Admission

by Julie Buxbaum

  Me: Sorry. Ignore that

  But Shola doesn’t write back.

  * * *

  —

  Later, I get what might be my very first text from my half brother.

  Hudson: Heard about SCC! How much did Mom and Dad have to pay to get you in there?

  Me: Very funny

  Hudson: Kidding! Happy for you lil sis. Go Trojans!

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Now

  When my parents finally shuffle into the emergency room waiting area, Isla and I have already been waiting for two hours and have been given no new information despite multiple attempts to break the front desk lady. I’ve flipped through the Instant Pot recipe magazine, even though (a) we don’t own an Instant Pot, and (b) we have Cristof.

  After the bloody woman passed out, she was finally moved inside, so at least one question was answered for us. How much blood do you need to lose to get through Cedars’ double doors? Answer: enough to lose consciousness, apparently.

  My dad storms over to the desk, while my mom runs to Isla and me and gathers us into a hug. I ignore the looks of the other people in the waiting room, who clearly recognize my mother, despite the fact that she’s wearing a brand-new Red Sox baseball cap obviously bought at an airport gift shop. She has door-to-door VIP service when she travels, so I assume this was a futile attempt at anonymity for the plane ride itself.

  “We don’t know anything yet,” she says, which is not new information but feels like it anyway, because it’s coming from them and not from us. From the real adults.

  “We keep asking to see him and they keep telling us to wait,” I say. I don’t tell her that in the meantime I learned how to make taco chicken or that the seat she takes used to be covered in blood and was wiped down with Lysol less than ten minutes ago.

  I don’t scream: Is Hudson dead?

  I want to, though. I want to yell until my voice gives way.

  * * *

  —

  “Come on,” my dad calls, and he signals us to follow him and a nurse, who uses a magnetic pass to let us through the double doors. I have no idea how he managed to do in twenty seconds what I couldn’t do in two hours, but that’s so like my dad. To show up in a white button-down shirt rolled to his elbows—a tall, white, middle-aged well-off man whose clothes look professionally laundered and who sports an outrageously expensive watch—and make people listen at the mere sight of him. This nurse, a tall woman with long, thin legs and a long, thin face, like a greyhound, leads us to a room, and with an unnecessary flourish pulls open the curtains. She doesn’t say ta-da, but I bet she thinks it, and then with her matching creepy, long, thin-fingered spider hands, she waves us in.

  Hudson is lying in a bed, an oxygen tube hooked up to his nose, and though he has an IV, I can’t bring myself to look at his arms, which are no doubt mottled with track marks and bruises.

  He’s unmistakably alive.

  I feel a relief so palpable, my legs quiver. Isla bursts into tears.

  “Come on, guys. It’s not so bad. It’s not like I’m going to jail or anything,” Hudson says.

  “Not funny,” my dad says.

  “It’s a little bit funny,” my mom says. “Prison, actually,” she adds. She’s full-on laughing, and so is Hudson, and while normally the two of them laughing together would be a happy thing—the stepmonster and her stepson, finally bonding—today, the rest of us watch in horror.

  “It’s not funny. Not even a little bit funny. Any of it,” Isla says, and she marches right up to Hudson and gets in his face. So much for not being angry and addiction being like cancer. She’s practically spitting. “You almost died. You know how scared we were? This needs to stop. Why can’t you stop?”

  I think, not for the first time, that we’ve broken my sister. That if I could, I’d swap her out, send her off to a better family, one that wouldn’t test her so often. At the dinner table, instead of talking prison strategies, they could discuss molecular biology and the work of Anaïs Nin.

  “Shh, it’s okay. I’m okay,” Hudson says, still wearing that goofy smile, like we’re overreacting, though I catch a thread of nervousness. I don’t know if he’s worried about Isla or pondering the fact that he almost died or if he’s doing calculations in his head about how quickly he can get out of this hospital and get his next fix.

