Getting In: A Novel Read online

  Chloe looked as though she had been drawn with a compass, a source of infinite exasperation to her mother, who had been laid out with a straightedge. Chloe was adamantly, irrevocably round, from her mink eyes to her soup-bowl belly to hips that yearned for the demise of low-rise jeans. A fat halo of russet curls framed her face, despite her mother’s repeated offers to pay for Japanese straightening. Her little cobalt blue toenails were rounder than her mother’s red brick rectangles; she was not so much plump as circular, as unsubtle and unstable as a beach ball. She knew from her mother’s perpetually downturned mouth that Deena resented the way she looked. As long as Chloe was in the house, it was impossible, despite a folder full of legal documents, for Deena to eliminate Dave from her life entirely.

  In an intact household, Chloe told herself, she would have channeled her energy into something big, an as yet unidentified career that guaranteed her a closet full of the latest fashions and public appearances where she would be photographed wearing them. Ever since her parents’ argument in the parking lot, Chloe had a darker mission—to retaliate, to punish them for being so selfish that they could not manage to stay married until she left home.

  If getting into a great college was going to be the one stellar accomplishment her parents pointed to, to prove that they had not irreparably harmed their only child, then college was going to be the one thing Chloe blew off—just shy of not going, of course, for she was not that brave. Chloe intended to find a decent school that her parents considered to be completely inappropriate, a private one that cost a lot of money, and to insist that it was the only place on earth where she could be truly happy.

  Chloe had sustained damage in the breakup, she just knew it, though she figured it would be years before she understood its scope, and years more before she was willing to give it up as a convenient excuse for bad behavior. The right college might help her get her bearings, but of course losing those bearings in the first place probably guaranteed that the right college would not want her. Other kids might feel like rejects when a school turned them down. Chloe intended to occupy the much cushier berth of the emotional casualty.

  If she were being honest, she would have admitted that life before her parents’ split had not been much fun, either, and that in fact there was a certain relief to being able to get through a day without holding her breath. She preferred instead to remind her parents, whenever possible, that she had endured a wrenching detour, one that involved not just the logistical challenge of joint custody but the academic and social demands of a new school—a transition of a magnitude her parents failed to appreciate to this day.

  There were so many adjustments to make. At Crestview, she had never carried a real purse, thanks to an informal competition that involved being the senior with the most beat-up but still serviceable six-year-old backpack. At Ocean Heights, girls started babysitting in eighth grade so that they’d have enough saved up for a Kooba or a Tylie Malibu by the time they started high school. They bought their shoes at Payless and their jeans at Target—at Tar-jay, merci—but the purse had to be an important one, even if it was last season’s, even if they ignored their algebra homework to scour eBay and the online discount sites for markdowns.

  By the time anyone remembered her name, Chloe was sporting a brand-new Tylie that the other girls would have to dream about until the after-Christmas sales. She banished to the back of her closet the $175 jeans favored by Crestview kids, with their frayed hems, strategic holes, and machine-aged denim, and replaced them with four pairs of pristine, perfectly pressed jeans and two pairs of Dickies khakis that cost the same amount, total, as a single pair of her discards. Private school girls, who saw nothing wrong with calling their tank tops “wifebeaters,” wore them with push-up bras in a contrasting color, but public schoolers called them “tanks” and piled on two or three at a time over bras with transparent plastic straps, so Chloe had to buy some extras, along with the proper underwear. She needed a new cell phone; she switched to a different styling gel. Whenever Chloe felt like stabbing her parents in the heart she speculated, loudly, about how much better she might have done in the two high school years that really counted, if she had not had to navigate the educational equivalent of a move from France to Sri Lanka.

  “Salad night, honey.” Deena’s voice from the kitchen interrupted her daughter’s internal rant. “Ten minutes.”

