We Regret to Inform You

by Ariel Kaplan

  I set my sandwich back down on my plate. “Actually, I hadn’t been planning on studying for that.”

  “So, what, you’re just giving up? On everything?”

  I shrugged and ate my soup. It tasted a little too much like the inside of a tin can and that worried me, but I kept eating it because it was in front of me and I was hungry. “Listen,” I said, “you know Sisyphus? Guy with the boulder? Cursed with having to roll it up a hill for all eternity and stuff?”

  “Sure.”

  “You ever wonder why he didn’t just…stop…pushing the boulder?”

  “Well, he couldn’t. That was the curse. He was in hell, that was the whole point.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But what were they going to do, make him push an even bigger boulder? What was stopping him from just sitting down in the dirt and saying, ‘I am not pushing any more stinking rocks up this stinking hill.’ ”

  Caroline scowled. “I can’t remember. I’m pretty sure there was a reason, though.”

  “But what if there wasn’t? What if someone just told him to do it, and he just kept doing it because it never occurred to him he had a choice?”

  “So in this analogy,” she said, “you’re Sisyphus. And the boulder is—”

  “High school, yeah.”

  “And you’re just…” She made a flourish with her spoon. “Giving up.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think nothing’s going to happen to you.”

  “I think nothing worse is going to happen to me,” I corrected her.

  “Mischa,” she said, “things can always get worse.”

  * * *

  —

  Bebe found me at the end of the day; she was still limping on her broken shoe. I guess it would have been a giveaway if she’d had an extra pair with her that day. That we’d had an extra kitten sweater with us had been bad enough.

  “Hey,” she said. “I heard, you know. Stuff.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We found stuff. It was…”

  “Stuff.”

  “Yeah. It was stuff.”

  “So we’re going to Emily’s now. Emily and me. To analyze the stuff. Are you coming?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Do you really think Nate was in on this? You know him. Can you imagine him lying about something this big?”

  “I’m not really sure,” she said. “I haven’t analyzed—”

  “The stuff.”

  “Right.” She started walking toward the doors, and I followed.

  “Emily thinks so,” I said. “Occam’s razor, right? If it looks like there was a grade-changing ring, there was probably a grade-changing ring.”

  “That’s not how Occam’s razor works. We haven’t even thought about the other possibilities.”

  “Which are?”

  “Not sure yet. But say it’s true. There was a ring, and Nate was in on it. Does it change anything?”

  “Of course it does!”

  She stopped short and turned toward me. “Would you really cover this up to protect Nate? You would just…not go to college. For him.”

  I exhaled slowly. “No. I guess not.”

  “Glad we got that straight.” She started walking again—tiptoe, click, tiptoe, click—in her broken-down shoes.

  * * *

  —

  When we got to Emily’s, she already had both databases open, one on each of the two monitors that were set up on the desk in her basement.

  “I feel like I’m missing something,” she said as Bebe and I went to sit next to her. “Sixteen people with grades that went up. Sixteen people with nothing in common. They aren’t friends. They aren’t necessarily applying to the same colleges. They don’t play the same sports. A lot of them don’t even like each other.”

  “Maybe they didn’t know who else was involved,” I said. “Maybe, like, there was one central person changing the grades.”

  “I considered that,” she said. She pulled out a piece of paper on which she’d drawn a web, connecting the sixteen people to one another. “But there isn’t one person who’s friends with everyone else, and it’s not like they could be bribed, because all these people are super rich.”

  Bebe turned to look at her. “All of them?”

  “Yeah,” Emily said. “Look at the list. These are the sixteen people who had their grades tampered with.”

  Bebe pointed at the RANK field. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Class rank,” I said. “But it seems to be influenced by test scores, too. We’re not really sure how it works.”

  Emily pointed at the PFC AMT field. “Near as I can figure, it’s SATs plus some kind of number made from AP scores? I don’t know. We couldn’t find a formula….”

  Bebe nudged Emily out of the way and scrolled up and down the screen. “Are you guys completely out of it?” she asked. “Did you even look at the range?”

  I looked at the numbers again. I hadn’t actually been paying that much attention. “What?”

  “One fifty to eighty-eight thousand? What kind of test score does that? Even if it’s an aggregate, that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “We were a little busy not getting arrested,” Emily said. “We didn’t exactly have time to analyze—”

  “You saw what you expected to see,” Bebe said.

  Emily glared at her, but Bebe continued as if nothing had happened. “Now, where am I?” she muttered, scanning down the list. Her rank was somewhere in the middle.

  Tandoh, Beatrice. RANK: 62. PFC AMT: 3000.

  “It’s a dollar amount,” she said. “Parental Financial Contribution Amount.”

  “How can you possibly have figured that out?” Emily asked.

