Getting In: A Novel (37 page)

The boy next to Chloe whispered, “Jeez, nothing like cheering everybody up.”

“But you see, that’s part of why we got a little crazy this year,” Liz continued. “You parents need to understand. I mean, your parents—our grandparents, that is—could hope that you didn’t have to go through a depression or a world war. But most of your lives have been pretty smooth, when you think about it, relatively good, which means that you’re under a lot of pressure to figure out what better lives even are, and we’re under a lot of pressure to live them. I mean, thanks to AIDS we can’t even have a sexual revolution like you did. And thanks to the economy, we probably won’t earn as much as you do.”

There was no laugh this time.

“So we end up spending an awful lot of time worrying about college. Whether we’re going or not, whether we’re going to a good one or not, whether we have a chance at a great one or not, it seems like everyone is trying to take a step up in the world. It makes me wonder, is college really the one thing that’s going to make a difference in our lives? Everyone probably knows a great senior who didn’t get in where they wanted to go, or an awful person who got into a terrific school, but I doubt that four years anywhere is going to undo eighteen years here. We ought to have more faith in ourselves than that, I think, at least in terms of the great seniors.

“I know what some of you are thinking. ‘It’s easy for Liz to talk, she’s going to Yale, she’s got it made,’” she said, flipping to her next card, the first of three that listed every major story she had found on CNN.com in the past month. “But look at what
I’m facing. I have to remember to wear sunscreen, and take my calcium, and eat plenty of deeply colored fruits and vegetables, and get exercise. I have to reduce my carbon footprint, take my own bag to the grocery, not print up my emails, buy local, buy organic, watch out for irradiated meat, buy fair-trade coffee, and avoid clothes made in third-world countries even though they’re the only ones I can afford.”

Everyone chuckled again, in relief.

“I have to stop the genocide in Darfur and cure disease everywhere else in Africa, I have to not ignore the poor in my own country, I have to make sure everyone has health insurance, and I have to make sure the insurance companies that cover us actually pay for anything we need to have done. I have to protect women’s rights and I have to pretend they don’t need protecting, because feminism is so out of date. I have to make sure that the public schools support special programs for children with autism because it’s an epidemic, one in every hundred and fifty kids, but I have to spend more on all the other kids in our failing public schools, except that the budget is too tight to stretch that far.”

She was picking up speed. “I have to dismantle the nuclear threat in Iran and Pakistan and make sure North Korea is telling the truth, and while I’m at it I need to bring peace to the Middle East, because we’ve only been trying and failing for sixty years. Oh, and if I just pack light when I go to all these places, I can have a real impact, because did you know that ten pounds extra, per suitcase, per person, equals the same amount of carbon emissions as 2.8 million cars?”

Liz paused to catch her breath and chided herself for failing to include even a short paragraph of heartfelt feeling in her speech, though she had no idea what feeling she would have chosen. Everything she said made her think of all the things she had not said, which made her think of all the things she did not yet know. She
wondered if she would have the nerve to dye her hair or oversleep or fall for a guy who ignored her once she got to Yale, or if the members of her family simply lacked the gene for what other people considered to be normal behavior and she too often thought of as excess. Nature or nurture. It might be generations before a Chang had a memorably or unexpectedly good time.

“Sometimes I think that we are the crest of the wave,” she said. “Sometimes I think that me wanting more for my kids will mean making sure they still have a working planet to live on. Think about it: we might be the last generation to lose our minds over where to go to college.”

She paused again and looked out at the crowd, some of them smiling, some of them not happy at all, a few sending text messages or checking their lipstick or cleaning their sunglasses, a few still asleep. She glanced at her parents. Yoonie smiled and blew her a little kiss, and Steve nodded and gave her a thumbs-up. Liz’s throat closed up.

“I don’t mean to depress you on this glorious day,” she said, a slight huskiness in her voice that the principal attributed to a speech that had gone on too long. “This glorious day. In about five or ten minutes, almost a thousand of us will stop being high school students. We will never, ever be here, in this way, with all of you, again. Isn’t that strange? This part of our lives is about to become the past. From one minute to the next, it all changes.

“So please, moms and dads,” she said. “Learn how to text, try not to nag. And hey. Let’s stay in touch.”

