We Regret to Inform You

by Ariel Kaplan

  But I was pretty sure an A− in ninth-grade gym didn’t keep you from getting into college.

  I walked into the bathroom before calculus that morning and stepped directly into the path of Meredith Dorsay, who was walking out. She stopped when she saw me, putting an arm out to block my path.

  Meredith Dorsay was the scion of an old Virginia family that had owned several plantations before turning to railroads and then real estate development and then state politics. Meredith’s father had been the black sheep of the family and had rebelled by marrying not the daughter of some other wealthy family, as had been expected, but the scientist who headed the ovarian cancer research division at NIH. Why this had been a scandal was puzzling to me; Nate had tried to explain that it had something to do with her lack of connections or her hair being too curly, but I’d never really understood. Rich people are just weird sometimes.

  Anyway, Meredith had money, great gobs of it. If the universe was fair, she would have been stupid, or at least of middling intelligence, but instead Meredith had inherited her mind from her mother.

  It’s hard to survive this level of privilege while also maintaining a semblance of humility. Meredith had not done so. She was not humble. She was not kind. Actually, and rather unfortunately, she was something of a schmuck.

  That’s unfair. She was a schmuck of epic proportions. The schmuck. The schmuck’s schmuck. All lesser schmucks trembled before her.

  “Michelle,” Meredith said. This was our own private joke. Well, it was her private joke. Our freshman PE teacher had steadfastly refused to call me by the right name all year, and while I’m pretty used to people bungling my last name, the first-name thing could not have been anything but deliberate. I’d been “Michelle” in her class until June, which everyone found hysterical. Nobody else seemed to remember it but Meredith, though.

  “I thought you were in France,” I said, ducking under her arm and stopping at the sink to fix my hair, because I didn’t want to go into the stall and pee until she’d left the bathroom.

  She snorted. “I went to L’Auberge Paris for lunch. Not France.”

  I got my brush out of my bag and started working on my hair. “Huh,” I said.

  “John Andrews got into UCLA,” she said, crossing her arms.

  “Did he?” I said, knowing perfectly well it was true, because I’d been in the room when he’d gotten the email.

  “Marissa Singh is going to Oberlin.”

  When I didn’t respond, she added, “Tara Goddard is going to Duke.” She traced a finger along the edge of the sink next to me. “I haven’t heard anything about where you’re going, though.”

  I swallowed. “I’m a private person.”

  She chuckled. “Yeah, but that’s the thing, isn’t it? You aren’t. I know every test score you’ve gotten in government this year. I know your SAT scores.” She dropped her voice. “I even know you got an A− in gym freshman year.” She made a tsk sound. “Didn’t even know that was possible. But I don’t know where you got into college.” She leaned closer. “Why is that?”

  I put my brush back in my backpack. I was going to have to hold it until next period, because no way was I finishing this discussion. “Because it’s none of your business? Why do you even care?”

  “It’s not that I care,” she said. “I’m just curious.”

  “Those two things tend to be mutually dependent,” I said, “and I’m late to class.”

  Her face lit. “You didn’t get in.”

  I took a step toward the door, but she moved sideways to block me. “Who? Who rejected you? Harvard? Princeton?” Her eyes took on a greedy gleam. “Both?”

  I checked her with my shoulder and moved past her, but she laughed and said, “It’s okay, Michelle. We can’t all be special snowflakes.”

  I spun around and glared at her.

  She chuckled. “Someone has to dig the ditches.”

  I made it as far as my desk in calculus before I started dry-heaving.

  “Mischa?” Mr. Bronstein said. “You okay?”

  “Just—” I said as another spasm seized my stomach. “I’m not…no.” An awful noise came up my throat, and everyone in the room made sounds of disgust, waiting for my breakfast to hit the floor. I bolted for the nurse’s office, which was closer than the bathroom.

