by Ariel Kaplan
ALSO BY ARIEL KAPLAN
Grendel’s Guide to Love and War
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locales, or university admissions practices is entirely coincidental. Except for Harvard. It really is that hard to get in.
Text copyright © 2018 by Ariel Kaplan
Cover art copyright © 2018 by Maggie Edkins
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9781524773700 (trade) — ISBN 9781524773717 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781524773724
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Also by Ariel Kaplan
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1/2
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Acknowledgments
About the Author
FOR MY PARENTS
In the beginning, there is a formula.
Actually, there are several formulas. You start learning them in algebra and then keep going, because you need them to pass your classes and eventually graduate. You memorize formulas to get through geometry, through science and SATs and AP exams. You fill your brain with exponents and derivatives, wondering When am I ever going to use this? and the answer for most people is probably “never,” but learn them you do, because the alternative is a lifetime of misery and poverty and unemployment. Learn them or you will not pass GO. You will not collect two hundred dollars. Your life, it seems, will be ruined in some strange, horrible, undefinable way. You imagine yourself on your deathbed, reaching out a withered hand to future grandchildren, beckoning them closer, closer, to impart the wisdom you wish you had possessed in your youth, before your life was derailed, misspent. “If only,” your aged self says, “I had remembered the quadratic reciprocity theorem.” And then: death.
So you learn your formulas: the Pythagorean theorem, the quadratic equation, E=mc2, and all that. And then, just when you’re approaching the finish line, when high school seems so, so close to being over, you have to learn the biggest, ugliest formula of them all.
The college admissions formula.
This is the formula that hangs over you from the first day of high school until the day you walk out again, mortarboard atop your head, diploma in your hand, as your mother cries and takes way too many pictures. It’s the formula you parse out in dreams, pick at while eating pizza during student government meetings or studying for finals that account for precisely 20% of your grade. The one you wake up thinking about every morning, the one you breathe in and out like heavy oxygen, filling your lungs with it as you walk from class to class, as you grip your pencil while you scribble on pop quizzes, as you flex your tired fingers while you hammer out essays on keyboards. It lingers behind your eyes as you drift off to sleep, dreaming of that single “YES” that will be the key to unlocking four years of learning and networking, and a lifetime of success to follow.
It looks like this:
Like I said, it isn’t pretty. It’s also unofficial, since every college has its own secret formula, but this is as close as the administration at Blanchard High has been able to approximate. This formula is on a poster in Ms. Pendleton’s college counseling office, and we’ve all worked it out for ourselves, inputting our GPAs and SAT scores to figure out our college admissions number. Mine, for example, is 812. The higher your score, the more likely you are to get in wherever you’re applying.
The upshot is that it’s pretty easy to predict whether you’ll be accepted at most schools. (I say most because at schools like Harvard or Stanford that reject almost everyone it’s a total crapshoot, even if the formula shows that you ought to get in. It’s just that hard.)
So I knew what my chances were when I sat down during the spring of my junior year and assembled a list of reach schools, middle-of-the-road schools, and a safety. Seven schools total. I was confident. I was prepared. I was a college admissions machine.
Once my applications were signed, sealed, and delivered, there was nothing to do but sit back and wait for the acceptance letters to roll in.
The morning I started to suspect that Ms. Pendleton’s equation had some holes in it, I was late for school. Mom and I were on the way to the Metro; we share a car, and on the days I have stuff to do after school I drop her off to take the train into Arlington. We’re a well-oiled machine in the morning; to get both of us where we need to be on time, we have to go out the front door by 7:10. This gives us fifteen extra minutes of wiggle room in case we hit traffic, or someone spills coffee on themselves and has to change again, or whatever.
Mom was driving so I’d have time to eat a bagel before I had to switch seats at the station, and with my free hand I was fiddling with the radio, bouncing back and forth between the morning news, which my mom wanted to listen to, and the music I was listening to during the commercials. I wasn’t really 100% awake yet; I hoped she was, because she was driving, and then there was a huge clunk followed by rattle-rattle-rattle, and then my mother looked in the rearview mirror and said, “Holy crap.” I turned and looked, and there were sparks coming from the back of the car.