As soon as the processional ended, Chloe elbowed her way past a number of seniors in her row to get off the bleachers and into the gym before Liz got away. A visit to the gym to turn in their robes was the final enforced activity for Ocean Heights graduates ever since two years earlier, when the school had had to pay for a dozen
graduation robes that disappeared and could not be traced, despite a YouTube video involving billowing navy blue polyester gowns and girls in bikinis and mortarboards who were too smart ever to face the camera from the neck up. Since then, graduates had turned in their gowns at one of four long tables set against the walls of the gym, where a faculty member matched the number on the inside of the gown’s collar with a number and name on the master registration list.

Chloe ran over to Liz, who was first in line at her check-in station.

“Listen, nice speech, but you don’t know the latest,” said Chloe.

“I’m glad you liked it. I got a little carried away.”

“No, that’s good, but guess what. Lauren got into Northwestern after all.”

“Is she happy?”

“Of course. Well, she will be. But yeah.”

“Katie’s not happy.”

“That’s Katie. She’s only happy if someone else is miserable. Of course Lauren’s happy. Well, okay, it’s a little weird, she isn’t going until second quarter or something because it’s so last-minute I guess, but yeah. She’s happy. I think she is.”

“Good then. Tell her congratulations for me.” Liz patted Chloe on the arm. “I have to go find my parents.”

“Oh. Sure. And I have to turn in my gown. Well. Congratulations.”

“Congratulations,” said Liz, and she turned away. Still holding her gown, Chloe wandered over to the door of the gym and watched as Liz crossed the lawn to where her parents were waiting. First Liz hugged her mom, and then her dad, and then Liz’s mom and dad hugged each other, and then they started the cycle over again. They lingered, in no hurry to get to the reception in the parking lot. A few rows away, in a more jittery knot, Chloe’s
mom and dad looked this way and that, impatient for the chance to lose themselves in the crowd, waiting for Chloe to save them from having to be alone together.

She spun around, ran toward the nearest checkout line, and rushed up to the table ahead of a half dozen other kids. She threw her gown at the cafeteria manager who was checking off numbers.

“Oh my God, I think my mom just fainted,” she said. She turned to the first girl in line. “Check me out, will you? I have to see if my mom’s okay!”

She was gone before anyone could call her bluff, out the door, running full-tilt across the field, her arms outstretched like a bird’s wings, calling, “Hey, hey, hey!”

Dave laughed, louder than he had in a while, and the sound of his laugh tripped an identical memory for Chloe and Deena, a little documentary movie that ran simultaneously inside both their heads—the family at a Fourth of July picnic, Dave sprinting across a crowded park, weaving a serpentine with his four-year-old daughter riding his shoulders no-handed and squealing with delight, while Deena cried, “Careful, careful, my God, you’re going to drop her,” which Dave never did.

“Careful, careful” said Deena, as Chloe got close. “You’re going to knock us over running like that.”

Chloe slowed down just enough, just in time, to wrap her arms around both of them. She hung on for a long moment, her eyes closed, until Dave squirmed to get an arm free and return the embrace, and Deena, mistaking his gesture for an escape attempt, said she really wanted to get to the reception before all the little cakes were gone.

The box was sitting on the concrete stoop in front of Liz’s house when she and her parents got home, a plain brown box with the
words “For Liz” and “fragile” written all over it in big, loopy printing. Her father offered to carry it inside for her, and remarked when he picked it up that it was awfully light. Liz gave her parents a playful look and told them there was no need to pretend that they did not know what it was, as it obviously was her graduation present. They insisted it was not, which only made her more certain that it was.

Her father placed the box on the dining room table, which had not yet been put back to use, even though he had packed up all of the college brochures and dropped them off at Ocean Heights, and put the Yale paperwork in a slim cardboard file that he kept on the nightstand by his side of the bed.

Liz opened the envelope taped to the top of the box.

“Told you I had a good idea. Slice the sides of the box to get it out. Hope you like it,” read the note. It was signed, “Congratulations. Brad.”

Steve took a small, sharp knife, cut open the top of the box without lifting the flaps to look inside, and, with Liz steadying the carton, cut down the sides, one by one. The box fell away to reveal Brad’s model, and for a long moment, no one said a word. Yoonie and Liz walked slowly around the table, considering the house from every side, while Steve positioned himself at the back of the building, rose up on tiptoe, and stared at the roof.

