Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  “But you lied.”

  “Sort of. Yes. Why should I play by the rules if the rules fuck over people like you? It’s a crappy system, so I say do what you need to do to beat it.”

  Lauren rubbed the carpet nap this way and that, until the palm of her hand started to tingle. “Too late for that.”

  “Maybe you’ll get off the wait list. They have to take somebody.”

  Lauren shrugged. “No, they don’t. Can we change the subject?”

  “Sure,” said Chloe, who had been waiting for the opportunity. “Paul asked me to prom.”

  Lauren lay back on the carpet and stared at the ceiling. This was the last straw. Her college choices were the equivalent of a bad date; no, that was unkind, the equivalent of a date she did not care about. She had no date for prom and no plan to get one, as she had always imagined she would follow in the tradition of the Crestview girls who ended up going stag and proud of it, girls who loudly proclaimed that they could celebrate just fine without a date, which they had been too busy to bother looking for, by the way. She had intended to buy a ticket and bring Chloe along for comic relief, and now Chloe and her zillion college acceptances had a date with a boy who was going to Princeton. A handsome, fairly funny date who Lauren had occasionally imagined was looking over at her in a meaningful way from the baritone section of the choir. Clearly not—or, if he was, it was because she was a friend of Chloe’s.

  “Did you hear me? Paul asked me to prom.”

  “I’m going to be the only one there without a date. I’m not going. That’s it.” Lauren got up. “I have to go home.”

  “Don’t go home. You’ve got weeks yet. Find somebody. Want me to ask Paul?”

  Lauren groaned, because on some hideous level she wanted exactly that and would never say so. Until this moment, she had not even been aware of how much prom mattered, and now it was probably too late to find an acceptable date, let alone a great one.

  “I am not getting fixed up for prom.”

  “Then you have to get asked or ask someone. You can’t not go.”

  “Right.”

  “You think I was terrible to make stuff up. You’re going to go home and never be my best friend again, aren’t you? I would give you one of my acceptances if I could, I would, and we have to go to prom together because otherwise we will wish we did for the rest of our lives.”

  “I hope not,” said Lauren, grabbing her bag and planting a kiss on the top of Chloe’s head. “I really hope that none of this matters in about an hour, but I think that’s not happening. Talk to you later.”

  Mr. Nelson, the Crestview student newspaper’s faculty sponsor, had dyed his prematurely gray hair brown over winter break, but bad brown, the kind that oxidized and turned brassy in the relentless southern California sunshine. Nora said he looked like Lucille Ball. Joel said he looked like an idiot, as though anyone needed further proof. Lauren appreciated her parents’ attempts to ridicule the man who had denied her the editor’s job, but her problem with the dye job had nothing to do with the quality of the workmanship. She hated the new look because it made Mr. Nelson and Don, the editor, look even more disturbingly alike than they already did.

  They were waiting for her in Mr. Nelson’s office after school on Friday with their usual mutually perturbed air, as though it was her fault that she had a class instead of a free period at the end of the day. Two wan, round, expressionless faces, two small and tidy bodies in Brooks Brothers and J. Crew, respectively, their lollipop physiques topped off by their matching carrot tops, one fake and the other genuine. They had pale eyes and eyelashes the color and texture of bee pollen. If life were a science-fiction movie, Lauren thought, they would turn out to be insects who assumed human characteristics in the hope of infiltrating and then conquering the world.

  Stop it, she told herself. She needed to stop finding reasons to dislike her life.

  “End-of-year issue coming up,” said Mr. Nelson as soon as Lauren sat down.

  “End-of-year issue,” said Don, as though Lauren had not understood.

  “End-of-year issue,” said Lauren, pulling a spiral notebook out of her bag and pretending to consult a nonexistent list of topics. “College roundup, sports roundup, graduation ceremony instructions, grad night rules, dress codes, prom photo spread, farewell editorial.” The final issue of the school paper was meant for parents, not students, a keepsake to be packed away along with the diploma and the mortarboard and the graduation program.

  Don did his best to look down his insufficient nose at her. “That’s all you’ve got?”

  “That’s what the last issue always is,” said Lauren. Seeking the truth had lost its appeal since Chloe’s disclosure about how she got into so many colleges. Between her friend’s engineered victories and her own seemingly limited destiny, Lauren was not in the mood for vigorous inquiry.

  “Don has a couple of good ideas that aren’t what the last issue always is,” said Mr. Nelson.

  “Okay,” said Lauren, holding her pen poised above her notebook.

  Don leaned forward. “Let’s find somebody who didn’t get in anywhere good and get them to write a first-person thing.”

  “With their name on it?”

  “Lauren, I’m surprised at you,” said Mr. Nelson. “Since when do we use anonymous sources?”

  “I don’t mean anonymous sources,” she said. “I mean why would you ask someone to confess to the whole school that things didn’t exactly go so well?” Lauren assumed that she was not the only Crestview senior keeping a secret, and that the others were as determined as she was not to divulge the truth. Don only liked the idea because he had gotten in early at USC and had no idea what trouble was; he was the high school equivalent of someone who watched Storm Chasers on television, not for the science but for the vicarious thrill.

