We Regret to Inform You

by Ariel Kaplan

  “Three paragraphs. This book sucks.”

  “You could have watched Apocalypse Now. It’s basically the same thing.”

  “I hated that, too.” He pushed the computer away and tapped my hand. “I just got your text, by the way, about needing a ride. Call the house next time and tell my mom to wake me up.”

  I shrugged.

  “No, I mean it. I don’t hear my phone if I’m asleep, but Mom’ll wake me up if you tell her to.”

  I pulled out my own phone and refreshed my email a few times to end the conversation. It’s kind of awkward being Nate’s “poor” friend sometimes, especially since no one in the real world thinks I’m poor. But the first time Nate came to visit me at my townhouse, he’d thought we owned the whole block, that it was one big house, not five houses pushed together.

  “So what are you going to tell Ms. Parker?” I asked when it was obvious no college emails were forthcoming.

  “I don’t know.” He rubbed his temple. “I think I feel a migraine coming on.”

  “You look a little sick,” I said, which was totally not true.

  “Maybe I should go to the nurse.”

  Nate had faked so many migraines over the last six months that his parents had taken him to a specialist, who prescribed him some very expensive pills that he never took. As far as coping mechanisms go, I guess it wasn’t a bad one.

  He closed his computer and looked across me at Jim, who was still hitting refresh, refresh, refresh on his email. “A watched pot never boils, dude.”

  “Actually,” Jim said without looking up, “it does. The watching has no effect on the temperature.”

  “Okay,” Nate said. “Make yourself nuts if you need to.”

  Jim rolled his eyes and stowed his phone. “So did you hear? Meredith Dorsay got into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “All of them?”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t hear her screaming. She sounded like the freaking fire alarm.”

  “Huh,” I said, because all I could think was Meredith Dorsay heard back from Harvard and Princeton, and I had not, and what did that mean?

  “Yeah, her mom picked her up from school. In a limo.”

  Nate made a face. “What for? She has a car.”

  “Caitlin Mayfair said they were on their way to the airport. They’re going to Paris for the weekend.”

  “Caitlin Mayfair is full of it.”

  “Yeah, well, I know she left, though, because she was supposed to be in calculus with me last period and she wasn’t there.”

  I shrugged. I, for one, hoped that Meredith actually had gone to Paris. Maybe she’d stay there until graduation.

  “Hey,” Jim said. “Maybe if you get into Harvard, too, you guys can be roomies.”

  I gave him my best death glare, which lacked the desired effect, since it made him crack up. “Don’t worry, Vicious,” he said. “You’ve got everything Meredith’s got. You’re a shoo-in.”

  I nodded, because it was true. I had the grades, the scores, the extracurriculars. Not the internships, maybe, but that was because I had an actual paying job in the summer. Not the random trips to Paris, either. Or the limo. Probably mufflers don’t fall off limos, or if they do, the people riding in them don’t trouble themselves over it.

  Mrs. Freeport started class, and I was taking some halfhearted notes on the failure of the Bohr model to accurately describe the atom when my phone beeped with a new email. I slipped it under the lab table, just long enough to see if it was from a college.

  It was from Princeton.

  Princeton, like most of the other Ivies, has an admissions website; you log in with your student PIN, and a message pops up to tell you whether you got in or not. Nate peered over my shoulder to see what I was doing, and I shut my phone off and stuck it into the pocket of my jeans. Then I put my hand in the air and asked to go to the bathroom.

  Two minutes later I locked myself in a stall and clicked through to the Princeton website. I imagined going back into the room to tell Nate and Jim I’d gotten in. Maybe someone would get me a cookie at lunch.

  The website popped up, and I entered my PIN, drew in a triumphant breath, and clicked NEXT.

  Status, it said. Not accepted.

  “WHAT?” I said too loudly, and the girl in the stall next to me said, “What is your problem?”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  I stared at the screen. I refreshed the screen. Nope. Nope.

  Maybe, I thought, I’d entered the wrong PIN. But there was my name, Mischa Abramavicius, and my birth date, and it said, NO NO NO.

  “No way,” I whispered.

  I banged my head against the stall door.

  “Are you taking a pregnancy test in there?” the girl said.

  “No,” I said. “No. Everything’s fine.”

  “ ’Cause I’m trying to PEE here.”

  “And no one’s stopping you.”

  “I have a shy bladder and you’re being seriously intrusive.”

  “Just go to the bathroom. Jesus.”

  “Maybe you could have your breakdown somewhere else?”

  “I’m not having a breakdown!”

  “Well, whatever. Go away.”

  I looked at the shoes of the girl next to me. Black lug-soled Mary Janes with lace tights. Probably they belonged to Shira Gastman, which meant that she was waiting for me to leave so she could smoke a joint in the stall. “Nice shoes,” I said.

  “Would you go?”

  “I’m going,” I said. Just not to Princeton, apparently. Crap.