“It is very beautiful,” said Yoonie, who knew nothing about what had happened on prom night and regretted the fact that Liz had not spoken of Brad since. For an instant she hoped that she, like any other mother, had purposely been kept in the dark, that what she had taken as silence was in fact romantic teenage secrecy.

“Where am I going to put it?” said Liz, dashing her mother’s hopes. The model was beautiful, but if Brad had stopped to think he would have realized there was no room for it in Liz’s tiny house. She tried to focus on the impracticality, and not on the model it
self, because otherwise she would call him to say she loved it and start a whole new round of foolishness. She had no desire to start anything; she wanted to show up at Yale without a past.

Her father straightened up. “Rainwater will pool in the middle of the roof,” he said. “This requires a drainage system which he has not included in the design, but of course, that is not something he would know yet. It is very handsome. It will not work, though, not without some changes.”

Liz sighed and peered through one of the windows at a row of miniature cardboard books on the bookshelf in what would have been her room. “Mom, do you mind if we leave it on the table until we can figure out where it should go?”

Yoonie replied quickly, before anyone could come up with a more practical and less enjoyable solution. “As far as I am concerned, it can sit there as long as you like.” She went outside and plucked a few sprigs of the pink alyssum, which she placed on the model’s base in exactly the spot where they grew in the real world.

Maintaining the illusion of equality at Crestview was
tricky, as it required special treatment not only for parents who expected it but also for parents who assumed that there must have been an error if they got it. A $40,000 annual contribution bought Dan and Joy seats in the third row for graduation, two rows behind Trey and Alexandra, alongside one of the scholarship families that were always sprinkled into the front rows to derail accusations of economic favoritism. Everyone understood the agenda, and people who fell between the extremes resented it, but no one was about to complain. The big donors in the first three rows did not care where anyone else sat, and families whose contribution was demographic, not financial, were not about to draw attention to themselves by asking why they had not been assigned to the back row. Parents like Nora and Joel, who contributed exactly one dollar more than the threshold amount for breakfast with the head of school, always felt slightly guilty about their strategy, so they did not make a fuss. They took their seats in the twelfth row and settled for making faces when the people in the eleventh row turned out to be very tall. Nora peered around them to look for a familiar face, waved at Joy, and wondered if this was going to be one of those tremulous days when she found herself feeling happy to see people she did not care for all that much.

Joy had learned on a London vacation that the proper way to sidle down an aisle was facing the already-seated guests, as it was considered rude to display one’s ass to a row of strangers. She was
facing the back of the field, waving a little wave to Nora, when a giggle drifted by behind her, followed by voices held so low she could barely hear them, let alone recognize their owners.

“…a reason she didn’t get it, don’t you think?”

“Has to be. Like she’d give it up without a fight.”

Joy strained to hear more, but she could not tell if the next sentence contained the word “vodka,” “wadded,” or “vested.” She straightened her back and resisted the urge to turn around. Joy prided herself on never listening to gossip, and on only sharing what she knew to be reliable information, which this clearly was not. For all she knew, the two women were discussing a friend who had lost out on a particular three-piece suit at the Armani sale, and not the fact that someone other than Katie was the valedictorian.

She took her seat and devoted all of her attention to the program.

“Unendurable,” said Dan, tapping his copy with his index finger to reinforce whatever point he was about to make. “Let’s ask for our money back.”

“What?”

“I should have asked for a recount,” he went on. “You cannot tell me that Mike has a higher grade point average than Katie does. Computers make errors. Someone misreads a line, enters a standard A instead of a weighted grade, a 4.0 instead of a 5.0, and the wrong senior steps to the podium. I should have inquired when Katie first told us that she was not the valedictorian.”

Joy leaned in close, so that only her husband could hear, tried not to speculate about what she had overheard, and failed. “Perhaps there’s an untold story here,” she said, weakly, hoping that he would have incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, marveling at how so much of his vocabulary had seeded itself in her brain. Incontrovertible evidence? She had become bilingual; she spoke English and Dan.

“Oh, yes, I can imagine all sorts of misbehavior. Alcohol consumption in public. Fellatio in the school bathroom. Methamphetamines in her locker. That’s our Katie. Honestly, Joy.”

Chastened, Joy did her best to match Dan’s obstinate faith in his daughter. “I’m sure that Katie didn’t want to embarrass the boy by pointing out the mistake,” she said, even though random empathy was as unlikely an explanation for Katie’s behavior as any of the ones her husband had suggested.

