Admission

by Julie Buxbaum

  “Of course you’ll be home for break,” I say, and I hear the slight aggression in my tone and try to shake it off. “You have to come home.”

  “If I’m on the East Coast, I might not be able to afford to. Those flights aren’t cheap around the holidays,” Shola says.

  “Right.” I decide later I’ll offer her my frequent flyer miles or to float her the cost of the ticket, but not in front of everyone. Knowing Shola, she’ll refuse. But I can’t imagine saying goodbye to her until next summer. We’ve hung out every day for the last six years. We can’t be expected to go cold turkey.

  “Harvard’s winter break is—” Levi says, but he doesn’t get to finish his sentence, because Simon walks over, picks him up, and throws him in the pool. Everyone else spontaneously applauds.

  I guess I’m not the only one who’s had enough of Levi’s Harvard talk.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Now

  “GossipPolice says Mom and Dad are on the verge of divorce,” Isla says while we eat pizza on the floor of the screening room, like we used to when we were little. This is how we’d spend every Friday night before I started at Wood Valley—Dad would pop popcorn in the old-fashioned machine and Isla and I would watch Disney movies down here.

  “You know better than to listen to GossipPolice,” I say, distracted. I keep hearing the soft click of Shola walking out the door. Click, click, click. “Who’s their source?”

  “Someone ‘in the family’s inner circle.’ Probably Hudson,” she says glumly, and while I wish I could tell her that’s an unfair leap, I too suspect Hudson has long ago replaced the phone we stole and has been planting stories all over town for cash. Two weeks ago, in a piece also sourced to our “inner circle,” GossipPolice claimed that my mother’s hair was falling out because of stress over the scandal; that one, which took such clear aim at her biggest insecurity, had to be him.

  Isla and I are watching cable news again. We’ve stopped expecting updates from our parents, who, when anything breaks—additional people charged, additional people pleading out—need to immediately consult with their lawyers and don’t have time to give us a full download.

  CNN tends to be quicker, less sugarcoated.

  “Mom and Dad are fine,” I say. “I mean, not fine-fine. None of this is fine. But solid. They’re solid.”

  “Stop saying fine and solid. You’re freaking me out more.”

  “They’re not getting divorced,” I say, and reach across her for a napkin.

  “Holy shitballs!” Isla screams, and my heart plummets into my stomach. This is how things are: We live on high alert. There’s always farther to fall. “Look!”

  Isla points to the screen. The headline along the bottom reads: COLLEGE ADMISSIONS SCANDAL: POLICE WERE TIPPED OFF BY BILLIONAIRE IN LEGAL TROUBLE. A tall man walks into a courthouse holding up a leather briefcase to shield his face. Rookie move, as I’m sure they already have hundreds of other images of him all teed up to use next.

  “So?” I ask. My dad likes to enumerate all the things he’d do to the guy who tipped off the feds as payback for ruining our lives.

  I couldn’t care less who the informant is.

  I think it’s pretty clear we ruined our own lives.

  “That’s Charles.” Two pictures of Charles, Aunt Candy’s husband, who we’ve never called Uncle even though we’ve known him forever, fill the screen. In the picture on the left, he’s smiling with his arm around George W. Bush. In the one on the right, he’s ringing a bell at the New York Stock Exchange. In both, he looks tanned and tired, the kind of dude with manicured nails and an ulcer.

  “CNN has learned that Charles Bonaparte, billionaire president and CEO of the hedge fund Napoleon, tipped off prosecutors to the college admissions scandal a year ago. Reports say that he offered the information in exchange for leniency in his own legal troubles, as he is facing charges of tax evasion and money laundering,” the silver-haired reporter says. “Apparently, Bonaparte became aware of the nationwide scheme when Dr. Wilson, the mastermind behind the scandal, offered to bribe a tennis coach at Yale to help Bonaparte’s son get into the university. Bonaparte claims that he turned the offer down, using Dr. Wilson only for his legitimate college admissions services, and that his son gained entry to Yale on his own merits.”

