by Jen Larsen
I’ve had the actual application finished for ages, except for this part, and the deadline is only weeks away. First the storm and then my birthday and then time running out. So many worrisome things all in a row.
When I was eight, at dinner my father said, “What do you want to be when you grow up, Ashley?” This would be before my mother had left, because he was still talking to us. He had stopped for a while after, as if he knew he’d have to confess that her disappearance was his fault.
My mother said, “A veterinarian, I bet.” But I remember that I stopped sculpting my mashed potatoes into a perfect cube and I said, “Grandmother. I want to be Grandmother,” and my mother pushed back her chair and went into the kitchen. She didn’t come back out.
What I meant was that I wanted to be someone who knows everything.
It was an endless frustration to me that not everything made perfect sense. I needed a way to straighten it all out, once and for all. My grandmother always seemed to know everything. With extreme certainty.
“Go ask your grandmother,” my father always said, and I asked her all the questions I had.
The idea of Harvard? Maybe I got that from my mother. There’s a picture of her on the lawn in front of the law school, hugely pregnant with my brothers, leaning back on her hands with her face turned to the sky. I don’t remember ever seeing her that happy in real life.
But she dropped out. She gave up. I’m not the kind of person who does that, and I never will be. My grandmother would rather I go to Stanford. But it has to be Harvard. It must be. Because it’s the best school in the country. Because it would give me irrefutable prestige, the kind of credentials no one can ever argue with. Even if . . . well, even if my grandmother were right about other things.
And I’m the kind of person who goes to Harvard. People say, “Harvard? Well of course.” I think that’s a compliment, most of the time.
That night long ago, at the dinner table, my mom knocked her chair back and disappeared into the kitchen, but Dad laughed and my older brothers snorted. My grandmother said, “You mean a doctor, darling? Like me?” and I nodded and she actually smiled. She said, “You will be.”
My grandmother explained how things would work out from then on and I believed her, because my grandmother knows everything. After dinner I locked the door to my bedroom and thought about how I would graduate Harvard, and then I would know everything one day. The noise and the confusion of the world would settle into something I could hold in my hand and take apart and put back together and finally, finally understand.
From my grandmother: anatomy books and medical dictionaries and histories of science. Models and chemistry sets and microscopes. A gold pendant shaped like a strand of DNA that I won’t ever take off. Subscriptions to science magazines, the popular and the professional kind. I put each one in a binder to save.
She said: A broad background that you’ll narrow down into your scope and focus.
Scope and focus have always been my gift.
It is a feeling of gratitude sometimes when someone cares that much about you. It is hard not to want to live up to those expectations.
My future was set like an atomic clock that night. My grandmother’s expectations are not hopes, they’re certainty.
I could write an essay about that, I think. Instead I shut the laptop and put my face in a pillow until Soto finds me and shoves her big snouty face in mine to lick everything she can reach.
I could flee, just for an hour, just down the coast. But everything is always waiting for me. Everything is always about to happen.
I can feel the laptop hot and whirring against my shoulder. You get five hundred words for your personal statement, which is about a page if you double-space and a page and a half if you single-space. I checked. I don’t know what to tell Harvard that they can’t just figure out from my transcripts, from my application, my writing supplement, my SATs, my school report, my teacher reports, my midyear school report, my final school report, the article clippings from all my volleyball wins, the feature in the Chronicle about leading a Habitat for Humanity project.
There I am, on paper. All the important parts. Everything I’ve done and had to do for them. Do they seriously need me to spend a page explaining it all to them?
None of my personal essay attempts have been anything but approximations of me. They have felt empty and strange. Like lies.
My father said, “Personnel essay? Why do they want you to write an essay about staff members?” and laughed at his own joke, as he does. He is not helpful.
My grandmother bought me a book called 50 Successful Harvard Applications and left it on my bed.
