Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  The light turned green, and Steve banked the car into the curve of the freeway entrance ramp. Lauren sat back and stared out the window, and when they got to the exit near her house she cracked open the window an inch, so that she could smell the ocean.

  They pulled up in front of her house and she nudged Katie, hard.

  “Listen, wake up,” said Lauren.

  “Where are we?”

  “My house,” said Lauren. “Open your door, take a couple of big breaths, and then right up to my room. My mom always wakes up the minute I open the door, but do not talk to her, do not do anything but walk straight into my room and flop on the bed.”

  “Is there a reason you’re being such a bitch?”

  “If you don’t do what I say I’m going to have Liz’s dad drive you home and you can explain to your mom why the front of your dress looks like old salad.”

  Katie stared down at her lap.

  Steve’s voice came from the front seat.

  “Do you need me to help you get her to the door?”

  “No,” said Lauren, as though she could will it to be true. “I’m sure we’re fine. Aren’t we, Katie. Can you stand up?”

  “I am fine, thank you,” she said, swinging open the door of the cab and wobbling to her feet. She clung to the open door while Lauren got out.

  Lauren turned to Steve. “Thank you so much for taking us home,” she said, and then she stopped, flustered, and reached into her purse for her wallet, not knowing whether a twenty would be enough or an insult.

  “No,” Steve said. “You are Liz’s friend.”

  “Well, barely,” said Lauren.

  “You should get her upstairs.”

  Lauren pried Katie from the door and put an arm around her waist in what she hoped looked more like friendship than aid, in case anyone was at the window. Steve waited until they were standing under the light at the front door before he drove away. Once he was gone, Lauren took a deep breath and grabbed Katie’s elbow.

  “Okay. We had a great time and we took a cab home because we weren’t interested in driving all over town to after-parties. Got it?”

  “You said I shouldn’t say anything to your mom.”

  “You shouldn’t. But don’t say anything if I say anything, either. Ready? One, two, three, and we hit the bedroom.”

  “God, you’d think I was incapable of knowing how to behave.”

  Lauren turned so that her face was inches away from Katie’s.

  “I think you’re an incredible bitch and you don’t deserve any of the nice things people do for you, but here we are.” She opened the door, they sailed straight to the stairs, and by the time Nora had thrown on a robe and moved to intersect them, Lauren was at the door to her bedroom with a ready story, and Katie, who had flopped onto Lauren’s bed, managed a wave and a gleeful “Hi, Mrs. Chaiken. What a night!” before Lauren gently closed the door in her mother’s face.

  chapter 16

  An idea lodged itself in Ted’s brain like a parasite clinging to a host: he had to get Lauren into Northwestern. He fought it all day on Sunday, to no avail. Every time he let down his guard, he heard her pleading for a friend who did not deserve it and, even worse, expecting him to behave in a compassionate manner. The degree of her decency was irrelevant to his mood; there was no such thing as spiritual valedictorian. What mattered was that he had short-changed a good kid without even realizing that he had done so. He had given her less than his full attention and convinced himself that he had done enough, while a star from an important family, like Brad, or a perfect specimen with pushy parents, like Katie, drew him right into their drama and got more.

  It was his behavior, not Lauren’s, that nibbled at him. At $20,000 per outcome, every one of his new clients was going to be a first-tier customer who expected Ted to give his all. By six o’clock, collapsed in front of the Travel Channel, he had come to the terrible conclusion that he had to intervene with Northwestern, had to get results to prove to himself that he could. He had an inviolate rule about never going into his home office after the first week in April—any loose ends after that could be handled during regular weekday working hours, and if he did not draw boundaries the job would consume him—but the day after prom, for the first time since he ascended to the top job in the counseling department, he turned on his computer to take a look at Lauren’s application. All of his seniors submitted copies of their final applications to him; privacy was for kids who were arrogant enough to think they could get in without help, and he had swapped them out to a junior counselor the previous September.

