Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  It was true, what people said: if you took Ambien longer than the label said to and washed it down with a glass or two of chardonnay, you could end up wanting a steak at three in the morning, even if the next day you failed to remember either the craving or the empty refrigerator that had gotten you into so much trouble.

  There were people at the cable network who considered “forty-two-year-old sex object” to be an oxymoron, so she did everything the show runner asked her to do to repair her image. Madison appeared on Showbiz Tonight to discuss the physical and psychological pressures of being a forty-two-year-old high-definition sex object, while her lawyer quietly investigated the possibility of an age discrimination lawsuit if she got written off the show, and she was tentatively scheduled to testify at a congressional hearing about strengthening federal warnings on prescription sleep aids, depending on whether anyone but C-SPAN intended to be there. The head of production was one of those rabid alums with Northwestern license plate holders, so she signed up to conduct alumni interviews, figuring that a couple of quick chats with some eager seniors would be a small price to pay for getting back in his good graces. She never imagined that there would be so many, and that they would expect her to pay attention.

  The second knock. “Come in,” she called.

  Lauren stepped into the trailer. Madison Ames was sitting at her makeup table dressed as a member of the Red Guard, probably the only member in the history of the Chinese Revolution to show quite so much cleavage, lining up a row of lipstick tubes in front of the mirror. She did not get up.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late,” said Lauren, trying not to stare. “The guard didn’t have my name on the list and I had to…”

  Madison held up her hand for silence and gestured toward a chair piled high with bikinis. “Sit down,” she said. “He’s an idiot. Dump them anywhere.” She caught Lauren’s gaze and tugged irritably at her jacket. “It’s a dream sequence. I’m adopting a Chinese kid.”

  “Right,” said Lauren. She put her shoulder bag on the floor, scooped up the bikinis with both hands, and looked around for a break in the clutter. She lengthened her arms and pointed with one index finger at the top of a little cabinet. “Is that okay?”

  “The floor is okay,” said Madison. “I’m joking,” she said, as Lauren started to lower her arms. “Put them right where you said.”

  Madison consulted the list of questions she used for every interview.

  “So, tell me a bit about yourself,” she said, much more concerned with finding a lipstick that stood up to the bilious khaki of her costume than with any answer Lauren might give. She held up an open tube of MAC Viva Glam next to the Red Guard jacket. “What are you interested in?”

  “Journalism,” said Lauren. It was not true, but it was not exactly a lie, it might be true someday, and in the meantime she knew enough about it to sound convincing. Lauren sensed that being undecided was not a viable response.

  “Journalism,” said Madison. She set aside the Viva Glam and reached for Chanel Red No. 5. “You’re not going to be one of those reporters who camps outside my house, are you?”

  Lauren had forgotten about the business with the steak.

  “Oh, no,” she said, “of course not, I think what those people do is despicable, and…”

  “Let’s not get carried away,” said Madison, with a tight laugh. “If they don’t write something, then maybe people forget me.”

  “Oh, no,” said Lauren, “but not that kind of journalism. My father’s an editor. I can imagine myself being an editor.”

  “Really. Where?”

  “Events.”

  Madison wrote this down next to Lauren’s name on her interview list. “So you’re thinking about the family business. Did you apply to, what’s its name?”

  “The Medill School. Of journalism.”

  “Right. Did you?”

  This was the real reason not to lie, Lauren realized. Tell one and inevitably you had to tell another.

  “Well,” said Lauren, trying to remember why her parents made fun of the one guy on the magazine with a degree in journalism, “I can get a summer internship to give me on-the-job experience in whatever aspect of journalism I decide to pursue. I think it’s important to major in something else, or even have a double major, so that when I graduate I’m knowledgeable in my field. Otherwise you end up knowing how to say things but you don’t have anything to say.”

  She smiled. Good save.

  “And I can always take journalism classes,” she added.

  “Yes, you can,” said Madison. She looked at her list of questions, which one of the publicity kids had drawn up for her back in the fall.