  I stared down at my phone one last time, reminding myself that Princeton was one of those schools the formula didn’t exactly apply to, because there were just more qualified applicants than spots. I could have lost out to the entire Olympic gymnastics team, or to that girl I read about who published her first novel at sixteen. People with that crazy “it” factor that most of us have no shot at getting. It was fine. It was fine. It was fine. I shut off my phone and went to tuck it into my pocket and

  fumbled

  it

  into

  the

  toilet.

  I stared down at it for a minute. It had already sunk to the bottom of the bowl. I said, “Damn it.”

  “Really?” said Shira.

  Then, because there was nothing else to do, I picked my phone up out of the toilet, dried it off with some toilet paper, and stuck it back in my pocket, knowing full well it would probably never work again.

  I slumped back to class, where Nate looked at me expectantly. “So?” he whispered.

  “So what?” I asked, still contemplating the replacement cost of my phone. It hadn’t been an expensive one, at least.

  “Princeton?”

  “You are so nosy!”

  “Like you wouldn’t ask.”

  “Mischa,” Mrs. Freeport said. “Nate. Please.”

  “Sorry,” I said. Nate smiled and ducked his head. He leaned over and wrote PRINCETON? on my notes.

  I stared forward. I shook my head the barest amount possible.

  NO WAY, he wrote.

  I was a little touched that he thought I’d be such a shoo-in. But it didn’t exactly make me feel better. I kept thinking, though, that I couldn’t imagine how I hadn’t even ended up on the wait list.

  From my other side, Jim wrote, I heard that some schools make deals with each other, like if you apply to both only one will take you. It keeps their acceptance numbers low.

  Who told you that?

  My aunt’s friend is in the admissions office at Cornell.

  So how do they decide which school takes you?

  Not sure about that part. But maybe this means you’re in at Harvard?

  This sounded like wishful thinking to me.

>   All through the rest of the day, I watched as people’s phones pinged, and their owners either whooped or burst into tears. A few hardier souls turned their phones off, because they didn’t want to have to get the news in front of everyone else. I didn’t want to tell anyone about my phone’s potty adventures, so I claimed to be doing the same. “I’m waiting until the end of the day,” I said. “I’m not really worried about it.” Ha. Ha. Ha.

  So I didn’t get my email from Harvard until I went home and fired up my mom’s ancient laptop.

  I copied my PIN into Harvard’s website and closed my eyes. I counted to ten. I opened them again.

  I hadn’t gotten in there, either.

  It was okay, I told myself as I lay on my bed with my calculus notes. Harvard and Princeton are long shots for everyone, and both had been contingent on my getting big bucks in financial aid anyway, so there’d always been a chance that I might not have been able to go even if I had gotten in. And I still had five schools left. It was too bad, but it was okay. I was okay. I just had to wait for the others, and those should be coming in any time now. Any time now.

  Any. Time.

  My mother came home from work an hour later. She was a lawyer with Legal Helpline, which means that she spent the day working with people who needed lawyers but couldn’t afford them, and she didn’t know what to expect from day to day. Sometimes she got some really sad cases: parents trying to get custody arrangements changed, people with immigration status problems, all kinds of things. That day, she looked particularly tired.

  “Hey, Mischa,” she said. “Good news: the car’s fixed. I think. How was school?”

  “It was fine,” I said. “Nate got sick, though. I need to take him my government notes later.” Nate had gone AWOL right after physics, probably with the expected migraine. He’d called my landline after school.

  “You aren’t answering my texts,” he’d said. “Are you dead?”

  “I’m not,” I’d said. “But my phone might be. What’s up?”

  “Wait list at Northwestern,” he’d said. “I’m on it.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I’m still holding out for Emory anyway. Chicago’s too cold in the winter.”

  “Yeah,” I’d said, because Chicago is cold in the winter. Emory, I knew, was Nate’s first choice and had been for years. “So did you finish your Heart of Darkness paper?”

  “Gaaaaah…don’t ask me that. I’m going to have to ask for another extension.”

  “Another one? How do you keep getting these?”

  “My eyes,” he’d said, “are very blue.”

  “Ha.”

  “If you bring me your government notes later, I’ll love you forever.”

  I’d known Nate long enough to know that he was not going to love me forever, government notes or not, but I’d said, “Yeah, fine.”

  “You’re the best.”

  “I know.”

  * * *

  —

  “Again?” my mother said. “That kid.” Which meant either Poor Nate, he’s sick all the time or That kid is going to be living in his parents’ basement until he’s forty if he doesn’t get it together. Or possibly both. My mother liked Nate, but when she looked at him, she saw a bona fide parental nightmare. Success was defined in a limited way for Norah Abramavicius: it meant college graduate school job. Or possibly, college medical school job. Actually, she would probably be okay with just college job, too, if it came right down to it. But anything that didn’t involve higher education and employment (and me living someplace that was not with her) was a disaster too horrible to contemplate.

