We Regret to Inform You

by Ariel Kaplan

The University of Virginia

  This was not happening.

  That’s what I told myself: This was not happening. It could not be happening. I would not allow it to be happening.

  I supposed this happened, occasionally, to other people. People who hadn’t properly applied Ms. Pendleton’s handy-dandy college admissions formula. People who misunderstood where they stood in the hierarchy of high school academia.

  That was not me. Therefore, this could not be happening.

  I felt…numb. Like I was watching a movie about someone else. I got up the next morning. I dissolved a packet of instant oatmeal in a bowl of hot water. And I went to school.

  What I did not do was tell any of this to my mother. This wasn’t the result of any conscious decision on my part: I just didn’t open my mouth and make the words come out. It’s so simple, really, not to tell people things. All you have to do is not say them.

  This should not have seemed like a deep thought to me, because it wasn’t.

  At school I managed to avoid everyone, which is surprisingly easy to do when you don’t have a phone. Somebody asked me if I was okay. It might have been Jim. It might have been Caroline. I told him/her/them I had a headache, which was not untrue. I felt a little like I was swimming through Jell-O.

  That afternoon, I had to meet the rest of the senior student government officers at the Starbucks two blocks from campus. I caught a ride with Caroline, who is the secretary, and Mark Santos, who is the treasurer. I’m the vice president, a position I chose strategically because it involves less work than any of the other three main positions (I don’t have to deal with money, keep the minutes, or delegate to other people), which frees me up for more activities than I could have managed otherwise. When we got there, Jim (our Fearless Leader) had already commandeered the long table under the window and was drinking a cup of coffee bigger than his head.

  I sat down on Jim’s left, and the smell of coffee was so strong I wasn’t sure if it was coming from the cup or somehow emanating from his pores. “What is that?” I asked.

  “Quad shot venti skim latte. No foam,” he said.

  “Foam is for sissies,” Mark said sagely.

  “Quad shot?” I asked.

  “Four shots of delicious espresso,” he confirmed.

  “Sleep is also for sissies,” Mark said.

  Caroline snorted, pulling out her laptop. “Do I need to take minutes for this?” she asked.

  “Probably not,” Jim said. “I just wanted to talk about the formal away from the big group. Becca’s asking for more money again.” Becca O’Connell was the head of the Senior Formal Committee, which was in charge of doing all the work for the dance. Our job, basically, was to hold their purse for them. She’d already asked for extra money for better decorations, an extra photographer, and fancier snacks for the buffet.

  “Again?” Caroline asked.

  Jim shrugged. “She says they sold more tickets than they expected, so she had to get the Regent to move us to a bigger ballroom. She guesses there are either a lot of seniors taking underclassmen or people who don’t go to Blanchard.”

  “Shouldn’t the extra ticket money make up the difference?” I asked.

  “She says they’re still four hundred bucks short.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Mark said. “And she should have cc’d me her numbers.”

  “I’ll forward them to you,” Jim said. “Oh, and they also want to hire the premium DJ instead of the regular DJ, and that’s going to be three hundred extra, too.”

  “What does a premium DJ even do?” I asked. Admittedly, I had never been to a Blanchard senior formal, but putting on music for a high school dance didn’t seem that hard. You mixed the fast songs and the slow songs together. You tried not to say anything too embarrassing or accidentally play polka music. I wasn’t sure what a premium version of this would look like. The DJ agreed to wear matching socks?

  “I don’t know,” Jim said, rubbing his eyes. “She sent me a brochure, but I didn’t have time to read it.”

  “This is stupid,” I said. “We don’t need a premium DJ.”

  “I’ll let you tell Becca that.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll email her later. Next she’ll want a petting zoo and a pony ride.”

  “Don’t give her any ideas.”

  “Okay,” Caroline said. “So Mark’s going to check Becca’s financials, and Mischa’s going to lower the boom about the DJ. Anything else?”

  I scooted my chair back from the table a little, because I was kind of hoping we were done, and I was also kind of wanting to go home. My phone was still in the box of rice, so I couldn’t get any calls, but Nate had promised to give me a ride home at five, which was in ten minutes. I was supposed to meet him out front; he’d told me he was going to hang out at the bookstore next door.

  But Jim said, “Actually, there was one more thing. Becca wants to have a banner printed up with a list of where everyone’s going to college.”

  The Jell-O in which I was swimming seemed to get a little thicker. I felt something in my head that might have been an electric shock.

  “A banner?” Mark said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” Caroline said.

  I felt like the universe was contracting a little bit, like gravity was pulling in toward me and I was being compressed. My head went throb, throb, throb.

  “But,” I said. “Not everyone’s decided yet. Not everyone’s even found out where they’ve been accepted yet.”

  “The formal’s not until the first week in May,” Mark said. “We’ll all have picked someplace by then. How much does she want for that?”

  “Hundred twenty-five,” Jim said. “The printer who did the tickets offered her a deal.”

  “Why would we have something like that up at the formal?” I asked. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “She wants to put it up in the foyer outside of the ballroom, so people can have their pictures taken in front of their names.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just another photo op. Jeez, Mischa, what’s with you?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “It’s just another stupid waste of money.”

