Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  The first year on the job, Rita concentrated on working the list quickly and efficiently, and at the end of the season Ted handed her a Nordstrom’s gift card that turned out to be worth $300. The second year, she merely let a particularly pushy set of parents know that Ted had heard from Bowdoin, in return for which she received a gift certificate for six sessions with a personal trainer. Soon after, discreet notes and small gifts from other parents began to appear on her desk (“Why wait until graduation to thank you for all your help?” “Dear eagle eyes, if Donny ends up at Brown we’ll have you to thank for watching out for him.”), until she had enough high-end skin-care products to stock a small boutique. All that they wanted in return was a quiet heads-up when Ted took a call from their children’s first-choice schools, so that they could coincidentally call to check in later the same day.

  It was easy enough to accommodate them, as she was not being asked to divulge content. Rita was an ambitious girl who had lost her development job at Paramount because she believed an article about office romances posing less of a risk than they used to. Now she dreamed of being made a full-fledged counselor just in time to derail the college aspirations of the current ninth-grader whose father had cost her the studio job. While she bided her time, she looked for ways to be even more indispensable than she already was.

  She always knew which school was on the phone. The next step was to watch Ted as he talked, to look for clues—and once she noticed the tapping, to look for a pattern. At the end of her second year at Crestview, she had drawn up a list of presumed acceptances, which she compared to the official list the school published every June. Based on Ted’s tapping, Rita had been right on twelve of the fifteen calls she had tracked. This year, her third, she was sure enough of her technique to share information with a very select group of parents.

  Ted was on a call with Skidmore when the phone rang.

  “He has the head of school in his office,” she lied. “But he did ask me to let him know when you called. Just a moment, please.” She did not take the time to write. She got to the doorway of Ted’s office, held up one finger, and he nodded and got off the phone.

  It did not take long. Ted talked, Ted listened, Ted drummed on the desk, Ted hung up and smiled. Rita took a small Moleskine notebook out of her purse, pulled the elastic strap out of the way, and wrote down, “Harvard—2. 1/1?” She had a hunch that gender played a role in Ted’s tapping, that he tapped one-handed if it was all girls or all boys, and two-handed, like a typist, the phone cradled against his shoulder, if both girls and boys had gotten in. She had yet to figure out if he always used the same hand for the same sex, but there was no rush. Parents were satisfied to know that he had made contact. The rest of her sleuthing, the attention to gender-specific tapping patterns, was a puzzle for Rita’s personal entertainment. The more sophisticated her code-breaking skills, the greater the risk she would be found out.

  She pulled up the final application list on her computer screen and found the five students who had applied to Harvard. One set of parents always called her Rhonda, so they would not be getting a call. The remaining four had been attentive to her in varying degrees, but two of their children were long shots, so only two sets of parents would hear from her.

  At this time of year, her calls always went through.

  “Hi. How goes it?”

  “He just got off the phone with Harvard,” she said, “and he was smiling. There may be two yeses. I’m sorry I don’t know more about who it is.”

  “That’s fine,” said Trey. “Thank you.”

  “No problem.”

  She hung up, put the notebook back in her purse, and glanced up just in time to see Ted riffing with two fingers on each hand as he chatted with the rep from Skidmore. When he finished the call, he dialed another number and swiveled his chair so that he was facing the back wall, and Rita assumed that he was making his own call to Trey.

  The University of California schools dumped notification emails throughout the month of March, as though being first gave them any meaningful advantage over the East Coast schools. Crestview parents who had grown up in Los Angeles wanted to send their kids east to prove that they were cosmopolitan, that they appreciated the existence of a larger world, where men shaved every day and women of a certain status and zip code dressed as though they were on their way to either a funeral or a foxhunt. Parents who had fled the East Coast and migrated to the promised land, on the other hand, had to prove that they had not gotten lazy, that they still appreciated the character-building aspects of frostbite and vertical architecture, and they dreamed of sending their children back to the very cities they had fled. For most Crestview families, a UC application was little more than a sunlit insurance policy against the unthinkable on April 1.

  The single exception was UC Berkeley—Cal to the people lucky enough to go there. Cal, a vestige of the time when it was the one and only UC, the first, the sufficient, the definitive, the model for the satellites that followed. Berkeley was as difficult to get into as a private school, the site of an ongoing and escalating battle between white and Asian students, each of whom thought their acceptance rate was too low and the competition’s too high. A Crestview senior might bide his time in March by bragging about a Cal acceptance, but most of them tallied their UC acceptances with the same nonchalance that enabled them to fill up their cars with their parents’ credit cards and never once look at the price.

  There were no surprises for Lauren, as she had checked off only three UC campuses. Three emails popped up on a single evening, a rejection from Berkeley and acceptances from UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine. She reported the news to her parents without disappointment or relief. As far as Lauren was concerned, there was little difference between a no from a great school like Berkeley and a yes from a school she had picked because Ted said she needed three Best Chances.