“Then what explains Brad?” said Dan. “I’m telling you, Mike is not supposed to be the valedictorian.” He got up suddenly. “I will be right back.”

He headed for the aisle and made his way toward Trey, who stood up as Dan approached. Joy watched the two of them and started to relax. They shared a common set of mannerisms, Trey’s inherited, Dan’s acquired by assiduous study: one hand in a pants pocket to show how beautifully an expensive wool jacket draped up and over that hand, the other resting on a friend’s elbow or shoulder, or straightening one’s own tie. They drew closer and tipped their heads ever so slightly, like birds, to convey that this was a private, not a social, conversation, to ward off intruders.

A more insecure man might have made good on his threat to inquire about the valedictorian, but in the end Dan would not, because such a challenge betrayed a man’s need, and he worked hard to convince himself that he had none. He settled instead for sharing his frustration with Trey. As far as Dan could tell, the only people happier than he and Joy were Trey and Alexandra, happier only because they were more used to it, having been successful for generations back. There was no way to rewrite his own history, but Dan took some pleasure from being the kind of guy, now, who could saunter over to Trey for a confidential chat about a shared slight of no lasting consequence.

“Can it be that the same secretary who wrecked Katie’s chances had her way with Brad’s transcript as well?” Dan wondered, with
a smile. “I see a conspiracy here. We might want to subpoena Mike’s dad’s bank records, don’t you think, to look for a pattern of large donations to Crestview.”

Trey smiled. He couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for Dan, who probably was not aware of how hard he scrabbled for position.

“Well, what can I say?” Trey replied. “I never quite know with Four. He might have thought, Harvard, fourth generation, everything going my way, I can afford a little…”

“…noblesse oblige?”

Trey shrugged, patted Dan on the shoulder, and turned back to his seat. He had not said that Brad had stepped aside to give Mike a treat, but he was perfectly comfortable if Dan drew that conclusion.

Joy, watching, mistook Dan’s purposeful stride for restored confidence and the glint in his eyes for clarity. It was only when he sat down next to her that she felt the slight angry vibration of a man who had just been put in his place by a pro.

“Smug bastard,” he whispered to her. In predictable situations, Dan was a master of his own carefully crafted image, but in unexpected moments, to his endless frustration, his instincts failed him. Trey assumed. Dan still aspired. The closest he might ever get to a natural sense of entitlement was through his children.

Mike strode purposefully across the stage, mindful of his mother’s reproachfully muttered “Don’t stand like your father” when he tried on the cap and gown for the first time. He shook hands with the diminutive head of school and stepped around him to the podium. Slowly, very slowly—as his father had instructed him—Mike raised the microphone six inches, paused, raised it another six inches, paused, and tugged at it just a bit more, until it was in range for a six-foot, four-inch valedictorian.

He was amazed at how fast the laughter came. His father had sworn that all Mike had to do was take his sweet time adjusting the microphone, and the crowd would be his. Mike thought his father was a loser on topics ranging from what he wore to what he drove to his choice of a second wife, a woman who wore Juicy Couture as though it were. That last was his mom’s line, a funny person in her own right who would probably still be acting if his dad had not replaced her in the second season with the woman who would become wife number two. But no one argued with his dad about funny, not with two sitcoms winning their time slots week in and week out for four years running. Mike was prepared to be lavish in his thanks right after the ceremony ended, particularly because they had not yet resolved the issue of whether he could have his car at school.

He retrieved his speech from the little shelf under the podium and took a deep breath, not to steady himself but to alert people that something important was coming.

“Valedictorian,” he said, and then he paused. “Valedictorian.” Another pause. “Where does the word come from? People think it means the person with the best grade point average because that’s the person who gets to give the valedictory address. But in fact it’s derived from the Latin
vale dicere
, which means to say farewell, and I bet Dr. Johnston’s proud to hear me say that after all these years of Latin.

“I’m not denying I have the best grade point in this year’s Crestview graduating class,” he said. “But the more interesting question, I think, is who I got a better grade point
than
.” He drew a wide arc with his right arm. “Who are the people on this stage? I’m saying farewell to all of you on behalf of all of them, and so I think it’s up to me to tell you a few things about them—about us—that you might not know.”

His father had inserted another pause here, so he waited, one, two, three.

