Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  He was at the center of a perfect storm. The west side of Los Angeles was the applicant equivalent of the strawberry fields up the freeway in Oxnard, packed so tight with succulent fruit that it was almost impossible to reach for one gorgeous berry without bruising a couple of others. The luckier candidates attended a handful of prep schools that were proud to call themselves elite, and each one of those schools had a team of warrior counselors like Ted.

  Most of the private school parents were wealthy, or serious enough about time management to reassign the budget for a nonexistent, standard-issue second child to the enhanced education of a first—or both. Ted believed that there was no one more ambitious than the parents of an only child. It was simple math: If each parent represented one unit of ambition, and if they invested those two units, combined, in their offspring, then an only child demanded twice the payoff of two siblings, and three times the payoff of three.

  The older moms and dads, who had protested the war in Vietnam or marched in Chicago, were fed up with the way life had dwindled from macro to micro and all too eager for a new cause. The younger ones, who had missed out on social protest because they needed a nap after kindergarten class, had convinced themselves that the right college for the right kid was going to make the synergistically large difference they had so far failed to make in the world. And those were the liberals. The more conservative ones, who had always chafed at their generational identity, focused on accruing accomplishments of enduring value. Either way, they all got to the same place, an obsession with their children’s college choice as empirical and irrefutable proof of their own worth.

  On those two counts—too many qualified candidates and too many heavily invested parents—Ted was under no more pressure than hundreds of counselors at dozens of urban prep schools all over the country. What set him apart, what made his victories uniquely sweet, was that he was dealing with a pack of gamblers, no matter what they did for a living. Crestview parents might pretend to admire the diligent dad who worked his way through Stanford Law and up the ladder at a prestigious firm, but in truth they found him boring, the equivalent of a big tropical storm you could track for days in advance on the Weather Channel. They were not impressed by the institutionalized risk of Wall Street, not when everyone knew someone who had made a fortune in a more surprising and nonlinear way. They preferred the stories of the ex-junkie who sold a screenplay, the gang member who became a rap star, the newspaper beat reporter who picked up the phone right before he got fired to find out that any one of a dozen buff young actors wanted to option the rights to his final, pre-layoff story and make him an associate producer as well.

  They chose to live in a city where the defining weather disaster was the earthquake, which said something about their tolerance for, and infatuation with, the unexpected. Crestview parents went to bed each night knowing that they might wake up before dawn to find the bed in the backseat of their car—but if surprise could turn a two-story faux Georgian into a one-story ranch, surprise could just as quickly, just as randomly, turn a life around. The issue, for Ted, was that at some point millionaire ex-junkie screenwriters conflated with earthquakes to yield a dangerously why-not mentality. West side parents embraced the inevitable jolt. If fate was a matter of fluke and denial, it was all too easy for Mom and Dad to imagine a beloved but ever so slightly unqualified child catapulted into Harvard Yard. Stranger things had happened, and look at what Ted had done for that kid at Brown.

  Nora sat down in one of the plaid club chairs that were supposed to make the college counseling lobby not feel like purgatory, while Joel studied the biggest piece of furniture in the room—a standing, revolving, six-foot-tall bookcase full of college literature, arranged by topic. Standardized testing and prep, college brochures, financial aid and planning, and, on the side that had been facing the wall until Joel nudged it into view, as though Ted and the others were trying to hide them, sheaves of articles on surviving the stress of the application process. One of them was about seniors who slipped in their second semester and had their acceptances revoked; another was about perfect students who went to perfect schools, only to fall apart once they got there. “Eggs,” the admissions directors called them, or “teacups.” They were too fragile; they tended to crack. He spun the bookcase back to its original position and hoped that Nora would not ask him what he was looking at. His role in the college drama, as far as he could tell, was to defend against this kind of peripheral information, to edit out any stressful data that did not directly pertain to Lauren.

  Joel had designed his first magazine when he was eight, a single-issue, four-page, hand-colored and-lettered publication called Pet, full of pictures and articles he had drawn and written about the dog he did not own but wanted his parents to acquire for him. He had worked on the student newspaper in high school and college, and, after a brief stint writing news items for a restaurant trade magazine, he had settled in at Events, where he had been ever since. He had been the west coast editor for ten years, which meant that he knew a small amount about a great number of subjects, information that had served him well until very recently; he could sit next to anyone at a dinner party and keep the conversation afloat through Nora’s dessert course.

  And then, for reasons he could not name, gradually, imperceptibly, Joel had shifted his focus from what he knew to the gaping maw of what he did not know, most of which had to do with his daughter. He had plenty of research at his fingertips—school rankings, acceptance rates, online slide shows of dorm rooms, average financial aid offers, all of his daughter’s statistics—but it refused to congeal into anything resembling a point of view on what Lauren ought to do about college. He worried that the true curse of middle age was not thick yellow toenails or progressive bifocals or sore knees. It was not the creases in his long, thin face, because men could get away with craggy. It was not his salt-and-pepper hair, because George Clooney had single-handedly made gray desirable. No, Joel feared that middle age brought an absolute and terrible clarity: he understood, finally, that information was not the same thing as wisdom, no matter how much of it he compiled. He wanted Ted to help them create a plan almost as much as he wanted print media to survive until after he was dead. He could only hope that the odds of the former were better than the odds of the latter.

