Gabe gave Anna Fletcher a big welcoming smile—looking at her, he felt a tug of wistfulness for those early days, tortilla chips and sangria on the Fletchers’ patio. He almost hugged her.
“Anna! Long time no see.”
When they first knew Anna she had been voluptuous and sensual, with a short and daring haircut. (“I never say no to dessert,” she’d said once, and Gabe couldn’t help it, he thought that was one of the sexiest things a woman could say. Though not sexy enough, apparently, for Alan Fletcher.) Now she was three shades paler and twenty pounds lighter (“Divorce diet,” Nora said). She’d grown out her hair, too, into a disappointingly ordinary style. And she was most definitely not smiling.
“Gabe, hello. I was wondering. Is Angela here?”
“Out for a run. But I can pass on a message!” He was still trying to be jovial, still attempting to coax a smile out of her. She had had a gorgeous smile, back in the day. It really stood out against the shorter haircut. “Are you looking for a sitter? I don’t know her sched—”
“No.” Anna shook her head. “I am not looking for a sitter.” He saw now that she was holding a small green bottle. “I am looking, in fact, for my son’s medication.”
“Excuse me?” Gabe dropped the joviality; he was genuinely confused.
“For my son’s medication. For Joshua’s Adderall, which he takes for his ADHD. And which Angela has stolen from him.”
“Which Angela has what?” Gabe’s hackles were raised now: somebody was accusing his little girl! “Uh, I’m afraid you must be mistaken.”
Anna sighed and looked heavenward, then leveled her gaze at Gabe. “There used to be thirty pills in this bottle. Now there are twenty-two. Angela is the only person outside of my kids and me who’s been in my house lately. And I don’t keep medicine where my kids can reach it, believe me.”
Gabe backed away from Anna; he backed right into the variegated sweet flag, which was really, come to think of it, quite delicate. Even if he was barefoot. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why would Angela take Joshua’s medicine?”
“Are you kidding?”
Gabe wasn’t; he was thoroughly perplexed. Anna sighed in an exasperated way.
“It’s all over the Internet, Gabe. Adderall is a stimulant. The drug of choice among high school students. High-achieving high school students, in particular. They use it for mental clarity. They use it to stay awake, sometimes all night. They use it as a study drug. Don’t tell me you don’t know anything about it.”
The variegated sweet flag crunched under his feet. The soil was still damp from the morning’s watering by the in-ground sprinkler system. “I don’t know anything about it,” Gabe said. “Really, truly, I don’t.”
Anna sighed again. “Talk to her. Look it up. Stealing prescription medication is a felony, Gabe. A felony. I could press charges.”
Gabe’s heartbeat picked up ferociously. He could feel the tips of his ears growing red, the way they did when he was embarrassed or scared or really drunk. A felony! “What about—what about, well, don’t you have a cleaning person?” Everybody on their street had cleaning people.
“It wasn’t my cleaning person, Gabe.”
“But—”
Anna was becoming fed up with Gabe; he felt like a chastised schoolboy. He was at a loss for words; he was at a loss for actions too. Then Anna’s expression softened; her features relaxed to create the face that Gabe remembered from the long-ago cocktail parties. “If you talk to her, if she apologizes, to me, in person, I won’t go any further than this.” This was probably the face that Alan had fallen in love with initially. “She’s a great kid. She’s always been so wonderful to my boys, Gabe. I mean, my God, she captured Colton’s first steps on video for me! You know I love her. But this is unacceptable. This needs to be addressed.”
Gabe said, perhaps too eagerly, “She loves your boys too, Anna. She always has. She always came home and told me all the cute things they said…” (Angela, in fact, had never done this. She was a responsible, solid babysitter, but it was not her great passion. She was not the person who couldn’t resist smiling at a baby in a shopping cart. Now that Gabe thought about it, actually, it was surprising that she’d made time for babysitting during this very busy fall…or, in light of this conversation, not so surprising.) “She’s just…I can’t imagine why she would do something like this. She’s just under such pressure this fall. Incredible pressure.”