“Pull over,” I said, dropping my bagel. “Pull over, pull over, WE ARE ON FIRE.”
“I’m working on it,” she said through gritted teeth. “It’s not on fire. Yet.”
“There are sparks!”
“I’m aware of the sparks! Can I get to the right?”
My mom is always doing this thing where I have to copilot and tell her if she can merge. I have no idea what she does when I’m not in the car. “It’s fine,” I said. “Just go. Go. Go like you mean it. No, wait. Wait!” This last bit was because she’d waited too long, and there was a truck bearing down on us from the right lane.
“You said I could go!” she shouted, jerking back into her lane.
“You could have, when I actually said it!”
“I was merging!”
“You flinched! You can’t flinch on 95!”
“I think there might be fire now,” she said. “Do you smell that?”
“Get over,” I said. “Get over get over get over.”
She merged and pulled over to the shoulder. The car made an ungodly scraping sound as it came to a stop.
Both of us turned to look out the back window. I couldn’t see any flames, but there was smoke, and something smelled like burnt motor oil.
“What happened?” I said, still looking out the rear window, hoping that nothing was getting ready to explode back there.
“Muffler, I think,” she said. She got out of the car and went around to the back, and I followed. “Oof,” she said. The muffler had indeed detached itself from the bottom of the car and was being dragged on the asphalt by whatever it was attached to on the other end. A bolt? I have no idea what holds mufflers on.
“I’m thinking that’s bad?” I said.
“It’s bad.”
“Can you, like, put it back? Maybe with duct tape?”
“Duct tape,” she said, mulling it over. “No, we’ll have to get it towed.”
“Great,” I said. “I’m supposed to be in calculus in half an hour.” I pulled out my phone and started texting to see if anyone could come and pick me up, but it was still early, and nobody answered.
“Nate?” Mom said. “Caroline?”
“Still asleep,” I said. “They’re not answering.”
“Well, you’ll just have to go in a cab,” she said.
“Mom,” I said. “I don’t think—”
“It’s fine.”
“A Lyft would be cheaper,” I said.
“I’m not putting my eighteen-year-old in a Lyft,” she said. “Anybody could be driving it.”
“Do you know how much a cab is going to cost?”
Stupid question. She knew exactly how much it would cost.
“Here’s what’s happening,” she said. “You’re going to school in a cab. I’m going to wait here for the tow truck.” She rubbed her face with her hand. “I had a nine o’clock meeting today.”
We stared at the dead car. I don’t usually think about how much depends on a big chunk of metal and an internal combustion engine, but one sheared-off bolt was all it took to set us scrambling. The car repair and the cab would both end up on the credit card, my mom would miss her meeting, and if I was very lucky, I wouldn’t miss a pop quiz in calculus.
Ten minutes later my cab showed up. I gave the driver directions to my school and then sat back to listen to twenty minutes of the second act of Hamilton, plus three different cell phone conversations in Amharic. Then Hamilton died (both literally and metaphorically) and the music ended, and then the driver was singing along with Evita, and I guess the driver had watched too much Phantom of the Opera because he kept saying “Sing! SING!” and seemed annoyed that all I knew was the chorus, and also that I really don’t sing all that well.
I got out after the second verse of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” shutting the door as the driver belted out, They are illooooooosions…and wondering if this guy had had theatrical aspirations before settling down as a cabdriver, because he sang like a dream but did not seem to know how to, like, parallel park.
The forty-dollar cab got me to school ten minutes past the bell, and I had to sprint through the building, racing past Mr. Pelletier, the assistant head, who looked like he would really have liked to give me service hours, except he was already in the middle of giving service hours to someone else.
The rest of my calculus class was still half-asleep as I slid into my chair, sweaty and panting, but Mr. Bronstein frowned at me as I pulled out my notebook. “Miss Abramavicius,” he said. “You are aware that your grades this quarter will be sent to your college?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, still puffing.
“And we still have the AP exam coming up,” he went on. “Unless you are looking forward to repeating this class in college with a less understanding instructor.” He pointed at me with his dry-erase pen. “One who locks the latecomers out of the classroom.”