My boyfriend, Hector, says, “If you can’t write it, maybe that is a sign that it wasn’t meant to be.” And he doesn’t mean to be, I know he doesn’t—but Hector is sometimes irritating in his sense that the world is something you just sit back and let happen to you. He noodles on his guitar and never remembers the lyrics he forgets to write down and shrugs when I ask him why he doesn’t just carry a pen and notebook already. All of his songs are beautiful, and then they’re gone forever and he doesn’t seem to care.
I have time before I have to start to worry. I will come up with something soon. I always do. But the wind and the noise of the storm outside are not helping me concentrate.
A thought, vivid and pleasant: Maybe this is the year the house will soak up all the rain and start to collapse like cardboard, in slow motion, and be carried away on the river that Highway 1 becomes, all the way down to San Ysidro.
Then my grandmother will forget that it’s my birthday.
She’ll be so busy being ruthlessly competent—salvaging the rattling old furniture and the antique rugs and establishing a new residence and replenishing our personal items and calling insurance companies to speak to them in icy tones—that she won’t remember it’s time to draw me aside and hand me the little envelope and watch me while I debate whether this year I tear it in half or crumple it into a ball or scream or cry or whatever. All while she looks at me as though I have disappointed her. As though she has done everything in the world for me, and I can’t do this one thing for her.
When the knock at the door comes I jump like I’ve been shot out of a cannon. “What the hell?” I say, probably too loudly. My father squeaks open the door.
“You’re still up,” he says. His hair is a rat’s nest on top of his head, a halo of frizzy dishwater blond curls. He squints at me in the low light of my bedroom because he can never find his glasses when he gets up at night. He’s been restless since my mother left eight years ago. That’s a long time to be restless. “Are you supposed to be up this late? What time is it even?”
“You should be asleep,” I say. “You have meetings tomorrow. You need to be awake for them.”
He crunches up his forehead and scratches his neck, and then his face clears. “Oh that’s right. The boathouse thing.” He leans against the jamb of my door with his arms crossed. He’s wearing my mother’s awful, hole-filled “100% Latina Bonita” T-shirt that I have begged him to burn and plaid pajama pants that have almost faded to just gray.
“The boathouse thing,” I agree. “I put together the sales folders for you. Don’t forget them.” Soto chuffs like she’s agreeing. Toby never stops snoring.
“You know how these people are, kiddo. If they’re going to buy they’ve already made up their minds.” He sounds less hopeless and more resigned. He is not so much cut out to be a real estate agent, and he knows it. He is not cut out to do much, which he knows, too. My father’s boss, Gloria, is the only person in their three-person office who ever sells anything not just by accident. Her properties are the ones that keep the business afloat. She is one of my grandmother’s oldest friends and the person who hired my father in the first place.
“You can still convince them,” I say. “Grandmother says that confidence—”
“I know,” he breaks in. He pushes away from the doorjamb and shuffles over to me. He pats th
e top of my head.
“I’m just saying—” I can hear my voice getting impatient, but he never seems to mind.
“Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.” He smiles at me.
I sigh. “If they do, I will bite them back.”
“That’s my girl,” he says. He pats my head again and turns to shuffle back out of the room, yawning hugely.
“I have to finish my essay first,” I say, opening my laptop.
He turns back around, and his face is a frown. “You work too hard, honey.”
I shrug. “Not really.”
“Your mother liked to keep busy, too.”
I’m not sure how to answer that.
He shakes his head and waves his hand in the air. “You do what you need to, honey. You always do.” He’s halfway out the door now. Toby’s head pops up next to me and his little tail starts thumping against the pillow.
“Don’t forget your lunch,” I call. “It’s in the cooler in the fridge.”
He gives me a thumbs-up and another yawn, and disappears into the dark hallway. Toby leaps over me and then down to the floor to trot after my dad. The light bulbs in the hall must have burned out again. The fixtures are too old and unreliable to ever stay lit long. The floorboards creak with every thud of my father’s heels. You can map the movements of anyone in this house, where they are and what they’re doing. He stops before he reaches his room, in front of the stairs up to my grandmother’s room. I hear voices and tense up, but he’s talking to Toby. The foster dogs all get attached to him, trail him like the tail of a comet, but he never seems to notice where they came from, or when they go.
