Admission

by Julie Buxbaum

  Wait, what?

  I read it again.

  “I got in,” I say, turning to Shola. She looks at me, stunned, and then, without missing a beat, pastes a giant smile on her face. I wonder if she’s ever had to do that for me before, swallow her own envy, but I’m too overcome to dwell on the question.

  “Oh my God, I got in.” I stand up, throw my arms in the air in triumph.

  “I’m so happy for you,” Shola says. This is why she’s my best friend. Because even at this moment, when the inexplicable forces of the universe somehow let me into SCC and not her, a clear violation of the world order and any metric of fairness, she’s still gracious in defeat. She pulls me in for a giant hug. I’m crying, happy tears and a few sad ones too. I’m not going to lie—during weak moments, I fantasized about both of us getting in, Shola with a full ride, and the two of us rooming together. Me still getting to see Cesar a few times a week.

  Very little actually changing.

  “I don’t understand. I mean, you should have gotten in too.” She shakes her head, like it doesn’t matter, though of course it does. I know she has mixed feelings about going to school in LA, and maybe even mixed feelings about going to school with me, but I also know a full scholarship would have really helped her family. Her mom has hinted more than once that it would be good to have her nearby to help out with the Littles. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” she says, and even though she’s right and I’m not privy to the weird decisions of the SCC admissions committee, I still feel like somehow it is.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Now

  “Go get ready. You’re taking me hiking,” Isla says on Sunday morning. Our parents will be back later today from the hearing in Boston, so my plan was to numb myself with Xbox all day and then Postmates a belated birthday cake for my mom. This might be the first one we’ve ever gotten her that she’ll actually eat.

  The only plus side I can come up with to this whole disaster is that our house is no longer carb free.

  “I think you’ve forgotten that hiking happens outside.”

  “You have to get out, Chloe. This hermit depressive thing isn’t cute,” Isla says. She gathers a dirty T-shirt and yoga pants from the floor of my room and throws them at me. I know my room smells, and probably so do I. Since Shola came by, I’ve been doing some next-level wallowing. “Get dressed.”

  “There are people outside, and did you know all of them have cameras in their pockets? Also, what if I run into Levi? Or Shola? What if someone tips off the paparazzi and they take a picture of me with a sweaty red face?”

  “First of all, LA is a huge city, so the chances that you’ll run into Levi are like literally one in a million. Also, screw him. He’s kind of a conceited douche. Did I tell you he put a Harvard sticker on his locker? The outside. And it’s Sunday morning, so you know Shola’s at church with her family. So get over yourself. The paparazzi have better things to do than hunt you down. Sneakers. Hurry.”

  “Have you always been this bossy?” I ask.

  “I’m not bossy. I have leadership skills,” Isla says.

  * * *

  —

  An hour later, I find myself at the top of Runyon Canyon with Isla and Fluffernutter. I’m out of breath and slick with sweat. I wear large aviator sunglasses and a baseball hat low on my forehead to go incognito. We’ve been hiking for an hour and I haven’t noticed a single second look. I realize these are probably unnecessary precautions. It’s my mom who draws attention, not me.

  We collapse on a bench, and I hold Fluffernutter’s leash tight. I worry about him jumping off the edge. Below us stretches this whole silly city, clusters of tall buildings and little houses and the disorganized, smoggy sprawl. LA in all its ugly, beautiful glittering mirage. I turn east to where Cesar lives, and I picture him at home with his mom, her making him a pancake breakfast; I do not think about his list, how his mom presumably crossed out my old number in Sharpie and replaced it with my new one, like I asked her to over text when I explained I’d be away from the Center for a while. How it’s getting wrinkled in Cesar’s pocket because I keep catching him rubbing his fingers over the edges.

  “You were right,” I say, taking in an extravagantly deep breath. “I needed to get out.”

  “Can you repeat that please? Did you say I was right?” Isla asks, pretending to gasp. “We should take a selfie to commemorate the moment.”