  “But it’s your first yes,” said Nora. “Yeses, excuse me. We could stop for a second and think about that.” She tried to put her arms around Lauren. “You’re going to college.”

  “Not in Santa Barbara or Irvine I’m not,” said Lauren, backing off.

  Joel stopped loading the dishwasher. “You would have preferred getting turned down?”

  “Stop it. Don’t pretend to be happy about something we’re not happy about. I mean, what do you think I should major in, surfing? Antiques? I’m going back to work. We don’t want Northwestern to accept me and then take it back because I flunked out.”

  She disappeared, leaving Nora and Joel to finish cleaning up the kitchen. Joel waited until he heard Lauren’s door close before he leaned over to whisper to his wife.

  “What are we, living with Groucho Marx? ‘I don’t want to go to any school that would accept me as an undergraduate’?”

  “Something like that.”

  Disdain, ingratitude, tempests of self-hatred and rage and sarcasm, and the occasional ultimatum that equated UCLA with prison, UC Santa Cruz with summer camp, and UC Davis with the boonies: as April 1 got closer and closer, Crestview seniors began to fall apart. With Ted’s fingers poised in midair more often than they made happy drumming contact with his desk, there was precious little good news, or even good rumor, to go around. Worse, everyone assumed that the acceptances and rejections were by now loaded into every school’s outbound email bins, waiting for a bureaucrat to launch them at the end of business on March 31, or at a minute after midnight on April 1—cruel inconsistency—so that heartbroken families would have to wait overnight to call to appeal. Like cows being herded into the slaughterhouse chute, like dead men walking, seniors lived the last days of March with a cold inevitability, knowing that there was not a single thing they could do to alter their fate. Bad news was coming to someone, but no one knew how much or to whom.

  The tunnel vision got worse every day, even among families that had in the past acknowledged the existence of more substantial threats to their happiness than a college rejection: rogue nuclear nations, a global food shortage, phenome
na that people with stacked degrees from illustrious colleges and universities were having a great deal of trouble solving. The mood was only slightly more festive at Ocean Heights, where the demographics included families for whom a UC acceptance was heaven on earth, proof that they were about to send a first generation to college, or that they would spend fewer years in debt than they had feared. But the best Ocean Heights students were as crazed as their Crestview counterparts, hopeful that they would show to advantage in the public school population, terrified that an Ivy would discount a public school A because the curriculum lacked rigor. Liz’s Berkeley acceptance registered as little more than confirmation of her competitive status for Harvard.

  On April 1, Steve dropped off his last fare at 2:15, complained to the dispatcher of a terrible stomachache, possibly food poisoning, and headed for home, as did Yoonie, who at 2:15 feigned an identical stomachache and left Dr. Joy in the lurch for the first time in her life. They met in the parking lot of the Coffee Bean so that they could arrive at home simultaneously, and when they pulled up, Liz was already standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, staring at a pile of mail stacked on the stoop. She could have checked her email before she left school, and for a moment she regretted not having done so, but her parents had always talked about what the three of them would do when Liz got her good news, not what Liz would do by herself. The unspoken assumption was that they would find out together. It would have felt like cheating to look at her email.

  Steve and Yoonie came up next to her, silently, tallying the number of big manila envelopes. Six. They had a mail slot in their front door, so there was no way to tell if there was a thin envelope without going inside, but for a long moment they did not move.

  Six large envelopes.

  “We should go inside,” said Liz.

  “You said you did not want us to open the mail,” said Yoonie. “We are waiting for you.”

  “Right. Okay. I’ll go first and pick up the stuff on the stoop but I’m not going to look at the return addresses. I’m going to open the door and take in the mail and not look either. I’m going into my room. I’ll come out and tell you what happened once I look at everything.”

  She could not make good on the business about not looking at the return addresses, but she picked up the outside stack and opened the door to collect the inside stack without giving anything away, and then she disappeared down the hallway into her room, leaving the front door open behind her. Yoonie waited for Steve to move, and Steve waited for Yoonie to move, and neither of them did until a sound behind them made them jump. They turned, as one, and the mailman smiled and saluted as he locked the back doors of his truck and came around to the curb-side driver’s door.

  “Lotta mail for you folks,” he said, with a knowing smile. For ten years he had been delivering school news to the families on his route, from preschool acceptances on up to college, and he knew what a pile of fat envelopes meant.

  “I can see there’s going to be some celebrating here tonight,” he said as he got into the truck.

  Steve and Yoonie waved, mimicked his neighborly smile, and went inside. Yoonie put on water for a pot of tea, but Liz was still in her room when the water boiled, still in her room when the tea had steeped. The optimistic flush that Steve and Yoonie had felt at the mailman’s reference to a celebration began to fade, replaced by the awful sense that the delay had nothing to do with Liz being overcome by joy.

  When she did emerge, holding a single sheet of stationery in her hand, there was none of the drama that her parents had anticipated. She simply placed the letter on the table between them and said, “I didn’t get in.” She went to the cabinet, got a mug from the company that made Dr. Joy’s favorite retinol preparation, poured herself some tea, and sat down, so that they could all stare at the letter together.