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense with this big a range,” she went on. “My parents give seven hundred and fifty dollars to the school every December. Over four years, that’s three thousand bucks.” She scanned down to the bottom of the list, where the last half a dozen people had numbers under five hundred. Mine was one fifty. “I’m guessing your mom didn’t donate much to the school,” she said.

  “She paid the tuition,” I said.

  “These are gifts to the annual fund,” she said. “It’s not part of the tuition.”

  “I didn’t realize that was required,” I said.

  “It’s not,” she said. “It’s a tax write-off.”

  “Apparently it was a little more than that,” Emily said.

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait. So RANK is—”

  “It’s a fundraising rank,” Bebe said. “It’s the rank of whose parents gave the most money to the school. It’s got nothing to do with class rank.”

  Bebe and Emily looked at each other over my head. “Tell me you’re not seeing this,” Bebe said.

  But we were. Because now that we had the lists side by side on two different monitors, we could see exactly who the sixteen people with baked transcripts were.

  It was the top sixteen ranked students.

  Emily sat back from the desk. “Oh my God.”

  “Money makes the world go round,” Bebe said.

  “There was no grade-changing ring,” I said. “But wait. Are you saying it was someone at the school?”

  “No,” Emily said. “Mischa, it was the school.”

  I felt strange.

  When I was a little eighth-grader in my navy blue suit, I’d come to Blanchard for my tour and my interview, and Ms. Whitman, the admissions director, had offered me a plate of cookies and talked to me for forty minutes about what I wanted out of high school and where I hoped to be in ten years. Afterward she’d said to my mom, “She’s very articulate. Any school would be lucky to have her.” My mom had been so proud. I’d been so proud.

  Emily was still talking. “Someone in the administration, at least. Som
eone high enough to care where the money was coming from.”

  “No,” I said, because the logical part of my brain was still telling me this didn’t add up. “No, that doesn’t make any sense.”

  Emily shook her head over my objection. “They’re socially engineering their student output so that the kids with the most money go to the best colleges. If I’m right, with these new transcripts, the entire top 20% of the class is now the kids of major donors.”

  “I understand why they would bump up people’s grades,” I said. “But why bump mine down so much? Why write those fake recommendation letters?”

  “What were your SAT scores?” Bebe asked.

  “1580,” I said. “And I had 5s on four AP tests last year.”

  “That’s why,” she said. “They didn’t want to risk you getting a spot they wanted for someone else. So they cut you off at the knees.”

  “I don’t understand, though. What does the school have to gain by me getting in nowhere?” I pointed at Lisa Mann. “Lisa still got into Chapel Hill. That’s what Shira said. I don’t think they’d have taken her with a D in trig. And David’s going to Johns Hopkins.”

  “I’m not sure,” Emily said. “It doesn’t make sense. But there are only two possibilities: either they really hate you, or someone screwed up.”

  “But that would have to be Ms. Pendleton,” I said. “She’s the one who sends these out to colleges. And she’s been gone for weeks.”

  “She was definitely in on it,” Emily agreed. “But someone higher up was pulling the strings. What does the college counselor care about fundraising?”

  “Who do you think it was?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. My money’s on Pelletier.”

  “Why him?”

  “The Lexus,” she said. “Plus he’s a schmuck.”

  “That would be nice,” Bebe said. “We turn him in to Marlowe and the whole thing’s done in an hour. I bet he was the one who framed Shira, too. It makes sense; he was the one running the locker search.”

  “Wait,” I said. “He was there that day, when Shira was talking about the transcripts in the hall—he was yelling at Derek Logan about that stupid hat. Pelletier must have heard us. So can we prove it was him?”

  “Check the metadata,” Bebe said. “It’ll tell you who created the fake records.”

  “They would have masked their IP address,” Emily said. “No one would do something this illegal and leave their fingerprints on it.”

  “Just do it,” Bebe said. “The Instagram was a hack job, too.”

  Emily pulled up the metadata for my fake transcript. It looked like this:

  Abramavicius, Mischa

  Record Added: January 7, 2018 8:47 p.m.

  Record Last Modified: January 7, 2018 8:47 p.m.

  Created by: Administrator

  Changed by: Administrator

  IP Address: 107.32.24.1

  “Well, that’s helpful,” I said. “Who’s Administrator?”

  “Could be anyone,” Bebe said. “We’d need to check the IP address, and to do that we’d have to look at every staff computer on campus.”

  Emily smirked. “Or we could check this,” she said, pulling a folded piece of paper out of her pocket. It was a list of IP addresses. A long list.

  “Where did you get that?” Bebe asked, incredulous.

  “I went after school to get my phone back from Ishikawa, but she wasn’t there, so I checked her desk.” She gave us a smug smile. “I found this in her top drawer.”

  “Why would she have it?” I asked.

  “She does tech support for the staff,” Bebe said, scanning down the list. “Oh,” she said, her face falling. “So much for that idea.”

  IP: 107.32.24.1 Assigned: R. Marlowe.

