Getting In: A Novel (31 page)

“Not salmonella,” she said, with a delighted grin.

“What do you mean?” asked Liz, gently squeezing the sodden pieces of Katie’s dress.

“I mean vodka is what I mean.” Chloe poured the contents of the bottle into an adjacent sink, rinsed it twice with hot water, filled it with cold, and handed it to Liz, who held the bottle to Katie’s mouth but did not let go.

“Take a little sip. Little. Swish it around in your mouth and spit.”

Katie had come around just enough to remember the usual order of things, and she started to back away from Liz, only to have Lauren and Chloe tighten their grips. So she swished, and she spit, and she awaited further instructions.

Liz washed her hands, stepped over to the hot-air dryer, and gestured for the girls to follow. She held the wet segments of the dress under the blower, chiffon leaf by chiffon leaf, until it was almost dry. When she was done, she washed her hands again and
walked over to the door.

“My father will be in the parking lot by now,” she said. “Probably best to take her home.” Without another word, she pushed open the bathroom door.

Ted was assigned to the serpentine hallway that led to the ladies’ room, but every half hour he took a break and slipped out the back to pop an Altoid and disengage. He was deep into his fantasy of wealth and autonomy, amusing himself with the philosophical question of which was more appealing, money or not having to answer to anyone but his clients, when a cab pulled into the small service lot by the garden exit and the driver got out, the engine still running, to open the back passenger door. The limos were all parked in the Marbella’s valet lot, and the kids were supposed to come and go only from the front entrance, given the opportunity for all sorts of misbehavior in the dimly lit gardens behind the hotel. Ted’s inner institutional voice told him that he was about to witness an escape attempt, and, while he was not in the mood for anything that required intervention, he was curious. Who would be dumb enough to get into trouble only weeks before graduation? He stepped into the shadow of the building, hoping to get a look at the senior who had interrupted his reverie without the senior seeing him.

He was a second too slow. Lauren caught sight of Mr. Marshall the moment she and Liz and Chloe and Katie stepped outside, having left Brad behind with instructions to head toward the ballroom and divert anyone who threatened to wander by. She maneuvered Katie into the cab, tucked the trailing, damp ends of her dress into the backseat, and sat down next to her as close as caution would allow.

“We’ll leave in just a second, Katie. I’m going to go talk to Mr.
Marshall and then I’ll be right back, okay? He saw us come out. If I don’t go over there he’s going to come over here, and you don’t want him to see you like this.”

As she backed away, Katie called after her, “What’s the big deal? It’s not like I ran over a dog or anything.”

Two years earlier, on prom night, a boy had lost his spot at Princeton when he ran a four-way stop and hit a Boston terrier on its nightly stroll with a public school teacher who cared for foster dogs until the rescue agency found them a new home. The boy’s beverage of choice was a bottled margarita, four of which were empty in the backseat, two of which were open in his and his date’s cup holders. The last thing the teacher had drunk before she told her story to the police was a bracing cup of sencha tea.

Standing in the deserted intersection, their conversation illuminated by the headlights of a squad car and an animal control truck and punctuated by the sobs of both the dog walker and the rookie nightshift animal control officer, Ted and the boy’s father had agreed that getting drunk at prom was as much a part of the ritual as a white dinner jacket, a corsage, and a boutonnière. The issue was not partying but getting caught—in this case, by a horrified and sober witness whose story was now part of an official record that might require Crestview to make good on its impressively stern drugs-and-alcohol policy. The challenge, with Princeton at stake, was for Ted and the dad to construct a credible counter-narrative. Together, they paced the death route and agreed that the untrimmed ficus definitely obscured the stop sign. They suggested to the cop that a $2,000 donation to the ASPCA, along with the purchase of the teacher’s purebred puppy of choice, might reduce this to an unfortunate life lesson of no lasting consequence or blame. The cop, mindful of his own drunken prom, decided to let the boy off with a stern warning, and gently suggested to the teacher that she wear brighter colors or a fluorescent armband when she walked her soon-to-be-acquired bichon frisé late at night.