“I’m sure she is.” Anna nodded crisply, and her features tightened up again. She shook the bottle one more time. “I mean, jeez. Harvard! That’s a big deal. What we expect of our kids these days is ridiculous, right?”
“Right.”
“But still. These drugs are not meant for people who aren’t prescribed them. It’s a real epidemic among these teenagers. The side effects are worse if you aren’t treating the underlying condition.”
Gabe said, “Side effects?”
“Stomachache. Difficulty sleeping. Headache. Appetite suppression. Bouts of teariness, when the drug wears off. That’s usually in the late afternoon with Joshua, because he needs it for school. But with these other kids, teenagers taking it to stay awake at night, who the hell knows when the drug wears off. It’s no joke.”
Gabe thought about Angela picking at her dinner, Angela with dark circles under her pretty blue eyes. Angela coming in eighth in a race she was qualified to win. He thought about Angela in prison, in an orange jumpsuit, like that pretty blonde on that series Nora had just started watching on Netflix. He felt like punching something.
Anna laid a hand on his arm. She’d always been like that, touchy-feely, which Gabe attributed to her South American roots—she was from Colombia. He didn’t mind. It was oddly comforting to have a moment where only he and someone who was now mostly a stranger knew something about Angela. “It’s okay, Gabe,” she said. “It’s really not the end of the world, I promise. But you’ll talk to her?”
“I’ll talk to her.” This was all his fault, there was no escaping it now. The pressure he put on her, to do something he’d never done himself. All his fault.
—
Best to get it out of the way immediately. Gabe didn’t wait until Angela had gotten herself a glass of water, until she’d stretched her hamstrings or her calves. He certainly didn’t wait until she’d taken a shower. He got to her as soon as she entered the house. Nora and Cecily had dropped Maya at a reading tutor (Nora had managed to track down an available one—not the one everybody raved about, but better, they all hoped, than nothing) and gone shopping for supplies for Cecily’s science fair project, and he didn’t know when they’d be back.
Angela was sweating, still breathing hard. She was wearing a black Nike running cap pulled down low enough that her eyes were almost obscured. Her cheeks were pink. She looked happy, content; she looked the way Gabe remembered feeling after a day out with the cattle, the satisfaction of a job well done, the eagerness for a well-deserved rest. Some of the best sleep of his life he’d had in his boyhood bedroom, aching down to the very bones, the memory of the cold still gliding out of his muscles. All the beds in the ranch house, even his parents’, had plaid flannel sheets and thick wool blankets that scratched at your chin when you pulled them up.
“Sit down.”
She was confused. “What? Dad, I just got back. I’m sweating. We did eight.”
“I don’t care if you did eighteen. Sit down.” He motioned to a stool at the island. Then he filled a glass of water for her from the refrigerator.
She said, “Dad?” Uncertainly.
“Anna Fletcher came over.” He watched her face carefully.
“Dad—”
“She wasn’t happy.”
Several emotions crisscrossed Angela’s face at once: hesitation, recognition, embarrassment, defensiveness. He watched as she settled on defensiveness. Inwardly, he approved (it was the mark of a smart negotiator, never to admit wrongdoing right away). Outwardly, he was livid.
“Dad, it isn
’t what you think…”
“Oh yeah?” Gabe surprised himself with the force with which his fist hit the island (goddamn granite, on the ranch they’d had Formica, which had suited everyone just fine, though the fashionable East Coasters, hobbyists, really just weekenders, who had bought the ranch from his mother had changed that—they’d made the kitchen white. White!). “If it isn’t what I think, what, then, is it? Did you or did you not take pills from Joshua Fletcher? From an eight-year-old child?”
Angela stood, refusing the water. (Another mark of a good negotiator: don’t act like you need anything, even when you do.) Her chest was still heaving. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“It’s not. It’s pretty simple. You did or you didn’t. Which is it?”