“Of course,” he continued, “if you want to get the congratulations out of the way right now, for me being the chosen guy and all, I’m happy to wait while you get it out of your systems.”

Mike’s father led a smattering of applause, primarily from parents whose children had either gotten into their first-choice schools or had not applied to the same schools as Mike. The others sat on their hands. To them, Mike was a spoiler, one of those seniors with impressive records who had racked up acceptances to a dozen schools simply to show that he could, even if it meant knocking their children out of the running.

“Okay,” said Mike. “Let’s look at this year’s graduating class and see what we’ve managed to accomplish.” He turned to his second page, a list of bullet points, and began to recite.

“Let’s look at sports other than soccer, so that nobody can accuse me of only thinking about myself. Crestview’s varsity tennis team was first in its division, first in the region, and, no surprise, first in the state for the second year in a row. TiVo that U.S. Open in a couple of years, and I think you’re going to see Wayne and Jim going head to head in the final. On the women’s side, a second-place finish statewide, to a school in central California that’s been in first place for seven years. I think they have a breeding program, if you want to know the truth, so let’s say we’re first among people with normal DNA.”

His dad’s line.

“First in the southern California conference in football, third statewide for the women swimmers and fourth for the guys but first for both of them in the region, and did I mention soccer?” He smiled. “First in the state, for the first time in Crestview’s history. So let’s give it up for Crestview athletes, none better.”

He rattled off the seniors’ accomplishments in national language competitions, in the Scholastic art contest, as Intel science finalists and National Merit semifinalists, finalists, and winners,
thanks to the list that what’s-her-name in the college counseling office had provided him.

“But being first is not enough,” he said, though he hardly believed it. “If it was, I could just rattle off that list and sit down….”

“If it
were
, not if it
was
,” muttered Joel. “Some valedictorian.”

“Shhh,” said Nora, who had not taken her eyes off Lauren’s faraway face.

Mike slowed down for emphasis. “The real question is, what does it take to be first? It boils down to this: We never give up. We know what we have to do to excel, we know how hard it is to do it, and we never give up. If you think I’m exaggerating, look at Frannie Rose. We all remember when Frannie’s dad died, but was Frannie going to sit around and mope? She knew her dad wouldn’t want her to do that, and she knew the people at UCLA, at the med center, from all the time they had to spend there when Frannie was in ninth grade.”

“My God,” whispered Nora, leaning toward Joel. “It’s the heartfelt human-interest story. He’s running for president.”

“Shhh,” hissed a voice behind her. “And can you sit still? I can’t see.”

“So she went to them and said, ‘Let me work in the lab. I’m going to make sure that someday this doesn’t happen to another ninth-grader.’ And every year since, in the summers, for four years, Frannie’s helped out in the lab when she could’ve been having fun. Maybe that’s the key to the Crestview seniors: We don’t hang out at the beach or the mall. We know there’s important work to be done.”

Frannie Rose, who barely knew Mike and had not known he intended to co-opt her life to make a point, stared at her clenched hands and let people assume that she was overcome by grief. She hated every classmate who had avoided her for four years, as though bad news were contagious, and she looked forward to attending Bates College primarily because no one else at Crestview
was going there. This was the last day she would be Frannie Rose whose father had dropped dead on the golf course at forty-five. Next fall she would be Frannie Rose, period. She could not wait to leave.

“Crestview teaches us to step up, more than it teaches us AP Calculus BC, though aren’t there more of us in that class this year than ever before? It teaches us to step into the world and claim our destiny, whether it be as a heart researcher like Frannie, or a famous director, which may be my fate, or…”

Trey never heard the final component of the holy trinity, after altruism and artistry, because he was on his feet, heading toward the building, as soon as Mike launched into the business about that poor girl whose father had died. People who did not know Trey assumed that he had been overcome by emotion. People who did know him gave him a free pass for this kind of behavior, because he was Preston Bradley III, and his responsibilities did not end at family time, not even on graduation day. He slipped through the building and out to the front courtyard, leaned against the nearest pillar, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw Ted standing three pillars down, in much the same when-will-it-end posture. Trey walked over to him, wordlessly lit a cigarette, and blew as perfect a smoke ring as his grandfather ever had. For eighteen years, ever since Four was born, Trey had limited himself to one cigarette a week, always smoked out of range of his boy’s lungs. He enjoyed them far more than he ever had during his chain-smoking college days.