Getting In: A Novel Read online

  Yoonie told a very small lie when she first came to work for Dr. Joy: she said that she had to leave at two thirty on Wednesday afternoons. It was not a premeditated lie but a sudden, spontaneous, self-indulgent one, unusual for a woman whose idea of a big treat was a single mini-Snickers in the evening, after the dishes were done, no more than once or twice a week. She had no need of time for herself, not with a job that required her to wear surgical scrubs, white sneakers, tidy hair, no nail polish, not that Yoonie would have used it, and less makeup than the patients wore. When she got home after work she changed into sweats, and if they visited friends on a Saturday night she had a rotation of three interchangeable outfits that yielded nine agreeable combinations. There was no real reason to leave early, but she said it on the off chance that someday there might be, and she picked a weekday afternoon in the hope that whatever it was would involve her daughter.

  When Elizabeth was younger, Yoonie had picked her up at school every Wednesday afternoon, but lately there were more and more reasons to break their date, meetings with teachers, meetings of the film club, orchestra rehearsals for the fall musical, days when Elizabeth chose to do her homework at school for no reason Yoonie could fathom. Most Wednesdays, Yoonie drove straight home and took a brisk walk down to the ocean and back, focused on maintaining her pace, hopeful that the following week she would not have the chance.

  On the rare occasion when Elizabeth had nothing else to do, Yoonie made sure to be first in the pickup line, rather than waste twenty precious minutes edging forward behind a row of other cars. The daily drama was always the same. The security guard walked the perimeter of Ocean Heights High, stopping only to glower at the neighborhood drug dealer, who glowered back from the sanctity of the public sidewalk in front of his conveniently located apartment building. His circuit complete, the guard unlocked the main gate and the driveway gate, waited for the bell, and nodded to three custodians, who opened three sets of double doors with the precision of synchronized swimmers. At the start of each year, the three-story concrete slab that was Santa Monica’s contribution to blockhouse architecture spewed forth almost four thousand students every afternoon, though that number would dwindle by hundreds by spring, as a predictable percentage of the seniors made life choices that did not require a diploma, one or two of them always drafted by the freelance pharmaceuticals rep across the street. Even so, it was a great wave of teenagers. Yoonie had the chance, on increasingly intermittent Wednesdays, to watch them grow up, to be reminded—not that she ever forgot, not even for an instant—that in three years, in two years, next year, she would be able to walk on the beach every week. She opened her checkbook register to the little calendar printed on the back, to get an idea of how many Wednesdays there were between now and college, but Elizabeth swung open the passenger door and plopped onto the seat before she could finish counting.

  Liz. Yoonie corrected herself. On the first day of senior year, Elizabeth had informed her mother that she preferred to be called Liz.

  “You have anything left to eat?”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  Liz settled into the passenger seat, carefully set her water bottle into the cup holder her father had built for her out of a beheaded Big Gulp cup and some duct tape, and reached down at her feet for her mother’s new book bag, which sported the logo of the wrinkle filler whose manufacturer was courting Dr. Joy. She pulled a Sharpie out of her own backpack and began to color over the pharmaceutical logo with black ink.

  “You’re not a billboard,” she told her mom, as she had when she had blacked out the logo on the previous book bag, “and you really ought to carry a regular purse separate from lunch. What if something spills?” Yoonie watched her daughter with frustration. She was proud to carry the bags from the pharmaceutical companies, just as she enjoyed wearing the pastel scrubs that Dr. Joy liked the nurses to wear instead of plain white, but Liz always marked out the logos anyhow. As she turned the bag over to start on the other side, the flagged Fiske guide slid out of the bag onto her lap. She riffled through to see what schools were marked.

  “Where’d you get this?” she asked. “Why did you flag all these?” She picked a page with a blue flag and held it up for her mother to see. “Duke? You’re not serious.”

  “Dr. Joy gave it to me,” Yoonie said.

