We Regret to Inform You

by Ariel Kaplan

  He sighed. “Here’s what I have to offer.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Miss Gastman will be reinstated. Your suspension will be lifted, and I will explain to your mother that the Instagram fiasco was an unfortunate prank.” He folded his hands in his lap. “And you have your spot at Duke. All is well. Are you satisfied now?”

  All is well.

  For a moment, I saw the entirety of what he was offering. I could take the spot at Duke. My mother would be thrilled; we’d go out for ice cream and laugh and laugh about the ridiculous misunderstanding we’d had. Shira would be off the hook, and Nate would go off to Emory. Everyone in my life—everyone that mattered to me—would get exactly what they wanted. Happy endings all around, as we all went off to our shiny, successful futures.

  It made an appealing picture.

  “You’re right,” I said. “It appears we’re done here. So I’ll be going home.”

  “Miss Abramavicius,” he said, starting to get up.

  But I wasn’t quite done talking. “And you’ll be going…,” I continued. “Huh. Where do they put white-collar felons around here? I don’t actually know. Should I look it up for you, or do you want it to be a surprise?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Oh, you will beg my pardon. You’ll be begging a lot of people’s pardons.”

  He loosened his tie, just enough to let me know he was taking me seriously. “What do you intend to do?”

  “Me? I intend to do nothing,” I said. “I’m going to go home and take a nice, hot bath and eat a carton of Ben and Jerry’s. I’m not the one you have to worry about.”

  His eyes cut sideways. He said, “You lied to me. You’ve been recording this conversation.”

  “Nope,” I said. “A for effort, though.”

  The door to Richard Marlowe’s private bathroom opened, and out stepped Meredith Dorsay.

  “Too bad you didn’t ask me to sign something,” she said, holding up her still-recording iPhone. “That seems like an oversight.”

  He rounded on Meredith. “If this gets out, your chances of getting into Harvard—”

  “I’m pretty confident of my chances of getting into Harvard, actually,” she said. Looking at me, she added, “Should I send all this to Margot now, do you think, or wait until after lunch?”

  “Sorry, I can’t advise you.” I grinned at Marlowe. “I signed a nondisclosure.”

  Margot Dorsay, as it turned out, was not at all bad at her job. The story started off at MSNBC. And then it went on to all the major papers. Meredith was the hero of the piece. She’d taken the recording of my conversation with Marlowe, kept the most incriminating bits, and then edited me out of it.

  But I did keep my word. I never spoke of it again.

  Of course, I didn’t have to. Everyone had already read the paper. Including my mother.

  Several days after the story broke, Mom and I were back at the duck pond down the street from my house; we’d long ago used up all our peas, and the ducks had gone back into the water to swim off their lunch. We’d been silent for the last fifteen minutes, because I honestly couldn’t think of anything to talk about.

  “Hey,” I said. “Did you know that turtles eat baby ducks?”

  “Ugh,” she said, making a face. “That’s disturbing. Who told you that?”

  “It came up,” I said.

  “Is that just snapping turtles, or all turtles?”

  “Oh. I don’t actually know. Did you want me to look it up?”

  “Uh, not really.”

  More silence. Mom took a sunscreen stick out of her purse and rubbed it on her nose.

  “Did you hear back from that guy about the part-time thing?”

  “Oh,” she said, handing me the sunscreen. I ran my finger over it and rubbed a little on my own nose. “Yeah. I didn’t get that.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She put the sunscreen away and shook her head. “Is this the most awkward conversation we’ve ever had?”

  I shrugged. “I think the sex one was worse, actually.”

  “I was good at that!”

  “You put a condom on a banana, Mom.”

  “That was very informative!” she protested.

  “You put me off bananas for life! You could have at least used a zucchini or something. I wouldn’t miss eating zucchini.”

  “You can’t fit a condom on a zucchini!” She held her hands about a foot apart, and I smacked them back down, not needing the visual.

  “You could have used a small one!”

  “Where am I supposed to find a zucchini the size of a—”

  “STOP stop stop. I get it. Eesh.”

  She laughed a little. “So banana bread? Banana muffins?”

  “It’s all dead to me, Mom.”

  “Banana pancakes?” she asked. I shook my head. “Wow. Sorry about that.”

  “You should be.”

  We stared out at the ducks a little longer. They were swimming in circles, lost in their inner duck lives. I don’t know what ducks think about when they’re not eating. I bet they have deep thoughts.

  Mom adjusted herself a little, and I thought she was going to get up, but then she said, “There’s something I want to give you.” She pulled the ring off the first finger of her right hand. It was my great-grandmother’s wedding ring, the only thing anyone in my family had from the old country. It had gone to my grandmother when she’d died, and then to my mother when Grandma died a handful of years ago.

  “No,” I said, “wait. I don’t really care that much about the bananas.”

  “This has nothing to do with bananas.” She took my hand and slid the ring onto my own forefinger. “Your grandmother,” she said, “would have been proud of you.”