  “Mom’s going to freak,” I say, my heart sinking. “Also, ‘own merits’ my ass.”

  “Sources report that Yale is currently reviewing all transcripts and applications of students who may have been illegally admitted, and at least one student has been expelled,” the reporter continues.

  “No wonder Aunt Candy hasn’t even called,” Isla says.

  “Were we set up? I mean, if he tipped them off a year ago, Aunt Candy knew exactly who Dr. Wilson was. Did she recommend him knowing that the feds were listening?” This is, of course, a silly question, because though Isla usually has all the answers, there’s no way she can have this one. As I’ve come to learn from my mom’s middle-of-the-night murmurings, it’s not like Candy has the happiest of marriages. Who knows how much she knew?

  As I understand it, the biggest piece of evidence the feds have against my mother is a wiretapped conversation between her and Dr. Wilson in which he manipulated her into reciting their plan out loud. My dad happened to have a meeting that day, which is the only reason he isn’t facing charges too.

  I decide it truly doesn’t matter why Aunt Candy connected us to Dr. Wilson. That feels too much like looking for a loophole to our own culpability.

  “I don’t know,” Isla says. “Maybe Aunt Candy didn’t know.”

  “What does that even mean? ‘Didn’t know’?” I ask, and we both dissolve into giggles, and then, as the report flashes photos of my mother on the screen, we sober up.

  “Poor Mom,” Isla says, and I wonder if she’s finally softening. “I mean, Aunt Candy is her person.”

  “Dad is her person. I’m her person,” I say, then add as an afterthought: “You’re her person.”

  Isla smirks. Okay, fine. We both know Isla is not her person. Her mini-me, maybe, but not her person.

  “Maybe she has a few people. You can have a few people,” she says, and that sweep of sadness whenever I think of Shola takes hold of me again.

  “It’s good to have backup,” I say.

  “I’m sorry about Shola.”

  “Me too. She’s right, though. I don’t think I’d forgive me.”

  “It’s not like you killed anyone.”

  “I killed people’s dreams,” I say with a teary half-smile, and she nods, because it’s kinda true. “It’s so big, the scale of it, what it all meant, and I don’t know how I didn’t realize that when it was happening. I was so clueless. I should have listened to you.”

  My phone chimes and I see that my Signal group is active again. After they went quiet in the wake of all the plea bargaining, I found myself missing them. Beyond my sister, they’re the closest thing I’ve had to friends since this mess began.

  TheIgster: That dude deserves a beatdown. How dare he?

  Slyse: Right? What a POS

  PhinnyB: We were going to be found out somehow eventually. If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else

  ALC: My therapist says I need to learn from this experience. That maybe this is a good thing that happened to all of us. A wakeup call

  Slyse: Screw your therapist

  TheIgster: I wish I could screw my therapist. She’s smokin’

  ALC: Ew

  TheIgster: Why’d a billionaire need Dr. Wilson anyway? Why didn’t he buy a freakin’ building? That’s what I keep telling my parents they should have done

  PrettyPen: I wish I was a billionaire. I lost my LipPlump endorsement deal. My career is over

  Slyse: Being an influencer is not a real career

  PrettyPen: Tell that to my sev
en million subscribers

  ALC: Who added Penny back on the thread?

  PrettyPen: Up yours, bitches

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Then

  “You got in somewhere?” Cesar asks when I walk into the Reading and Resource Center with a big gummy smile. He knows that over the last two weeks, I’ve been rejected from ten different schools. One by one, I’ve logged on to an admissions page, hopeful and expectant, and I’ve been met with a variation on the theme We regret to inform you…Each time, instead of marinating in my parents’ disappointment, I’ve gotten into my car and driven to hang out with Cesar. He always greets me with the handshake we made up, which he treats as a matter of utmost importance—a complicated slap, fist-bump, foot-tap routine that ends with a tweak of each other’s noses. Afterward, though it’s not part of our choreography, Cesar rests his forehead in my elbow, a gesture that reminds me of Fluffernutter in its unconditional affection.