  Isla whips out her phone, and in a sudden frenzy, it beeps and vibrates in her hands. Cell service is spotty up here, so this happens sometimes: that frantic flurry of missed calls and text messages all at once.

  “What is it?” I ask. I left my phone at home because I am friendless, so no one calls me but Kenny. Since it’s Sunday, I figured he’d take the day off.

  I scoot next to Isla to read over her shoulder, but she gets up and walks away. She paces back and forth, holding a finger to her ear so she can hear what must be multiple voice mails. Who leaves voice mails anymore?

  “What’s going on?” I ask again as I read her body language. Tight and overly controlled. My panic mounts, but Isla ignores me. She folds over, head between her knees. I get up and rub her back and she makes a strangled noise. I go through the list in my head, every imaginable disaster, which is silly, because lately all of the disasters have been unimaginable. “Are you okay? What’s happening, Isl? Tell me.”

  She straightens herself, clears her throat.

  “We have to go. It’s Hudson.” My go-to disaster, which somehow over the last few months has receded to the end of my worry list. I haven’t been thinking about my half brother, and maybe in the forgetting, in the not tending to those fears, I willed the worst. “He overdosed.”

  * * *

  —

  We run down the mountain, dirt kicking up our legs, sweat turning it to mud, Fluffernutter barking beside us. He thinks our sudden urgency is a game, and he wags his tail with enthusiasm, like our panic is fun. As we go down the hill, desperate for full cell service, Isla chants over and over, with each step: Be okay, be okay, be okay.

  Here’s all we know: Hudson is in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, which I decide means he’s alive.

  Both Isla and I were born at Cedars. This feels like compelling evidence that my brother cannot die there. I don’t say this out loud to Isla, who would dismiss the thought the same way she dismisses my mother’s vision boards (which, fair enough) and the rest of what she calls our “woo-woo crap.”

  I don’t say this out loud because I don’t want to use that word, die.

  “You think Sage will be there?” I ask once we’re in the car, speeding toward the hospital. I run a stop sign and then turn left despite the fact that it’s restricted hours. Sage is Hudson’s mom, my dad’s ex-wife. She’s a short woman with tattoos snaking up both of her arms and emphatic, jagged dyed-black bangs. She has the sort of tanned, wrinkly skin that gives the impression she’s spent the last twenty years hard-living on the beach.

  It’s almost impossible to picture her and my father doing all the things they apparently did once upon a time: falling in love, getting married, having Hudson.

  “Carrie said in her messages that she’s leading a yoga retreat in Nevada. So it should be just us, until Mom and Dad get here. They’re landing any minute. Carrie’s going to meet us at the hospital to take Fluff home.”

  Isla kisses our dog’s head, scratches under his ears. I wish we could take Fluffernutter with us into the waiting room. His heavy dog inhalations are comforting. As is the fact that he doesn’t know how screwed up we all are, and if he does, he loves us anyway.

  “This family is so screwed up,” Isla says, reading my mind.

  “Hud’s going to be okay,” I say.

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Isla says.

  * * *

  —

  The woman s
itting behind the desk in the emergency room tells us to take a seat with barely a glance in our direction. When I ask to see Hudson, she says, “That will not be possible at this time.” When I ask when someone will tell us what’s going on, she holds up her palms, like she’s not in charge, even though she’s the one with access to a computer and a phone and a special hospital pass, which means she can go behind those swinging double doors, where presumably our half brother is.

  “Is my brother even alive?” I ask. “Can you at least tell me that?”

  She looks up at me and then over at Isla, and for the first time, I can see the recognition in her eyes. That we are human beings stuck in the swampiness of real life, and that we are scared. I wish I weren’t wearing my hiking clothes. I pull out my jaunty ponytail, hoping that will add a year or two.

  “Have a seat, sweetheart,” she says. “Waiting is always the hardest part.”