  “Because it’s a great story,” he replied. “I mean, c’mon, I heard about one school that had a wall of shame, people posted their rejection letters on a big board in the cafeteria and they had a vote, which school wrote the coldest rejection. Where’s your sense of humor?”

  “I don’t know, maybe someplace where you laugh at funny things instead of laughing at people who are less lucky than you are, what do you think?” She shoved her notebook back into her bag and stood up suddenly. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Like you’d step up and confess in public if ten places turned you down. I don’t think so, which makes you what? Kind of a hypocrite.”

  She sat down again and waited for a reply.

  Mr. Nelson wondered why it was that the girls on the staff—even a girl like Lauren, who had journalism in her genes—eventually let their emotions get in the way. He made a mental note to mention this incident to the head of school, who was pressuring him to name a girl to the editor’s job for the coming year and did not seem to appreciate that Mr. Nelson evaluated candidates based on ability, not gender.

  Don wished he had presented the idea as an assignment for Lauren, which might have made it harder for her to turn down. Now he was going to get stuck looking for a subject himself.

  “Is anybody going to say anything?” Lauren asked.

  “I think Crestview seniors know how to say no if they don’t want to participate,” said Mr. Nelson, “but if the idea upsets you, Lauren, I’m sure Don can handle it.”

  “I’ll get on it,” said Don, intending to draft one of the juniors to do the leg work. If that did not work, he would complain bitterly about having to make room for all the traditional articles, and then he would kill his nonexistent story for space.

  “There you are,” said Lauren. She got up and left before either of them could respond. After a long moment, Mr. Nelson walked over to his desk and imitated a man checking his email.

  “You see, this is where you get into trouble,” said Mr. Nelson, who had never actually worked for a newspaper but had written his master’s thesis about the limitations of advocacy journalism and had trouble distinguishing between passion and bias. “You let your
feelings cloud your judgment and you miss out on a good story.”

  Don stared at the empty doorway, wishing he had ever had the nerve to ask Lauren out. The best thing about working on the school paper was the guarantee of seeing her at least once a week, even if she always seemed to be looking just past him, and over the course of the school year his interest in her had become inflamed to something more like worship. His disdain was merely camouflage. He never once thought to wonder why she had reacted so negatively to his suggestion. If anyone had asked Don how Lauren had done with her college applications, he would have speculated that she had gotten in everywhere.

  chapter 14

  Brad had envisioned an escalating series of encounters with Liz in the months between asking her to prom and prom itself, but he had failed to take her work ethic into account. Extreme diligence was not a situational personality trait: Liz treated second semester of senior year as though it were first semester of junior year, so there was no letup in her workload, no hope of more than an occasional after-school coffee in a week without deadlines or exams. She finally agreed to spend a Sunday morning with Brad instead of at her desk—but then the notifications came, and it took three days to reply to her text about Harvard, so she put him off for one more week while she sorted out how she felt about him being both rude and luckier than she was. Brad had planned to take Liz to the Getty, but by the time he pulled up in front of her house he had decided instead to take her to the Venice boardwalk, in the hope that it would feel more like a date and less like an art history field trip. The drive down to the beach felt like nothing at all.

  Brad loved Venice because it was goofy. No matter how many art collectors bought adjacent shacks, tore them down, and built a single showplace home in their stead, no matter how many movie directors installed security systems, Venice refused to tidy up completely. He and Liz walked past a farmers’ market set up in a parking lot, a sausage cart, a skateboarding Sikh with a flute. They stopped to watch the bodybuilders at Muscle Beach, men and women the color of rotisserie chickens, who failed to see the irony of bodies built to last covered by skin about to kill them. They turned around and headed north, past a row of old Russian Jews on new woven folding chairs, past a knot of gnarled, argumentative men kibitzing over a speed-chess tournament, without once talking about college. They studied the guys who swung along the rings like happy apes, swapping one arm to the next, ring to ring, until they flew off at the far end and landed facing the ocean. Brad put his arm around Liz’s shoulder and thought he saw her smile, at least a little bit. She was not one for large expressions.

  “I don’t see how they do it,” said Liz. “I mean, I see how they do it, I see how they pull down on the back swing to get the momentum going forward. I think I would crash right into the upright.” She leaned against him for a moment, thought better of it, and straightened up. “See, that’s why I didn’t get into Harvard. Idiot me. I should’ve said I was an ace on the rings. I bet nobody said that.”

  I didn’t get in either.

  That was his first line of dialogue. All he had to do to make her feel better was open his mouth and say it.

  Instead, he said, “I think Yale’s great. Katie would kill to be you.”

  “I haven’t decided for sure” was all she would say. Brad decided not to push. He could hardly ask Liz who had offered her the most money, and it would be cruel to talk about Yale if Yale was not the answer to the question he could not ask. They got as far as the Santa Monica pier, where a bunch of kids clutching presents streaked across their path on their way to a birthday party at the carousel, and then they turned around and headed back toward the car, grateful for the ambient noise that covered the sudden silence. Even on the far side of acceptance letters, college could kill a conversation more quickly than the unexpected appearance of a nosy parent or a gossiping friend.