  “But we’re not interested in any of these schools.”

  “I know,” said her mother. “When I read some of it I felt even more sure that we are not interested.”

  Yoonie pulled carefully into traffic and headed for home, a small stucco cottage in a corridor of rentals sandwiched between the Santa Monica freeway and the gentrified neighborhoods to the south. She and her husband and her daughter lived on a street where gang members still sprayed their initials on fences, where the neighborhood market stocked a dozen kinds of salsa but not a single jar of danmooji. Her second cousin, who lived in Koreatown, liked to remind her on a regular basis of exactly how crazy she was not to move, but Yoonie ignored her. She and Steve had moved here for the schools, because the district served the overpriced beachside communities as well as the few remaining blocks at their margins that had not yet been remodeled. They had endured thirteen years of kids smoking who knew what on their front lawn after school, of boys walking flat-headed, spike-collared dogs that growled at anything that moved, of sirens that screeched to a halt in their neighborhood, all so that Liz could attend a halfway decent public high school. In a year, she would go to Harvard, and then perhaps Yoonie and her husband would move onto her cousin’s block, where people understood that Eun Hee was pronounced with a breath in the middle.

  Liz flipped to another flagged page, read silently for a moment, and tossed the book onto the floor of the backseat. “Can we go to Coffee Bean?”

  “Yes,” said Yoonie, who had yet to develop a taste for even the most doctored of coffee drinks, but would never turn down such an invitation. “But look again in the bag and see what I got you.”

  She pulled into the left-turn lane so that she could double back toward school, and Liz dutifully rummaged around and extracted a half-dozen sample tubes of sunscreen in a range of intensity and formula: SPFs from 15 to 55, finishes from matte to all-sport waterproof. Liz muttered her thanks and put them in her purse, so that she could empty them into her bathroom drawer along with all the other sunscreen samples her mother had presented to her in the last year. Yoonie devoutly believed that the Los Angeles sun was her mortal enemy, and she kept her family in an oversupply of sunscreen, which she insisted they slather on every time they left the house. Her adopted home was a city full of terrors, from earthquakes to the subjunctive, and she was powerless to do anything about most of them. The blinding sun was a problem she could solve. Her daughter would go to Harvard with very healthy skin.

  A generation earlier, an after-school snack meant a Coke and fries, or a milk shake and a burger, any carbocentric treat that pumped up the collective serotonin level for such slap-happy concerns as a pep rally or the annual disco night fundraiser. There might be a city somewhere where similar tastes still prevailed—a flyover state that no one from Crestview or Ocean Heights had ever visited—but for twenty-first-century urban teens, the snack of choice was caffeine. They knew the difference between a cappuccino and a macchiato before they were old enough to drive. They sneered at the hardcore users who chugged cans of Red Bull after an all-nighter and convinced themselves that four visits to Starbucks between breakfast and dinner was a sign of sophistication, not dependency. Between three and five on weekdays, the gourmet coffee outlet nearest a high school was this generation’s hangout, and an espresso-powered drink topped with whipped cream was its strawberry ice-cream soda.

  One of the city’s luckier franchisees ran the Coffee Bean across the street from Ocean Heights, which was mobbed by the time Yoonie and Liz arrived. They took their place in a slow, snaking line, as one after another of Liz’s classmates debated the relative merits of an extra shot, the addition of cocoa nibs, or the exa
ct amount of whipped cream required to avoid speculation that the consumer was either an anorexic or a pig. Like any self-respecting teen, Liz stood far enough away from her mother to allow people to mistake them for strangers, but when she made the tactical error of waving to a girl at one of the tables, her mother closed the gap.

  “Who did you see?” Yoonie asked. Liz never brought friends home, and if Yoonie and Steve had not been completely focused on academics they might have worried, but Liz never seemed unhappy, and there was plenty of time for friends in college, so they did not dwell on their daughter’s nonexistent social life.

