We Regret to Inform You

by Ariel Kaplan

  So I stopped hiding them. And that’s when it began, whatever stupid competition we had going. If I made a point in class, she one-upped it. If I did a trig problem in four steps, she’d let the teacher know that it could be done in three. If my sonnet had a syllable with the wrong inflection, she’d make sure to point it out to the rest of the class. I couldn’t put a toe out of line without her being all over it. It was exhausting. On the upside, it meant my work was always letter perfect. It had to be.

  “I think maybe she’s just super competitive,” I said.

  “And you applied to a lot of the same schools,” Emily pointed out.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

  “Schools that, historically, don’t take more than one or two people from Blanchard every year.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “This seems pretty low, even for Meredith.” But truthfully, I was starting to wonder.

  They exchanged a glance. “Do you have someone else in mind?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  Emily wrinkled her nose at me. “Well,” she said, “either this was revenge, or someone had something to gain by shredding your transcript. Someone else who was applying to the same schools as you, maybe? Any other possibilities you can think of?”

  Shira wiped off a space on the whiteboard and made two columns. “A” was revenge. “B” was personal gain. Five minutes later we sat back and looked at the board.

  Category A was Meredith. I honestly couldn’t think of anyone else. (“Because you’re so boring,” Emily told me.)

  Category B consisted of all the other students I knew who’d applied to Harvard and Princeton. Which included Meredith again, plus about fifteen other people, and probably left out a bunch of others who were being quiet about having applied.

  Shira leaned back and tapped her lip. “Why are we limiting ourselves to students?”

  “You think it could be a teacher?” Emily asked.

  She shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe one of them’s got it in for you?”

  I closed my eyes for a minute. “Well, there’s Mr. Bender, maybe.”

  Everyone perked up. “Really?” Emily said. “Why him?”

  Mr. Bender had only been teaching at Blanchard for a few years; he was around twenty-five and looked like a senior, unless he remembered to shave, and then he looked like a sophomore. He was cute, I guess, one of those men who was probably a huge nerd but had recently shelled out for a gym membership. There were girls flirting with him constantly, and I thought he was, frankly, pretty gross, though I seemed to be alone in that assessment. Well, actually Meredith Dorsay despised him, too, but that was kind of her default setting.

  “I caught him with Beth Reinhardt between classes last year.”

  Emily cocked her head to one side. “Define ‘caught him.’ ”

  “They were alone in his room with the door locked,” I said.

  “Locked,” Emily said. “Not shut.”

  “Locked,” I confirmed. “And the blinds were down.”

  “Holy crap,” Bebe said. “Beth Reinhardt. She’s as dumb as a rock.”

  It was, unfortunately, true. Beth’s father was famous for having been the senator from New Hampshire. Beth’s mother was famous for having been an extra on Baywatch. Beth, at Blanchard, was famous for having accused Ms. Templeton, the biology teacher, of sexual harassment for using the word “cleavage” while discussing cell division.

  “I’m not sure if Mr. Bender knows I know. But Beth definitely does. I ran into her in the hall afterward, and she was all sweaty and red in the face.”

  Bebe said, “Ew.”

  “Add Beth to the list,” Emily said. “Mr. Bender, too.”

  “Um,” Shira said. “Full disclosure: I caught Mr. Bender with someone else last fall.”

  “Who?”

  “Willa Jenkins. I saw her get out of his car at Starbucks.”

  “Willa,” said Bebe. “Wait, aren’t she and Beth pretty good friends?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They are.”

  Bebe said, “Ew.”

  “So we suspect Bender was getting it on with at least two different students,” Emily said.

  “At least?” I asked.

  “Two is a pattern.”

  “Yeah, but why go after me, even if he did know that I knew?”

  “Where did Beth and Willa apply? Do you know?”

  “Beth’s a legacy at Princeton, I’m pretty sure. And I heard Willa got into Williams.”

  “Well, that’s interesting,” Emily said. “Maybe he’s getting the competition out of the way for his lady friends?” She dropped her voice. “Or in exchange for—ahem—favors?”

  Shira said, “Ew.”

  “Or it could be a coincidence. It’s not like there aren’t a ton of us applying to the same schools.”

  “It’s an avenue worth pursuing,” Emily said, fiddling with the ends of her hair. “But one other thing occurs to me. A couple of Ds shouldn’t have kept you out of Revere, especially with good SAT scores—it doesn’t make any sense. It’s possible they got into other parts of your packet.”

  “Like my test scores?”

  “No way,” Bebe said. “ETS is pretty much unhackable. People have been trying for years. It’s too hard.”

  “Well, the only other piece that came from the school and not from me was my letters of recommendation—oh no, no, no. My letters.” I sat back from the table and made eye contact with Emily. Shira let out a low whistle.

  “That actually has the potential to be worse than the grades,” Emily said. “A lot worse.”

  The admissions equation flashed along the backs of my eyelids.