  “It’s only a hundred bucks!” Mark said. “I think it sounds cool.”

  I was starting to twitch all over. I stirred the rest of the whipped cream into my Frappuccino and wished I’d gone with the decaf. Or maybe it was just too much sugar. I felt less numb and more…something else. Whatever I was feeling, it wasn’t something I knew how to name. It was bad on so many different levels; it went beyond sad or angry or freaked out.

  “All in favor?” Jim asked. Caroline and Mark both put up their hands. They stared at me.

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “She’ll be happy we at least said yes to one thing she wanted.”

  I mashed the ice in my drink with my straw.

  “So,” Jim said to Mark while I stared at my cup. “I heard you were choosing between Penn and Rice. That’s pretty sweet, man.”

  “Yeah,” Mark said. “I’m leaning toward Penn, I think.”

  And then I’m pretty sure he kept talking, but Caroline, who had just closed her laptop, said, “What about you, Mischa? You never texted me back last night.”

  “What?” I asked. Then, hoping maybe I could just sideways myself out of this conversation, I said, “No, thanks, Nate’s picking me up.”

  “No, I meant which schools have you heard from.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh. Well. You know, I’m still deciding.”

  “You’re deciding who you heard from?”

  “No, I mean, of course not, it’s just, well, it’s a lot to think about, you know? I need—I need to talk it over. With my mom.”

  She exchanged a glance
with Jim and Mark. I could feel my face getting red. “I guess I’m not ready to talk about it just yet. It’s all kind of…” I swallowed some Frappuccino. “New.”

  “Oookay,” she said. Her eyebrows were all knitted up like I had ceased to be a person she recognized. “So do you want to go dress shopping this weekend?”

  Dress? What was a dress? Oy. She was talking about the formal again. “What? I—I—I don’t even know if I’m going. To the formal.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course you’re going!”

  “It’s, uh, I have this thing.”

  “No you don’t,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Look, my parents and I are going out to dinner on Saturday to celebrate Dartmouth and Columbia.”

  “You got into Columbia?”

  “That’s what I was texting you about last night! Didn’t you get my message?”

  “Um, no.”

  “So let’s go shopping first, and then maybe you can come along to the dinner? My parents have been dying to know where you’re going, too.”

  No way was I going to Caroline’s Dartmouth/Columbia dinner. “Uh,” I said.

  “Mischa, come on.”

  “I’ll go dress shopping with you,” Mark offered.

  “Shut up,” she said. “Mischa,” she wheedled. “It’ll be so boring otherwise. My mom put up like twenty Facebook posts about it already. She’s getting super annoying.”

  “Oh my God,” Jim said. “My grandmother came up from Florida to take me shopping. Apparently my shoes are not Brown material.”

  “She made you buy new shoes?”

  “Three pairs!” he said. “I don’t even know.”

  “Mischa!” Caroline was saying again. “So Saturday?”

  But I was starting to feel a little weird. Like everything in the room had suddenly gotten way too loud, and too bright, and too—too something. I grabbed Jim’s phone off the table. “What time is it?” I said, glancing at the screen, and then I said, “Crap, I was supposed to meet Nate five minutes ago, I have to go, sorry.” And then I bolted outside without looking at Caroline or anyone else again.

  Nate wasn’t out there, of course, because I was five minutes early, not five minutes late. I ran into the bookstore, hoping he would be there, but since I had no phone, I couldn’t even text him. I checked the magazine section, but he wasn’t there, and by then I was starting to feel really, really not good.

  I don’t know why it hadn’t exactly hit me before, the magnitude of what was happening. I hadn’t just been rejected by the best schools on my list. I’d been rejected from virtually all the schools on my list. There was nothing left.

  Well, not nothing. I still hadn’t heard from Paul Revere. My safety school.

  Nate came around the corner. In his hand was a city guide to Atlanta.

  “Hey!” he said brightly, then his expression went into concerned-Nate mode when he saw my face. “What’s wrong?”

  I didn’t actually know how to answer that.

  Wonderful. This was all wonderful. There was going to be a banner. My name was going to be on it. And I was going to have to pose with it, in formal wear. And meanwhile, Caroline was going to Dartmouth (or Columbia). And I would probably have to go to her stupid dinner, because otherwise I was going to look like a jerk. I was going to have to remember all the times we sat in trig together last year, getting back our tests and quizzes, and always, always comparing our scores. Mine were always higher. Always. She would pretend to slap me with her quiz, and I would pretend like I thought that was funny, and she would say, “I’ll beat you next time!” and I would say, “Sure!” even though she never, ever did. But now she was going to Dartmouth (or Columbia), and her parents were taking her out for steak and a ten-dollar baked potato, and I was going to have to stand in front of a banner with my name next to Paul Revere University and act like I was happy about it.

  It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair.

  I looked at Nate. He looked so happy, with his Atlanta book. I said, “I think I’m getting a migraine.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Do you mean a migraine-migraine or a”—he made air quotes—“ ‘migraine’?”