  He reread the application, looking for proof that she never really had a chance. Regular sections in science were reason enough to excise a candidate, these days. B pluses could be the kiss of death, especially in those unweighted regular science classes. Very high test scores, but no 800 to draw the eye away from the B plus in physics. The same was true of her extracurricular activities—impressive, and yet not enough to tip the balance. Choir, which relied on the God-given ability to carry a tune, carried less weight than an activity that required ambition and mastery, like debate or student government. Lauren should have been editor in chief instead of news editor, but even that might not have been enough, as every decent high school had a newspaper and every newspaper had an editor who deluded himself into thinking that any school with a great journalism department—like Northwestern—was a lock. Lauren had not even applied to the journalism program, which made the newspaper matter even less.

  His left calf began to seize up, so he walked around the house to loosen it. If he felt like selling, if he was really on his game, he could recast all of these elements in a better light. Lauren had taken real lab sciences instead of going for an easy A in the various punt sciences Crestview sprinkled through its curriculum for grade-grubbers. Any SAT score over 720 might as well be an 800, and could have been, with a handful of different vocab questions. She ran the alto section of the choir, or so said the choir director, whose offer of a recommendation Ted had turned down, as singing was irrelevant to the task at hand. Without her the editor of the paper would have had no story ideas to claim as his own. In truth, the worst thing Ted could say about Lauren was that she tried things and rejected them—introduction to ceramics never became AP studio art, freshman volleyball never became a starting position on the varsity team. She spent high school being curious, and he berated himself for not seeing the thread sooner; curiosity, journalism, curiosity, life, it would have made a good essay, one that exalted her record, that made it sound more strategic than it was. Unadorned general interests might be admirable in any other generation, but they were death for a candidate who had the bad luck to grow up in the middle of a population boom and had a counselor too busy to conceptualize on her behalf.

  Ted was bleeding altruism out of every orifice, which scared him. He composed an email to his Northwestern admissions contact and did not send it, called the guy’s private line to leave a voice mail but hung up before he got connected, and drove over to Whole Foods to keep from doing anything rash. A half hour later, he stood in the express line with a grilled boneless and skinless chicken breast, a container of brown rice pilaf, a container of steamed spinach, a little tub of rice pudding in case his courage soured into despair at the whole wretched mess, and an overpriced bottle of garage wine for later on, no matter how he ended up feeling.

  He drove home a bit too fast, strode straight into his office, dumped the grocery bag on the floor, got his draft email up on the screen, and hit SEND without bothering to sit down:

  “Bob, do me a favor, dig out Lauren Chaiken’s app. It’s Sunday. I’ll call you Monday. Ted.”

  Ted burst out of his office first thing on Monday morning, dropped a Post-it on Rita’s desk, and disappeared down the central corridor. He fell into step next to Katie when she came out of AP French and cut her off from the rest of the herd with nothing more than a tense “Come with me” and a no-nonsense glance. As they passed Rita’s desk, Ted raised an eyeb
row and Rita mouthed the words “Got him.” He nodded and ushered Katie into his office. He did not reward Rita’s success by leaving the door open.

  “How’re you feeling, Katie?” he asked, not because he cared but because he wanted to give her the opportunity to tell the truth before he lowered the boom. It would not make any difference to the verdict, but he was curious to see what she would do.

  “Fine,” she said, looking right at him. “What’s up?”

  Not a hint of remorse. He supposed he ought to be grateful. It made his job easier.

  “So, Katie, I doubt this is going to come as a surprise, but under the circumstances we’re not going to be able to ask you to deliver the valedictory address this year.”

  “What do you mean? Who’s going to get it?”

  “Which would you rather I answered first?”

  “What do you mean? My GPA’s the highest, isn’t it?”

  “Katie, let’s not pretend here. I doubt you registered that I was in the parking lot when you left prom. Still, I am aware of the drinking and your being sick and leaving in a cab. You could be suspended for that. Actually, you could be expelled.”