  The R factor—which accounted for the quality of the letters of recommendation—rarely meant anything, unless the letters were bizarrely good. Or bizarrely bad. If my letters had been hacked, if someone had put something really bad in there, called me a felon, said I bit the head off a live chicken during class…my admissions number could have been decimated. “Oh my God,” I said. “Oh my God.”

  “Deep breaths, Mischa,” Emily said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. Okay.” I breathed a few more times. “But how could we even find out what’s in those letters? They’re anonymous. I can’t get my own copies.”

  “Couple of possibilities,” Emily said. “We could pose as a college and ask Blanchard to send a copy to a fake address. Or we could hack the system ourselves.”

  I said, “Can you do that?”

  “Somebody already did.”

  * * *

  —

  I left with my OpheliaOne card tucked into my pocket, sitting in the passenger seat of Emily’s car as she drove me home on her way to whatever she was doing next. She drove a five-year-old BMW, bright red and way too clean to belong to an eighteen-year-old.

  “What do I do now?” I asked.

  “You wait,” she said. “When we get a plan in place, I’ll call you.”

  I rubbed the skin between my eyes. This was my entire future, and I was leaving it in someone else’s hands. I was trusting Emily and Company because I had no choice. The school wouldn’t have believed me; the transcript they had on file for me was the right one, and the only evidence I had was what I’d seen with my own eyeballs.

  I suppose I could have told my mother.

  My mother.

  I couldn’t tell my mother.

  “This is a nightmare,” I muttered.

  “It is,” Emily agreed.

  I sifted through the contents of the cup holder next to me: two bottles of nail polish and a keychain of the starship Enterprise. “It’s like…it’s like I was just walking along, minding my own business, and someone randomly shoved me off a cliff,” I said. My eyes started to ache, and I turned my face away from Emily and coughed into my hand.
>
  She turned onto my street and pulled up in front of my house. Before I could get out, she reached across and took hold of my hand, which reminded me, for some reason, that she used to go out with Nate, which made my insides feel strange. I looked over to see what she wanted, and she gave me an intense stare. I looked at her. She looked back. She had, I thought, the longest eyelashes in the world. “You need to separate yourself from this,” she said. “Don’t confuse College Applicant Mischa with the real person.”

  I looked down at her hand. She was wearing a ring with a blue stone in the middle and flowers on either side, the same flowers that were on the Ophelia card. I wondered again what they were. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Think about it this way. At any point in your life, you are two people. There’s the Mischa you think you are, and then there’s the Mischa everyone else sees. The second one is the one who gets you into college, or not. That’s the one who applies for jobs, and mortgages, and gets written about in the paper. Call her the Mischa-bot, if you will. Your brand. Your avatar. You’ve worked for the last twelve years programming her with all the bits you want her to have. The right classes. The right extracurriculars. All that garbage you do as a means to an end.”

  “And now someone’s reprogrammed my avatar.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Can we fix it?”

  She let go of my hand and put hers back on the gearshift, which I recognized as a dismissal. “I guess we’ll find out,” she said. “But, Mischa, remember. That avatar is not you.”

  When I got home that afternoon, my mom was already there, buzzing around the kitchen making some kind of leftover casserole that she called “glop,” which both of us would drown in mango chutney to try to mask the taste of three-day-old chicken and cream of Choose Your Own Adventure soup.

  “Hey,” she said, while I came in and got myself some water. “So the guys at work heard about how you’re going to Revere next year.”

  I tried not to choke on my water. “Mm-hm.”

  “And they got together and got you something.” She picked an envelope off the counter and handed it to me.

  “They didn’t have to—” I started.

  “It’s like the circle of life,” she said. “We all put money in for baby showers, weddings, housewarmings. It all cycles around. Now it’s your turn.”

  “But I don’t even work there.”

  “Just open it.”

  I opened the envelope. In it was a card that said CONGRATULATIONS! in big bubble letters, while a bunch of Dalmatian puppies wearing mortarboards pranced around looking winsome. The inside said, “We know you’ll be SPOTTED doing great things!” and then there was a hundred-dollar gift card to Macy’s.

  “Wow,” I said, tearing my eyes away from the faces of the mocking dogs. “That was really nice of everyone.”

  “I thought we could go after dinner,” she said. “Pick out some stuff for your dorm room. They’re having a sale.”

  “I don’t know,” I hedged. “Isn’t it kind of early for that? Don’t people usually do that at the end of the summer?”

  “Yes, and everything will be all picked over,” she said, taking the card back from me. “Come on. I know you’re bummed about Revere. This’ll help you get over it.”

  I wasn’t sure which was worse, that she thought, somehow, that a new bedspread and shower caddy would be enough for me to forget that I’d be going to my safety school, or that, in fact, nothing so good as that was going to happen. I needed to tell her.

  “You know,” I said. “I was thinking of applying to a couple of other schools. Places with rolling admissions or late deadlines. Just so I have some more, uh, choices.”

  “Oh. Really?”

  “It just seems like a good idea.”

  “Hmm. You’re probably right. Still, though,” she said, tapping my arm with the envelope. “We can go pick stuff out. Wherever you go, you’ll have a room.”