His door squeaks, then shuts, and it’s quiet now. Everything is quiet. Soto is curled warm and asleep in the crook of my legs. My laptop is open but my screen is blank. The window is open too and I smell the brine and before-storm air. But unless I concentrate I can’t even hear the waves down through the backyard and past the trees, dragging the little sandbar back under the water.
I listen again. That slow, quiet, endless roar finds my ears.
It has always been there and always will be.
It’s all I hear.
CHAPTER 3
“If you touch my latte one more time,” I tell Hector, “I will end you.”
He lifts the cup to his lips and makes slurping noises while he sips. Laura is rolling her eyes but she doesn’t lift her head from her sketchbook.
“Goddammit, Hector,” I say, reaching for the cup. But he’s got the longest arms and even though I’m tall, I don’t have monkey reach. He is smiling in his sweet and silly way, and I settle back in my chair. I refuse to sulk. I am stronger than caffeine.
“I won’t actually end you,” I say comfortingly, if a little grudgingly. His dimples deepen.
“I don’t know. You could probably take me,” he says.
I ignore that, and ignore my impulse to glance around and see if anyone heard him. I pick up the printed-out pages I brought to class and then toss them back on the table. I’m scooted back with my calculus book open on my knees because linear approximations are still pissing me off and now my midterm is tomorrow instead of two days away and I don’t want to think about personal essays anymore.
“She was up all night, Hector,” Jolene says, looking up from her own printout.
The rest of us are slouching at the big round table, but Jolene sits as if she’s been carefully, gracefully arranged into place. Her hands never stop moving, creasing the corners of her pages. Her small face is serious, but it almost always is.
Hector glances at her, and then back at me, still smiling. He has a gift, and all of it is centered in that dimple on his cheek.
“What were you doing?” he says. Hector’s problem is that he smiles a lot. The word sunny was invented for him. The word cheerful is inscribed across his heart. I feel guilty when he irritates me, as if he is a sweet puppy who should only be loved.
“The essay,” I say. I am speaking so carefully and deliberately. “The assignment that I am very annoyed you forgot about.” I can hear how rough-edged my voice is. It could leave behind abrasions. I close my mouth in case I’m just baring my teeth instead of making an actual smile. He wouldn’t notice, though. Or if he did, it wouldn’t bother him. I am grateful for that, even when it irritates me.
He reaches out and tucks a curl behind my ear. “You work too hard,” he says. “You don’t have to kill yourself all the time, you know. It makes you cranky.”
“Yes, Hector, I am extremely cranky,” I say.
“See, I do learn,” he says. He makes a check mark in the air with his finger. “Gold star for Hector! But you shouldn’t have stayed up all night.”
Laura glances up from her sketchbook and squints at him. She says, “Hector. Honey.” He cocks his head at her. “You remember Harvard, I assume, and I have to assume because otherwise I am worried about your brain capacity and your ability to retain and retrieve essential, life-saving information.”
“Well yeah,” he says. He slips his arm around my back. He is so easy and thoughtless in his gestures and I don’t understand how that works. I wonder how it would be to not have everything feel like a chess game, planning three moves in advance. Especially when, like me, you are terrible at chess.
“I’m just saying. She doesn’t have to work so hard. She’s in. She’s got this. She’s on it. Early admission and a free ride.” He leans over like he’s going to kiss the side of my neck.
“Quit,” I say, ducking, but I can’t quite keep myself from smiling at him. He grins and kisses my temple instead. He flips his pen a few times, tapping it on the pad of paper in front of him, but stops when Jolene frowns at him.
Everyone is writing again, and the whole guidance class is a low-pitched buzz of typing and pen scratching and whispering. Today we’re supposed to be “pausing for a breath.” Writing down all our best qualities, the things that make us unique and interesting and stand head and shoulders above all the other candidates and other handy guidance-counselor phrases. It’s supposed to help us take a fresh look at the draft of the personal essay we’ve already finished. That I haven’t finished. It will help us revise it with clear eyes, Dr. Ellman says.
