Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  “Thinking you don’t need time probably means you do,” he said. “Talk it over. Look at it from another angle. The guy I talked to has kids camping out on his lawn, they want to go there so bad. Kids sending him gifts, parents calling him on the phone.” He hesitated for effect. “Somebody enrolled him in the fruit of the month club, we’re talking desperate measures here. And yet they took you, and all I had to do was point out that they’d made a huge mistake they needed to rectify. You could think of yourself as being at the bottom of the accepted list, but what I’m suggesting is that you think of yourself instead as being at the top of the wait list. Which is a very competitive place to be.”

  He waited to see if they were going to protest, and when they kept quiet he pressed on, hoping that their silence meant willingness.

  “Look, maybe if they didn’t have thousands of apps, maybe if they weren’t reading essays at three in the morning, maybe if Lauren’s app didn’t come right after some National Merit scholar who volunteers in the UCLA brain research lab—no, I don’t know that’s true, but I don’t know it isn’t. Maybe they would’ve taken her the first time around and they’re trying to fix a mistake, but whatever it is, why not take it? What’s wrong with Prague?”

  “I’m working on it,” said Lauren. “Excuse me, please.” She disappeared up the stairs and very quietly shut her door.

  Ted pretended to stir his coffee while he made a little pact with the god of his pending autonomy: if Lauren accepted the offer, he would work strictly by the numbers from now on, the counseling equivalent of the test-prep guy who dismissed any student who failed to score over 2250 on his biweekly sample SATs and then crowed about how all of his students scored over 2250. Ted would turn down the next Lauren. He would turn down a $20,000 fee, as tempting as it might be, from anyone whose kid was a percentage point short of stardom. He would embrace natural selection, as though the Brads of the world were not challenge enough, if only Lauren would say yes to Prague.

  He could hardly call Bob back to say thanks but no thanks. If he failed to deliver Lauren, he would never again be able to ask for exactly the kind of favor he had to be able to deliver for his private clientele. He studied the painted fruit on his cup and saucer, and he did not look up again until he had the lemons lined up in a way that pleased him.

  “I can think of one other way out.”

  “I can hardly wait,” said Nora. “Sorry. We’re listening.”

  “I can’t get her in first quarter, I just can’t. You can only push so hard for a given student before you get the sense that you’ve reached the limit. You can’t ask for more. You can’t even ask if you can ask for more.”

  “We know you did your best,” said Joel, and Nora pinched the back of his thigh to inform him that she knew no such thing. “What’s the other way?”

  “If she doesn’t want to go to Prague I can ask if she can start second quarter. Skip first, wait for the fallout, and start second.”

  “Which means she graduates when?” asked Nora.

  Ted looked genuinely confused. He never thought past admissions. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  Nora took a sip of her espresso. “If she starts a quarter late, she’ll end a quarter late. She won’t finish up until the other kids in her class have graduated. So what do they do, Ted? Have a little graduation some time in November for the stragglers they took off the wait list?”

  Ted recovered quickly. He knew how to work a parent’s sarcasm to his advantage; if Nora was going to be rude, he got to be brusque in return. “If you present it that way to Lauren, she’s not going to be able to make an honest decision,” he said. “I’m sure they don’t graduate a quarter late. She can pick up the classes in summer school. Come on. There are all sorts of ways to make this work if you want to make it work.”

  “So speaking of an extra quarter,” said Joel, “which is not a cheap sentence, I assume there’s no prayer of money with an acceptance like this.” The government had declared that the Chaikens would have received barely $7,000 in aid against a private school bill, had any of them accepted Lauren, and he was reminded by the warning glint in his wife’s eye that they had made a pact to send Lauren wherever she wanted to go. But Joel had taken Nora out for dinner to celebrate when the mortgage slipped below six figures, and he enjoyed the notion of owning the house in another five years instead of feeling that the house owned him. The bakery was paying off the line of credit, which was more than enough debt for him, and $7,000 a year would have added up. It did not hurt to ask.

  “Pretty much not,” said Ted. “They figure a kid who gets in off the wait list is motivated enough to find the money.”

  He stood up, brushed coffee cake crumbs off the front of his sweater, and mentioned that he needed an answer by the end of the week. He gave them his cell phone number and tried to make it feel like a gift. Joel walked him to the door, muttering insincerities about how hard Ted’s job must be, and as soon as they were alone again Nora grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the front bathroom, where Lauren could not hear them.

  “What’re we going to do?” Nora asked. “Do you think she ought to go late like that? I don’t think so. Prague, why do you think Prague? Maybe there’s someplace else she’d actually like to go.”

  “I think she’s going to Northwestern is what I think,” said Joel, sounding far more certain than he felt, “and once it sinks in we go back to figuring out the money. It’d be nice to know what a regular kid—”

  “Don’t call them regular kids,” Nora said.

  Lauren pounded on the bathroom door.

  “If you don’t want me to hear, maybe you should wait until I’m not around, what do you think?” she asked. “I’m going to meet Chloe at the Grove, can I take Mom’s car?”