  With Cesar, I don’t feel like a reject.

  “I did! AIU, baby!” I say. Honestly, I know very little about AIU—it wasn’t on our college tour last summer—but that doesn’t seem to matter so much. It’s likely my only option. The only other school left to hear from is SCC, which was a long shot to begin with and now, in the wake of so many nos, seems like an impossibility. Mrs. Oh told me that Dr. Wilson’s application strategy was too risky: You can’t only reach up. You need at least one safety unless you’re okay with the possibility of a gap year, which come to think of it might be a great idea for you. Since, unsurprisingly, my parents are not on team gap year—“No way,” my dad said—I threw in the extra application she recommended just in case.

  “Too bad you can’t go to Hogwarts,” Cesar says, thrusting this next volume of Harry Potter in my hand even before I have time to shrug off my backpack. “Then again, I mean, what’s the point of anything if you’re a Hufflepuff.”

  “Dude, Hufflepuffs rock.” I grin at him. He’s too young to take the Pottermore Sorting Hat test online, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to bend J. K. Rowling’s rules, not even for Cesar. As a result, he’s been able to nurture the fantasy of children everywhere that he’s a Gryffindor, just like Harry. Today he’s wearing the Gryffindor Quidditch T-shirt I bought him.

  “Where’s AIU?” A shyness creeps into his voice. Like every other part of my life, my impending departure seems to sit heavy in the air, like a chore I’ve been putting off.

  “Arizona.” I get up to circle it on the dry-erase map of the United States that hangs on one wall of our favorite reading corner. We like the overstuffed chairs on this side best, because as Cesar says, they have more oomph.

  “That’s far.” My heart tugs. I’ve promised to read to him over FaceTime while I’m away—we still have the rest of the series to finish—but of course it won’t be the same. I’ve spent more hours after school here than I have anywhere else these last few years, and I’m going to miss our low-key afternoons together.

  Still, I didn’t expect Cesar to feel sad already.

  Surprisingly, my parents have taken the news well. No tears or panic attacks or any of the What are we going to tell people? I expected. They haven’t even called to yell at Dr. Wilson, which is what I assumed would be my dad’s MO, especially after the ridiculous amount of money they donated to his charity. My mom keeps telling me to chill—that’s the word she uses, chill—and claims SCC is my school. Says we put it on the vision board. Says she’s known from the moment we stepped on campus for a visit last summer that it’s where I belong. I’ve listened to this optimism for months, which is really just magical thinking because she doesn’t want me far away. After the Week of Rejection, I’m done. In fact, I’m practically looking forward to crossing this last school off my list today so we can all move on.

  I can’t wait to burn that freaking vision board in our fire pit in the backyard. Make s’mores on its ashes. Maybe tonight I’ll order an AIU sweatshirt online, or two, one for me and one for Cesar, a size too big so he can grow into it.

  “You’ll still be one of my backups, right? Even if you’re in Arizona?” he asks. Our conversation in the fall feels like forever ago. According to Rita, ICE has been ramping up its raids on immigrant communities all over the country. I haven’t heard of it directly impacting any of the kids at the Reading and Resource Club, though of course, it impacts them every single day in the form of a constant, low-level trauma.

  I don’t let myself think too much about what it must be like for Cesar’s mom to move through the world so unprotected and powerless, to know that if she were to be swept up, she’d have no ability to fight back. No money for a lawyer. No way to stay with Cesar. My impression is that she’d likely be immediately deported.

  I don’t let myself think too much about the reasons behind all this—how she came to this country pregnant at the age I am now, under the most desperate of circumstances, fleeing not only poverty but also violence. How it was this wobbly life for them or none at all. How that’s not a choice she should be punished for, but a success story to be celebrated.

  I wouldn’t be capable of doing what she did—what she does—should I have been born in El Salvador instead of Beverly Hills. She works three jobs.