  For the first time, my anger mutates into compassion. I know what it’s like to be your own worst enemy, to have inflicted your own deepest cuts, to let the easy way always win. To have dug yourself a hole so deep you wonder if you’ll ever crawl out.

  Maybe my brother and I have more in common than I realized.

  “It honestly wasn’t all that bad. They didn’t even need to take me to the hospital. This was a precaution,” he says carefully, like he’s testing out a line.

  “You need to stop,” Isla says again, though even as the words are coming out, I can see she knows they’re pointless. She’s too smart to think she can reason Hudson into getting clean. We’ve all met with enough family therapists over the years to know at least that much. “Just stop.”

  My dad puts his hand on her shoulder and pulls her to him. He kisses the top of her head, then quickly wipes his eyes in hopes that the rest of us won’t see him crying.

  I think about all the things money can and cannot buy. A spot at SCC, but not a moral compass. Health care and rehab, but not immunity from our worst impulses. Fluency in Mandarin, but not the ability to talk honestly.

  Privilege and large heaping chunks of the world, but not confidence. Or self-reflection.

  And certainly not courage. No, money doesn’t buy courage. In fact, if I’ve learned anything since the scandal, it’s that the opposite is true.

  Money makes you weak because it tricks you into thinking you’re strong.

  “I wish it worked like that, Isla,” Hudson says. “I really, really do.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Then

  I need a breath mint. Levi texted, Be there in five, and I’m pretty sure this is it, the moment I’ve been hoping for all year—Levi Haas is going to ask me to the prom. Of course I had red onions on my salad at lunch, even though I told the guy explicitly please no red onions, and I don’t have time to run upstairs to the bathroom to brush my teeth again. I can’t risk Isla opening the door and ruining whatever Levi has planned.

  I’m nervous, which is silly. He’s the one doing the asking. I only have to smile and say yes. It’s not like I expect some elaborate promposal, because that isn’t really a big thing at Wood Valley. Still, this is another milestone reached, which seems to be happening almost daily. First getting into college, now prom, next graduation.

  Check, check, check.

  Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

  I’ve already picked out an array of dresses for the dance, and I make a mental note to buy a new makeup palette to test before the big night. Maybe I’ll try teal eyelids. I can be brave for once.

  “Dad, help!” I yell, sprinting to his office, since I know he usually keeps Altoids in there for emergencies. “I can’t get asked to the prom with onion breath.” I simultaneously brush my hair with one hand and put on lip gloss with the other, a brilliant effort at multitasking. I need to be prepared. I bet we’ll take an after-ask selfie, and Levi will post it on Instagram with a cute caption like She said yes.

  My dad’s not in his office, though, so I push his door open and help myself. I love this room. My father has one of those oversized wooden power desks—glass-topped and studded down the legs. A brass bar stocked with fancy man bottles—bourbon and gin and even tequila—stands in one corner, and a bookcase full of leather-bound classics that only Isla reads stands in the other. An original of the Baby Hope photo hangs on the wall, though why he’d want to see that every day, no matter how much money it’s worth, I don’t understand. The sofa faces the desk, and
when I was little and Mom was on set, Isla and I would sit tucked into its corner and draw. We preferred to be with my dad, even when he was too busy to pay attention to us, instead of in the playroom with our toys and the weekend nanny. He’d yell into the phone and scowl at his computer screen and mutter curses to himself, and it felt a lot like watching my mother on television—a glimpse at their strange alter egos, the people they morphed into when we were not around.

  I rummage around in his top drawer and find only orange Tic Tacs, which my mom would say are more candy than breath mint, but beggars can’t be choosers. I steal a handful, throw them in my mouth, and enjoy their sweet crunch. A red file sits loose in the drawer, and before I realize what I’m doing, I lean down to read the label.

  It’s neatly typed, innocuous: Chloe College Apps.