  Nora opened the door. “Lauren, if every time there’s a problem your solution is to go to—”

  “I want to go out. Please don’t ask me any questions,” said Lauren. “We’re going to look for shoes on sale, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Nora. “But if you hung around for—”

  “I cannot think about this right now. I have to go do something else. And don’t tell anyone. Promise me, both of you, that you will not tell anyone. I don’t want everybody talking about it all the time. ‘What’re you doing, Lauren?’ ‘What’re you going to do, honey?’ ‘I thought you had two real acceptances.’ I will go crazy. Promise me.”

  “Lauren, Mom’s just trying—”

  Lauren put her hands over her ears, closed her eyes, and hopped up and down, and both her parents stepped back as though she might explode. She grimaced, balled up her hands into tight little fists, and batted the sides of her head. They waited to see what she would do next, but just as suddenly she stopped, went limp, and looked at them with an expression they both would have described as abject.

  “Don’t you understand? If I stay here I just hate myself for letting you down. I mean, I know you’re proud of me but it doesn’t help when I feel like”—and her voice slowed down, as though the words were quicksand tugging at her heels—“such a failure. And every time you look at me like that, like you feel so sorry for me, it only gets worse. Please. Can’t I go do something that doesn’t matter and we’ll talk about it later?”

  “Well, you don’t have all the time,” said Joel. “Ted says within the week, so—”

  “Dad. I don’t want to talk about it right now. Can I please have the car?”

  She was out the door before they could do anything more articulate than nod.

  Nora slumped against the wall.

  “Well, now that we have exactly what we want, my question is, does anybody actually enjoy this by the time they get to the end of it all? Because I’m feeling less than elated about her dream come true.”

  Joel was running numbers in his head. “Absolutely,” he said, not quite sure what he had responded to.

  Lauren had not taken into account Chloe’s new best friend, the Prius, and when she calmed down enough to call
to say that she was coming over, Chloe answered from the parking lot at the Camarillo outlet stores. She was happy to shop while Lauren made the hour’s drive to meet her, but Lauren was not in the mood to compete for Chloe’s attention with a rack of baby-doll tunics. She pulled onto the Santa Monica freeway with no destination in mind and decided to drive until the freeway traffic stopped moving or she got bored, which happened simultaneously at the La Cienega exit.

  She turned onto the first residential street and pulled over to text Brad.

  “I am nuts. What are you doing?”

  “Come see. What’s up?”

  “Tell you when I get there.”

  Brad was sitting at the curb when she pulled up. He opened the passenger door and sat down next to her rather than wait for her to get out of the car.

  “So what’s the big deal?”

  “I got in at Northwestern.”

  “I figured. Is that the one you picked?”

  “No, I mean I got in.”

  “Right. So which school lost out?”

  “Look,” said Lauren, “can we go inside?”

  She followed Brad into the house, down the long center hallway and into his mother’s room at the back. He had taken everything that usually sat on the big wooden table and put it on the floor, against the wall, and in its place stood all the supplies he had purchased at the art store near Liz’s house—the cardboard, the knife, the two kinds of glue, the pens. A rectangular piece of plywood sat in the middle of the table, surrounded by shards of discarded cardboard and balsa wood curlicues, and resting on the plywood was a two-foot-long model of a narrow building without a roof.

  “You built that?”

  “Yeah, but you first.”

  “I didn’t get in at Northwestern.”

  “You just said outside that you did.”

  “I did, now. But I didn’t at first. I was on the wait list, but now I’m in, except Ted says I can’t go in the fall. I have to go to Prague first.”

  Brad peered into the model and adjusted an interior wall.

  “I don’t get it. You were on the wait list? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Would you please keep up? I’m in is all that matters, but I have to go to Prague first quarter and then I can move into a dorm.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I’m not really accepted. I’m accepted once somebody else drops out.”

  “It happens. Prague is probably cool.”

  “God, you sound like Ted. Like this is no big deal.” She stepped back from the table; she was too angry to stand near something as fragile as the model.

  “You wanted to go to Northwestern,” said Brad. “So you start late. You still get there.”

  “Everybody’s going to look down at me.”

  “No, they’re not.”

  “What do you know? I mean, God, Brad, you have the easiest life of anybody. You have no clue. Never mind. I shouldn’t have told you. I should just go to Santa Barbara. If I go to Northwestern in January, everybody I meet is going to know why. I might as well wear a big sign that says not good enough. Missed the first cut. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Go to Northwestern. There’s no difference between you and some kid who starts in September. I really believe that.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Based on you know it’s true. It’s all bullshit, give or take.”

  “I don’t know it’s true. I wasn’t good enough to get in with the other kids, and the other kids were good enough to get in in front of me. So how are we the same?”

  “Because you don’t know exactly why they got in, and it might not be so impressive. Katie’s brother got in at Williams because they needed somebody to yell crew.”

  “And because he’s a physics whiz. Not a good example.”

  “Jim got in because his girlfriend wrote his English papers.”

  “Except nobody knows that, so it doesn’t count.”

  “Lauren. You know kids in our class who aren’t any smarter than you and they got in because of who the hell knows what. You can’t really think that they’re any better than you are.”