  My mother was in front of her computer when I got home, her laptop sitting open on the kitchen table like she’d been paying the bills online, except I didn’t see any bills around, or her checkbook register, or anything else like that. She looked at me, a long look that spoke of disappointment, like the time she caught me stealing five dollars from her purse to buy candy when I was six.

  She pushed back from the kitchen table and watched me for a good long minute.

  I thought: She knows about Revere.

  There were a limited number of people who could have told her, though. And I couldn’t figure out why they would have.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Sit down,” she said. I sat. She turned the computer to face me. “I want you to explain this,” she said.

  It was my Instagram page.

  I’d thought it would be down by now. According to Emily, it should have been down by now. But there it was, still live, and either Mom had noticed the block or someone had told her to take a look at it. Either way, this was bad.

  What she was looking at wasn’t the picture of me at the party, though. It was a letter. Some long diatribe about the unfairness of life, about how every college I’d applied to had rejected me, and about how I was bound to get revenge on the good people of the Blanchard School, whose fault this all was, in some unspecified way. The letter got increasingly strange and disjointed the longer it went on, deluded, paranoid, enraged. There were oblique references to fire. And then I said I was going to kill myself.

  “I didn’t write this,” I said. “Someone made this entire thing up and then sent you the link. My page got hacked a few days ago. I tried to report it.”

  Without speaking, she took two folded pieces of paper from next to her laptop and slid them toward me.

  I unfolded them.

  To Whom It May Concern:

  It is only with grave reservations that I write this letter. On the one hand, Mischa is a very bright student, as her test scores attest.

  No. No.

  “You searched my room?” I asked.

  “Mischa,” she said. “Did you get into Revere? If I ask you to show me your acceptance letter, can you do that?”

  I swallowed. “No.”

  “Did you get in anywhere you applied to?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t. That part’s true. Someone hacked my transcript and my letters—”

  “Mischa, stop.”

  “It’s true!” I pulled out my phone. “Call Emily Sreenivasan. She’ll tell you.”

  “She’s friends with that girl who got caught with the drugs, right?”

  “Shira was framed! How do you even know all this?”

  “So you’ve been lying to me for the last month. About Revere.”

  “I didn’t want to,” I said desperately.

  “But you did. I’ve been burning myself to the ground for four years to send you to Blanchard, so that you could lie to me about this? When were you planning on telling me? When I dropped you off for orientation?”

  “Mom—”

  She slammed her fist down on the table. “NO. This is not okay.”

  “What? That I didn’t get in anywhere? Or that I let you think I had?”

  “You lied. You LIED to me.”

  “But that’s not really what you’re mad about,” I said. “Is it? It was bad enough that your daughter got rejected from everywhere good, but now you have to tell everyone that I got in NOWHERE.”

  “Damn it, Mischa.”

  “You’re not mad. You’re ashamed.”

  She jammed a finger toward the computer screen. “And you’re going to fix all this by setting fire to your school? Killing yourself?”

  “No,” I said. “No. I didn’t write that. The person who hacked me put that up there.”

  “How can I possibly believe anything you say to me?”

  “Because I’m your daughter! Because the only reason I didn’t tell you about Revere is because I knew how disappointed you’d be! I thought if I could fix everything, apply
someplace else, it wouldn’t matter. But I haven’t been able to—”

  “Mischa,” she said. “If you really thought your transcript had been hacked, why didn’t you come to me in the first place?”

  I stopped short. “I don’t know,” I said. Which was another lie. I hadn’t told her because I didn’t think she’d believe me. Because telling her meant I’d also have to tell her about all my rejections. And I couldn’t handle it.

  “Go to your room,” she said.

  “But—”

  “Now.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Mischa. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” She closed the laptop. “I suppose you’ve figured out that you’re suspended.”

  I gaped at her. “From Blanchard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because of that Instagram post?”

  “Yes. Apparently someone from the school found it. You can’t threaten people at school and expect nothing to come of it.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “Mischa. Go. Now.”

  * * *

  —

  I went into my room and shut the door.

  My phone rang in my pocket, and I silenced the ringer before my mom heard it. I was surprised, actually, that it hadn’t occurred to her to take it away, especially if she thought I was lighting up the Internet with homicidal blog entries.

  It was Emily. I picked it up and curled up on the floor between my bed and the wall.

  “They’re going to expel Shira,” she said.

  “What? No,” I said. “No, you said—”

  “They aren’t going to graduate her early, even. They’re just tossing her out.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “What a stupid question.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Bebe’s hysterical. She won’t even talk to me.”

  “Why won’t she talk to you?”

  “She thinks this is my fault, because it was my idea to help you. They’re using Shira to shut us up.”

  “But if they’ve already kicked her out, what else can they do?”

  “Can you really think of nothing? Mischa, they’re sitting on a distribution charge. If they go to the cops, Shira goes to jail.”