Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  When Lauren was in first grade she had taken Joel’s visiting college roommate and his wife on a tour of the house, and had explained to them, with a great seriousness of purpose, that PC stood for Parents’ Computer. Those were the days, thought Nora, when the simple ability to link a letter to a sound to a word was accomplishment enough. The memory only made her feel worse. Living in nostalgia’s swamp was not going to be easy. They might have to get a dog.

  A moment later, she called out, “Hey, come see what I found.”

  Joel folded the newspaper slowly, hoping that whatever it was had nothing to do with college, knowing as he walked down the hall that it did. She edged over so that he could pull up a chair, and she started to read aloud.

  “Well, somebody sure as F made a big fat mistake they’re going to regret forever when they rejected me. After I go to Harvard Law, after I clerk for a Supreme Court Justice, when I’m weighing offers, like maybe what public office should I run for first, who do you think is going to get credit for sending me on the path to greatness? When I’m on the road to the White House! Not Northwestern. Colgate is going to see that application spike because other people are going to want their kids to do what I did. I have a 2290 on my SATs and who cares about Bs in science if I’m going into politics? You took a kid I know with only three APs, and if I cared at all I’d challenge the rejection because I bet you made a mistake. Your loss, bozos.”

  Joel looked up from the screen, praying that they were going to play this for comedy. “Where did you find this?”

  “I Googled ‘Northwestern University undergraduate acceptance,’ and I found a blog of nothing but kids who applied there, all the way back to last fall. He posted this on the school’s own website. Can you believe it?”

  “What I’m having trouble believing is that you Googled ‘Northwestern University undergraduate acceptance,’” Joel replied. “What did you expect to find?”

  Nora shrugged, embarrassed but defiant. “And if I scroll down, he posted the same thing every hour. It shows up every five or six posts, so no matter when you look, you’re going to see it. That’s how angry he is.”

  “How do you know it’s a boy? Could be a psycho girl.”

  “Named Bob.”

  “If you were that nuts, would you use your real name?” Joel scrolled further down the screen.

  “Maybe we should have—”

  Joel cut her off with a curt “No!”

  “How do you know whether we should have or shouldn’t have when you don’t even know what I’m going to say?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I meant no, there’s no point to second-guessing. For all we know, she was the next kid up at every single school she applied to.”

  “Then she’d be on the wait list at all of them. So we know she wasn’t. Next kid up, that is.”

  “Don’t be so literal. You know what I mean.”

  “Actually, I don’t know what you mean.”

  Joel’s voice got tight. “You heard what Ted said. Any other year and she’d be a gimme at these schools, but this is not any other year. Last year wasn’t any other year, next year won’t be any other year, these kids are trapped because too many of their parents had too many kids at the same time. And because we get U.S. News & World Report confused with the ten commandments. And because everybody has to apply to two dozen schools.”

  “But we didn’t figure it out for her,” said Nora, her voice strangled by coming tears. “Maybe we should have—don’t you dare stop me—maybe we should have had her apply easier places, and who knows if Ted really fought for her. But like you say, it’s beside the point.”

  She sputtered and looked around the room. “Why is there never Kleenex in here?” Joel waited while she stomped into the bathroom, blew her nose once, twice, splashed water on her face, and came back in.

  “If you want a big mistake to agonize over,” he said, closing the blog, “we should’ve waited longer to have a kid. The boomlet crests in maybe two years, three, five at the most.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “I don’t mean ridiculous to wait. Ridiculous to think it’s going to end. Not for kids who think there are only ten schools worth going to and their parents will do anything to send them there. All the Crestviews, all over the country, still have the same number of kids applying to the same number of schools, and that’s before you even think about Ocean Heights. Maybe it gets a little easier getting into preschool, but after that? It’s only going to get easier at the schools Crestview kids don’t want to go to. Like the ones Lauren gets to pick from.

  “And how sad is it,” she went on, “that I feel a little bit better knowing we’re not going to suffer alone?”

  “There’s a hole in your logic somewhere,” said Joel, “but fine. You’re right. It’s never going to end. I don’t have the energy to figure it out. She’s going to be fine.”

  Joel wrapped his arms around Nora in what he hoped was a suggestive embrace and pointed out that sex required neither debate nor research.

  She slumped against him. “Oh, honey, I don’t have any energy. We could get up early tomorrow. She still won’t be here.” She kissed him, but not in an encouraging way, and slipped upstairs.

  The sirens of middle age, the couch, the newspaper crossword puzzle, and the television set, lured him back from disappointment, but not for long. The guy in the erectile dysfunction commercial looked no older than Joel was, and he seemed to have no trouble coaxing his energetic wife away from responsibility and into a bathtub, a hammock, a sunlit bedroom. Joel’s success rate in terms of even creating the opportunity for dysfunction was as bad, lately, as was his daughter’s college acceptance percentage. He might be suffering from chronic ED without even knowing it, brought on by the prolonged stress of making sure that Lauren could go to a school she seemed to hate. He wished he could assign a story on the toll college applications took on parents without his colleagues questioning—or, worse, making assumptions about—his motivation.