  Chloe had made it a policy, since the breakup, never to respond to either of her parents the first time they called. Deena waited for a reply, got none, and blamed Dave for the silence, as she blamed him for everything. Dave, the only man in the known universe who managed not to get rich in advertising, the man who created what was widely considered one of the most offensive television campaigns ever made for an intestinal gas product. The executives who had approved the campaign pretended that they had not been involved and transferred Dave to media sales because they felt too guilty to fire him. Now he told people that he sold time and space for a living, a sure indication of how funny he was not, in case anyone needed proof beyond what Deena referred to as the singing fart commercials.

  When Deena had first confessed her dismay at his downward mobility, he said she was being inflexible and lacked compassion. As his income decreased and her spending did not, he complained further that she was grasping, selfish, and unsupportive; he accused her of everything short of having given him the original inspiration for the gas commercial. Deena replied that Dave had failed to live up to his obligations as a husband and a father. Dave, having recently found sympathy incarnate in a twenty-nine-year-old yoga instructor who frequented a deli he liked, agreed with his wife. He had not done a good job. He was resigning his post in the hope that he would do better as an ex-husband, another line he found amusing.

  If only it were that simple, if only leaving really meant gone. Deena knew all too well that people did not disappear just because they were no longer around. Her mother, Nana Ree, was getting the biggest laugh of anybody about Dave, and she had been dead for four years, felled by an aneurysm in the porte-cochere at Saks and buried in the navy blue two-piece St. John knit that she had purchased mere moments before. She was sitting in a fitting room in heaven shaking her head and muttering, “I told you so,” because she had recognized in her son-in-law the same fool’s belief in change, not effort, that had drawn Deena’s father away from his wife and daughter for life with a North Beach bartender.

  Deena was getting better at not thinking about any of this during the day, but at dusk, with Chloe sequestered in her bedroom and only fresh produce to keep her company, the kitchen filled with unwanted ghosts.

  “Stop it,” she said, sawing at a hapless tomato with more force than its pliant skin required. “Everybody out of my kitchen,” she muttered as she proceeded to dice the memory of her mother and her ex-husband into an exceedingly fine chop. She mutilated tomatoes, olives, avocados, and a takeout rosemary chicken breast, dumped them into a big bowl already half-full of shredded lettuce, and padded down the hallway to knock on Chloe’s door.

  “You can come out now,” she said. “There’s nothing left to get ready, so it’s safe.”

  “Right,” came Chloe’s voice from behind the door. “Wouldn’t want that lettuce to get cold.”

  Deena bit her lip, walked back into the kitchen, and drowned the salad with bottled no-calorie Italian dressing, knowing that Chloe often required a third call these days, knowing that Chloe hated soggy lettuce. Too bad. Salad night was Deena’s thinly veiled attempt to get Chloe’s weight down and make it seem like fun, with a different combination of veggies and protein each time, and all she got for her trouble was sarcasm and resentment. She was not about to sit here and wait until Chloe deigned to appear. Deena piled salad on her plate, poured herself a glass of iced tea, and tried to focus on the first delicious and virtuous bite even as she listened for the doorknob turning.

  She took a second helping that she did not really want, to make it look as though she had a good reason for sitting with
Chloe while she ate, and worked hard to ignore the melodramatic sigh as Chloe hoisted her first swampy forkful. Deena poked at her food until Chloe’s plate was half-empty, to ensure that her daughter had a healthy meal even if she stormed out of the room once Deena said what she had to say.

  “Your father and I had a talk,” she began.

  “That always works well,” Chloe shot back.

  “Do not use that tone of voice—”

  “Any more olives?”

  Deena got up to retrieve them from the fridge.

  “I’m going to finish my sentence. Your father and I had a talk about these ten schools on your list…”

  Chloe smiled, which Deena took as encouragement, though it was in fact amusement. Her parents had managed to have a conversation about the ten schools on her list without ever realizing that each one of them had a different list, that there were twenty schools, not ten, that so far her search for a school resembled nothing so much as a Saturday afternoon spent on random shoe-shopping sites. It included the top five private schools from the U.S. News & World Report list, on the off chance that one of them might consider an applicant with premillennial SAT scores; Berkeley and Michigan, because they were big enough to disappear in; five schools close to big cities from the book about schools that made a difference; six from the deep double digits on the U.S. News list, because who was she kidding; and two UCs, in case her parents’ endless arguments about money caught fire.