  Ted’s office door swung open.

  “C’mon in,” he beckoned, with a calibrated enthusiasm. “How’s the master baker?”

  “Oh God, I didn’t think,” said Nora. “I’m so sorry, and I had these little apple charlottes, how could I…”

  “Hey, I could lose five pounds. Lauren will still get into college, I promise. Maybe not the college of your dreams…”

  Joel saw an opening. “And if Nora delivers a chocolate cake by noon tomorrow?”

  “Any school you want, early decision,” laughed Ted. Lauren was not an Ivy League candidate, but he had plucked her off another counselor’s list because he had a fairly good contact at Northwestern—she was going to need help—and because he was curious about Nora, or rather about Nora’s midlife career change. Ted’s current fantasy involved ditching his job someday for something better, though he had no good idea what that might be. He could write the insider novel to end all insider novels, but he worried that what he knew about college apps would only scare off potential readers. He worried that no one would make a movie out of his novel, so he would have to keep his job—except that parents would refuse to work with him out of fear of being ridiculed in the sequel. He could write an original screenplay instead, but one screenplay was not enough to subsidize his freedom, and he had no idea what the second screenplay would be about. Ted could not figure out how to turn desire into advantage, but Nora was proof that it could be done. She had switched over from magazines to baking. She knew something he did not know, which made her potentially as useful to him as he was to her.

  “Tell me it doesn’t work like that,” laughed Nora, who had already decided on the dark chocolate cake with the espresso ganache.
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  “It doesn’t work like that,” said Ted. “You have to come up with much more than a cake. A wing of a building, maybe.”

  At that exact moment, Lauren blew into the room, all apologies and flying shirttails.

  “Here she is,” said Ted. “Now we can get to the important stuff. You have a list for me, young lady, I believe.”

  Lauren pawed through her backpack and extracted a sheet of paper, which she handed to Ted, while Joel quietly opened his briefcase and pulled out a copy for himself and one for Nora. Nora reached for it without taking her eyes from Ted’s face.

  Ted stared at the page for one of those long moments that seemed, to Nora, to define adulthood: the periodontist looking at the x-rays, the colorist looking at her roots, the associate publisher pretending to review her file before he followed his boss’s order and fired her. Getting older meant handing over far too many fateful decisions to people who had no vested interest in the outcome, and Nora was never comfortable waiting for the verdict.

  “Northwestern is a very popular school this year,” said Ted. It was a very popular school every year, one of about twenty schools that sat high on the U.S. News & World Report rankings and were either near a major airport or ranked in the single digits, which compensated for the connecting flight or the rental car. It was one of the schools Crestview seniors thought about without thinking about it, which made for a crowded applicant field.

  “Yeah,” said Lauren, who liked the school because the proportions felt right—far enough away to prevent spontaneous visits but closer than the East Coast, selective enough to feel special but not as daunting as the Ivy League, big but not too big, a modulated choice for a girl who had yet to be seized by an extreme desire. “It would be so fun if a bunch of us ended up there together.”

  Nora watched Ted, who did not smile enough.

  “Or are you saying it’s too popular to get into?” she asked.

  “Mom, will you stop?”

  “No, she’s right to ask. Their apps were up maybe, I don’t know, fifteen, twenty percent last year. It’s a big favorite.”

  “She’s the news editor,” said Nora. “Doesn’t that help?”

  “Mom. It’s not like I’m the editor in chief.”

  “Well, if Mr. Nelson lived in this century…” Nora was convinced that the faculty sponsor had decidedly obsolete ideas about what women could and could not do.

  “Mom. Could we not talk about this here?”

  Ted smiled and waited. Lauren was right and Nora was right, but there was nothing to be gained from agreeing with either of them. He studied the list again and made a decisive mark with his pencil.

  “I’d say it’s a stretch unless you apply early, and early might get you even odds, but they don’t defer, so if it’s over, it’s over.”

  “Hold on.” Nora reached into her bag for a pen, despite the fact that Joel was already taking notes.

  Lauren gave her a pulverizing stare. “You know what that means. I can apply early decision and have a better chance of getting in, but Northwestern doesn’t defer you into the regular pool if you apply early. They accept or reject. No in between.”

  “Good job,” said Ted. “You want to handle my ten thirty appointment?”

  They made their way through the rest of the list that way. Ted alternated between tough love and humor, Nora asked questions she knew the answer to in case the response changed with repetition, Joel took more notes, and Lauren refused to hear anything but the optimism she needed to make it to the end of first semester. If Ted had polled each family member at the end of the half hour, Lauren would have said she was getting in everywhere but Stanford, Joel would have said she would get into more than half the schools on her list, and Nora would have wondered why her beloved and accomplished daughter was clinging by a hangnail to the bottom of the acceptance brackets at so many schools.

