Getting In: A Novel (29 page)

That was it. Katie could not stand the idea that this interloper, this phony, thought she could take whatever she wanted out of the refrigerator without addressing Katie’s accusation.

“I think you have bigger worries than the fridge right now.”

Carol’s smile curdled into a smirk. “Oh, now I’m scared. Look, here’s the deal. This is me, Carol. Greenwich, Connecticut, Miss Porter’s before Barnard, old money, I mean really old, like my parents would think of your parents as working class. Okay? If I’m somebody more fun than this when I’m at school, what business is it of yours? You think I’d be stupid enough to show up here looking the way I do at school?”

“Your parents don’t know?”

“Oh, come on.”

“So you lie about all this stuff.”

Carol rolled her eyes. “Right. And you’ve always told your parents absolutely everything you’ve ever done, haven’t you.”

“That’s different.”

“No, it’s not. You’re just more limited in what you can get away with because you’re still at home. My parents know what I tell them, and what I don’t tell them they don’t know, and as long as I go to class and keep my grades up, they honestly don’t care, no matter how much they pretend they do.” She regarded Katie with a new interest. “So if you get tired of being Miss Perfection, you can give it up the day you get to Williams. You can dye your hair and get a tattoo and sleep with the TA in your French class and be any old thing at all you want.”

With that, she trotted down the stairs, and Katie, who was trying very hard not to cry, backed into her own room, shut the door, and leaned against it, gnawing on her thumbnail until she realized what she was doing and dove for an emery board to repair the damage. She put her dress back in its bag and the bag back in the closet, she stuffed her sandals with tissue and tucked each one into a felt bag, and she folded up all the magazines that Lauren and Chloe really could have helped to stack before they left. She lay down on the bed and put a pillow over her head, which was not enough to muffle the sound of Carol’s footsteps coming back up the stairs and the door to the guest room opening and closing.

Who was happy? Ron and his schizo girlfriend, her parents who were out to dinner with their boring friends, Lauren and Chloe and Brad and even Liz, who probably got her prom dress on sale at Ross Dress for Less or Loehmann’s, even though none of them had as much reason as Katie to be pleased with life. Who was unhappy? Katie, which made no sense at all. Without moving
the pillow, she reached over and felt her way along her night table: hair elastic, nail file, lip balm, pad and pen, Tweezerman, scented candle, cell phone, back to the Tweezerman. She picked it up and spun it around like a miniature cheerleader’s baton, poked her head out from under the pillow, and held it still, poised, pointing at the zipper of her jeans.

“Hah,” she said, and put the tweezers back on the night table. She was not unhappy, she was exasperated, which was different. Exasperated was a good thing because it meant she was impatient with her high school life and ready for a new one. She glared at the tweezers. She was as done with puncture wounds as she was with biting her nails.

It was always a struggle to find an acceptable venue for the Crestview senior prom. This year’s class had already attended bar mitzvahs on movie soundstages, sweet sixteens at private clubs taken over for the occasion, and a quinceanera at the biggest country club in town. They had eaten lobster tacos and white-truffle mini-pizzas; with the swipe of a handmade rosemary cracker, they had decapitated molded swans made of duck pâté, salmon mousse, or goat cheese, each one with a black-truffle beak, all the while pretending that what they really wanted was quesadilla, which was their way of saying that luxury was commonplace in their lives. They had danced to up-and-coming disc jockeys and famous bands on the decline, and they disdained the look-at-me Hummer stretch limos that the kids at Ocean Heights rented for their prom, preferring a discreet town car and a driver or a six-seater, tops.

This year, prom was at the Marbella, a doubly oppressed downtown art deco hotel that had been abandoned for the first time in the beach hejira of the 1950s, and ignored again in the recent redevelopment craze whose epicenter was a deserted half
mile from the property. The Marbella had been a signed offer away from becoming a parking structure and a big-box store when it caught the eye of a New York hotelier who had made his fortune on what he called vintage real estate. Two years and an Italian interior designer later, the Marbella was back, dignified by a press agent who used phrases like “recycling panache,” made accessible to the rest of the new downtown by a fleet of shuttle buses designed to look like the city’s long-dead Red Car trolley fleet. The entire block behind the hotel—a Spanish-language movie theater, a Laundromat, a single-room-occupancy hotel, and a taco stand—was demolished to make way for an authentic reproduction of the type of gardens that had never existed downtown in the first place.