  Katie had waited all day Saturday to see if her parents noticed that Ron had swiped a bottle of scotch the night before, but they never said a word. They only kept hard liquor in the house for parties, ever since a famous local chef had come out of the kitchen to chastise Dan for ordering a martini, which dulled the taste buds, before the foie. Her dad had surveyed the inventory midday without comment—he often did that on Saturdays, as though they knew anyone who ever dropped by unexpectedly for anything, let alone a drink. He checked only to see if he needed to restock, not because he thought anyone in his household was drinking on the sly. The kinds of excessive behaviors other people worried about were not an issue with his children.

  After he went to the club for his weekly tennis lesson, and her mom went upstairs for her weekly massage, Katie had crept into the study, emptied two water bottles into the ice bucket, filled them both just past halfway from an open bottle of vodka, and topped them off with some of the water. She dumped the rest of it into the bar sink, dried the ice bucket, screwed the caps on the water bottles extra-tight, and stashed them in her purse for the evening. Brad liked vodka. He once said that a sip at bedtime took the edge off, which was exactly what she had in mind. She would sip like he did, and cope, and no one would be the wiser.

  She could not have anticipated the combined effects of the vodka and a stomach denied anything but a plain piece of breakfast toast, thanks to a wildfire rumor among the girls that a more substantial meal, eaten within twenty-four hours of an event, would result in visible bloating. She got only as far as the ballroom entrance before the few sips she had drunk in the limo took hold of her brain and misinformed her about the temperature in the room, the stability of the decorative palms, and the exact location of the seat of her chair at the dinner table.

  The simple logic of the first-time drinker told her to eat to correct the imbalance, as though food would absorb the alcohol and nullify its effect, but dinner rolls and butter and rare salmon only made things worse. Katie had no memory of the cab ride, and only a vague sense of charming her way past both Lauren’s parents and then her own on Sunday morning. A few blithe words about what a great evening it had been and she was safe in her own bedroom, where it was hours before she felt anything like herself.

  Like any amateur drunk, she thought she had deceived everyone—except Lauren, of course, and she would keep the truth a secret because she was too nice not to. As for Ted, he might know or he might be bluffing. He had not said that she was suspended or expelled, only that she could be, which to Katie signaled that this was a negotiation, not a sentencing.

  She did not flinch. “If what you say about me drinking is true, then maybe you’re doing something to find out who spiked my water bottle. You could expel them instead.”

  Ted had to smile. Someday this girl would be the press secretary for an administration that needed to rationalize an unjust war, or run a government regulatory agency involved with hazardous materials or covert operations; she was that good at turning disaster to her own advantage. Katie had an instinct for the feasible lie—not the whopper that betrayed her, but the completely plausible story that he would have fallen for if he had not seen her. She was even savvy enough to risk the spiked water bottle story instead of salmonella, which sounded good but would not hold up because no one else had got sick.

  “Perhaps you have an inkling of who might have done such a thing to you?” he replied, happy to play along because he knew he would not have to for very long. He placed a cool, composed hand on the telephone. “Look, if we’re going to mount an investigation we better do it fast, so let’s get your dad and mom in here to help us figure out what to do.”

  He held her gaze and counted silently toward ten. If she called his bluff he was going to have to place the call, which he did not want to do.

  At nine she held up her hand.

  “Y’know, Mr. Marshall, I’m sorry to say this, I mean, I love Crestview and all that, but I am, I am, so, I don’t know, so over it.”

  “You are?”