  “But Northwestern’s not your first choice,” she said, confused. “You didn’t apply early. Why is that?” She remembered the time she had pretended to be on vacation in Fiji so that she could avoid committing to a part while she waited to hear about a bigger one. “Was your first choice someplace you didn’t get into?”

  Lauren bit her lower lip. Ted had circulated a list of the twenty things alumni were likeliest to ask, and this was not on it, because not applying early usually had to do with trolling for the best money package, and that was nobody’s business outside of the financial aid office.

  “Not at all, no,” said Lauren, flailing about for the answer to the question she knew was coming next. “Northwestern’s my first choice.”

  “Then why didn’t you apply early?”

  Having credited her parents for her choice of major, Lauren decided to blame them for her timing. In the algebra of falsehood, perhaps two lies canceled each other out.

  “My parents feel,” she said, and then she stopped, dismayed at the good-girl tone in her voice. If she was going to make things up, at least she ought to have a sense of humor about it. “You know, parents. They have this notion that senior year’s a big year. My mom says I shouldn’t limit myself in the fall when I’ll be a different person by May. And, well, I mean, parents. They think I’m going to get in wherever I want. They’re so proud of me. My dad says I should let schools fight over me. I mean, I’m not conceited, I know how hard it is, but he has a point—if you have confidence in yourself then why would you limit your options?”

  She stopped short. She could not let it sound like she agreed with her parents.

  “But I’m going to Northwestern if I get in,” Lauren announced, even though it was clear that Madison had stopped listening back at the business about being a different person in May. A moment later, a production assistant walked in without knocking, on cue; it was her job to interrupt every one of these interviews after ten minutes. Madison Ames stood up and flashed her most apologetic smile.

  “Great to talk to you,” she said, “and I’m sorry I’m out of time. I will tell the Northwestern people what a lovely conversation we had. Thank you for coming by.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Lauren, edging her way to the trailer door. She turned back before she took the first step. “And thank you. For taking so much interest in my application.”

  “No problem,” said Madison.

  Nora listened to every grotesque detail, even as she should have been filling four custom Valentine’s Day orders, one of which involved hiding an engagement ring in one of six tiny velvet boxes, each of the remaining five containing a chocolate truffle. It was painstaking work, so she handed it over to one of the bakers whose hands were not as likely to shake with rage and retreated to a quiet corner of the bakery to debrief her daughter. Lauren barely got as far as the bikinis before Nora decided to assassinate Madison Ames.

  She had been having very primitive and definitive fantasies of late, any time she perceived the slightest threat to Lauren’s happiness—and at this point in the process, it was all too easy to confuse a small bad moment with the apocalypse. Her targets, at various times, had included Ted at his most officious, Joy at her most patronizing, even the Northwestern alumni rep, whose only crime was that he took two days to return Lauren’s email about sett
ing up an interview—and now Madison Ames, for the crime of narcissistic inattention. Anyone who did not treat Lauren with the proper respect got a miniature pecan pie spiked with a single drop of cyanide—where would Nora find it?—or a quick jab between the ribs with Nora’s favorite paring knife, even though it was too short to do any lasting damage and she could never remember whether real killers used an underhand or overhand thrust. Faced with a choice between depression and fantasy, Nora chose fantasy, which at least entertained her while she worked.

  She wrapped her arms around Lauren, who burst into frustrated tears, leaving the two women who were packing gift boxes to wonder how a mother and daughter lucky enough to live in the same city, no, in the same country, could be so very sad. Nora hung on until Lauren wriggled free, and did not protest when her daughter blew her nose into the nearest prep towel. She simply guided Lauren toward an empty work table with one hand, tossed the snot towel into the laundry bin with the others, and set out bags of lemons, eggs, and sugar, two cutting boards, and two knives.

  “Lemon curd, what do you say?” she asked. “For all those nice people who don’t happen to be in love today.”

  For an hour they stood side by side, Lauren cutting and juicing, Nora measuring sugar and separating eggs, Lauren stirring at the double boiler, Nora filling jars, talking about nothing more pressing than whether the lemons were juicier this year than last. The crazier college applications got, the more the bakery hummed. In the comforting and finite world of dessert, a teaspoon was always a teaspoon, never a teaspoon and a half. Melting chocolate seized up if it got wet, cream biscuits were lighter mixed by hand, a pastry crust that spent an hour in the freezer baked up flakier than one that had not been chilled. Baking was reassuringly rule-bound. It was solace for baker and customer alike.