Angela studied her feet. Then she took off the hat, placed it on the island. Bits of her hair were sticking to her forehead in a way, nearly comic, that almost detracted from her air of utter certainty and control. But not quite. She looked at Gabe squarely and said, “I did.”
“Oh, Angela. Angela! Why?”
“Because I needed them.”
“Why?”
“To stay awake. To study. To do the fourteen hours of homework I have every night.” (It was, in fact, just as Anna Fletcher had said. How was it that Gabe knew nothing of this phenomenon? He must be a terrible father, isolated from his children’s worlds like this. When he’d woken up that morning he had been completely unfamiliar with a drug called Adderall.) Angela took a deep, quivering breath and continued. “Everybody uses stuff like that, Dad. Everybody in the top third of the class, anyway. If not specifically Adderall, then something. Massive energy drinks, other stuff, who knows. All kinds of things.”
Gabe made his voice as level as he could manage. It was a struggle: he wanted to scream like a toddler. “Am I to believe, Angela, that the top echelon of your class has all stolen prescription drugs? That they have all committed a felony?”
Angela shuddered at the word felony, and briefly he felt sorry for her. She was the little girl who used to push a fake lawn mower around the yard behind him. She used to leave Post-it notes for him on the bathroom mirror every morning with messages like SMILE ALL DAY LONG and YOU ARE THE BEST DADDY OUT THERE. She was the girl who had tried to stay awake all night waiting for Santa when she was seven, and who had eventually fallen asleep in the dog’s bed, her arm held firmly under one of Frankie’s gigantic paws. Both of them drooling.
“No, but. They take them from their younger brothers or sisters. Or they lie to their doctors, fake symptoms for ADHD to get a prescription. Some kids’ parents take them to the doctor for just that reason. Some of the kids who get prescriptions, they sell them. I didn’t do that. I’m not selling drugs, Dad. Or buying them at school. I just…I just borrowed. Just a little bit, a couple of times, when I really needed them, just these last couple of months. Just to get through the last stretch.”
“Let’s be very clear here. You didn’t borrow, you stole.”
She sighed, started to roll her eyes. Must have thought better of it because she stopped. “Because that was the only way to do it. I never even took any before this fall. I just did it to keep up, not for any other reason. I’m not, like, some crazy drug addict, Dad. You know I’m not.”
Gabe paced the length of the kitchen. Outside, the day sparkled on, oblivious. He could see the Fletchers’ house, the English daisies in the front garden blooming ferociously. “That’s not a good argument, Angela. That makes you sound like Lance Armstrong, and look how that turned out for him. Next thing you know you’ll be acting awkward and unapologetic on Oprah.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Actually, I don’t think any part of this is funny.”
“I don’t either.” She folded her arms.
“Well, then.” He stopped moving, folded his arms in the exact same way as she had: a parody of a game they used to play, where Angela would try to replicate Gabe’s expressions. Happy. Sad. Confused. Scared. Silly. (How about irate, my darling daughter. Can we try irate?) “At least we agree on something.”
She snorted. “Yeah. That’s about all we agree on.”
He was momentarily thrown off balance by the venom in her voice. His little girl, sneering at him! “What’s that supposed to mean?”
It didn’t take long—three seconds, four. She turned the full force of her fury on him. “You expect me to do all of this!”
“All of what?” He was genuinely confused. He felt exposed, nearly naked.
“You expect me to be perfect at everything. To win every race, be first in everything. You always have. And you expect me to do it without any help. And you’re shocked when I can’t. Well, I can’t. Nobody can. So there.” Childishly, she stamped her foot. He almost laughed, except this wasn’t funny. None of this was funny.
“I do not—”
“Don’t think I couldn’t tell that you were disappointed about that race, the one that the Harvard coach was at.”
Gabe swallowed.
“Ha!” she said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. If you could see your face now, how disappointed you look, how worried. You’re frantic.”
Carefully, Gabe rearranged his features, made them as neutral as possible. He said, “I’m not—”
“You are! Of course you are! I don’t know if the coach was there or if he wasn’t, and I don’t know if he was watching me or the girl from Novato or Henrietta Faulkner. Who knows. But I ran like crap, I think we can all agree on that. So that’s one more disappointment for you.”