  I stared at the plain gold band on my finger. I remembered Grandma wearing it when she came over to visit. I’d play with it while I sat on her lap and she read to me.

  “Mom,” I said, “are you proud of me?”

  “I’ve screwed up pretty bad if you have to ask me that,” she said. “I already said it, but I’m sorry. I’m sorry for not believing you.”

  “I’m sorry for not telling you right away,” I said. “I was scared.”

  She looked at me sadly. “That’s a problem. Isn’t it?”

  I shrugged.

  She sighed. “You asked me one time what Grandma said when she found out about you.”

  “What Grandma said? Yeah. I remember.”

  “I don’t think I answered you.”

  “No. You didn’t.”

  She smiled. “I didn’t tell her. I showed up at the house for Thanksgiving seven months pregnant. Just me and my giant belly and a pie that wasn’t even homemade.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I hate baking,” she said.

  “Mom.”

  “I was scared. That way, she found out in front of ten other people, and she had to pretend like she already knew so she wouldn’t be embarrassed.” She snickered. “By the time everyone else went home, she was too full of turkey to go full-throttle on me. I thought you and I were a little tighter than that, though.”

  Mom reached out and held my hand, the one that was wearing Grandma’s ring. I pulled out my phone and opened a picture Nate had taken of me, floating down to earth in my parachute.

  She looked at it, her eyebrows approaching her hairline, and said, “Huh.”

  * * *

  —

  There’d been a conversation about transferring me to a public school for my last quarter, but the idea of having to get used to seven new teachers and a few hundred new kids that I’d never see again after a whopping nine weeks seemed ludicrous. Blanchard’s interim principal, who had been hired by the board of directors to take over from Marlowe and Pelletier, offered to
graduate me early, mainly, I think, because despite Meredith’s public credit taking, there seemed to be an undercurrent at school that I was the person behind everything, which made me decidedly unpopular with fifteen of the nineteen people on the list. There was quite a furor when the corrected transcripts were sent out, and Blanchard kept begging for the colleges to offer some kind of amnesty to the students they’d already accepted.

  Meredith was the triumphant whistle-blower. Harvard maintained they were happy to have her.

  Not everyone else was so lucky.

  Nate was not so lucky.

  “It’s okay,” he insisted. “It’s what I deserve.”

  We were on a date, the first one we’d been on since the skydiving. It was the night of the Blanchard Senior Formal, and neither of us had any desire to go, so I’d asked Nate for the most DC date he could think of, which meant we were taking a tour of the monuments at night (which happened to also be #57 on the Mischa Abramavicius Bucket List). We’d stopped near the Jefferson Memorial and were staring out at the black slate of the Tidal Basin. A few weeks ago it would have been stuffed with cherry blossoms and tourists, but now it was pretty empty, just us and a bunch of other couples and a few panhandlers.

  “It is not what you deserve!” I said hotly. “What Meredith’s taking credit for is what you actually did! You knew what would happen if we released those files. We never could have gotten them in the first place if it hadn’t been for you. And you did it all anyway, because you knew it was the right thing to do. They should care about that. It should matter.”

  “It turns out that matters less than my math grades,” he said. He looped an arm around my neck. “Mischa, I’m not sorry, if that’s what you’re wondering. Blanchard was a garbage fire.”

  “I don’t see how you can be so calm about this,” I said. I wondered how much of his placid attitude was for my benefit, because he didn’t want me to feel guilty. I wondered what he really let himself feel, when he was alone.

  “I’ll go someplace else,” he said with a shrug. “I have three other schools to choose from. I’ll choose one of them.”

  “You don’t have to pretend to be so blasé. I know you really wanted to go there.”

  “So maybe I’ll transfer next year. Nancy Roman’s pretty sure they’ll take me if I do well someplace else.”

  Nancy Roman was the college coach Nate’s parents had hired after he’d lost his spot at Emory, to help him figure out what to do next. For weeks he’d refused to meet with her, convinced this was just another instance of his parents pushing their agenda on him. But I’d persuaded him not to cut off his nose to spite his face, and he’d relented.

  “What about your parents?”

  He shrugged. “Well, I’m sure they’d like a refund from Blanchard.”

  I laughed without really meaning it. “Hey,” he said. “This is always how it was supposed to be.”

  “No. It’s really not.”

  He squeezed my hand. I squeezed his back, a silent acknowledgment.

  “What about you?” he asked. “Have you decided yet?”

  I shook my head. Once my corrected transcript and letters had been sent out, I’d been accepted to five of the seven schools I’d applied to. But the idea of going, of showing up on campus in August and pretending like nothing had happened, made me a little sick.

  “What does your mom say?”

  “You know what she says.”

  “Did you talk to her about the gap year?”

  “Yeah. She wasn’t happy about it. But she doesn’t get to choose. Not anymore.”

  “So all you have to do,” he said, “is pick a school, announce your deferral, and decide what to do with your life for the next sixteen months.”

  “Yep. That’s all.”

  “Doesn’t sound like too tall an order.”

