don’t have to yell. Sorry I’m late.”

Chloe pulled a copy of
Nylon
out of her bag and turned to the feature on boot heights, hoping for advice on how best to make short legs look longer, certain that the answer would require her to buy something new. Lauren flopped on her back and closed her eyes.

“Don’t you want to know why I was late?”

Lauren and Chloe glanced at each other. Katie clearly was not going to sit down unless one of them asked.

“You had to stop for Tampax?”

Katie ignored Chloe and turned to face Lauren.

“I filed.” Without waiting for a reply, she plopped down between her two friends. “So I’m actually not going to stay long. I have to get a dress.”

Chloe sat up and wriggled her shoulders in a way that made every part of her body shimmy. “Well. We’re special.”

Katie shrugged. “I need a dress. My folks are taking me out to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” asked Lauren

“I just said. I filed.”

“Everybody files,” said Chloe. “Don’t most people celebrate when they get in? What if Williams doesn’t take you?”

“Right,” said Katie. “Or, fine. If they don’t, we won’t go out to dinner then, but for now we are, so I have to get a dress.” She lowered herself carefully onto the blanket, glanced up at the sun, and adjusted her position three times, which required Lauren and Chloe to adjust theirs as well. She untied the straps of her bikini top, wriggled out of her shorts, and tucked all the edges of her bikini bottom around each other, to make it an inch smaller in every direction. She lifted her head and set it down again, once, twice, to make sure that her hair was piled properly beneath it, and then she wiggled one last time, ever so slightly, and let out a tiny resting breath.

“Is there more?” asked Chloe.

“So I’m going to the Co-op if anyone wants to come and help me try things on,” said Katie, who knew how to shut Chloe up. Some people wanted to see the Sistine Chapel; if Chloe in fact wanted to see it, and the subject had never come up, she dreamed first of buying her travel wardrobe at Barneys Co-op. The one time Katie had dragged her along, Chloe had come this close to embarrassing them both, swooning over T-shirts indistinguishable from all the other T-shirts in the world except for their three-figure price tags. Katie understood that the whole point of the Co-op was to shop with passion and without emotion, to build a wardrobe and disdain the impulse buy, but Chloe was by nature a Forever 21 girl, happiest in a store where she could buy three sweaters she did not need and still come in well under $100. Still, Katie invited her along, as though Katie were a colonial empire and Chloe a small underdeveloped nation—because it was good for her, because she might learn something. She invited Lauren because she trusted her
taste, and because it was nice to have a friend to retrieve another size and bring it back to the fitting room if the salesperson was not around.

“I don’t think so,” said Chloe, who was dying to go. “I try to limit myself to being jealous maybe once or twice a week.”

Normally, Lauren would have preferred the beach to being Katie’s handmaiden, but October of senior year was a tough time to kick back on the sand. Not having anything to do, usually a welcome state at some point on the weekend, inevitably devolved into having too much to think about—like the fact that Ted had added UC Irvine to her list of Best Chances when she returned from the college trip without a better solution. People drove to Irvine for an afternoon of antiquing, and Lauren thought that college ought to be more of an adventure than looking for a vintage lamp, but Ted had insisted, and her parents, the traitors, had chimed in about what a great writing program Irvine had. She did not want to sit on a beach towel and think. Busy was better, even if it meant listening to Katie agonize over which expensive dress to buy or whether she would get any long-term use out of the adorable little clutch purse the salesgirl had suggested to go with one of them.

“Fine. We’ll go,” said Lauren, wondering if at this time next year she might be sitting at the edge of Lake Michigan, talking to girls she did not yet know. “We can get sushi after.”

“Sushi at the Farmers Market?” asked Katie. “I can’t believe you eat at that place. How fresh do you think it can be?”

“I love that place,” said Chloe. “I’ll go.”

“It has a really good Zagat rating,” said Lauren, defensively. “My mom loves them too.”

“Well, fuck me,” said Katie. “Fine. The Co-op and then sushi, and if I have to leave early to get ready, you can both make fun of me behind my back for being a food snob.”

“I don’t need to wait until you’re not here,” said Chloe.

“Oh, I’m sure of that,” said Katie, fighting a sudden urge to
get up and stomp away. “Honestly, Chloe, you know, I invite you so we can all do things together and you are such…”

“Oh my God,” said Chloe, nudging Katie with her foot, on purpose, to make her move over a half inch.

“You’re kicking me,” said Katie, her voice starting to tighten.

“I am not kicking you,” Chloe replied. “Maybe you could take up less than most of the blankets.”

“Maybe you could move closer to the edge and we wouldn’t all feel so crowded.”

“I don’t hear Lauren complaining about me. Lauren, am I shoving the two of you off the blankets?”

Lauren got up and grabbed her tote bag. “Will the two of you stop it? You sound like…like…”

“My parents?” said Chloe.

Lauren started to laugh. “Exactly.”

“Thank you,” said Katie. “Because that’s how I want to think of myself, as…”

“Stop,” said Chloe. “Only I get to bad-mouth my parents. C’mon. Let’s go watch you spend money.”

“Already?” said Katie. “Okay, fine. Whatever you say.”

They gathered their belongings and headed across the sand toward the parking lot. Katie drew up close to Lauren.

“Haven’t you filed?”

“It’s not like they start reading before the first,” Lauren snapped, surprised at the exasperation in her voice. “I’ve got a week yet. I want the essay to be right. I mean, you don’t get points for being there early.”

Katie was offended at Lauren’s response—she had filed already because she was efficient, not because she was looking for an edge, which implied self-doubt—but she worked hard to maintain a tone of sincere concern.

“Maybe not,” she said. “And I can imagine, I mean, it’s got to be hard, them not deferring. I mean, you’re out, you’re out. That’s
tough. Well, see you guys there.” She turned away and headed for her car.

Chloe grabbed Lauren’s arm and propelled her in the opposite direction. “When she doesn’t get in and you do,” she said, “promise me you’ll make her life hell.”