Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  One point and she got a letter of commendation instead of being a semifinalist. One point, and she found herself far more disappointed than she had expected she would be.

  “Am I leaving?” Chloe started to gather up her things.

  “Yeah, I have to tell my parents before somebody else does, that’s for sure.” Her phone moved again. “Katie’s so very sorry. Not sorry, not very sorry, but so very sorry. She sounds like her mother.”

  “Hey, it’s tough only being in the top, what are you? Two percent of all the seniors in the country?”

  “One and a half percent,” said Lauren, listlessly.

  “Agony,” said Chloe.

  The Crestview computer lab was empty, so Katie slipped in right after AP French, retrieved a small dog-eared notebook from a zippered compartment in her purse, and entered the 98 from the first test of the year on the page devoted to AP French. She had kept this book since ninth grade, and while she could hardly go around asking people what their grades were, she always listened carefully and watched the looks on certain of her classmates’ faces. She believed that Brad had an A minus in AP chemistry, and she knew from an overheard tantrum in the girls’ bathroom that the science nerd did not do well enough in AP Latin to pose a threat. Katharine Dodson, National Merit semifinalist at the very least, was almost certainly going to be valedictorian of this year’s Crestview senior class, even with the unweighted A in ceramics.

  She tucked the notebook back in its hiding place and decided to take another look at talk.collegeconfidential.com, which was filling up with California posts.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Instinctively, Katie clicked the site closed and put on her best sympathy smile for Lauren.

  “Forever 21 has such slutty clothes, it’s just amazing,” said Katie. “Listen. How’re you doing? It’s crazy, you know, somebody gets semifinalist and a point away you just get a letter…”

  “Katie, if you ever say ‘just’ gets a letter again I will hate you for the rest of my life.”

  “Can I join?” Brad came in just in time to hear the second half of Lauren’s sentence. “Do we get club T-shirts? Just kidding, Katie.”

  She ignored him and glanced at the wall clock.

  “Oberlin rep’s coming at lunchtime. Want to go?”

  “You’re not applying there,” said Lauren. “Neither am I.”

  “Exactly the point.” Katie brushed past Brad and hooked her arm in Lauren’s. “My dad says it’s good practice and it doesn’t matter. We should go pretend we’re desperate to go to Oberlin and see what kinds of things the woman says. What kinds of questions she likes. What she thinks is stupid. C’mon. And they always bring in turkey wraps, so it’s free lunch besides.”

  Lauren sighed and followed Katie down to the college counseling conference room, wondering about the potential advantage of having a dad who thought of going to a college rep visit to rehearse versus having parents who had never met a bureaucracy they liked. She and Katie took seats on either side of the Oberlin rep and took notes on how she responded to various questions, on what made her smile, on the way she gently demolished one applicant by pointing out that the answers to all of her questions were on the school’s website. Four of the other attendees, for whom Oberlin was far and away a first choice, went home that afternoon in varying states of distress and announced to their parents that Katie and Lauren seemed interested in Oberlin, which undoubtedly wrecked their chances of acceptance. On the mere fact of their attendance at the meeting, one girl decided to switch her early application from Oberlin to Grinnell. No one of their caliber had shown up for the Grinnell lunch.

  On their way out, Katie leaned in close to whisper, “You should ask Ted how many semifinalists there are, total.”

  “To make myself even more miserable?”

  “How can you say that?” asked Katie. “I meant as news editor. I thought you might not be thinking about it right now, you know, but isn’t there usually an article when the names come out?”

  Ocean Heights High School was a vestige of an era when insulation was asbestos, paint was lead-based, and the only students who went to private schools on the West Coast were debutantes or discipline problems or devout Catholics. It was one of the better public high schools in Los Angeles, which was an accomplishment in a universe where no one used superlatives anymore, but every year budget cuts claimed another chunk of the curriculum. The custodians regularly mopped and buffed the floors of rooms that no one used—the dance studio, the little theater, the girls’ gymnastics gym. If a senior tracked the fresh buffer marks on the linoleum floor, she could always find a pristine and empty room where she could hide to catch her breath.

  When Liz needed to call her parents, she liked the privacy of the long, narrow locker room on the far side of the swimming pool. Now that swimming was no longer part of the physical education rotation, the locker room filled up twice a day at most, before school when the team practiced and after school during the competition season. Sometimes it was empty for weeks on end. She slipped in before lunch and left an identical voice-mail message for her mother and her father.

  “I got National Merit,” she said. “I am a semifinalist. They gave me the letter today so I wanted to let you know. Not a surprise, but it feels very nice.”

  Chloe, who often hid out in the deeper recesses of the locker room to sketch without anyone seeing her, waited until she heard the swinging doors swoosh a second time and counted ten fading footsteps before she closed her pad and took out her phone.

  She texted Lauren. “Math tutor scores on NMerit. Let’s fix her up w Brad.”