  The nurse was running a thermometer over some freshman’s forehead when I came in, and from the other room, I could hear the sounds of racking sobs. Wordlessly she handed me a wastebasket, which I heaved into for a minute. Nothing came up, though, and I sank down onto the nearest cot and put the trash can on the floor.

  “Okay?” she asked.

  I nodded, and she handed me a bottle of water from the little refrigerator where she keeps antibiotics and stuff. “Try drinking little sips,” she said soothingly. I did, and my stomach slowly unclenched.

  I closed my eyes and breathed through my nose, because I was starting to feel like, now that I wasn’t going to barf, I might just hyperventilate instead. Meredith knew. She didn’t know what she knew, but she knew I hadn’t gotten into anyplace really good, because if I had, I would have told everyone. She was probably telling people right now. But what did I expect? Everybody was going to figure it out at some point, unless I lied and said I’d gotten in someplace I hadn’t. Everyone would know what a failure I was.

  My mother would know. She would know, because I would have to tell her.

  Damn.

  I imagined her face. She would pretend to be okay with it. Her face would get that frozen look it gets sometimes, when something awful has happened—there’s mold in the basement or the roof is leaking or whatever—and she would say, We’ll get through this. Then she would go in the other room and, what? Cry? Rage? Wish I’d never been born, probably. My mother got pregnant with me while she was in law school, and my dad’s not really in the picture. All I know about him is his name, and that I’m supposed to have his complexion, and he lives in Boston.

  If Mom hadn’t had me, maybe she’d have taken a different career track. She could have gone into some high-paying corporate-law position of the kind you can’t really do if you’re the single mother of a baby. Or maybe she could have even gotten married somewhere along the line. To someone who could have picked up the slack at home while she climbed the corporate ladder, or to someone rich who would have let her do the kind of pro bono work she likes to do when she has extra time. But no. She had me instead. And I was about to pull out her heart and stomp on it.

  I’d already told Nate in a middle-of-the-night text confessional, and that had been bad enough. He’d said, Are you sure? and I’d said, Yes, I’m sure, and he’d said, Not even VA Tech? and I’d said, Nope, and he’d said, Are you sure? again, and then I’d had to turn my phone off because the whole scenario was so utterly unbearable.

  I put the bottle of water down, because I didn’t think I really deserved to feel better. Meredith was right. I wasn’t special. I was just another peon, another salmon trying to make it upstream, and the current had been too much for me. The magnitude of my failure pulled me down, down, down, until I felt like I was at the bottom of the ocean, looking up at everyone around me through ten million gallons of water. I would never be able to make this up to Mom. Never.

  I lay down for the rest of calculus and ended up running into Nate on my way to lunch. Today’s Emory sweatshirt was navy blue with an embroidered crest, and I hated noticing that it made his eyes look even bluer than they really are. He walked with a bounce in his step, like a man who was on his way to his dream school, his dream life. I walked like a girl who had just spent the past ten minutes with her head in a trash can full of used Kleenex and dirty Band-Aids.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” he said, which annoyed me, because I knew I looked like hell. He fell into step alongside me and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “Any news?”

  I
shook my head. “Just the usual apocalypse.”

  “So no word from Revere?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Well, of course you’ll get in there. It’s like a joke to think you won’t.”

  “Nate,” I said. “It’s already a joke. I just don’t get it. Maybe…I don’t know. I don’t even know what went wrong.”

  “Did you see Ms. Pendleton yet?”

  “What would I say to her?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she could give you a pep talk or something.”

  “I don’t need a pep talk. I need a school. UGGGHHHH! I can’t believe I’m going to Revere.”

  “Okay, Snobby Snobberson,” he said.

  “Oh, like you’d be okay with going there!”

  “It’s a perfectly fine school.”

  “It’s a perfectly fine school for people who didn’t work that hard in high school!”

  “Oh dear,” he said. “Entitlement, thy name is Mischa.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Hey, none of this is my fault. Just try to have a little perspective.”