  The notorious exception to all the misery was Chloe, who found herself in the midst of what Nana Ree would have called a laugh riot—or rather, a laff riot, for she rewrote English at will to convey the uniqueness of a particular feeling or event. A laff riot was better than a joke, better than a funny movie or a sitcom, because it was unexpected. For Chloe’s grandma, a laff riot was finding a size six in exactly the dress she wanted, hanging by mistake among the size tens she passed on the way to the ladies’ room, after having been told definitively that all the small sizes were gone. But each generation defined the phenomenon for herself; it was the antithesis of tradition.

  Chloe had not previously experienced anything that qualified as a true laff riot, though she lived her life in anticipation of one. It got her by happy ambush: In a single week she got packets and emails inviting her to attend Bard, Skidmore, Sarah Lawrence, Goucher, Hampshire, George Mason, the New School, Hunter, and the universities of Arizona, Colorado, and Florida, though she honestly did not recall filing the Florida application. She could go to UC Santa Cruz or UC Irvine. She got thin letters from the top-ranked schools she had put on her list only because her old friends at Crestview were applying, and she threw those envelopes out without bothering to open them. Chloe had volume. She had the academic equivalent of a closet full of new clothes, and she had the new respect of classmates who might have heard that still waters run deep, but had no idea that there was anything of substance beneath Chloe’s effervescence.

  Lauren padded down the carpeted hallway behind Chloe, past Deena’s closed door. No muffled television, no music, no nothing. The loudest sound in the house, at the moment, was the refrigerator motor.

  “Is your mom asleep already?”

  “Yeah, she read that the hours you sleep before midnight are better sleep than the hours after,” said Chloe. “She believes those kinds of things.”

  Lauren hesitated. “It’s a little weird.”

  �
�Hey, things have changed since the big breakup, you know that. Trust me, if you didn’t need to get away from your parents we’d be sitting down to one of your mom’s desserts right now.” Chloe took two bowls out of a cabinet and two spoons out of a drawer. “I like your house better.”

  She pulled open the freezer door of the side-by-side, and Lauren let out a surprised little breath. The shelves were full of pints of ice cream, row after row, arranged by brand.

  “Häagen-Dazs chocolate chip, chocolate, and coffee, Häagen-Dazs Light that’s never been opened, Ciao Bella sorbet for when Mom buys jeans too small, Ben & Jerry’s for when Mom’s depressed that she bought jeans too small.” Chloe grinned, hard. “All of it’s supposed to be if friends drop by unexpectedly. What do you want?”

  “I don’t want to take her favorite.”

  “She doesn’t have a favorite. This is our medicine chest. Two tablespoons before bedtime to improve your mood. The only time I ever saw her actually eat ice cream like a normal person was the night my dad moved out.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Chloe grabbed one pint from each shelf, except for the low-fat, and filled the bowls with a scoop from each pint. Lauren looked over Chloe’s shoulder as she did, and sure enough, there were no scoop-sized indentations in any of the containers. Nothing but shallow little craters of the sort that a tentative, abashed tablespoon might make. All of a sudden Lauren hated herself for being a brat, which was what she had been, as far as she could tell, ever since the night she missed the early-decision deadline. Chloe’s parents were kind of useless, when they weren’t downright embarrassing. The worst she could say about her own parents was that they took everything so seriously. They wanted to do a good job, which they defined as something more than what they were doing at any given moment in time.

  “You waiting for it to melt? C’mon.”

  “Sorry.” She followed Chloe in a minor but familiar daze. When she was five her parents had let her sleep over at Chloe’s house for the first time in her life, and it was in this hallway, in front of Deena and Dave’s closed door, in the middle of the night, that she had demanded to go home right that minute because she was scared. Deena had called her parents to say that Dave would drive her home, but Joel and Nora had insisted on driving over in their pajamas—discussing, they told her when she was older, the damage they must be doing by not encouraging her independence.

  She thought about driving home, but she did not yet know what she wanted to say to them. Stuck in self-pity as thick as coastal fog, she could not see her way clear to anything as simple as I’m sorry, or I love you guys. Not yet.

  Instead, she and Chloe sat on the floor and listened to Chloe’s Life Sucks playlist, songs about suicide and tragic accidents and love affairs gone wrong.

  “My mother hates these songs,” said Lauren.

  “Mothers are supposed to hate these songs. Her mother hated her songs.”

  “No, I mean specifically,” said Lauren. She did her best to imitate Nora’s deadpan. “‘Whiny white boys,’” she intoned, “‘fed up to here with getting rich and touring the world. What do they think, you wake up the day after you’re dead, still conscious? Heaven is clubs and girlfriends and attitude?’ That’s what she says.”

  Lauren turned her attention to her ice cream.

  “Look, can I ask you something disgusting and you don’t have to answer?”

  Chloe grinned. “Go ahead.”

  “Look, I know you’re smarter than you let on and all, you know that, but, I mean, you’re the only one I told…and you’ve got…”

  “All these acceptances and you want to know why the fuck I got in every place when you didn’t.”