  Lauren read the message and flipped her phone shut, fast, before Brad could see what Chloe had written. She took a pair of latex gloves out of the lab station drawer and reminded herself sternly that her fetal pig dissection was not merely a lab exercise but a brick in the foundation of her future. That was one of the phrases Ted liked to use. Another of his favorites: first-quarter grades are the swing states of the college application process, and they can make the difference between acceptance and rejection for an early-decision candidate. Regular-decision kids had to hold it together for an entire semester, but the early applicants had nine weeks to make a good impression. As she made the first incision, she was sure that Ted’s comment was the reason the biology teacher always scheduled the dissection for first quarter, and grateful that she had drawn Brad as a lab partner. He was getting AP credit because he had a scheduling conflict with AP bio and Ted had insisted that the regular-section teacher accommodate him, and Lauren depended on credibility by association.

  Second quarter, she might have been tempted to say that she had a profound moral objection to the use of dead lab animals. By second semester, she happily would have threatened to throw up all over the lab station rather than do the dissection. First quarter, she would cut open a dead pig even if her family kept kosher.

  “What do you think I should call myself next year?” asked Brad, who was kind enough to take over scalpel duties whenever the teacher turned his back.

  “What?”

  “Nobody gets to call me Four in college. I need a name.”

  “Nobody calls you Four but your dad. Just be Brad.”

  “But he thinks it’d be cool to be Four at Harvard, you know, because then people would ask and I could tell them about the other three.”

  “Say he has Alzheimer’s when he comes to visit.”

  “Right. ‘Listen, if my dad starts using numbers for people just ignore it, that’s how he keeps track.’” He pushed aside a piece of porcine gristle and wrote a note down in his lab book, which he loaned to Lauren every weekend because she and Chloe were the only girls he knew who occasionally said what they meant to say. “My mom thinks I should switch to Preston.”

  Lauren glanced over and was amazed at how sad Brad looked, as though a fourth-generation Harvard legacy who was probably down to the wire with Katie for valedictorian had any reason to be upset.

  “Ca
ll yourself Gene,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s such a dumb name. You could use something dumb in your life.”

  The dark secret of Brad’s life was that he was a virgin, despite the legions of Crestview girls who swore, with a knowing smile and a sigh, that they had succumbed to his charms. It was all the fault of the girl who was in the same inner-city ecology program as Brad the summer before their junior year, and was assigned as his partner to drive around South Central and East L.A., instructing people on the dangers of all the things in their environment that they could not afford to repair or replace. In the morning, they pointed at flakes of lead-based paint and rattled off statistics about toddler brain damage, or suggested planting trees to absorb emissions. In the afternoon, having left behind parents plastered with a thick new layer of helpless rage, they fought their way back home, making their own contribution to the particulate layer. It was a long ride, made longer by the fact that rush hour began at two in the afternoon. The girl had since been sent to a boarding school where she had to get up at five in the morning to feed the chickens, but that summer she had devoted her excess energy to Brad, who in turn had worked very hard to fend her off.

  He did not like her, and after weeks of being polite he finally had to tell her so—at which point she promptly told everyone she knew about their wild night of passion. Wild nights, actually; by the time the story got around, like a secret whispered around the table at a five-year-old’s birthday party, it had mutated and grown into a summer’s orgy of fun. To his horror, it spawned offspring. During junior year, a dozen other girls came up with stories of their mad fling with Brad. And then Katie joined their ranks, in retaliation for Brad informing her that a second month of dating was pointless because they really did not get along. He had never gotten north of the fabric-care tag on the side seam of her T-shirts, never wanted to, never tried, which enraged her. She chimed in to the chorus of conquered voices with stories that frightened him in their specificity, almost daring him to contradict her.

  He did not have the energy to fight with her. Some of the other boys, intimidated by the scope of Brad’s conquests, demanded to know the operational secret of his success and bitterly accused him of holding out when he tried to tell them the truth. They settled for honing their foreplay skills—which was fine with the girls, who, truth be told, were not as eager to lose their virginity as the headlines had their parents believe they were. They were perfectly happy—relieved, actually—to pretend that they had slept with Brad and to spend senior year pretending to get over him, while they devoted their real energies to college applications. Brad resigned himself to ending his Crestview career as an entertaining rumor, and consoled himself with the notion that he probably had kept at least a few of his friends from getting herpes.

  Preston Bradley IV: safer than a condom. He doubted that calling himself Gene was going to help.

  The world loved Brad to excess, more than he thought any one person deserved, and he was always looking for ways to put a scratch in the veneer of his life. It was the one thing he failed at, again and again. He ate between meals and never gained weight, he rolled through stop signs and waited for a cop who never appeared, he wrote a paper no smarter than Lauren’s and got not just an A minus to her B plus, but an outright A. A dozen girls picked him as the costar of their fictional sex lives because of nothing that had anything to do with him.