  By midday, the boardwalk started to fill up with locals trying to forget who they were during the workweek and sidewalk entrepreneurs getting ready to open for business. Vendors carrying collapsible canopies and boxes of merchandise piled out of pickup trucks and vans, and five minutes later they were selling T-shirts and sunglasses and straw hats, saris and lucky-hand charms and henna tattoos. The sausage cart was flanked by carts selling Mexican ices, popcorn, and cotton candy. The skateboarding Sikh with the flute had competition from guitars and steel drums, from congas and a violin and a guy singing along to instrumentals blaring from a boom box.

  Liz stopped in front of the violinist and cocked her head to one side, as though changing the angle at which sound waves struck her ears might improve the quality of the sound. A moment later, she straightened up and turned away.

  “I don’t think more practice is going to help,” she said, with a small shake of her head. “Maybe he ought to try another line of work.”

  Brad tagged after her, trying to ignore the fact that she sounded, in that moment, exactly like his father. Silently he calculated who all these musicians would have turned out to be if Trey was right about discipline and the responsibilities of adulthood. The Sikh undoubtedly would have negotiated a lasting peace between India and Pakistan, and the black guy with the boom box had surely taken his eye off the ball and missed out on a seat on the Supreme Court. The three steel drummers? A medical research team, consigned to the boardwalk because no one had cared enough to wrest those instruments out of their hands and insist that they finish their chemistry homework.

  Brad knew he was being unfair, which made him feel a twitch of sympathy for his father, a fleeting shudder that came and went in a heartbeat. He understood what it was, just as he understood the cold, vacant feeling that followed it. What if Preston Bradley III knew something that Preston Bradley IV did not? What if his devotion to the goal of a Harvard legacy for his younger son was actually a positive spin on a negative truth, which was that the Bradley men were very good at being Harvard lawyers and not so good at anything that required a little creativity. Brad did not even bother putting a question mark on that second what-if, because it came into his head accompanied by an old memory of Roger, who really was not much of a dancer as far as Brad could recall.

  It was entirely possible that Brad’s father was the smartest guy around, not the dullest. He might be trying to spare his son the heartbreak of whatever Brad’s clarinet turned out to be; might be trying to protect him from the hard lesson Trey had long since learned about accepting one’s own limitations. Getting Brad into Harvard could be his father’s version of a great kindness. If that was true, then Brad was expending an awful lot of energy guaranteeing his own unhappiness down the line.

  Liz was going on about the dismal level of teaching in the English department at Ocean Heights, and Brad made what he assumed were the proper encouraging noises in response, because she kept talking. He waited in vain for his father to get out of his head. If only Trey had a more mundane obsession than the family legacy, one that he kept to himself instead of using it as the foundation of his parenting philosophy. If only Trey were having an affair, like other people’s dads, Brad’s life would have been much easier.

  But it was clear to Liz that Brad was not listening; her two questions about Crestview’s English faculty got the same noncommittal responses as her comments about her own teachers. What was his problem? She continued talking only because she felt that he might as well be required to feign interest if he was suddenly going to be moody about nothing at all. Brad’s unpredictable silences were as frustrating as Chloe’s dependably endless talk; Liz had begun to wonder if it was possible to be both well-off and well-tuned, to be rich and consistent. Based on her admittedly small sampling, the most pervasive side effect of having money, even the supposedly paltry amount Chloe always griped about, was the loss of conversational equilibrium.

  Liz decided that she would look back on this part of her life, once she was successful and comfortable, and be oddly grateful that she had been able to afford so little latitude when she was young. She was glad that some instinct had k
ept her from blurting out the news about the offer of a full ride from Yale, which effectively had eliminated the need for her to make a choice. She would text Brad during the week, when distance and a 160-character limit imposed a protective restraint on the exchange.

  chapter 15

  Katie was tired of being old news. The worst thing about getting in early was that everyone ignored you in April and expected you to be as happy for them as you had expected them to be happy for you back in December. She looked forward to prom as a chance to reclaim her place center stage, and she was not pleased to find out that Ron intended to ruin everything. She picked a little green bit out of the penne and glared at her parents across the dinner table.

  “I do not understand why Ron has to come home the weekend of prom,” she said. “And I don’t know what you mean, a girlfriend. Lauren saw him with somebody last fall, but her name wasn’t Carol.”

  Joy and Dan exchanged a brief reproachful glance. If there had already been a girlfriend acquired and lost without their knowing about it, one of them was not doing a good enough job of asking leading questions.

  “Perhaps Lauren misunderstood and she was just a classmate of his.”

  “Yeah. Right. In New York and he goes to school in Massachusetts. Whatever. Can’t they come another weekend instead of ruining the most important day of senior year?”

  “The girl has an interview for an internship.”

  “Well, she’s not staying in my room.”

  “She’ll stay in the guest room,” said Joy, “and I doubt that ruining prom is high on their agenda. Ron remembers how important prom was.”

  Katie sighed. “Ron only wishes his prom mattered.”

  “I think she wants to be a writer,” said Joy. “Won’t you be embarrassed if she turns out to be terrific.”

  “Yeah, embarrassed.” Katie pushed her plate away. “I’m done.”