  “If you call this a First World problem,” I said, “I will beat you to death right now.”

  He coughed.

  “Look,” I said. “If I end up at Revere, what was all this for? I might as well’ve just slept through the last four years. I just…I don’t get it. I don’t know what I did wrong!”

  “Have you told your mom?”

  “Oh my God. No. I don’t even know what to tell her.”

  I didn’t know how to explain to Nate the extent of what my mother had given up to send me to Blanchard. Even with my financial aid package, the part we were responsible for hurt pretty badly. I knew that money was coming out of my mother’s retirement savings. She drove a fifteen-year-old car (which seemed to be having trouble keeping all the required parts attached). We hadn’t taken a vacation in four years. That was all because of me. All so I could get into Revere. A school I could have gotten into, easily, from a public school for free, without spending every waking moment of the last four years studying or hunched over some stupid homework assignment that, as it turns out, was a total waste of time. We could have gone to the beach every summer. I could have had an after-school job. I could have dumped all my stupid extracurriculars and spent my weekends making money or hanging out with my friends, or maybe even taking road trips. I could have spent my last spring break in Florida instead of making posters for the freaking band booster club. Four wasted years. I could have done anything. I could have been happy.

  “I just can’t believe it,” I said. “I can’t believe I’m going to Revere.”

  Dear Ms. Abramavicius,

  No. No no no no no. No. Also: NO.

  Yours in sympathy (but not really),

  Paul Revere University

  The thing no one tells you about hitting bottom is that you don’t actually know when it happens. You have a moment where you think, Ah! This is it. I am at the bottom. Nothing can get worse. You look around for the other things that live at the Bottom, like those creepy fish with both eyes on one side of their heads. You think, Okay, here I am. You take a breath and wait to start bouncing back up.

  And then things get worse, because what you thought was the Bottom was just a ledge, just a momentary break before you plunged down the rest of the way.

  It’s like being on a roller coaster: you free-fall eighty feet, feeling the bottom drop out of your stomach, and then just as you start to level out, down you go again. And by that point you don’t trust your vestibular sense anymore; you have no idea what’s coming next, and you think that there may in fact be no bottom at all, and you’ll just keep falling all the way through the earth until you pop out the other side and then go shooting off into space, where your eyes explode in the vacuum.

  That was how I felt the moment I got the email from Revere, telling me that my epic failure was ten thousand times worse than I’d thought. I sat staring at my phone on my bed after school, waiting to fall through the earth, to shoot out of the atmosphere, for my blood vessels to pop. I wished, actually, that it had happened. I wouldn’t have been remembered as the girl who failed. I would have been remembered as the girl who died. That seemed so, so much better. People would forget about me. Maybe Nate and Caroline would take longer. Maybe my mom would be sad for a while, but then I wouldn’t have to tell her I’d screwed the pooch. She’d never have to know. People wouldn’t sneer at her. They’d feel sorry for her. Maybe that would be better, in the long run.

  But I kept breathing in and out. My heart kept beating. I had not actually been sucked into the center of the earth—I was still in my bedroom, with my broken Ikea dresser and my Star Wars poster over my bed. I looked at Rey, posed seriously with her eyebrows drawn down, her lightsaber at the ready, and thought, she never would have let this happen. She was special.

  I’d thought I was special, too.

  I took two Benadryls, because I knew I wouldn’t sleep otherwise, deleted some text about this week’s French club meetings, and went to bed. Then I had the wonderful experience of sleeping through my alarm the next morning.

  * * *

  —

  I woke up in the middle of my mother’s rant, which she was issuing from the end of my bed. It sounded suspiciously like she was shouting, “ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR!” but she probably wasn’t. I tilted my head up and tried to focus on what she was saying.

  “—meeting in an hour,” she said. “You have ten minutes to be in the car, or I’m taking you in your pajamas.”