  In answer, my knees kind of cut out from under me, and I sat down on the floor, hard. I hadn’t fainted, and I was actually pretty happy about that. But I felt like I was either going to pass out, throw up, or have a heart attack.

  My brain kept saying, Oh no, oh no, oh no.

  I’d read once that nausea was a heart attack symptom in women. What else? Pain in the jaw? Did my jaw hurt? It kind of did. I was dying. This is it, I thought. I am dying on the floor of the Barnes and Noble. I looked up at the shelves above me. In the manga section.

  “Whoa,” he said. “You are sick.” He pressed a hand to my forehead. Under different circumstances, I might have enjoyed it. “You’re all hot.”

  Under different circumstances, I really would have enjoyed that.

  He knelt down in front of me. “See, now you’re supposed to say, I know. Or, like, if you’re feeling especially generous, you could say that I, also, am all hot.”

  I just stared at him.

  “Not up to banter?”

  I shook my head. I wanted to tell him. I also didn’t want to tell him. I said, “I’m kind of dizzy.”

  “Maybe it’s an inner-ear thing.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll take you home.”

  I actually didn’t really want to go home. At least here there was Nate, who was not going to make me talk about stuff. At home, there was…my mother. “Can we just stay a little while?” I said. “I think I just need to rest a minute.”

  He pivoted to sit down next to me. “Okay,” he said. “Do you want me to talk or shut up?”

  “You can talk,” I said, because if he was talking, it meant the voice in my head shrieking OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! would have to be quiet. “But is it, like, okay if I don’t talk back for a few minutes?”

  “That’s great,” he said. “Because you know I really love the sound of my own voice, and I’m not too proud to admit it.” He held up his Atlanta book. “How about I read you some of this excellent Atlanta travel guide? I can tell you all about the museums down there. You’ll like that, right?”

  I had to look away from him. “Not that one,” I said.

  He set the book down on his other side. “Okay, not that one,” he said. He reached into the shelf behind him and pulled out a book, some paperback manga with two people on the cover, one with white hair and one with black. “Here we go: Inuyasha, volume one.” He opened the cover. “This looks good. Everyone has great hair.”

  “You’re reading it backward,” I said. “Japanese books go the other way.”

  He smiled and flipped the book around. “See? I’m so glad you’re here right now to tell me these things.” He put his finger in the first dialogue bubble and started to read it out loud. It starts off by introducing Kagome, a schoolgirl who falls down a well and ends up in feudal Japan, like Alice in Wonderland but with time travel and blood and demons. And then there’s a big battle where Inuyasha defeats some lady centipede monster who has way too many boobs.

  “There are boobs in this book!” Nate exclaimed. “I did not see that coming!”

  I sighed and leaned against him a little, and he either didn’t notice—because there were six bare boobs in front of him—or didn’t mind. He nudged me a little with his elbow. “I guess it’s fun to be surprised, right?”

  On another day I might have agreed with him.

  By the following Tuesday I had gone from numbness to full-on panic. My phone had miraculously survived its trip inside the toilet, and every time it chirped, I jumped. I was like the collegiate version of Pavlov’s dog. Or, actually, not the collegiate version. The no-college version. The “living at home in
my mother’s basement” version. The “Do you want fries with that?” version.

  I’m not even sure why I was so jumpy. The only place I hadn’t heard back from was Revere, a school so easy to get into that it was known occasionally as the high school on the hill. It existed, near as I could tell, to be a safety school. Nobody actually wanted to go there.

  I went back through my old papers and pulled out my SAT scores, my old report cards, my essays, thinking maybe I’d missed something. Did I have some horrible grammatical mistake in my essay? Had I split an infinitive or used too many adverbs? I didn’t think so, except I did use the word “thoroughly” three times, which was, in retrospect, a poor use of vocabulary. Had I unwittingly said something offensive? No, my discussion of how I wanted to be a pediatrician was totally benign (if not entirely honest; I have no idea what I want to do after college, but everybody loves pediatricians). My list of extracurriculars was decent but not so long that it made me look like I’d padded it too much. Everything was exactly the way I’d remembered it. I was a good candidate. I really was.

  I wondered, briefly, if there was another Mischa Abramavicius applying to all the same schools as me, but the idea was pretty ridiculous. As far as I know, I’m the only one in the entire country.

  While I ruminated about all this, Nate came to school in a revolving wardrobe of Emory sweatshirts. Caroline still couldn’t decide between Dartmouth and Columbia, and Jim was dithering about Brown versus Stanford. Dr. Marlowe, our headmaster, who seemed to spend most of the day holed up in his office, was suddenly visible wandering the halls, shaking hands with chuffed-looking seniors. “Congratulations!” he would say. “Make sure you come back and visit!”

  Meanwhile, I still had not heard from Revere.

  It was a joke even to be worried about it. The average SATs there were 450 points lower than mine. I had a 3.98 GPA. My lowest grade was an A−, and I’d only ever had one of those, and it was in PE.

  I grimaced, thinking of Ms. Erickson, my ninth-grade PE teacher, who had downgraded me for running the mile too slow because I’d had cramps that day. Ugh, I hated that woman.