  “You got into Harvard and lots of people didn’t, so don’t you think you’re better than they are? Come on, it’s not bragging, it just is. And you have to believe that, everybody has to believe that, because if Harvard kids aren’t better than other kids, then why does everyone kill to get into Harvard? The Ivy League’s the Ivy League because”—and she sputtered, looking for the right superlative—“because it’s the Ivy League. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say everybody’s the same if you’re going to a school nothing else is the same as.”

  Brad turned away from the table and opened a large cabinet. Gently, he lifted something out of the cabinet, and when he turned back again Lauren laughed in amazement. It was the rest of the model—the roof, which was a set of balsa wood wings that were joined at a point at the front of the house and spread from there to wrap the length of the building. The section of roof between the wings was wood as well, and a band of blue plastic about four inches high supported the entire piece. As Lauren watched, Brad inserted the plastic rim into a grooved edge at the top of the external walls. The groove was exactly two inches deep, leaving a two-inch band of blue between the walls and the wings. It all fit just so.

  “That’s beautiful,” said Lauren.

  “The blue part is the skylight. All around the house,” said Brad, without taking his eyes off the model. “And there would be shades to cover the skylight at night. Section by section, with a remote control.” He walked around the table once, considering the building from every angle. Satisfied, he lifted the roof off, put it back in the cabinet, and peered at the interior to keep from having to look at Lauren.

  “Go to Northwestern,” he said.

  “Look, I know you’re trying—”

  “I didn’t really get into Harvard.”

  “Right…”

  He straightened up. “No, seriously, I didn’t get into Harvard. I was on the wait list for three days. You want to know how much it cost my dad to get me in?”

  “You were on the wait list.”

  “Yeah, well, now it’s your turn to keep up. Yes, I was. Ask me how much.”

  “How much?” Lauren asked, hypnotized.

  “Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. More than school is going to cost. And I’m going to move in in September and nobody will know. Except you. And Ted. And me and my dad.”

  “I won’t tell anyone.”

  Brad shrugged.

  “Your dad wrote them a check for $350,000.”

  “Okay, forget it, Northwestern was right not to take you right away, because you are really slow.”

  “Brad. Stop it. You got in everyplace else and wait-listed at Harvard?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Exactly. Crazy.” Brad mugged a big smile. “But that’s my problem, not yours. What I’m saying to you is there are people like me who are going to school in the fall, and we’re no different from people like you.”

  “Except maybe that your father has a spare $350,000 sitting around with nothing to do.”

  “More,” said Brad, as the smile faded, “but that’s beside the point. Even if you got off the list to start in September, you’d still wander around worried that everybody knew you didn’t deserve to be there, because that’s what you do, which is as nuts as my father buying my way in. Worse.”

  “Thank you. Now I feel a whole lot better.”

  “Look,” said Brad, and then he stopped, realizing that he was about to say to Lauren the same thing that Mr. Marshall had said to him about not being ashamed, whether the source of that shame was the inside track, in Brad’s case, or the outside chance, in Lauren’s. As far as Brad was concerned, he had much more to be embarrassed about than Lauren did, as he had yet to figure out how to untangle himself from the advantage of his family history. He envied Lauren because she could squander an opportunity
on her own merits; she could be stupid and turn her back on Prague. He busied himself cleaning the construction scraps off his mother’s table while he sorted out whether or not Mr. Marshall’s advice had any merit. He decided that it had none, in his case, but that it was just right for Lauren. Intention made all the difference. Mr. Marshall had said what he said to Brad to get him not to take a chance. Brad was about to say it to Lauren to encourage her to do so.

  “Are you going to say something?”

  “Say you go to Prague,” he said, “and you start school and somebody comes up to you in the dorm to say, ‘Don’t expect me to hang out with you because I know where you were first quarter, and besides, I know why.’ What do you care? You’ve already got Katie. You don’t need another friend to make you feel like shit.”

  “True.”

  “So you dump that person and find another friend. Easy choice. Go to Northwestern. You’ll be happy there.”

  She leaned over to look inside the model.

  “It’s Liz’s house, isn’t it?”

  Brad nodded.

  “Yeah. It’s making my dad nuts. He keeps asking when I’m going to be done with my arts-and-crafts project. Why don’t you tell Ted you’ll go?”

  “Why is it so important to you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Brad. “I just think you should.”

  They sat there in silence for so long that Alexandra walked briskly past the room and onto the patio for no reason, although she had concocted one about having to check the water level in the birdbath, if Brad thought to ask. Not that she expected Lauren or him to do anything foolish with one or both of his parents on the premises, but checking in seemed to be the sort of thing that a mother ought to do.

  On her way back she paused in the doorway, coughed slightly to announce herself, as though they might not notice her standing there, and stepped into the room.

  “Lauren, so nice to see you.”

  “You too, Mrs. Bradley.” Knowing what to say to a parent was always tricky, but Brad’s mom was harder to figure out than most. Lauren had to make a concerted effort not to get caught in an endless loop of How are you? and How’s it going? with her. She cast about the room for a potential topic and settled on the photographs.