  “Can’t I just take my stuff from home?”

  “You’re not going to want to haul your sheets and towels back and forth every time you come home, Mischa.”

  I sighed. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Great! We’ll go after dinner.”

  “Okay,” I said, and then, because my mother was looking at me expectantly, I added, “Yay!”

  * * *

  —

  After dinner we made our way up to the Tysons mall, where Macy’s was having a white sale and the aisles were filled with people elbowing each other over bargains. My mother went to look at towels while I stood, despondent, in front of a selection of extra-long twin comforters.

  I didn’t much want to think about matching dust ruffles and shams right then. This was a waste of time and money, and I was considering telling my mom so when someone to the left of me pulled the package of bedding out of my hands.

  Of course it was Meredith Dorsay. Why she was shopping at Macy’s was another issue. I’m pretty sure her mother imports her linens directly from France.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “God, you’re rude,” she said. “I’m here with Amy Gregston. She’s going to Cambridge this summer so she has to buy everything early.”

  I spied Amy down the aisle, frowning at a package of sheets and muttering about thread count. I didn’t ask if she meant Massachusetts or England, because I couldn’t stomach caring.

  “So where are you going, anyway?” she asked. “You never did say.”

  I was about to tell her I hadn’t decided yet (which was technically true) when over my shoulder I heard, “Revere.” The answer came from my mother, who had come to stand on my other side. “Mischa’s going to Revere.”

  Meredith’s smile ate her face. “Really? Revere? Oh. That’s a really great school for you.”

  I let the slap pass over me. My mother, however, had gone rather stiff. “They have a great internship program,” she said defensively.

  “Oh, really? I hadn’t thought too much about internship programs.” Meredith pushed the package of bedding back into my hands. “You should get this one,” she said. “It suits you.” Then she turned around and went off to find Amy, who had a blue towel in one hand and a beige one in the other, weighing them like Lady Justice.

  I looked down at the bedding I was holding, and only then realized it was SpongeBob.

  “Charming girl,” my mother said flatly.

  “Oh yes,” I said, putting the comforter back on the shelf. “She’s a peach.”

  “Did you pick one?” she asked, gesturing toward the packages of bedding. “I assume you didn’t actually want the SpongeBob.”

  Good lord, I could not have cared less about bedding or towels or matching throw pillows. She held something up in front of my face; it was some kind of a bucket with lots of compartments. “It’s to take your shampoo and stuff,” she said excitedly. “To the showers. See? There’s even a spot for your razor.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Look at that.”

  “They have blue and orange,” she said. “Which do you think?”

  “Um. I don’t know. Orange, I guess.”

  “That’s a good choice,” she said. “Everyone else will pick blue.”

  I grabbed the nearest bedding set off the shelf—something paisley. “This one,” I said.

  “Perfect. Here.” She thrust the shower caddy at me, and I grabbed it with my fingertips, then she piled a couple of bath towels on top of everything, pulled out her phone, and said, “Smile!”

  “What?”

  “For the folks at work. So they can see what you bought. Everyone’s so proud of you, Mischa.”

  “Mom—”

  “They just want to be supportive.” She snapped a picture of me, then frowned at her phone. “Let’s get another one. You’re not smiling.” Then she put her phone down a
nd said, “Mischa,” probably because my eyes were filling with tears, and my only consolation was that Meredith Dorsay was not there to see.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Just don’t, okay?”

  On Monday I got up, I went to school, I did not cry in public, and I went home.

  After dinner Caroline messaged me three selfies where she was modeling different dresses in front of a three-way mirror.

  Can’t decide, she said.

  I rubbed my eyes. I was so tired.

  The blue one, I said. The red one won’t stay up while you’re dancing.

  What about the pink one?

  The pink one was too tight, but of course I couldn’t get away with that much honesty so I said, The blue one makes you look more collegiate.

  She said, YEAH IT DOES!

  I was about to turn my phone off because I was not really in the mood for this when I got a text from Emily. She’d put this app on my phone the other day called TalkOff, which deletes all your texts two minutes after they’re seen and is supposedly 100% anonymous, and it makes a little bloop sound when a message comes through.

  The message said, Meet me at my house at 11:30. Wear something dark.

  Eleven-thirty? I wondered how she thought I was going to get out of the house that late on a school night. My mother was usually asleep by then, but I felt a little weird disappearing with the car in the middle of the night. Even if she didn’t notice, there was a good chance one of the neighbors would.

  That might be a problem, I texted back.

  The phone rang. I picked up, and Emily said, “This is tiresome, Mischa.”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “We are attempting to render our services unto you, for which you are not paying us, by the way. The least you could do is actually show up when we call you.”

  “You know,” I said. “Not everyone has their own Beemer.”

  “Your boyfriend,” she said, “has a car.”

  “He’s not my—”

  “Shush. Borrow your mother’s car. Borrow Cute Nate’s car. Borrow the Queen of England’s car; I do not care. But be at my house by eleven-thirty. We have things to do.”