  Is waiting the hardest part? I wonder. I don’t know. In the last few weeks, while we’ve been waiting in a different kind of purgatory, I’ve thought that the in-between was what made everything so difficult. Now, I think the in-between is emotional boot camp. It’s what prepares us for whatever’s next.

  A few kids hold their elbows at awkward angles. I see a couple of black eyes, and one person who looks like they might have the flu. A woman drenched in blood sits across from us. The nurses give her a towel to drape over the rust-colored stains, but she refuses to cover herself. Maybe she thinks that will get her seen by a doctor faster. I hope it works.

  I try to pin down Hudson in my mind’s eye, as if seeing him in my brain will mean he still exists somewhere in our world. I decide to think not about the Hudson I saw the last time he was at our house—hopped up and twitchy—but about the sober Hudson from two Christmases ago. He was fresh out of rehab, and he showed up shaved and with a new haircut. He’d bought Isla a book—The Secret Garden, I think—and me a candle from Anthropologie, and my mom and dad made such a big deal out of him remembering to bring us gifts, like he’d won the Nobel Peace Prize and not like he spent an hour picking stuff out for his sisters at the Grove, that their low expectations piled on another unnecessary layer of awkward.

  Later, though, we watched a movie marathon downstairs under cashmere blankets because my mom had the screeners for the Golden Globe nominees, and Hudson didn’t refer to my mother as stepmonster even once. For a while there, all tucked in with them like a normal family, I wondered if all the energy I wasted on worrying about my half brother could be spent on liking him instead.

  “People don’t always die from overdoses. Some people live and it’s the wake-up call they need to get clean,” Isla says. I don’t ask how she knows this. If I could, I’d erase this information from her brain. I hate that my sister so casually tosses off the words die and clean. That this is the stuff she googles late at night when she can’t sleep, or when she’s not busy googling words like honest services fraud and mail fraud and felony vs. misdemeanor.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “He texted me yesterday. And I didn’t write back. I should have written him back.” She chews on the ends of her hair, like she’s munching on a corn cob.

  “What’d he say?” I ask.

  “Nothing really. What’s up? We talk sometimes, so…”

  “You and Hudson talk?” This shouldn’t surprise me. Isla and Hudson have always had a bond I’ve never quite understood. Still, for a moment, I feel excluded and sad. Why could I never figure out how to pin Hudson down?

  “I mean, we text more than talk. He checks in on me. He might be a mess, but he’s still our brother.” I don’t add in my usual disclaimer, half brother, because that seems wrong when we don’t know if he’s going to be okay. “I shouldn’t have stolen his phone. He got a new one like the next day anyway.”

  “Aren’t you mad at him?” I ask. “Because I am. At Mom too. I’m mad at the whole world.”

  For a second, I let the rage flow through me, and it feels empowering, as if I’ve been given an extra blood supply. I want to punch the wall and knock over the magazines neatly stacked on the side table with titles like Modern Health and 250 Easy Instant Pot Recipes. I want to hulk out and find that random bleeding lady a freaking bed. Also a pillow.

  I want to see that Hudson’s okay, and then I want to pinch his side handles, like he used to do to me when we were kids, so tight they leave red marks, and then drag him to some magical rehab place he hasn’t tried yet.

  I want to show up at Shola’s door with a frozen yogurt and two spoons and beg for forgiveness.

  I want to buy Cesar ice cream and get his mom a green card.

  I want to stop being such a goddamn monster.

  “Addiction is a disease, Chlo. Like cancer. You wouldn’t be mad at him if he had cancer.”

  “I know,” I say. “Still.”

  “Waiting is not the hardest part,” Isla says, and shivers, like it has occurred to her for the first time—though much more likely, it has occurred to her again, again, again—that things may not go the right way. That the reason they haven’t let us see Hudson is because he is dead.

  Dead, I think, which is a word that has a soft click, like a closed door. Dead, dead, dead.