  In the single most profitable consequence of her parents’ separation, she had a Jet Blue American Express card from her mom and an iTunes Visa card from her dad, so she could charge half the applications on each and perpetuate the illusion of thoroughness, not wantonness. Her mom shopped to fill the vacant space that was her life. Chloe shopped, in this case, to pave the road away from home. She saw this as a crucial distinction.

  Deena reached over to pat Chloe’s hand. “And we wondered why you’re not applying early to some special school. If it’s a reasonable choice you could get all of this over with before Christmas, and not have to spend time you don’t have on all those essays.”

  Chloe stood up so suddenly that Deena flinched.

  “That is so insulting,” said Chloe. “What you really mean is why don’t I pick someplace easy that no one else wants to go to. Why don’t you just say so? Let’s sign me up for City College and spare ourselves the disappointment. And spare you and Daddy all that money. I ought to bug the house, and then if you and Daddy ever decide to worry about my self-esteem, which I doubt, but if you ever do, you can just listen to the things you say to me. Then you’ll know why I don’t have any.”

  “Chloe. I was just asking. If we can’t ask simple questions…”

  “But they’re not simple questions. I picked out ten schools because I thought they gave me a really good range of options.” Suddenly she recalled something useful Ted had said at the one Crestview college workshop she had attended in her sophomore year. “Some of us aren’t really ready to make a decision this early, and the six extra months gives us time we need to mature. I’m a different person today than I was last year, right?”

  “Right,” allowed Deena, wondering what trap she was stepping into.

  “Then I’ll be a different girl when the letters come out next April than when the early ones come out in December, right?”

  “I guess so,” said Deena, although she had no idea if she really believed it. At some point the apocalyptics of growing up steadied into a more manageable rhythm—in Dave’s case, they had congealed into an infuriating sameness. Why not assume that Chloe would still essentially be Chloe next spring and go for early decision? Deena had no patience for the subtleties of a real college strategy, but she understood dating. Schools wanted to say yes to kids who definitely would say yes to them, not to kids who might have their heads turned by a more handsome suitor. That was what early decision was all about, at least at schools where an average student like Chloe might stand a chance.

  “Excuse me?” said Chloe. “You guess so?”

  “I’m thinking about what you said.”

  “Yeah, but while you’re thinking I’m not getting my homework done.”

  Chloe retreated to her bedroom, closed the door, and sent Lauren an instant message to see if she was home. Before the parking-lot argument, Chloe had had friends over all the time, but once she moved to Ocean Heights she had started inviting herself to other people’s houses. It made her parents feel bad, which never hurt, and it reminded her friends of how drastically Chloe’s life had changed, which was always good for a little attention. Lauren’s parents only minded company during midterms and finals, and occasionally on the night before a big test or paper, which, happily for Chloe, this turned out not to be. As soon as Lauren messaged back, Chloe threw her laptop into her bag along with her calculus binder, cell phone, a twenty, and her driver’s license. She ducked into the bathroom and rubbed her face with a dry towel until her cheeks and forehead colored up, and she ground a fist into each eye socket to make the whites redden, just a bit. She stood for a moment behind her bedroom door, as generations of actresses have stood in the wings before a big entrance, and then she rushed into the kitchen, looking suitably distressed.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said to her mother. “My calc binder is at Dad’s.”

  “How can that be?” said Deena. “Honey, you really have to—”

  “It’s not my fault. Daddy always double-checks, or he said he does, I don’t know, oh, Mom, I have to go get it right now.”

  Deena dried her hands and tossed the dishtowel on the counter. “I’ll drive you over. This has got to stop. I’m going to talk to him, sweetie, really, we’ll figure this out for you…”

  Chloe startled her mother by wrapping her in a hug. “Oh, Mommy, you are the best, but you don’t have to drive me all the way to the Valley. I’ll talk to Dad. Really. I have to learn how to take responsibility for myself.”