The animal control officer was not so malleable. She called Crestview first thing the following Monday morning, and the head of school made the mistake of mentioning the fine young man’s future at Princeton. The road to vengeance, for a young officer who had had to bag her first corpse, was now clearly marked. Ted’s only hope was to get there first, which turned out to be no hope at all.

The admissions director at Princeton listened to Ted’s carefully rehearsed defense of the candidate, which included a brief social history of ritualized and unpunished prom night drinking, sympathized, and pronounced sentence.

“That was then,” he said, wearily, “and this, I’m afraid, is now.”

In a buyer’s market, schools revoked slots in the freshman class for infractions that had never before been enforced, and college counselors found themselves trapped. If Ted defended the boy too strenuously, he lost credibility with Princeton, which might have an impact on future applicants. If Ted sacrificed the boy and allied himself with Princeton, he risked a significant ding in Crestview’s reputation, one that could have repercussions with other schools. The only safe exit was a fabricated one. By mutual agreement—Ted must have been on the phone with the admissions guy for a solid hour—Princeton dumped the boy but allowed him to weave a gap-year fiction that would enable him to apply somewhere else, unsullied, the following year.

Faced with a senior’s actionable stupidity, Ted far preferred secrecy to diplomacy. As long as the cab got Katie home without further incident, Ted would be spared having to beg on her behalf, and she would join the endless ranks of drunken seniors who managed to avoid detection and proceeded, unimpeded, into the glorious future that awaited them. He would have loved to turn her in, but he would settle instead for a smaller pleasure, for making sure she knew that he could have ratted her out and had chosen not to.

Before he saved her, though, he intended to enjoy himself a
bit. He smiled as Lauren approached.

“Seems to be a prison break going on here,” he said. “No one is supposed to leave until eleven, and never by the back door. Want to tell me what’s going on?”

“It’s ten minutes of, Mr. Marshall,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “It’s almost eleven. Please.”

“I can’t grant ‘please’ unless I know what I’m agreeing to, Lauren. Why exactly are we bundling Katie into a cab?”

“Mr. Marshall, I will tell you the truth but you have to promise me, promise me, that you won’t do anything that’ll get her into trouble.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, I know you won’t, right, because it’s bad for her, for Crestview, for Williams, and it was the kind of mistake anyone could make,” Lauren said. “Somehow, somehow, maybe her brother played a trick on her, but there was something in her water bottles, I think she got drunk without knowing it, I mean, vodka doesn’t smell, that’s what my parents say, I don’t drink, I don’t think Katie drinks either. Let’s just say somehow she ended up drunk and we got her into the bathroom and she got sick and now we need to get her home. And you’re the only one who saw her, so if you just let her go now, I know she’s really sorry and she’s learned a good lesson, except, really, I bet it was Ron playing such a mean trick, Mr. Marshall. Please. Can I just take her home?”

“Yes, yes. Of course you can.”

“Oh, Mr. Marshall, I’m so glad it was you who saw us and not somebody else.”

“I need a promise back.”

“Anything, you name it.”

“Figure out how to keep Chloe from telling everyone.”

“Oh, sure. It was the salmon. That’s what we’ll say, okay? Can she go now?”

“Sure.” He waved in the direction of the cab, in the malicious
hope that Katie had her eyes open, and went back inside.

Lauren hurried back to the cab.

“My dad wants to know is someone coming with her,” said Liz, “in case she doesn’t feel well on the way home.”

“I figured Chloe and I would—”

Chloe broke in, having learned moments before Katie’s collapse that her date had the keys to his family’s weekend cottage in Santa Barbara. “Yeah, but if two of us disappear to take her home it kind of screams crisis, don’t you think? I mean, I’ll come with you if you want, but if you’re good alone, well, you’re so good at this kind of stuff. Me alone, I’d…”

“It’s okay,” said Lauren, deflated. “It’s fine. I’ll take her. Somebody tell Jim for me.”

Chloe hugged her and disappeared inside before Lauren could change her mind, so Lauren opened the cab door and settled in next to Katie, while Liz checked out the backseat like a claims adjustor, making sure that Katie had not drooled or in any other way defaced Steve’s upholstery.