  I ran my fingers through the grass underneath me. In another month it would be summer. Nate would have graduated, and there would be nothing but several weeks of endless days in front of us.

  “Nate,” I said. “Have you ever thought about taking a gap year?”

  He chuckled. “I don’t think that’s a good idea for me,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I know myself. If I take a year off, it’ll turn into two, then three, then ten. I won’t be able to make myself go back.”

  “You think that’s what’ll happen to me?”

  “No. But you’re different.”

  I hugged his arm and leaned my chin on his shoulder.

  “I’m going to miss you,” I said. Then: “What about this summer?”

  “What about it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” I flapped my hands. “Remember when I made that list of all that stuff I wanted to do? And then we scrapped it and went skydiving?”

  “Well, you went skydiving,” he said. “I ate a really bad chicken sandwich.”

  “Right. What if we did some of the other things on that list? What if we made a bucket list together, for this summer?”

  “Like a vacation?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Us. Together. For the whole summer?”

  “If that sounds bad—”

  He cut me off with a finger on my lips. “Mischa,” he said. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  A few weeks later, I sat at Emily’s dining room table with the Ophelias and Nate, playing poker and eating pretzels out of a crystal bowl. I sat between Emily, at the head of the table, and Nate, who was struggling to fend off Emily’s giant fluffy cat, who kept trying to lick the salt off his pretzels. At the other end of the table, Bebe and Shira were alternately sneaking peeks at each other’s cards and then pretending not to notice. Between the two of them, they had nearly wiped the rest of us out.

  I was losing badly and folded before the hand could get any worse for me. Then I took a swipe of the hummus that was sitting in the middle of the table, dodging Emily’s cat, who was now sniffing at the bowl.

  “She won’t actually eat that, will she?” I asked. “She knows she’s a carnivore?”

  “Sometimes she forgets,” Emily said, picking up the cat and setting her down on the floor before sliding a stack of chips toward the middle of the table. “So has Nate told you about the latest drama?”

  I turned to Nate, who shrugged. Bebe said, “It’s the graduation speaker. It’s a whole thing.”

  “Really? Who’s the graduation speaker?” I asked.

  “I can’t believe Nate hasn’t told you,” Shira said.

  “I’ve been a little preoccupied.”

  “Yeah,” said Bebe. “Well, it started because Beth Reinhardt said she could get David Hasselhoff.”

  I covered my mouth with my hands. “No. Are you serious?”

  “Yes! And then there was this big fight between the people who wanted literally anyone but David Hasselhoff, and Beth’s friends who wanted him because he was the most famous person we could get. So Beth’s people won and they booked Hasselhoff, right? But then this whole transcript scandal blew up, so Hasselhoff backed out and now no one else will do it.”

  “No one?”

  “Nope. So then they were going to use one of the teachers, but none of them wanted to do it either, so the committee just decided not to have an adult speaker. It’s going to be Meredith Dorsay, and that’s it.”

  I frowned. “Meredith Dorsay?”

  Nate put his hand over mine. “She’s giving the valedictory speech.”

  I let out a long, slow breath.

  “Mischa, everyone knows it should have been you. Even Meredith knows it. Nobody expects you to come to this thing, but—”

  “Why would I come?”

  His eyes cut away. “I just thought maybe…”

  “No, I’m sorry. I just don’t think I can.
”

  “I understand. Pretend I didn’t say anything.”

  * * *

  —

  But I couldn’t pretend, because Nate was going to have to go through this three-hour ordeal, and so were Emily and Shira and Bebe and Jim and Caroline, and everyone else I’d gone through four years of Blanchard with, and I felt bad. So on the ninth day of June, I put on a dress and, twenty minutes into the graduation, snuck into the back of the auditorium.

  Meredith was just being called up to the front of the stage to speak. I silently willed her to trip, which was kind of unfair because she wasn’t guilty of anything other than being herself. Which admittedly wasn’t a very nice person, but still.

  She set her mortarboard down on the podium. And then she proceeded to give the most generic graduation speech of all time. She thanked her parents and her teachers and her friends. She recited that quotation about being the change you want to see in the universe and a few lines from Oh, the Places You’ll Go! I wondered, briefly, if she’d bought the speech off the Internet. But it also occurred to me that maybe Blanchard had insisted that she do it this way.

  At the end, she looked up to the back row. For a split second, she looked right at me. And then her eyes skated over me as if I did not exist.

  But she added, right before she stepped down from the podium, “I’ve often wondered what the secret to success is. Is it intelligence? Wit? Charm? But I think there’s one thing we forget. Life is a series of opportunities. And when you’re presented with one, you have to grab it with both hands. And when you’re not, you make your own.” Her eyes briefly met mine.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  There was a smattering of polite applause. I got up from my chair and left.

  * * *

  —

  I saw Emily in the parking lot afterward with her parents, the Doctors Sreenivasan. She was about to get in the car when she noticed me and walked over.

  “I can’t believe you came to this,” she said.

  “Well, you know. I couldn’t miss the chance to see Meredith Dorsay unironically read Dr. Seuss.”