  “It’s seven thirty,” said Deena, thinking that it had been a while since Chloe had called her Mommy. “Really, I can take you.”

  “If I leave right now it’s a half hour to Dad’s, and maybe I’ll study when I get there instead of waiting until I get back, and then a half hour back, so I’ll be home by ten.”

  “What if he’s not home?”

  “Then I won’t have to take any extra time talking to him. I can be the world’s most efficient calculus student.” She grabbed the car keys off the little hook by the kitchen door and sealed the deal with a kiss on Deena’s cheek. “Love you, Mom. Bye.”

  Communications technology was kind to high school students: instant-messaging, texting, and the vibrate feature on cell phones made it impossible for a parent passing by the closed door of a child’s room to distinguish between the keyboard clack of homework and the keyboard clack of chatting with friends. Outside Lauren’s bedroom, her parents commented on how nice it was of her to help Chloe with her history paper rather than relax once her own homework was done. Inside Lauren’s bedroom, the girls flitted from talk.collegeconfidential.com to a generalized Google search of “National Merit semifinalist cutoff scores.” Lauren had waited for almost a year to find out whether good news was good enough; she had scored 215 on the PSAT in the fall of junior year, which was exactly the California cutoff score for the previous year’s National Merit scholarship semifinalists, but National Merit issued new state-by-state cutoffs every year, which were almost always higher than the preceding year’s scores. Short of a mysterious infusion of bad test takers into the California population, Lauren had next to no chance of becoming a semifinalist. Unless, of course, she did. There was no way to know until the mailing arrived, except at schools that broke ranks and notified seniors before the official announcement. Word had begun to leak out, so seniors across the country were trolling the Web, looking for clues.

  As she and Chloe watched the screen, an Illinois girl set off a flurry of posts by reporting that she had made the cut with a 220. No one congratulated her. A
ll the responses were from Illinois students and parents who demanded to know if 220 was the minimum or if the girl had qualified with 220 but the actual cutoff was lower. As the girl had no interest in what happened to anyone else, she had not thought to ask, which led ChiTown Teen to post, “I’m sitting here going crazy with a 214. HOW COULD YOU NOT ASK WHAT THE MINIMUM WAS????!!!!???? Selfish biatch. They say SAT scores move toward the middle, so I hope you get a 1900. Watch out if you’re applying to Wash U is all I can say.”

  “Nice,” said Chloe.

  “Welcome to my world,” said Lauren. “I say ten minutes tops before we hear from Katie.” Lauren had intended to confide her PSAT score only to Chloe, but Katie had pried it out of her under the guise of comradely suffering, as though Katie’s score of 220 was in any way as precarious as Lauren’s 215. A moment later, her cell phone skittered across the bed. Chloe grabbed it and read the message. “She says did you see the 220 in Illinois, she just knows it’ll be lower here and you shouldn’t worry. Why did you tell her?”

  The phone jittered again, and this time Lauren dove for it.

  “Brad,” she said. “His dad just got a call from Ted and did I get one.” She felt an uncomfortable shudder work up her spine, as her default position of not caring wrestled with a younger, stronger adversary, the notion that all of this mattered tremendously.

  A third text. “Katie just got a call from Ted and I have to let her know the minute I hear.”

  “Well, fuck,” said Chloe, “what kind of friends are they? I mean, doesn’t anybody the fuck think to ask what the cutoff is?”

  “I can’t ask Katie.”

  “Ask Brad. Or wait for the phone to ring.”

  Lauren sent a text to Brad and sat, immobilized, watching the screen, waiting, but not for long. She read the message and tossed the phone back toward Chloe.

  “The cutoff was 216 and he wants to know did I make it. Can you believe it? I can’t believe it.”

  A single point. This happened to Lauren far too often to be merely frustrating. If the teacher in the other section of AP calculus rounded an 89.5 up to a 90 and an A minus, the teacher in Lauren’s section inevitably left it right where it was, as a B plus. Esos instead of esas on a Spanish translation was the point that would have meant an A, which would have canceled out the B plus, but instead the A minus faced off with the B plus, and lost.