Getting In: A Novel (6 page)

“It’s seven thirty,” said Deena, thinking that it had been a while since Chloe had called her Mommy. “Really, I can take you.”

“If I leave right now it’s a half hour to Dad’s, and maybe I’ll study when I get there instead of waiting until I get back, and then a half hour back, so I’ll be home by ten.”

“What if he’s not home?”

“Then I won’t have to take any extra time talking to him. I can be the world’s most efficient calculus student.” She grabbed
the car keys off the little hook by the kitchen door and sealed the deal with a kiss on Deena’s cheek. “Love you, Mom. Bye.”

Communications technology was kind to high school students: instant-messaging, texting, and the vibrate feature on cell phones made it impossible for a parent passing by the closed door of a child’s room to distinguish between the keyboard clack of homework and the keyboard clack of chatting with friends. Outside Lauren’s bedroom, her parents commented on how nice it was of her to help Chloe with her history paper rather than relax once her own homework was done. Inside Lauren’s bedroom, the girls flitted from talk.collegeconfidential.com to a generalized Google search of “National Merit semifinalist cutoff scores.” Lauren had waited for almost a year to find out whether good news was good enough; she had scored 215 on the PSAT in the fall of junior year, which was exactly the California cutoff score for the previous year’s National Merit scholarship semifinalists, but National Merit issued new state-by-state cutoffs every year, which were almost always higher than the preceding year’s scores. Short of a mysterious infusion of bad test takers into the California population, Lauren had next to no chance of becoming a semifinalist. Unless, of course, she did. There was no way to know until the mailing arrived, except at schools that broke ranks and notified seniors before the official announcement. Word had begun to leak out, so seniors across the country were trolling the Web, looking for clues.

As she and Chloe watched the screen, an Illinois girl set off a flurry of posts by reporting that she had made the cut with a 220. No one congratulated her. All the responses were from Illinois students and parents who demanded to know if 220 was the minimum or if the girl had qualified with 220 but the actual cutoff was lower. As the girl had no interest in what happened to anyone else, she
had not thought to ask, which led ChiTown Teen to post, “I’m sitting here going crazy with a 214. HOW COULD YOU NOT ASK WHAT THE MINIMUM WAS????!!!!???? Selfish biatch. They say SAT scores move toward the middle, so I hope you get a 1900. Watch out if you’re applying to Wash U is all I can say.”

“Nice,” said Chloe.

“Welcome to my world,” said Lauren. “I say ten minutes tops before we hear from Katie.” Lauren had intended to confide her PSAT score only to Chloe, but Katie had pried it out of her under the guise of comradely suffering, as though Katie’s score of 220 was in any way as precarious as Lauren’s 215. A moment later, her cell phone skittered across the bed. Chloe grabbed it and read the message. “She says did you see the 220 in Illinois, she just knows it’ll be lower here and you shouldn’t worry. Why did you tell her?”

The phone jittered again, and this time Lauren dove for it.

“Brad,” she said. “His dad just got a call from Ted and did I get one.” She felt an uncomfortable shudder work up her spine, as her default position of not caring wrestled with a younger, stronger adversary, the notion that all of this mattered tremendously.

A third text. “Katie just got a call from Ted and I have to let her know the minute I hear.”

“Well, fuck,” said Chloe, “what kind of friends are they? I mean, doesn’t anybody the fuck think to ask what the cutoff is?”

“I can’t ask Katie.”

“Ask Brad. Or wait for the phone to ring.”

Lauren sent a text to Brad and sat, immobilized, watching the screen, waiting, but not for long. She read the message and tossed the phone back toward Chloe.

“The cutoff was 216 and he wants to know did I make it. Can you believe it? I can’t believe it.”

A single point. This happened to Lauren far too often to be merely frustrating. If the teacher in the other section of AP
calculus rounded an 89.5 up to a 90 and an A minus, the teacher in Lauren’s section inevitably left it right where it was, as a B plus.
Esos
instead of
esas
on a Spanish translation was the point that would have meant an A, which would have canceled out the B plus, but instead the A minus faced off with the B plus, and lost.

One point and she got a letter of commendation instead of being a semifinalist. One point, and she found herself far more disappointed than she had expected she would be.