  Still, they had a list, which Ted transferred to Crestview’s printed form and embellished with underlining and brackets, arrows and margin notes. The point of this meeting was to evaluate the schools and divide them into three categories—Stretches, Even Odds, and the newly renamed Best Chances, which he had called Safety Schools until last year, when a very contentious father complained to the head of school that safety meant safety, and what was Crestview going to do about the fact that his child had been rejected?

  Ted made three copies and handed them out:

  STRETCHES

  Stanford

  Williams/Wesleyan

  Columbia

  Northwestern, underlined, with an arrow pointing down toward the Even Odds category, with the notation, “Early?”

  EVEN ODDS

  University of Michigan (too big?)

  Claremont (too small, too near?)

  NYU (no campus), also underlined, with a smaller arrow and “Early?” pointing toward the Best Chance category. Ted knew of eight other students who planned to apply early, a bit of information he would not reveal unless asked.

  BEST CHANCES

  UC Santa Barbara

  Skidmore

  “So all you need is another best-chance school and I’ll let you go,” said Ted.

  “But there’s no place else I want to go,” said Lauren. “I mean, I don’t even want to go to some of these.”

  “You know the rule. Everybody comes up with three likely candidates and I get to sleep at night. We’re just a bit top-heavy here. A bit top-heavy. We need to add a little more weight at the bottom.”

  Lauren’s voice got smaller. “I’ll think about it. Can’t I make NYU a best chance?”

  She had opened the door.

  “Bad-mouth it to the other seniors,” Ted said. “Your test scores are strong—”

  “That’s nice to hear,” Nora interrupted. A score of 2200 in May might not beat Sam the barista, but with his help Lauren had improved on her April score, and she was going to try one more time in October.

  “Mom.”

  “Well, they are, sweetheart. It’s nice to hear Ted say so.”

  “The scores are strong,” Ted continued, rowing for shore, “but I’d like the GPA up just a little, so no slacking this semester, no senioritis. It would be good if they didn’t have the biggest increase in apps of anybody last year, which makes them even hotter this year, but there’s not much you can do about that. Except convince your friends they’d hate it.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Nora, trying for a light tone. “I’ve got it. Tell us a great school nobody wants to apply to and Lauren can go there.”

  “Macalester,” said Ted, without hesitation.

  “Where’s that?” said Joel.

  “Minnesota,” said Ted. “St. Paul, either of you been there? Really a great city, great food…”

  “I am not going to school in Minnesota,” said Lauren, a pinched note of fear in her voice.

  That was Ted’s cue: logic and strategy were about to give way to emotion, and to preserve his sanity he had to get them out of his office, fast. “Anyhow, let me know by Friday and we’re good.” He stood up and shook hands all around, and before the Chaikens quite knew what had happened they were standing outside the counseling offices. Lauren put on her best harried face. The bell was not going to ring for another ten minutes, but her parents did not know that.

  “Listen, Chloe wants me to come by after school, so can you go home together and I’ll take Mom’s car?”

  She waited while her parents got flustered, compared their schedules, and worked out a new plan. Other girls’ parents acted as though they had it down cold, whether they did or not. Lauren’s parents were in what her dad called a suspended state of constant revision, which was not as unnerving as it sounded. Lauren knew they were going to let her use the car because they missed Chloe, too, so there was nothing at stake. She could stand there, safe in the outcome, and appreciate the effort they made on her behalf.

  Nora handed her the keys. “You’re going to pick her up at school?”

  “Right.”

  �
�And then?”

  Lauren shrugged. “Probably Coffee Bean.”

  “You have anything tomorrow?” Joel was double-teaming her.

  “You guys. I’m not going to flunk the calc test.” She rolled her eyes. “If I get a B, Ted will make all my Best Chances into Even Odds. Oh no! My life will be over.” She pocketed the keys, kissed them both, and ran off down the hall.

  “Home in time for dinner,” said Nora in a stage whisper.

  She and Joel were huddled over their respective PDAs, arranging their new mutual commute after work, when Dan and Joy and Katie glided up for their meeting, all smiles and twelve-ply cashmere. They waved without breaking stride and headed for Ted’s office. Joel, wondering why Dan’s perfunctory greetings always felt slightly like a snub, turned with what he hoped would be interpreted as urgency and strode toward the parking lot. Nora skittered alongside, glancing over her shoulder, wishing that she could be a fly on the wall for the sake of comparison. It was so hard to evaluate Ted’s comments in a vacuum.

  “Now that’s going to be a meeting,” said Joel.

  Nora slumped onto the passenger seat, in a deep adrenaline deficit.

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” she said, hoping to keep the quaver out of her voice. “We weren’t going to force her to take AP biology, what was the point. Okay, maybe she pays for that at someplace like Wesleyan. But still, she’s got, you saw the list, APs and good grades and awfully good scores.”

  “Yes, she does,” said Joel.

  “But you know what Ted says,” Nora continued. “‘Take the AP and get the A.’ And she did, some. You can’t always…”

  “You don’t have to defend her to me,” said Joel. “I’d take her in a minute if I ran an admissions department. Since I don’t, she took some APs but not all of them, and she got some As but not all of them, and that’s where we are.”