“For me?”
“Yes, for you. You want me to go there so badly, Dad, it’s so obvious. That’s why I’m working so hard, that’s why I took the pills. That’s why.”
“But.” His voice came out smaller and altogether less manly than he wanted it to. “But you love Harvard. You want to go there.”
“How do I know if I want to go there? I never had a chance to decide. It’s your school that you went to that you picked for me that I never had any say in.” Her voice broke, and then recovered. “You don’t do that to Cecily, decide things for her like that. You don’t do it to Maya.”
Gabe couldn’t stop pacing, back and forth, back and forth, a lion in its den. Pacing was a way not to have to look directly at Angela—maybe not to have to absorb what she was saying. He said, “Cecily is only ten. She’s a long way from the SATs. Maya is seven!”
“You bought me a Harvard sweatshirt when I was two.”
Gabe nodded. This was true. Point to Angela. He tried another angle. “Cecily,” he said, “is a different person altogether. Our expectations for her are different. As they should be. And Maya is different from both of you. But let’s get back to the case in point, which is the fact that you stole prescription drugs. Something like this, it could ruin you. All this work you’ve done, all these years. Gone. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. He had a very effective snap, louder and assertive. He’d honed that skill on the ranch, where it had come in handy in myriad ways.
Angela bent and peeled off her running socks. They were old and battered, gray from too much washing. Gabe felt exactly the same way as the socks looked. She tucked them into a neat little roll and put them on one of the kitchen stools. Her toenails were as short, as ravaged, as her fingernails. (Did she chew those too?) “Well, this is what it takes to get there, Dad, into your precious Harvard.”
Gabe winced. Then he thought about Abby, and about his job, and he winced harder.
“Maybe not when you went there, but now. This is what it takes.”
Even so. He was the father here. “You think so? You actually think you can convince me that that makes it okay to do something illegal? You think every person who is going to get admitted to Harvard this year is a felon?”
She evaded that question handily. He could see her working the angles in her mind. This kid was going to be a phenomenal businesswoman one day. Then she set her lips together, the pretty little lips with which she used to proffer
a goodnight kiss from the safety of her princess comforter, and said, “You try it.”
Gabe said, “Huh?”
“I challenge you. Try for a month. Trying living in my shoes and see if you can do it. Do my homework for a week and see how that goes. Go to these practices, listen to the kids at school talk about their GPAs and their class ranks. All. Day. Long. Do it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to—”
“One week! Kill yourself for one week, working for something you don’t even want.”
“We’re back to that again? This is now, officially, something you don’t want?”
“I don’t know if I want it. I don’t know! I never had a chance to figure it out! Like I said, it was all decided for me.”
Where was Nora? Gabe was foundering in this conversation. He cast a hopeful look at the driveway, wondering when she might turn up. Nada. Empty. Across the street Anna Fletcher was climbing into her Infiniti, sunglasses on. No kids with her; maybe the kids were with Alan.
“Let me ask you this, Dad. Why do you want me to go there so badly?”
Here was a question Angela had never asked him; he’d assumed, he supposed, that they all already knew the answer. But what was the answer? Did he know it? He wound his way through the bewildering maze his brain had become.
“Because,” he said finally. “It’s the best.”
Angela smiled: a knowing smile, not very sincere. The problem with having a smart child, he thought, as he had many times in the past seventeen years, is that they were more than able to outsmart you. “Technically,” said Angela, “by the way, according to U.S. News and World Report, Princeton is better.”
“Touché,” said Gabe. “It’s one of the best, then. And I want the best, or one of the best, for you. I always have, and I always will.”
“But,” said Angela, “why?”
“Because you deserve the best. You’re so smart, Angela. You work so hard. Your potential is limitless. So shouldn’t you be among other people like that? Shouldn’t you have the chance to spread your wings as far as they’ll go?”
The Admissions Page 22