“Am I leaving?” Chloe started to gather up her things.

“Yeah, I have to tell my parents before somebody else does, that’s for sure.” Her phone moved again. “Katie’s so very sorry. Not sorry, not very sorry, but so very sorry. She sounds like her mother.”

“Hey, it’s tough only being in the top, what are you? Two percent of all the seniors in the country?”

“One and a half percent,” said Lauren, listlessly.

“Agony,” said Chloe.

The Crestview computer lab was empty, so Katie slipped in right after AP French, retrieved a small dog-eared notebook from a zippered compartment in her purse, and entered the 98 from the first test of the year on the page devoted to AP French. She had kept this book since ninth grade, and while she could hardly go around asking people what their grades were, she always listened carefully and watched the looks on certain of her classmates’ faces. She believed that Brad had an A minus in AP chemistry, and she knew from an overheard tantrum in the girls’ bathroom that the science nerd did not do well enough in AP Latin to pose a threat. Katharine Dodson, National Merit semifinalist at the very least, was almost certainly going to be valedictorian of this year’s Crestview senior class, even with the unweighted A in ceramics.

She tucked the notebook back in its hiding place and decided to take another look at talk.collegeconfidential.com, which was filling up with California posts.

“What’s so funny?”

Instinctively, Katie clicked the site closed and put on her best sympathy smile for Lauren.

“Forever 21 has such slutty clothes, it’s just amazing,” said Katie. “Listen. How’re you doing? It’s crazy, you know, somebody gets semifinalist and a point away you just get a letter…”

“Katie, if you ever say ‘just’ gets a letter again I will hate you for the rest of my life.”

“Can I join?” Brad came in just in time to hear the second half of Lauren’s sentence. “Do we get club T-shirts? Just kidding, Katie.”

She ignored him and glanced at the wall clock.

“Oberlin rep’s coming at lunchtime. Want to go?”

“You’re not applying there,” said Lauren. “Neither am I.”

“Exactly the point.” Katie brushed past Brad and hooked her arm in Lauren’s. “My dad says it’s good practice and it doesn’t matter. We should go pretend we’re desperate to go to Oberlin and see what kinds of things the woman says. What kinds of questions she likes. What she thinks is stupid. C’mon. And they always bring in turkey wraps, so it’s free lunch besides.”

Lauren sighed and followed Katie down to the college counseling conference room, wondering about the potential advantage of having a dad who thought of going to a college rep visit to rehearse versus having parents who had never met a bureaucracy they liked. She and Katie took seats on either side of the Oberlin rep and took notes on how she responded to various questions, on what made her smile, on the way she gently demolished one applicant by pointing out that the answers to all of her questions were on the school’s website. Four of the other attendees, for
whom Oberlin was far and away a first choice, went home that afternoon in varying states of distress and announced to their parents that Katie and Lauren seemed interested in Oberlin, which undoubtedly wrecked their chances of acceptance. On the mere fact of their attendance at the meeting, one girl decided to switch her early application from Oberlin to Grinnell. No one of their caliber had shown up for the Grinnell lunch.

On their way out, Katie leaned in close to whisper, “You should ask Ted how many semifinalists there are, total.”

“To make myself even more miserable?”

“How can you say that?” asked Katie. “I meant as news editor. I thought you might not be thinking about it right now, you know, but isn’t there usually an article when the names come out?”

Ocean Heights High School was a vestige of an era when insulation was asbestos, paint was lead-based, and the only students who went to private schools on the West Coast were debutantes or discipline problems or devout Catholics. It was one of the better public high schools in Los Angeles, which was an accomplishment in a universe where no one used superlatives anymore, but every year budget cuts claimed another chunk of the curriculum. The custodians regularly mopped and buffed the floors of rooms that no one used—the dance studio, the little theater, the girls’ gymnastics gym. If a senior tracked the fresh buffer marks on the linoleum floor, she could always find a pristine and empty room where she could hide to catch her breath.

When Liz needed to call her parents, she liked the privacy of the long, narrow locker room on the far side of the swimming pool. Now that swimming was no longer part of the physical education rotation, the locker room filled up twice a day at most, before school when the team practiced and after school during the com
petition season. Sometimes it was empty for weeks on end. She slipped in before lunch and left an identical voice-mail message for her mother and her father.