  He was old money, which in Los Angeles meant wealth that predated the advent of cable television. He was high society, which meant money derived from law or banking or real estate and membership in both a tennis or golf club and a non-Catholic church. And he was impossibly, unarguably handsome, in a way that defied category and appealed equally to girls who had previously defined their type as surfer boy, as metrosexual, as neo-Goth, as whatever type their parents disliked the most. Lauren, who was the only one who knew the truth, told him that some of his fake conquests had devised a ranking list, to see if the female members of the Crestview senior class could think of anyone famous under the age of thirty who was better looking than Brad, and so far the consensus was no. The blue of his eyes was deeper than this actor’s, his wavy black hair more luxurious than that one’s, and on and on, feature by feature, from his cheekbones to his shoulders to the very toes that all of those girls said they had seen, exposed, in bed.

  He was a catalog of perfection, which was a terrible burden for a boy to bear. A beautiful girl at least had the support of feminists who encouraged her to develop her brain and sympathized when her looks kept people from taking her seriously. A handsome, wealthy, about-to-be fourth-generation Harvard boy had no such system to help him cope. Brad’s life always rounded up. He could hardly have any complaints.

  chapter 4

  Final Draft

  Preston Bradley

  Man has yearned to fly ever since he realized that gravity prevented him from doing so—from doing anything more than envying the birds overhead. Knowing our limitations hasn’t stopped us from trying, though, too often with disastrous results: from Icarus to Brewster McCloud, we get into trouble when we let ourselves think that we can defy the laws of nature.

  Air is just not where we’re supposed to be, I guess, which is why I get nervous every time there’s turbulence when I’m flying. As long as the flight is smooth, I can deceive myself into thinking that it’s reasonable for hundreds of people to be hurtling through the air in a metal ship. But as soon as there’s the slightest shudder, or one of those sudden drops, my stomach flips over and my palms start to sweat. I remember what I try so hard to forget, that flying is an unnatural act.

  There’s one way to defy our limitations, though, and that’s to rebel against the geometry that’s defined us ever since we decided we needed something better than a cave to live in. For too long we thought we needed the stability of a ninety-degree angle to hold up the buildings we live and work in, and to be fair, if it wasn’t for thousands of years of rectangles, Frank Gehry never would have had the nerve to try one of his tangled roofs. But now we know how to make metal and wood ripple, how to make shapes move, and the illusion of motion seems to me to be a pretty exciting step—and a whole lot safer than pasting feathers together with wax.

  I saw the bandshell that Gehry designed in Chicago, when I was there with my dad last year, and I say it looks like Mozart’s wig, curled back from the stage like that. It’s not quite flying, but it’s a good start. It feels like it defies gravity.

  Although there isn’t a wood shop at my high school—my mom says that went out of fashion with home economics classes, back in the 1960s—I’ve met a cabinetmaker who’s let me spend time in his workshop, figuring out how to make wood bend and turn, and right now I’m trying to make a double helix out of balsa wood. I could say I’ve dreamt all my life of being an architect or an artist, and I imagine that might enhance my status in the applicant pool, but the truth is that I don’t know yet where this is going to take me. Maybe I’ll end up a math teacher who builds little wooden birds on the side, or maybe I’ll build buildings that people make pilgrimages to visit. I might be able to make people feel that they’re lighter than air.

  It seems to me that that’s what college is for—to find out how a personal passion might translate itself into an adult life.

  Ted poured himself a glass of the Super Tuscan Dan had dropped off when he happened to be driving past school in the middle of the day, a wine intended to ensure that Ted read Katie’s essay first, which he might have done if not for the conspiratorial smile on Dan’s face when he handed over the bottle. It was not really Ted’s job to review college essays. The English teachers offered weekly workshops to help every senior develop at least one serviceable essay, if not two, by the last week in September, so that the ones who needed to take the SAT again could clear their heads in time. But he always read his early-decision candidates’ essays, the prime contenders, the ones who made his reputation. He was not about to leave their fate to a neofeminist literature teac
her who saw a connection between having a vagina and having a voice, or to the lumberjack head of the department, a fan of Hemingway and London who mistook short declarative sentences for power. English teachers might know a dangling participle when they saw one. Ted knew what the admissions readers wanted to hear.

  Now that Harvard had abandoned its early-decision program, Ted did not need to read Brad’s essay for at least a month, but old habits died hard, and he liked the idea of Brad filing early, regardless, to reinforce his commitment to going there. A good thing he had decided to take a look: Ted was fairly sure that the story of an aspiring math teacher who built little wooden birds was not going to wow the Harvard admissions committee, and, worse, he figured that Brad knew it. What was the best boy at Crestview up to? This batch of essays was supposed to be the final drafts of essays Ted had seen two weeks earlier, which in Brad’s case had been a fairly formal appraisal of Gehry’s architecture and a reflection on the immortality of a great building. All that stood between him and the final draft was ditching the passive tense—what was it with these lawyers’ kids?—and Ted had fully expected to see a more active version of the same essay this time around. Instead, he got two new essays clipped together with a little Post-it note on the front:

  Dear Mr. Marshall: Maybe Brewster McCloud is too weird a reference, but the first draft seemed too stiff, and nothing else works as well. Have you seen it? Thanks for reading two of these. See you Tuesday. Brad.