The Crestview faculty chaperones gathered at the entrance to the ballroom to form a corridor of flattery for the celebrating seniors, and Ted positioned himself discreetly toward the back of the group in the hope that students would drift the other way before they got to him. By prom night, most of them were perfectly happy to avoid him. The seniors who had gotten into their first-choice schools were dismissive, satisfied with a smug smile and a little wave, because of course they had gotten in on their own merit, with no outside help. The kids who had been disappointed steered clear of Ted because they blamed him. The ones who were still in play on a wait list somewhere avoided him like the plague, in case he had heard something earlier in the day that would wreck their evening. Short of graduation, this was as safe as Ted felt all year.

What he liked best were the groups of kids who flew by as one, their attitude toward him always defined by the pack’s luckiest member, because no one was about to betray anxiety in front of friends. As Brad and his friends rolled past, Ted ran a private tally and decided that this might be the most successful constellation at prom: Brad at Harvard, where an admissions officer faced
with a $350,000 donation quickly found the vacant slot that of course should have gone to Brad all along, what an unfortunate oversight, and his date at Yale, a bit of information Ted had picked up in a congratulatory call to Trey; Katie and her date, Mike, both at Williams; Paul at Princeton and Chloe, the volume winner according to Lauren, going to Santa Cruz, which was fine for an Ocean Heights kid.

As for Lauren, she had managed so far to use disappointment to her advantage. When people asked her where she was going, she replied that it would take her every single minute until May 1 to decide. She did not say that it would take that long because she had no good options, so the other seniors assumed that she must be facing a deliciously tortured choice, Northwestern or Columbia, Northwestern or NYU, Northwestern or whatever school had just turned the listener down. Ted had no idea whether she was going to pick Santa Barbara or Irvine, because her parents had stopped calling and Lauren had stopped dropping by. Ted figured they were in the purgatory known only to families who were figuring out how to put a good spin on bad news.

Lauren had less than a week until the truth narrowed down to the truth, and she had to send a commitment letter and a check to one school or the other, but for tonight she looked like she belonged at the best table, her status enhanced by her last-minute escort, Jim, whose longtime girlfriend had been sidelined by a herpes sore that made a public appearance unthinkable. Jim and the girlfriend, now there was a happy ending, both of them safely enrolled at Wesleyan despite the remarkable similarity in their end-of-semester papers on
King Lear
. Ted preferred to dwell on the victories instead of the failures, not that Lauren was a failure, but she certainly was not on the list he had drawn up to show his private clients, currently five of them confirmed, with another five sure to sign up by week’s end. The welcome letter that he intended to send out, as soon as he had his official chat with
the head of school, talked about Brad and Katie and Jim and his girlfriend, about Paul and the girl who ditched Harvard for Stanford. Lauren was the cautionary example on his list, anonymous, of course, the girl who had it all, except that other candidates had a bit more.

He watched her search for her table with the others, the girls’ long dresses floating behind them, lapping at the boys’ tuxedo pants. That is the way prom is supposed to look, Ted thought, gowns and tuxedos and upswept hairdos that won’t last the night. When he started out as a college counselor, everyone dressed that way, but in the last couple of years a style chasm had begun to develop between the top kids—who were either going to their first-choice schools or adept at faking that a second-choice school was really their favorite—and the rest of the seniors, who had never dreamt upper case dreams in the first place. The chosen few stayed formal, the boys in tuxedos or in Grandpa’s vintage white dinner jacket and the girls favoring the Greek goddess look, usually in no stronger a color than gray. As for the rest, the boys wore suits and ditched their ties before dessert. The girls wore short, shiny dresses that showed lots of leg and lots of cleavage, made of satin or taffeta tortured into pleats and ruffles and ruches, all of it in neon pastels—not buttercup but egg yolk, not peach but salmon, not sky blue but turquoise, and never pink if that little strapless number with the corset top came in coral. Their caterpillar eyelashes were heavy with mascara, and their lips were so thick with gloss—Ted tried and failed to censor himself in time—that a boy’s boxers would likely stick to his penis after the blow job.