  Isla always claims to have a sixth sense, and for the first time, I understand what she means. There’s a physicality to what’s happening, a cellular expectation deeper than my consciousness. Opening this folder will change everything, I realize; there’ll be no going back. Still, I feel the moment’s inevitability, no different from anything else inevitable—leaving home, growing up, dying.

  I open the file carefully, slowly, as if how I open it will alter what’s inside. At first, I can’t make sense of what I see. A photograph is clipped to the top.

  It’s me and it’s not me.

  I recognize my own face, of course, from that bikini photo in Cabo, though I don’t remember getting that tan on the trip. My mom is such a fascist about sun damage that she makes us all sit in the shade and wear 80 SPF. Instead of lying on a chaise lounge and throwing a peace sign at the camera, as I am in the original, in this one, I’m running, spear in hand, like an extra in Gladiator. I have biceps, the kind my mom has from strength training, a solid mountain range of bumps, not the kind I actually have, a slight sag from Pringles eating. My legs look longer, like an Olympian’s legs, or Stretch Armstrong’s.

  I have no idea why they’d manipulate my picture to make it look like I’m doing warrior-princess cosplay. On second glance, I realize I have it all wrong. It’s not cosplay. Not a costume, a sports outfit. Again, not the right word. A uniform.

  This is a picture of me pole vaulting.

  Pole vaulting?

  Fake news, I think. Which I realize doesn’t really make sense, but it’s a phrase I hear bandied about and it seems to apply here.

  I don’t pole vault.

  I don’t even run.

  This picture isn’t real.

  Fake news.

  I flip through the pages. An essay with my name at the top, though I didn’t write it, tells an elaborate love story about how I, Chloe Wynn Berringer, fell head over heels for the sport of pole vaulting after running track competitively for seven years. I’m a champion, a master, an athlete who wakes every morning before five a.m. to sprint in the refreshing morning air. I describe the spike of adrenaline and the cold clench of goose bumps as I hit my stride. Apparently, I get the same feeling when I win.

  According to the essay, I’m addicted to winning. Those are the words I use—or alter-ego me uses. Addicted to winning.

  Never mind that I don’t particularly appreciate heights, nor would I ever choose to use a pole to hoist my body over a bar, a sport that sounds like an f’ed up version of limbo. I don’t even like rooftop parties—I hate the idea of being solely responsible for keeping myself from falling off an edge. They make me the same kind of nervous I get when I’m stopped at a stop sign and a pedestrian walks in front of my car. How do they trust me not to let my foot slip off the brake?

  I don’t even trust me.

  Obviously, I can’t avoid driving, but I keep myself at a safe elevation. No need to throw my body around.

  So Dr. Wilson did a last-minute bait and switch. Assumed SCC would prefer Pole Vaulting Chloe to Noncommittal Chloe.

  I scan the basic information section, figuring at least here, they’ll have hewn close to the facts. My name is again at the top of the application: Chloe Wynn Berringer. No typo there. My birthday is again, correct. My parents’ names and occupations. Next to Race two boxes are checked: Caucasian and Latin American.

  This must be a joke, or an honest mistake or another Aunt Candy prank, like her framed intestine. There’s no way my mom and dad would have signed off on this sort of lie.

  Both of my parents are white.

  I am white.

  I might be tan in that photo, but that’s beauty bestowed by the Cabo sun.

  I’m so white, I’m sure my mom played Billy Joel in the delivery room.

  The doorbell rings, and I panic. I somehow forgot about Levi and prom and my real life. I close the folder and stuff it back in the drawer. I chomp on a few more orange Tic Tacs. I jump up and down a few times to stop my hands from shaking. And then I run and answer the door.

  * * *

  —

  Levi carries two dozen red roses under one arm and holds up a large poster board that reads Hey SCC girl will you go to prom with this Harvard guy? I feel dizzy and sick as everything falls into place in my brain. All the weirdness of the fall, my mother’s overconfidence, the emails, the exorbitant donations to charity.