  “I’m so over it.” As soon as Ted mentioned her parents, Katie began to craft a story for them about why she had decided not to give the valedictory address, one that dovetailed neatly with her explanation of why her prom dress looked as though she had gone swimming in it. Katie was more than up to the challenge of a credible narrative, and the one about prom involved Chloe getting drunk and sick and Katie coming to her aid, a gesture of sisterhood followed by a pact not to tell Chloe’s mom because she was under enough stress as it was. In Katie’s version, the girls were in the hotel bathroom after dinner, checking their hairdos and makeup, when Chloe took what turned out to be her fourth Vodka Cruiser out of her purse. When Katie gently tried to take it away, Chloe spilled it down the front of Katie’s dress and insisted that she had to help rinse out the dress in the sink. Leaning over must have made her head spin, because Chloe vomited as they were finishing up, and Katie had to start over and rinse out the dress a second time. She and Lauren took Chloe home in a cab, and because it was late, and because Lauren’s house was closer, Katie spent the night rather than spend even more time and money on a cab home.

  It was a heroic tale, culminating in Katie and Lauren’s decision not to tell anyone. There was nothing to be gained by getting Chloe into trouble. Katie had been a model of responsible behavior, and she hoped that her actions would inspire Chloe to emulate her.

  Much better to forfeit the valedictory than to run the risk of exposing the truth. Katie assumed that Brad was next in line for the honor, which fed nicely into the story. Her parents would assume that old money ruled, that Trey had somehow intervened and stolen the honor from their daughter, and Katie could selflessly instruct them not to challenge the decision.

  She already knew what she would say. “My self-image does not require that kind of outside acknowledgment. I’m fine just knowing that I’m the best. If Brad or his mom or dad is feeling needy for some reason, well, fine. He can have it.”

  If she was wrong, and the valedictorian turned out to be someone else, she would mention the unweighted A in ceramics, and her parents could argue about that instead of hassling her.

  She did not want to back down, but there was something about Ted reaching for the phone that unnerved her. He never said or did anything unless he meant it. The gesture had an unfamiliar and reckless edge, and she was not in the mood to take a chance.

  He took his hand off the receiver. “Then we’re in agreement.”

  “Sure,” she said. “It’s not like I want to sit down and write a speech right now.”

  “Excellent.”

  Katie stood up to leave. “But just curious—who gets it?”

  “Now, Katie, you know I can’t say until I’ve talked to him, or her.”

  She walked out without another word, closing the door with just a hint of a
slam, and Ted slumped in his seat. He did not like playing chicken. Katie had to know that he would not turn her in, and yet she had made him play his part up to the last possible moment. It made his head ache. He reached for a blank pad and sketched a little duckling with drops of water rolling off its back. Under the duck, which he labeled “Katie,” he wrote,

  Water off a duck’s back.

  Impermeable.

  Imperturbable.

  Implacable.

  Impossible.

  Imposter.

  He fed the page into his shredder, turned to his computer, and called up the document labeled OOH, which was code for “out of here,” a string of euphemisms that was his draft letter of resignation. He was revising the bit about how he had rendered himself obsolete by building such a dynamic team, when there was a knock on his door.

  He closed the document and yelled, “C’mon in.”

  Brad folded himself into a chair and gave Ted the kind of shambling grin he rarely saw before May 1. “Hey, Mr. Marshall. What can you do to wreck my life today? I don’t think my dad has his checkbook with him.”

  “Brad, c’mon. You’re going to come back here next Thanksgiving so embarrassed because wait, what’s this, you love Harvard and you want to say thanks for not letting you do something stupid.”

  Brad looked genuinely pained, and Ted wondered for an instant if any private consulting fee was large enough to compensate him for having to deal with yet another set of indulged teenagers and their invented woes. Ted had assumed that Brad would stop grousing once Harvard recalled the enduring, six-figure value of the Bradley legacy, but there seemed to be no pleasing some people, and Ted was frankly tired of complaints from such a fortunate boy. He was even more tired of knowing that Brad probably had a good reason for feeling the way he did, unlike some of his whinier counterparts, and that Ted had failed to figure it out. More than anything, he was tired of thinking that he ought to. It was Ted’s job to get his seniors into great colleges, not to unravel the family dramas that occasionally informed their choices.