  “Chloe,” said Liz, nodding toward a girl who waved back from one of the little round tables. “The kid I tutor.”

  Yoonie stepped out of the line so that she could get a look, and she would have waved, too, if Chloe had not turned back to the other girl at her table.

  Liz pulled at her mother’s elbow to get her attention. “Mom, it’s a terrible line and there aren’t any tables. You want to wait on the bench outside and I’ll bring you yours?”

  “Okay,” said Yoonie, who would have much preferred to stay in line. She found it increasingly hard to distinguish between compassion and embarrassment, to figure out if Liz was sending her outside because she had Yoonie’s best interests at heart or because she was trying to choreograph a temporary escape from being a daughter. Yoonie imagined that women like Dr. Joy had a private bank account of carefree memories from which they could withdraw a happy story when they were asked to wait outside, or whatever the dismissive equivalent was in their family. Yoonie had precious few such assets, for almost all of her memories had goals attached. She felt satisfied, surely, because Liz had accomplished more than she and Steve could ever have dreamed, but satisfied did not make the bench any more comfortable.

  Chloe had just sat down with two iced blendeds when Lauren blew in the door, and she instinctively placed a protective hand over each drink as her friend dumped her purse and backpack on the floor and sank into the empty chair across from her, legs splayed, seams askew. Chloe thought that Lauren dealt with the stress of junior and senior year better than anyone else she knew. Some girls ate too much, others ate too little, and the fringe element dabbled in drink or drugs or random sex or all three. Chloe had tried each of the standard remedies right up to the point where she scared herself, and since then she had settled for dripping sarcasm, the refuge of the timid but angry. Lauren was smarter; she let stress seep right out of her pores. It untucked her uniform shirt and ripped her hem, derailed her center part and sent her hair cascading, kept her knee jiggling no matter how hard she tried to sit still.

  She took a long slurp of her drink, sat back, and cupped her hands under her breasts, oblivious of the effect she was having on the Coffee Bean employee whose job it was to wipe down the tables and refill the napkin dispenser.

  “Get this. Ted the Great says I am top-heavy. Top. Heavy.” She waggled her fingers at Chloe, who laughed so hard she had to wave her hands at Lauren to get her to stop. If she tried to open her mouth to speak, she would have sprayed her drink all over her friend.

  “I want too many schools that don’t want me, is what he thinks. So my mom is in full fret mode, like, ‘What’re we going to do?’ and my dad doesn’t know what to say, and Ted wants me to go to, I don’t know, maybe night school?” Lauren paused to take a breath, which became a sigh, which became a sullen weight at the back of her neck. “It was totally depressing. ‘You’re a terrific kid—except wait, now that we think it over, oh, sorry, you’re a failure.’”

  Chloe’s mood turned appropriately somber. “He didn’t really say that. You’re not a failure.”

  “You’re not a college counselor. Do you have a college counselor?”

  “A college counselor. Well, almost. I of course got assigned to the loser one, basically she’s the receptionist.”

  “Would you stop it?”

  “Would you stop it?” Chloe had left Crestview at the end of her sophomore year, when, as she liked to put it, her parents had decided that it was more important to send their divorce lawyers’ children to private school than it was to let her graduate with her friends. That was not fair, and she knew it—her father had moved into a vacant dingbat apartment in a building his brother owned, and her parents did most of their fighting outside of the lawyers’ offices to keep costs down. Like any other overextended family with exploitable assets, Chloe’s parents had available to them all the usual resources for creating cash: a house whose equity they could borrow against, credit cards they could max out at ever-inflating interest rates, investment accounts they could raid. All that really stood between Chloe and a Crestview diploma was the specter of monthly finance charges or a chunk of added income tax on the investment money, and her parents willingly would have paid the extra freight to assuage their mutual guilt. In fact, it had been Chloe’s decision to switch to public school. In the spring of her sophomore year, her parents had gotten into a loud argument in the Crestview parking lot after the school play, in front of witnesses, and the next day Chloe had informed them that she would not be returning the following year.