  I didn’t get into SCC. The fictional character that Dr. Wilson created did.

  There are too many falsehoods to wrap my brain around. The bizarre pole-vaulting essay. The fact that I’m suddenly, conveniently Latina, which is a sneaky choice, one that couldn’t be dismantled by googling my family. My father’s golfing perma-tan leaving the benefit of the doubt.

  That photo.

  I have to confront my parents. I have to call the SCC admissions office and explain, though I don’t know what I can say. That they’ve let in the wrong person?

  I’ve already turned down AIU.

  “Chloe?” Levi asks, signaling again to his sign. “So? Will you go with me?”

  I stare into his eyes, and he looks expectant, like he’s sure I’ll say yes. This is the look I bet he had when he sat at his computer and checked to see if he had been accepted at Harvard. The look he will carry throughout his life as he goes forth and conquers, making his parents proud. I remember our conversation from only a few months ago, though it feels like longer, about his biggest fears, how he’s always so careful not to disappoint. I know now how little my parents must think of me, how incapable they assume I am, if they thought they had to resort to this.

  I wonder if they are right.

  “Yes, of course,” I say, forcing my mouth to curve upward. Too bad I’m not an actress like my mother, who’d be able to turn the energy of the moment and blind Levi with her high-wattage smile. “I can’t wait to go to prom with you.”

  Levi steps forward and drops the poster. He leans in for a kiss, soft and slow, and it all plays out exactly like I hoped it would before I opened that file. The ask, the yes, the kiss, as if I scripted it, or as if the fall version of me—who wanted nothing more than to be Levi’s girlfriend—made this reality manifest with my own, different vision board.

  “Yum. Orange Tic Tacs. My favorite,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  Once Levi leaves, my parents head out grim-faced for what they call an “important meeting”—maybe the reboot is in trouble?—and Isla ensconces herself in her room, no doubt reading more Dostoyevsky for fun. I put on my SCC sweatshirt, the cozy version, and stand in front of my full-length mirror. I look at my reflection and imagine myself in college: the real Chloe Wynn Berringer, not the one on my application. I imagine doing all the stuff that frightens me: Buying books and keeping up with my classes. Drinking beer at fraternity parties with people I don’t know. The comfort of having my parents only twenty minutes away should I need a hand.

  I think through my options. What good would alerting the admissions office do? If they can rescind your acceptance because o
f a slip in grades, surely they can rescind it for something like this, even if I wasn’t the one who did the Photoshopping.

  What’s done is done, I tell myself, if anything was actually done in the first place.

  After all, there are a lot of reasonable explanations for that file. It’s entirely possible that that application was never submitted, that I’m telling myself a story that isn’t true. That I’m making something out of nothing.

  I look in the mirror again, examine my decidedly non-pole-vaulting body. I will let this go. Even if my admission is some sort of cosmic mistake or even, worst-case scenario, the result of a rogue college admissions consultant’s lies, I’ll make myself worthy of SCC. I’ll rise to the occasion and earn my place retroactively. I’ll study hard and graduate with honors. Make sure to have a full, well-rounded college experience.

  I decide I didn’t really see anything in my dad’s drawer after all. That was a potential application or a prank, not my application.

  Shola: Levi asked finally?!?!?

  Me: He did!

  Shola: Yay.

  Me: So what’s your position on teal eyeshadow?

  Shola: DO IT

  I want to ask about the Littles and where they’re going to school. I want to ask if she’s heard from Harvard or Yale yet. But I keep putting my foot in it lately, so I think it’s better to stay quiet. I guess this is what happens as you start your goodbyes—little chasms open up to prepare you for letting go.

  Me: Done. Will you come over and get ready with me here before prom? We can raid my mom’s accessories

  Shola: Duh

  * * *

  —

  Before bed, I click over to Sephora. Order a teal eye shadow palette for prom. Since I still have some time, I decide not to pay extra for overnight shipping.