I wondered if that was an actual thing that happened. “I’m sorry,” I said. “My mom’s car died.”
He nodded thoughtfully. I was a “special case” at Blanchard because I was a senior and I didn’t have my own car. I wasn’t the only person there on a scholarship, not by a long shot, but I spent less time trying to pretend than the others. We aren’t poor, but the tuition at Blanchard is almost as much as my mother makes in a year, and I don’t think it’s particularly shameful not to have a cool forty thousand dollars a year sitting around collecting dust. The school fronted me three-quarters of my tuition, and my mother went broke paying the last bit.
“This is the best education you can get,” Mom said when we went without things like vacations or new shoes or takeout. “You know, we live in a global economy. You’re competing against people from all over the world. That’s how things are now.”
It was a speech I heard often. It wasn’t enough to compete against the kids from my school, or the mid-Atlantic, or the US. I was competing against people from China and Germany and Brazil, and would be for the rest of my life. How many people are there these days? Seven billion? The idea of all those people fighting for all the same things I wanted weighed on me. It was like circling the parking lot at the mall on Christmas Eve and discovering that there was one spot left—and several million people were already there, lined up to snatch it. If I thought about it too much, it made my head hurt.
Mr. Bronstein turned back toward the board and started discussing derivatives, which I already knew how to do, and I absentmindedly took some notes on what he was saying. My phone buzzed in my purse, and after deciding that no one was paying attention, I fished it out of my bag and stashed it on my knee.
It was a text from Caroline Black, who was sitting two rows behind me on the other side of the room.
Did you hear? she texted.
Hear what?
Oh my God, it’s Admissions Day. You did NOT forget.
But I had. A day so significant I had not even bothered to write it down. I’d been waiting for it forever, but with the car situation it had slipped out of my mind, and I hadn’t thought about it since breakfast. Not every college sends out emails on Admissions Day: it’s only for the Ivies and some of the other top schools, which have some kind of agreement to tell everyone on the same day, aside from the early-decision folks. At Blanchard it’s become like a party day for the super-high achievers, the day we’ve been waiting for since we enrolled (or, in some cases, since preschool). Parents wait on standby to throw impromptu dinner parties for kids who get into Haverford, or set up emergency therapy sessions for kids who don’t. It’s like having a stripper pop out of a cake and declare the direction of the rest of your life, with all the awkwardness that implies. I’d made a point of not telling my mom about it, because it would have made her nuts, and the last thing she needs is more stress.
It’s also the last thing I need, but I’m younger and more durable. I think.
I turned around and glanced at Caroline. She raised her eyebrows at me.
I texted, AND?
I totally got into Dartmouth, beyotch.
!!! I typed, which looked dumb, but it’s hard to text enthusiasm. Dartmouth, I knew, was Caroline’s first choice. I’ll get you a cooki
e at lunch!
YES YOU WILL.
I slid my phone into my purse and went back to half paying attention to calculus. I hadn’t gotten any emails yet, but I knew other people were hearing as responses trickled in and people would let out stifled little shrieks in the middle of class. After calculus, I saw girls standing puffy-eyed in the bathroom, staring unmoving at their own reflections, and I wondered who’d turned them down. I checked my phone after I washed my hands, but so far I’d heard nothing. I sent myself a test email, just to make sure it was working, and it popped right back up in my inbox, and because I’m an idiot, I still jumped a little when it showed up.
The girl at the sink next to me—an underclassman I didn’t know—said, “Well?”
“It was no one,” I said. “No one yet.”
* * *
—
During third period I squeezed into my seat between Nate Miller and Jim Wei; Nate had his laptop out and was working on a paper, and Jim was obsessively hitting refresh on the email app on his phone.
“What are you working on?” I asked Nate, who was in this pattern where he would type three or four words, swear, hit the delete key, and then start over again.
“Eh,” he said. His hair had fallen into his eyes, and he brushed it out of the way. “Leave me alone. This is due in an hour.”
I leaned sideways for a look at the screen and saw that the title was “Heart of Darkness: A Literary Analysis,” which I’m pretty sure was due a couple of days ago. “How much you got?”