  I think about my parents’ donation to Dr. Wilson’s charity for “underprivileged children,” which is so general as to mean almost nothing. I say a silent prayer that it’s going to an organization that will help families like Cesar’s or to somewhere like RAICES, which helps reunite families separated at the border.

  “Of course. I’m always here for you, even if I’m not here-here,” I say, and wonder if this is what Cesar’s mom says to him, too, to make him feel better about the possibility of her being taken. Cesar once showed me the laminated card he keeps in his pocket at all times, like a security blanket. It has the telephone numbers of two distant cousins, one who lives here in Los Angeles, the other in Texas, backup plans one and two for where he’d go live should his mom be deported. It also has Rita’s number, his first-grade teacher’s, his grandma’s back in El Salvador, and then, at the very bottom, mine. Of course, Cesar’s mom has never told me outright she’s undocumented—that would be too big a risk—but I’ve known her and Cesar for four years. It would take a leap of active ignorance for me not to understand why he carries that card in his pocket, what he means when he says backup. “You know that, right?”

  When I think about that list—and despite my best efforts, I often do—I cry.

  “Yup, and that’s why I’m willing to break my No Hufflepuff rule for you,” he says. He opens the book for me to start reading, but then he closes it and turns to me instead. He puts out a fist for one last bump. “Congrats, Chlo. I’m really proud of you.”

  * * *

  —

  “You sure you want to do this?” Shola asks after I tell her my new plan, which I devised during English 4 while Mrs. Pollack droned on about The Picture of Dorian Gray—another book I haven’t read, this time because I have no interest in spending 320 pages with a spoiled narcissist. I want to spare myself the drama of having to watch my parents feel the sucker punch of my last rejection. I want to check my SCC application online with Shola during free period instead of waiting till later. “Your mom’s going to be mad. She’s told me you’re going to SCC, like, no less than five times.”

  We’re in the far corner of the library, away from prying eyes, at the computer station. Because of the giant screens, if I cry, the only person who will witness it is my best friend. Later, I’ll seek out Cesar, take him for ice cream to celebrate that I’m officially going to AIU, which, according to US News & World Report, ranks 115th in the nation. That’s pretty good.

  “Exactly. She’s going to be devastated. This way I don’t have to see her disappointment in real time.” After my rejection is confirmed, I’ll send my parents a text that says SCC a no. I’m really sorry but go AIU! Maybe I’ll thro
w in a sunglass-face emoji.

  So far, Shola’s been accepted to six schools—three UCs, Columbia, Stanford, and UPenn—and rejected by only one: Princeton. She has not yet heard from Harvard or Yale. She’ll be checking SCC at the same time I am, though of course she’s not nervous. For her, the only question is whether they’ll give her enough scholarship money.

  “On the count of three?” Shola asks.

  “Okay.” We navigate to the landing page, and I stumble a minute, trying to remember my password.

  “One, two, three,” I say, and we click. At first, when the page loads, I keep my eyes closed. I’m not ready, I decide. I can’t handle another We regret to inform you…I don’t want to let my parents down, by text or otherwise.

  “Seriously?” Shola says, disappointment in her voice. “I got wait-listed. I thought I might get a full ride and I got wait-listed? Well, that sucks.”

  “Sorry, Shol,” I say, but I don’t look at her, because my eyes are still closed. If Shola didn’t get in, obviously I didn’t either. I’m tempted to click over to Instagram and never look. Turn the SCC admissions page into Schrödinger’s cat, which is one thing I actually remember from physics last year. Basically, the idea is if you put a cat in a box and close it, before you open it again, the cat is both alive and dead simultaneously. If you don’t know which is true, then both are true. I want to keep SCC like that—dead and alive.

  But I am not a coward. I can do this. I’ll go to Arizona and live happily ever after in the dry desert heat. I’ll buy a large sun hat and new Tom Ford sunglasses and steal my mom’s Mallorca sandals. I’ll join a sorority and sip margaritas by a pool.

  I open my eyes, stare at the screen. Congratulations! On behalf of the Southern California College, it is with great pleasure that we offer you a place…