  The problem with the truth, though, was that it was dire, and decidedly not funny. As Chloe had no interest in being the object of anyone’s pity or sympathy, she made up the business about the divorce lawyers’ children and stuck with it. The line always got a laugh, which was pretty much all Chloe cared about these days—that, and being able for the first time in her life to give her old friends a hard time for being sheltered and spoiled, which was what she tried to convince herself they were.

  “You can’t be suffering that bad,” said Lauren. “Your mom doesn’t even work. I mean, if one of my parents stopped working, I’d be at Cal State Wherever.”

  “My mom is going to work a couple of mornings to trade for free Pilates,” said Chloe, and she began to giggle. “Big breadwinner.”

  “So what’d the counselor say?”

  “Haven’t seen her yet. Basically she answers the phone and alphabetizes brochures. I’m not holding out big hope for help there.”

  “But when do you pick?”

  “Maybe I have,” said Chloe. “Hampshire, Bard…”

  “I’ve heard of Bard.”

  “Well, now I’m back with the cool crowd.” Chloe regretted the jab immediately. “Never mind.”

  “Y’know, it’s not my fault your life’s a living hell.”

  “Right. I have my parents to thank for that. Anyhow, someplace where they don’t expect me to take fundamentals of everything before I can have any fun. Oh, but there’s Harvard right there. See that girl? Total perfection. She’s the spoiler. Good thing I don’t want to go to Harvard. Like that was ever going to happen.”

  Lauren glanced in the direction Chloe was pointing. There were two girls in line to order drinks, a tall blonde in her Ocean Heights High basketball uniform and an Asian girl who was trying to pretend that the woman standing behind her was not her mother.

  “The jock or the nerd?”

  “Nerd, also known as my math tutor. Jock’s getting recruited at Stanford.” She made a polite wave, as opposed to a beckoning one, and got the same wave in return.

  “And Harvard?”

  “She got 2300 on her SATs, I asked her, straight As, she takes APs they haven’t even dreamed up yet.” Chloe shook her head. “Not a normal childhood if you ask me.”

  “Has she cured cancer?”

  “Next week. After the violin performance or the track meet, I’m not sure which, or tutoring five kids in South Central. Or saving me from failing calc. You’re taking calc, aren’t you?”

  “Like I had a choice.” Any girl who was halfway serious about college had to take more math classes than she could ever possibly need or want. It was the progressive choice. An A in AP calculus carried more weight for a girl than an A in AP American lit, no matter what anyone in the English department said.

  “Too bad for you,” said Chloe. “Reading is so yesterday.” />
  Lauren got up suddenly. “I’ve got tons of homework. I’ll drive you home.” She had gotten out of bed that morning with a list of possibilities, and now all she had were downward arrows, stretch schools, and strategies designed to compensate for what Ted seemed to feel were her shortcomings. The airy feeling she recalled when she first composed the list had congealed into something heavier, an awareness that the future might end just shy of where she thought it would—that it was not quite as vast as she had imagined. She looked at the Asian girl and felt a jab of envy, even though she had no desire to play the violin, run track, or go to Harvard.

  She never quite trusted girls who seemed to know exactly where they were headed. Chloe liked to tell people that she planned either to go into politics or to write fiction, though Lauren’s dad said that choosing the former, given Chloe’s lack of interest in current events, indicated her talent for the latter. Katie told everyone it was Yale and Yale Law, while Lauren had trouble hanging on to a version of herself for more than a couple of weeks at a time. Her parents always said she was not supposed to know if she wanted to be a chef or an architect or a teacher, and she might want to be a psychologist once she got to college and took a psychology class. That was the whole point of going to college, they said, to read and think and figure out who she wanted to be. Lauren watched Ms. Absolute Perfection inch toward the front of the line and wondered, for the first time, if they had any idea what they were talking about.

  chapter 3