  “See, you’re mad, I shouldn’t have…”

  Chloe held up her hand to silence her friend. “Here’s how I got in, so listen. Partly I got lucky because Ocean Heights doesn’t weight grades or report minus and plus, so my B minus is as good as a B plus. I picked schools on purpose that nobody else was applying to. And I told them what they wanted to hear.”

  She reached up, retrieved her laptop from on top of her desk, opened a Word document, and turned the computer around so that Lauren could see the screen.

  “See if you like it.”

  I could start out with a joke about how people in Los Angeles discriminate against anyone who isn’t a size two, because humor is pretty much the only defense against that kind of stupidity. And I guess I just have, but being a size six is a superficial issue. In fact, sometimes I’m glad that genetics have made me what I am, because it gives me something to laugh about while I figure out how to handle the other challenges I face.

  My parents say I’ve always been a pretty trusting person, which I guess is why I proudly told my third-grade class that I was part Sioux when we did our family tree project. I thought it made me a little bit more interesting. I never would have thought that other kids found it weird. I still remember the day a boy I liked came up to me on the playground, on my birthday, to give me a present he made himself, a war bonnet he made of feathers glued to construction paper. When I ran to the teacher, crying, she told me I shouldn’t be so sensitive, and what a lot of effort he must have put into that gift.

  Maybe a more cautious person would have learned a lesson—or maybe my commitment to personal honesty made me brave—but in high school, in the world religions unit, I decided to make famous agnostics the subject of my oral presentation. A list of well-known agnostics includes Matt Groening, who created The Simpsons, Zac Efron, of the movie High School Musical, and rock star Dave Matthews. As a curious and questioning person, I embraced agnostic beliefs. I wasn’t sure that God existed, but I wasn’t prepared to say He didn’t. I was proud of the fact that I was willing to be uncertain.

  This time some people got angry, and the others made fun of me again. They said I had commitment issues, like I was a boy who only wanted sex and didn’t call again if he didn’t get it. They said I was indecisive. One girl said if I was smarter I would at least say I was an atheist, because being an agnostic only meant not knowing what to do.

  My parents were as supportive as they could be, but when I was in tenth grade they went through an acrimonious separation and divorce. I spend half my time with my mother and half my time with my father, and they try to pay attention, but they each only have half-time, so many issues fall through the cracks.

  The unexpected benefit of this is that I have become an even more independent person, I think, and self-sufficient because I have to be. I am still amazed at how intolerant some people can be. I think it’s because they are so insecure in their own beliefs that they need everyone to agree with them so they don’t have doubts. As for me, I don’t back down.

  Lauren handed back the laptop. “You never told me any of this,” she said.

  Chloe smiled. “My English teacher said she cried when she read it. She actually offered to do a recommendation, I didn’t even have to ask her.”

  “I tell you everything, Chloe.”

  “I’ll just wait until you catch up here, genius.”

  Lauren read again until she got to “part Sioux.”

  “Oh my God,” said Lauren. “You made it up. You’re not part anything, except maybe liar.”

  “I prefer to think of it as a sales document,” said Chloe, paying great attention to the slick of melted ice cream at the bottom of her bowl. “I didn’t exactly say I was part Sioux. I said I said I was part Sioux. I can’t help it if people believed me.”

  Lauren stared at her friend.

  “Look,” said Chloe, “if somebody like you can’t get in places, what the hell chance do I have? I go to a school where college counseling is a joke. I’m white. I’m not rich and connected like Brad. Any way you look at it, I’m average, which is the kiss of death. So I did what I had to do to make myself not average.”

  Lauren looked at the screen again.

  “‘Acrimonious separation and divorce.’”

  “That’s the truth,” said Chloe.
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  “It doesn’t sound like you.”

  “You mean ‘acrimonious.’ This is why God invented the thesaurus. Or didn’t. Us agnostics just aren’t sure.”

  “What about the Simpsons guy?”

  “Wikipedia.”

  “What’re you going to do if they find out?”

  “Pay attention,” said Chloe. “I only picked things they won’t ask me about. It’s not like I said I have a limp and they’ll see me running across campus. Nobody’s going to stop me on move-in day and ask me to prove that my great-grandmother was an Indian. A Native American, sorry.”

  Lauren giggled. “So I should have said I was, I don’t know…”

  “A Pacific Islander,” said Chloe.

  “Wow.”

  “With an alcoholic dad you had to help take care of.”

  “I couldn’t do that to my father.”

  “An alcoholic neighbor. Out of the goodness of your heart. Who you helped when you weren’t lobbying people in front of the supermarket to stop using individual plastic bottles. And collecting neighbors’ old clothes for a shelter for women returning to the workplace.”

  “A part–Pacific Islander who took care of a drunk when I wasn’t saving the environment and helping women turn their lives around.”

  “Have we left anything out?” asked Chloe. “I don’t think attention deficit’s worth it at this point, too many people say they have it. Look. You did exactly what you were supposed to do, and I love you, you know I’m not insulting you, but it got you pretty much nowhere. Which is crazy, because those schools should be happy to have you.”

  “Please don’t say that. My parents say it all the time.”

  “But they’re right.”