  I rubbed my eyes, regretting the second Benadryl. Everything always hits me a little harder than I think it will, which is why I don’t drink. My mother says I have a sensitive system. My doctor says it has to do with my metabolism; I don’t know. “I’m up,” I said, even though I wasn’t.

  “You need to be upper than this,” she said, yanking the blankets off my bed and leaving me shivering on the bare mattress.

  I staggered into the bathroom and stared at my haggard face in the mirror, which is when I remembered about Revere, and then wondered how I’d forgotten about it for five minutes, and then remembered my mother’s scary Galadriel impression in my bedroom.

  “Ugh,” I said.

  “Mischa,” my mother called. “Get going.”

  “I’m in the bathroom. I’m up,” I called back, even though what I really wanted to say was that I wanted to go back to bed for the next hundred years and then wake up like Sleeping Beauty, after all of my problems had been solved by someone else.

  I rubbed at the dark circle under my left eye, which, for some reason, was worse than the one on the opposite side, maybe because I’d slept on that part of my face. Did I look different? I thought maybe I did. This was the face of a person who has no future. All that lay ahead of me was the edge of a vast cliff. I wondered if other people would be able to tell just by the sight of me. Maybe they should be able to tell. Maybe I should warn them, in case I was somehow contagious.

  I grabbed my mother’s eyeliner pencil from the jar where she keeps such things, and across my forehead I wrote FAILURE.

  Then I started to laugh, because I realized what I’d done. Not only had I leveled up to peak emo, the saddest creature living on this earth, I had written on my forehead while looking in the mirror. It wasn’t enough that my forehead said FAILURE. My forehead said FAILURE backward. I laughed some more. This was really very funny. And not at all sad. Just funny.

  So funny.

  No, I told myself. No matter how bad things got, I would not be this. I would not be the girl who wrote FAILURE on her face. I got a wad of toilet paper and started to wipe it off.

  It was stubborn, this eyeliner. I rubbed some more. My forehead was looking a little red. It was then that I realized I’d written FAILURE on my face not in my mother’s blue eyeliner, but in my mother’s
blue waterproof eyeliner.

  “Uh, Mom?” I called through the closed door. “You know that navy blue eyeliner?”

  “You’re putting on eyeliner? Now?”

  “Hypothetically speaking,” I replied. My rubbing grew desperate. The liner was not budging.

  “That blue stuff is the devil, nothing takes it off.”

  By then I’d moved on to my mother’s cold cream. It was not helping. “Nothing?” I asked, a little shrilly.

  “Oh, you didn’t,” she said. “Let me see.”

  “No, no,” I said, locking the door before she could open it. “It’s fine. Just out of curiosity, why did you keep it?”

  “I thought I threw it out! I never use it. Let me see how bad it is.”

  “It’s fine!” I said. “Really!” I’d given up on the cold cream and was lathering my face with Dial. The liner was fading, but it was still completely visible. “What about peroxide?”

  “On your eyes?”

  “Right,” I said. “Right. No. That would be bad.” My forehead was getting massively red now. I took the bottle of peroxide and poured it on a wad of toilet paper and started to rub.

  After a minute a lot of the eyeliner was off. But anyone standing within five feet of me would have been able to see it.

  “Mischa, we have to leave in five minutes!”

  Shoot shoot shoot.

  I could not go to school with FAILURE written backward on my face, even if it was faded.

  “How long does this stuff take to wear off?”

  “Two or three days. I’m sure it’s not as bad as you’re thinking—let’s go!”

  I stared at myself in the mirror. It was definitely as bad as I was thinking. I could wear a hat, I thought. If Blanchard allowed hats in class, which they don’t, and also that wouldn’t get me out of the bathroom and past Mom, and if Mom saw this she would a) freak out and b) ask the reason why the word “failure” was inscribed on her daughter’s face.

  “Damn it,” I muttered, and got the scissors out of the medicine cabinet. I brushed my hair over my forehead.