  “Would you like something with your tea?” asked Yoonie, who needed to be busy. Dr. Joy often bought cupcakes for the staff, even though she refused to go near refined sugar and the two younger nurses were on a lifelong diet that only included cupcakes if no one was watching. Yoonie always brought three of them home.

  “Sure,” said Liz.

  Yoonie cut a double-chocolate cupcake into thirds and put the pieces on a small plate. Steve picked up the letter and studied it, as though he might find a clue to his daughter’s fate in the watermark, or the typeface, or even the cushioned wording of the bad news. A friendly rejection letter had a familiar and disingenuous sting, like the fare who complained about the cab’s air-conditioning, left a chunk of almond bark to melt into the creases of the backseat, and departed the cab with a cheery, “Have a nice day.”

  Yoonie studied the cupcake segments and took the smallest one, and when Steve put down the letter she pretended to read it with great interest.

  “Mom,” said Liz, taking it from her mother’s hand and folding it in careful thirds. “There’s no point to reading it.” She stood up, cupcake wedge in one hand, mug of tea in the other. “I’m sorry I let you guys down,” she said.

  She was halfway down the hall before her father came to his senses.

  “Elizabeth,” he called. “All the big envelopes. What were they?”

  She answered without turning or stopping. “Yale, Swarthmore, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Chicago.” She shut her bedroom door behind her, and her parents, as depressed as though they had received nothing but bad news, finished their tea and wondered what they would do with the rest of the afternoon.

  Liz stacked the acceptance packets on the floor by her desk and picked up her cell phone. She sent a text message to Brad.

  “No from Harvard. You?” but he did not reply.

  Brad wandered over to Starbucks after school and wasted an hour pretending to read his biology homework, and when Liz’s text arrived he went back to school and slipped into the empty computer lab to find out his own fate before he answered her. He started to open his email once, twice, and closed it both times without reading the contents of the in-box, waiting for the excited tightening in his chest, the flutter of anticipation, that he imagined a senior was supposed to feel. All he got was a tight little tug in his right shoulder blade, which he knew was from hiking his shoulder when he used the mouse, but which felt like a knot of his father’s gathered expectations.

  Enough.

  He called up his email and there they were, eight emails lined up like little soldiers at attention, awaiting his inspection. He clicked. He was in at Brown, as though his father would ever let him go to a school with no set curriculum. Click, click, click, in at Penn, at Williams, at Cornell. At Wesleyan and Princeton. With Berkeley, he was batting a thousand, and the momentum of all this good news carried him, click, into the Harvard notification without hesitation, because for a single, sheer, clear moment he felt confident enough not to care what happened.

  Brad read the message, read it a second time, forgot completely about Liz, and called his dad on the inside office line. Trey picked up on the first ring.

  “Son, I called the house and no one is home. Where are you?”

  “I’m on the wait list, Dad. I got the email. I got accepted everyplace else, but Harvard wants to put me on the wait list. Go figure.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Want me to forward the email?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They send out emails. Besides the letters, so I opened mine. They didn’t take me, so what do you think? Penn might be good.” Brad heard the clacking of a keyboard and panicked. “Hey, who are you emailing? Don’t do anything. Please wait until we get home.”

  The clacking stopped.

  “Who got in?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Well, we’re all sorry, but we’ll get this straightened out. Who got in?”

  “How would I know? I’m in the computer lab. Who cares who else got in?”

  “I care,” said Trey, who went back to the email he was drafting to the head of the alumni association. “I’d like to know who
there has a more attractive record than a fourth-generation legacy who’s going to be valedictorian.”

  “A maybe valedictorian,” said Brad, feeling a sudden, small urge to give his father a hard time. “What if it’s Katie instead?”

  “Please. Let us not get distracted. Go ask Ted who they took.”

  “I will not.”

  “Brad, I need you to go ask Ted who they took.”

  “You need me…I don’t want to know, okay? Talk to you later. Thanks for all your sympathy.” He hung up and forwarded the email to his father, who called back a moment later. Brad thought about not answering. His friends ignored their parents’ calls, or pled bad reception or a low battery, but Brad always assumed that his father would see right through that kind of fakery.

  “Dad, I really don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

  “Son, is there anyone else in the lab?”

  “No.”

  “Listen to me. It may be that Roger’s behavior has cast a pall here. He certainly did not do the family any favor by making such a noisy exit.”

  “Dad. Maybe they just didn’t take me.”

  “They did not reject you. They offered you the wait list, and we’re going to clear this up. In the meantime, talk to Ted, but if you should see one of your friends I see no reason to make a lot of noise about not knowing yet.”

  “If somebody asks me I have to say.”

  “No, you don’t.” Brad had never heard his father sound so brusque. “You say you’re in. I don’t want to hear any more about this. Talk to Ted and call me back.”

  “You want me to lie and say I got in?”

  “I want you to appreciate that this is an error we are going to resolve.”

  “Right. See you at home.”