He took a deep breath to try to empty his mind. He vowed next year to fake a bad cold and stay home, and then he reminded himself that by next year, with luck—no, with continued effort—his attendance at the Crestview senior prom might no longer be required. Thanks to the speed with which Harvard had reversed itself on Brad, Ted had regained his balance. He planned to submit
his resignation letter about a week before graduation—early enough to promote the illusion that he cared about letting Dr. Mullin start the job search before everyone scattered for the summer, late enough to avoid an endless stream of anxious calls from the parents of juniors.

Katie’s family had stopped drinking tap water about five years earlier, when her father returned from a golf weekend to find a forgotten glass of water on his desk, a half-inch of the liquid equivalent of smog settled out at the bottom. He walked into the kitchen holding the glass at arm’s length between thumb and forefinger, as though it were a dead rodent, and announced to his wife and children that he was going to order a water purification system for the entire house so that even the bathwater would run clear.

Away from home, the Dodson family drank only bottled water. The recent pro-tap backlash was for people who worried about the larger environmental consequences of all those plastic bottles. Dan Dodson’s priority was his family’s personal eco-system, which was why Katie carried a larger purse to prom than the other girls did. She polished off one bottle of Evian before the entrée arrived, handed the empty to the waiter who placed her salmon fillet in front of her, and leaned down to fish a second bottle out of her bag, which sat on the floor at her feet.

Chloe reached over for Katie’s untouched water glass and took a long swill. “Am I glowing yet?” she said.

“Pick your poison,” said Katie.

“So’s your dad going to pop for a filtration system at the dining hall?” Chloe asked.

Katie smiled at the extent of Chloe’s ignorance. “Somehow I’m thinking they have bottled water at Williams,” she replied. “There’s no need to make fun.”

Liz broke in, determined to find common ground. “At Yale the residential colleges each have their own dining facility,” she said, “although I imagine that college food is college food.”

It did not matter that Katie was done with Yale and done with Brad, that in her assiduously rewritten life story neither her ex-first-choice school nor her ex-boyfriend had measured up. Liz seemed completely satisfied with both of them—and that, combined with a room that was suddenly too warm, salmon that was too rich, and a band that was too loud, made Katie feel the need to reestablish her personal equilibrium. She had worked hard to forget that she had ever preferred Yale, and she needed to make Liz just a bit less thrilled with her choice.

“All the boys at Yale are gay,” said Katie. She glanced at Brad. The last time she had asked, he swore that he was going to tank a math test for her, but what if he was lying to get her to leave him alone? She should have asked to see it, as proof that he had kept up his end of the bargain. Perhaps she ought to let him know—a little coded comment, nothing obvious—that she had not forgotten their deal. “So the dozen guys who are straight have to be sleeping with everybody. That’s going to be weird. Who would you rather go out with? A slut or a gay guy?”

Brad stretched his arm protectively across the back of Liz’s chair, and Lauren nudged her foot under the table to poke at Katie, but Katie smiled and took a nice, long moment unscrewing the cap on her water bottle.

“At least you know they’re gay,” said Chloe, desperately hoping to prevent trouble. “At some places there’s a saying, Gay by May, like these boys show up having no idea what they are and just about the time you figure out which one you’re interested in, it turns out he’ll never be interested in you. But I never heard that about Yale. I don’t know about Santa Cruz. I figure I’ll save myself the agony and just wait for sophomore year to fall in love with someone.”

“Check it out,” said Brad. “Maybe I’ll transfer. Improve my odds.”

“Yeah, like you’d go to Santa Cruz,” said Katie.

“Hey, don’t bash my someday alma mater,” said Chloe. Katie ignored her. Katie was staring at Liz, who was staring at her plate, and in that moment Chloe recalled all the times Katie had condescended to her, whether the issue was Chloe’s grades or her figure or her prom dress. The only difference was that Liz was too polite or too surprised to give back as good as she got, and Chloe was not.