  “No, it’s not,” I agree.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Then

  When I get home from school, the living room is full of cardinal and gold balloons, SCC colors, which are coincidentally similar to those of Gryffindor, and a giant sign hangs from the archway: CONGRATS CHLOE!

  “You guys didn’t have to do this,” I say, even though I know my parents didn’t actually go to Party City or make the sign. This is all Carrie.

  “It’s not every day your baby gets into SCC,” my mom says, getting up from the couch, where she’s highlighting a script—likely the new My Dad, My Pops, and Me reboot—to hug me. “We are so proud of you. I told you it was going to happen.”

  “I still don’t believe it.”

  “Believe it. We know you’re staying in LA, so pinky-swear that you’ll have family dinner with us at least once a month.”

  “Mom,” I say, pretending to whine, but of course I’m grinning. Los Angeles is my home, and no one is making me leave.

  “I can’t wait to tell everyone.” My mom shimmers with excitement, her eyes big and round and thrilled. I feel the glow too, a warmth in my belly, like I’ve eaten a good meal. Not pride, exactly. Satisfaction.

  “Mom. Chill.”

  “What? It’s SCC! This is a big deal. A huge deal. I’m allowed to be proud of you.”

  “Okay, be proud. But like, don’t broadcast it.”

  “Whatever. When have I ever been chill?” she says, and then starts chanting, “SCC! SCC! SCC!”

  “Shola got wait-listed,” I say, and my mother’s face closes for a minute, a studied blankness that comes in handy when she needs to play dense on TV. The calm before the punch line. Then it opens up again, a computer rebooted.

  “That sucks, but hasn’t she gotten in everywhere else?”

  “Pretty much. She was hoping for a scholarship. It’s weird, right? That I got in and she didn’t?” I don’t know what I want my mom to say. I used the word weird, but I think what I mean is wrong. It’s wrong that I got in and Shola didn’t.

  “Who knows how these admissions people think? Maybe they realized there was no way she’d accept. It hurts their admissions percentages to let in someone who they know will go elsewhere. It’s not like it’s one for one. They don’t directly compare you.”

  “It’s still weird.” Again, I use a safer word. Weird. Not wrong. How can my getting into college of my dreams be wrong?

  It’s not.

  “Shola will be fine. You deserve this, baby. Here, I got you a present.” My mom hands me a professionally wrapped box. The paper looks like an old-timey map, pretty enough to frame. I careful
ly open it up, and inside are two SCC sweatshirts.

  “Why two?” I ask.

  “One is extra small and preshrunk, to wear with jeans and stuff. The other is looser, more comfy, for hanging out at home. I also got a couple for Dad and me. I’ve been saving them for months.”

  I’m touched by her enthusiasm, if not a little disturbed by her confidence. I decide to save the extra-small for Cesar, who is going to freak that I’m staying in town.

  “Thanks,” I say. “For everything. You and Dad have been really supportive.”

  “You did it, sweetheart. Not us.” She cups my cheeks and kisses me on the forehead. “Dinner at least once a month. I’m not joking.”

  * * *

  —

  Later that night, Shola texts.

  Shola: Just wanted to say again, I’m so so happy for you.

  Me: Thanks! I don’t know what to say about you and SCC. I bet they thought you were too good for the school. They didn’t want to hurt their accept percentages

  Shola: I’m over it. Bigger problems now. The Littles didn’t get into Wood Valley. We found out today

  Me: WTF

  Shola: My parents are freaking out. Like full Balogun meltdown

  Me: What’s the backup?

  Shola: There’s no backup. Our local public school sucks. We hoped they’d get in because of sibling preference

  Me: Siblings always get in

  Shola: Apparently not when they need fin aid

  Me: Seriously?

  Shola: Welcome to the real world, Chlo

  Me: Maybe you guys should move to a better school district?

  Three dots appear, and then disappear, and then appear again.

  I wish I could erase what I’ve just written. Of course they can’t just pick up and move to a better school district. I’m an idiot.