Lauren reached out her hand and squeezed Liz’s arm.

“Look, it was so nice of you to fix up Katie’s dress like that,” Lauren whispered. “Can you imagine her mom if she came home—”

Liz cut her off. “I didn’t want her smelling up my dad’s cab.” She said something to her father in Korean that made him laugh, and walked away.

As he pulled out of the parking lot, Steve glanced over his shoulder and asked, “What is the address where I am taking you?”

“That’s a good question,” said Lauren. “I guess we should go to my house.” She gave him her street address and launched into directions, but he held up his right hand for her to stop.

“I know,” said Steve. “How is the girl?”

Lauren looked over at Katie, who was clutching her purse in one hand and the door handle in the other, her forehead and cheek
plastered against the cool window, her eyes closed.

“Well, she seems to be done throwing up, which I guess is what matters most at the moment.”

Liz’s father chuckled. “Yes, my cab and your dress are then safe, a good thing.”

Lauren desperately wanted to talk about anything else.

“By the way, that’s so great about Liz and Yale,” she began. “You must be so proud.”

“I am, and my wife is too,” said Steve, whose lingering affection for Harvard had been diminished if not erased by Yale’s offer of a full ride. “And your parents. You have made them proud.”

Lauren pretended to be ministering to Katie, who was in fact asleep. She still had not told anyone where she was going to school, hoping to hide behind an enigmatic smile all the way to graduation, and for now the Mona Lisa act had led to a nice new theory, that her parents had put down double deposits at two schools to buy her the summer to make up her mind. Come August, she intended to slip quietly up the coast to Santa Barbara, and anyone who still cared could gossip behind her back. She had come to regret that she had sent in the Northwestern wait-list form. She did not need to be turned down again.

She stared dully at the back of Liz’s father’s head, wondering why everyone she met felt that they had the right to inquire about her future.

“I say,” he repeated, thinking that she had not heard him, “you have made your parents proud.”

Lauren leaned back against the seat. There was no question mark in that sentence. Liz’s dad seemed to believe that there were two categories of children—those who let their parents down by swilling something that was not water and ruining an expensive dress, and those who behaved well and made their parents proud—and with very little evidence, without even asking where she was going to school, he had placed Lauren in the second category,
alongside Liz. For the first time since she had missed the early-decision deadline, Lauren considered the possibility that her parents were proud of her, had always been proud of her, and that perhaps pride was not conditional on acceptance letters from fancy schools. What she had read as their disappointment in her could have been their disappointment in it, in the process that had made her sad, or even their disappointment in themselves, for not being able to protect her.

“I did my best,” she said.

“Then you are like Liz,” he said. At the stoplight he turned to look at her. “I tell her, this is Harvard’s loss not to take you. It is their mistake, not anything you did wrong. At first I say it to her to make her feel better and do not quite believe it myself, but the more I think the more I am convinced. The more I think about it, this has nothing to do with her.”

“Of course you’re right,” said Lauren, although she had gotten angry when her father made an almost identical speech about Northwestern. Katie let loose a reedy snore. “It’s crazy this year. My parents say the same thing you do. It has nothing at all to do with us. Or at least not very much.”

The light turned green, and Steve banked the car into the curve of the freeway entrance ramp. Lauren sat back and stared out the window, and when they got to the exit near her house she cracked open the window an inch, so that she could smell the ocean.

They pulled up in front of her house and she nudged Katie, hard.

“Listen, wake up,” said Lauren.

“Where are we?”

“My house,” said Lauren. “Open your door, take a couple of big breaths, and then right up to my room. My mom always wakes up the minute I open the door, but do not talk to her, do not do anything but walk straight into my room and flop on the bed.”

“Is there a reason you’re being such a bitch?”

“If you don’t do what I say I’m going to have Liz’s dad drive you home and you can explain to your mom why the front of your dress looks like old salad.”

Katie stared down at her lap.

Steve’s voice came from the front seat.

“Do you need me to help you get her to the door?”

“No,” said Lauren, as though she could will it to be true. “I’m sure we’re fine. Aren’t we, Katie. Can you stand up?”