  Nate and I had been lab partners in biology freshman year; I’d come in from public school, and it seemed like everyone else at Blanchard had known each other from kindergarten, which made making friends kind of a problem, and I had to remind myself on the regular that I was there for the education—for the diploma—and not for the companionship. But then I went to Nate’s house after school one day, and we ended up spending four hours watching Gilmore Girls reruns on Netflix, and I’d really wanted to kiss him, but he was dating Pete Neilson, so I figured he was gay, and by the time I realized he was bi, I was pretty much in the friend zone, which is fine, because Nate’s great, and this way I get to be with him with no drama or breakups.

  There’s no making out, either, which is kind of unfortunate, but oh well.

  I probably should have told Mom right then about Princeton and Harvard, and I took a deep breath to do it, too, but then it occurred to me that there was absolutely no point in telling her at that exact moment. If I waited a few days, or maybe a week, I’d hear back from my other schools. Telling her I’d been rejected from Harvard and Princeton wouldn’t matter so much if I was telling her that I’d gotten in a bunch of other places at the same time, and there was no point in making her feel bad for no reason. The only people who knew were Jim and Nate, and they and my mother did not, so far as I knew, attend the same coffee klatches, so it wasn’t like she was going to hear it from either of them.

  So instead of saying, I have wasted three and a half years of effort and a very expensive private school education! I said, “What’s for dinner?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Shoot. I was supposed to stop at the store on my way home from the garage. I was going to make tacos. I don’t have the shells.”

  “We could just do them like burritos,” I said, which is what we’d done the last time we’d been out of shells on Taco Night.

  “No tortillas.”

  “Um. Nachos?”

  “No chips.”

  “Taco salad?”

  “No lettuce.”

  “Erm. Taco sandwiches?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Now that’s just sad.”

  But no one wanted to go back out, and we needed to use up the ground beef, so we had taco sandwiches on soggy white bread, which had been on sale the week before. They weren’t terrible, actually. That’s a lie. They were super bad. Anyway, afterward, I went to see Nate.

  He’d gotten into Emory, and his mother had come home with a cake.

  * * *

  —

  That night, while my mom was in the shower, I snuck back into her room and checked my email again. I hadn’t told her about my phone. It was currently stashed in a box of rice, which I hoped would dry it out enough to make it usable again, but that meant I couldn’t even try to turn it back on for three days, which was a huge pain.

  I had trouble looking at the screen when my email opened up, but I could still see right away that I’d gotten a bunch of new messages. College messages.

  I took a deep breath, in and out. This was it. The moment I’d been anticipating for four years. Longer, even. Since I was old enough to know what college was. Maybe first grade? I dimly remembered a trip Mom and I had taken into DC; I’m not sure why we’d gone, maybe we were having lunch with one of her friends, but afterward she’d taken me through the Georgetown campus. I remembered all the students, who looked like real grown-ups to me, since I’d only been seven or so. They were so beautiful, I thought, talking and laughing and swinging their arms, carelessly brilliant as they made their way to class, carrying stacks of books under their arms or stuffed into messenger bags. The buildings looked to me like they were a thousand years old. “If you work very, very hard at school,” my mother had said, “maybe you can go here someday, too.”

  I’d looked up at her. I was a pretty good kid, I thought. I usually did my homework, and when I didn’t, I’d get a lecture and then feel bad. My grandmother had escaped from life behind the Iron Curtain at the age of five; she and her own mother—who had survived the Shoah and avoided the camps by the skin of her teeth—had fled through East Berlin before the wall was built. “Grandma didn’t escape from Communism,” my mom would say, when tiny Mischa would balk at writing out her spelling word
s, “so you could mess around.” The lecture worked: I seldom messed around. I thought I was working pretty hard, but I guess I could have worked harder. And if I did, my mother was telling me, there would be a reward at the end.

  Then a Frisbee had hit me in the knee. It didn’t really hurt, but I said, “OW!” and bent to pick it up. A boy—I’d thought he was a man, then—ran over to get it. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m a terrible shot with this thing.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, handing him the Frisbee back. I don’t really remember what he looked like, just the overall impression that he’d been tall and gangly. He ran back to his friends, tossing the Frisbee in front of him, and everyone laughed, this gang of boys and girls, on their way to study French or chemistry or psychology. I’d never seen so many people who looked so happy in one place. And why shouldn’t they be happy? Shining stars, every one of them, passing through on their way to a bigger, better life.

  I opened the emails, one by one. And then, after I’d read them, I cleared my mother’s browser history, shut the computer down, and went back to my own room, where I spent the next five hours staring at the ceiling.

  Dear Miss Abramavicius,

  We regret to inform you that we cannot offer you admission at this time. Our admissions process was very competitive this year, and we had to turn away many worthy candidates. We thank you for your interest and wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

  Regards,

  Georgetown University

  Dear Miss Abramavicius,

  It is with great regret that we must tell you blah blah blah many qualified applicants, etc.

  Most sincerely,

  Williams College

  Dear Miss Abramavicius,

  Too bad. So sad.

  Best wishes for your future,

  Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

  Dear Miss Abramavicius,

  Nope.

  Good luck, sucker,