I am not interested in my best qualities. I am interested in not messing up my calc grade. I look at the textbook in my lap, the wandering numbers across my notebook, and realize I have screwed up this function. I flip to the back of the book because sometimes that’s where the answers are.
Hector goes back to drawing interlocking squares all over his paper. Some people have their heads down and are scribbling away furiously, others finished twenty minutes ago and are now comparing their long lists of best qualities with each other. So many of us have nannies and tutors imported from San Francisco or San Diego, who have spent most of their careers telling us that we are unique in hundreds of ways that the world will appreciate and celebrate, so everyone’s got plenty to scribble down.
Not me. As I sit here in the hyacinth-colored room in the northwest corner of George Love Academy, I can hear the buzz of the hive. Everyone here is busy, achieving, overachieving. I am not a special snowflake. I know that anyone could overtake me at any moment.
Our school was founded by a disillusioned millionaire oil executive (named George Love, of course) who wanted to drop out and tune in to intellectual rigor and spiritual growth. There are only 150 of us in this place, but we are all moonflower spirits whose great and beautiful gifts are being massaged here under the hot lights of our high-school incubator into greatness that will transform the world for the goodness of all mankind—or at least that’s what the plaque above the door says.
I like to think Mr. George is off in whatever afterlife he imagined, feeling good about his time on earth. But this school is only partly what he imagined.
Rich people move to Santa Ansia just to enroll their kids here—that’s how my best friend, Laura, ended up here. Her dad is a mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures lawyer; her mom is a
charity-gala hostess/bon vivant/drinker of coconut drinks in a wide variety of tropical locations. Super important. Super busy. Easier to toss their kid into a fancy school than to pay attention to her, Laura says. Her parents are pretty standard-issue, for this town.
Our teachers, on the other hand, believe very, very hard in their mission. Our Principle (who would be called principal in a normal school) actually says things like, “It’s so essentially vital to me to be a Sherpa to my students. To hoist you and convey you onward into your destiny when you can’t go on your own—to use the popularized Christian vernacular in which so many take true and welcoming comfort. Such a lyrical metaphor. Such magnanimity.” She really says that. All the time.
Principle Simons has been here from the start. She’s the one who wrote the Humanism Handbook that is required reading every year—how to respect your body and your spirit, and the bodies and spirits of those around you. She’s not wrong, obviously, clearly. But all that sincerity gets overwhelming.
Somehow, simultaneous to all this conveyance and respecting and Sherpa-ing, we get written up in national newspapers for our outstanding innovation in educational theories and practice—our alternative physical education program, a fully equipped physics lab, a vegetarian cafeteria, stringent rhetoric and debate and Latin requirements, and a bank of three personal days.
Which means those parent types come in droves, so that George Love Academy becomes this spicy organic vegetable soup of intense competition, and yoga instead of gym, and discussion of chakras, and a question, at the start of each school year, about what your preferred gender pronoun is.
My mother refused to let my brothers go to GLA when she was still around. I wonder how she feels about me being valedictorian of the place. If she knows. Wherever she is.
I picture my mother back home in San Diego. Or maybe she fled all the way to Bogotá to live with the rest of the extended family we never got to meet. Wherever she is, I picture her relieved to be gone.
Anyway. The thing about going to school with the same people for your entire life is that we all know what everyone else is writing. Emily, the new head of the volleyball team, is writing down “upper-body strength” and “winner.” Jared, the school treasurer, wrote “go-getter attitude” and “chocolate-chip cookies.” Morgan, the salutatorian to my valedictorian—and oh, does she hate that—is writing down adjectives as if she’s been waiting her whole life for this opportunity. Brandon, Laura’s twin, should still be writing because he has a ridiculous number of positive qualities, though many of them are external.