“I got National Merit,” she said. “I am a semifinalist. They gave me the letter today so I wanted to let you know. Not a surprise, but it feels very nice.”

Chloe, who often hid out in the deeper recesses of the locker room to sketch without anyone seeing her, waited until she heard the swinging doors swoosh a second time and counted ten fading footsteps before she closed her pad and took out her phone.

She texted Lauren. “Math tutor scores on NMerit. Let’s fix her up w Brad.”

Lauren read the message and flipped her phone shut, fast, before Brad could see what Chloe had written. She took a pair of latex gloves out of the lab station drawer and reminded herself sternly that her fetal pig dissection was not merely a lab exercise but a brick in the foundation of her future. That was one of the phrases Ted liked to use. Another of his favorites: first-quarter grades are the swing states of the college application process, and they can make the difference between acceptance and rejection for an early-decision candidate. Regular-decision kids had to hold it together for an entire semester, but the early applicants had nine weeks to make a good impression. As she made the first incision, she was sure that Ted’s comment was the reason the biology teacher always scheduled the dissection for first quarter, and grateful that she had drawn Brad as a lab partner. He was getting AP credit because he had a scheduling conflict with AP bio and Ted had insisted that the regular-section teacher accommodate him, and Lauren depended on credibility by association.

Second quarter, she might have been tempted to say that she had a profound moral objection to the use of dead lab animals. By second semester, she happily would have threatened to throw
up all over the lab station rather than do the dissection. First quarter, she would cut open a dead pig even if her family kept kosher.

“What do you think I should call myself next year?” asked Brad, who was kind enough to take over scalpel duties whenever the teacher turned his back.

“What?”

“Nobody gets to call me Four in college. I need a name.”

“Nobody calls you Four but your dad. Just be Brad.”

“But he thinks it’d be cool to be Four at Harvard, you know, because then people would ask and I could tell them about the other three.”

“Say he has Alzheimer’s when he comes to visit.”

“Right. ‘Listen, if my dad starts using numbers for people just ignore it, that’s how he keeps track.’” He pushed aside a piece of porcine gristle and wrote a note down in his lab book, which he loaned to Lauren every weekend because she and Chloe were the only girls he knew who occasionally said what they meant to say. “My mom thinks I should switch to Preston.”

Lauren glanced over and was amazed at how sad Brad looked, as though a fourth-generation Harvard legacy who was probably down to the wire with Katie for valedictorian had any reason to be upset.

“Call yourself Gene,” she said.

“Why?”

“It’s such a dumb name. You could use something dumb in your life.”

The dark secret of Brad’s life was that he was a virgin, despite the legions of Crestview girls who swore, with a knowing smile and a sigh, that they had succumbed to his charms. It was all the fault of the girl who was in the same inner-city ecology program as Brad
the summer before their junior year, and was assigned as his partner to drive around South Central and East L.A., instructing people on the dangers of all the things in their environment that they could not afford to repair or replace. In the morning, they pointed at flakes of lead-based paint and rattled off statistics about toddler brain damage, or suggested planting trees to absorb emissions. In the afternoon, having left behind parents plastered with a thick new layer of helpless rage, they fought their way back home, making their own contribution to the particulate layer. It was a long ride, made longer by the fact that rush hour began at two in the afternoon. The girl had since been sent to a boarding school where she had to get up at five in the morning to feed the chickens, but that summer she had devoted her excess energy to Brad, who in turn had worked very hard to fend her off.

He did not like her, and after weeks of being polite he finally had to tell her so—at which point she promptly told everyone she knew about their wild night of passion. Wild nights, actually; by the time the story got around, like a secret whispered around the table at a five-year-old’s birthday party, it had mutated and grown into a summer’s orgy of fun. To his horror, it spawned offspring. During junior year, a dozen other girls came up with stories of their mad fling with Brad. And then Katie joined their ranks, in retaliation for Brad informing her that a second month of dating was pointless because they really did not get along. He had never gotten north of the fabric-care tag on the side seam of her T-shirts, never wanted to, never tried, which enraged her. She chimed in to the chorus of conquered voices with stories that frightened him in their specificity, almost daring him to contradict her.