  Second semester was an eternity. There were no deadlines, no goals, and homework only mattered if a student had applied to an Ivy or an Ivy-equivalent or stopped turning it in altogether. The seniors wondered how they would fill the empty months that spread in front of them like whatever the name of that African desert was on their tenth-grade geography exam. The teachers, exhausted after a semester of writing recommendation letters and fending off prying parents on top of everything else they had to do, were perfectly happy to spend a week’s worth of class periods watching any DVD that had a tangential relation to their subject. Ted could stroll the English lit corridor and hear dialogue from film adaptations of King Lear, Beloved, or The Crucible, chosen, he imagined, to remind seniors of the larger world and put college apps into context. It never helped. The kids in the bottom half of the class had already perfected an I-don’t-care façade, but the top students felt as though they were living one variant or another of that awful anxiety dream, the one about waking up late for a test, or being inexplicably naked in public, or the popular Crestview hybrid that involved showing up late and nude for the SATs.

  Alliances shifted. Lauren stopped telling Katie anything, because Katie had such a gift for making her feel worse than she already did. Reluctantly, she stopped confiding in Chloe as well, because for Chloe the difference between a closely guarded secret and public information was five minutes, tops. Instead, Lauren said that she needed the Threesome DVD for a paper discussing the effects of a stifling status marriage in popular culture and in The Great Gatsby, and Chloe believed her. But Lauren needed a confidant, so she told Brad she was going to see Madison Ames, and he promised to say she was at the dentist’s, if anyone should ask.

  In return, Brad told Lauren about the parking-lot ambush and Katie’s ultimatum, and she made him swear not to miss so much as a minus sign on Katie’s behalf. He had promised, in the hope that taking a vow would enable him to stop debating. Weeks later it had not, though he chose not to tell Lauren about that part. He told her instead that he liked the coincidence of her interview being at the same time as his calc test, which he was sure was a good sign for both of them.

  Brad always took math tests the same way: he read a test from start to finish to make sure that he understood each problem, and then he went back to the first page and worked straight through to the end. He rarely found a problem that stymied him, but if he did, he worked it first, out of sequence, to get it out of the way. There were no surprises on this calculus test. Brad finished the first five pages before class was half over, so he took a break before he tackled the final page, and scribbled some notes on his scratch paper.

  Under the heading Tank, he wrote:

  No legacy?

  No valedictorian

  No Katie trouble

  No Liz

  Under Ace he wrote:

  Legacy

  Valedictorian

  Katie trouble

  No Liz

  He could blow the test and risk never seeing Liz again because she would be at Harvard and he might not make the cut, in which case buying Katie’s silence hardly mattered, because there would be no relationship to protect. Or he could ace the test and see Liz every day next year, maybe even be in the same dorm, except that she would refuse to talk to him because Katie had filled her head with lies about his nonexistent promiscuous past, out of concern for Liz’s happiness, of course. He wanted to think that she would see right through Katie, but this was his worst-case scenario, so he scratched out “No Liz” on both lists. He liked the idea of Liz better than Liz at this point, anyhow, as he barely knew her. It would be crazy to make a decision about his future based on a relationship they did not yet have.

  No, the lasting impact, in either case, would come not from Liz but from his dad’s reaction—either his rage and disappointment, if Brad missed the cut at Harvard, or his belief that Brad finally had come to his senses, if Brad got in. He worked the last page of problems on the scratch paper, got all the answers, and turned in the test at the bell with the sixth page completely blank, which had to be good enough for a C, possibly even for a written progress report that would have to become part of his official record. As he walked down the hall toward his locker to grab his other books and head home, he felt a hazy little thrill, a disoriented sense that only someone who had been a good boy for eighteen years, with minor infractions, could appreciate.

  By the time Brad got to the parking lot, his calculus teacher was standing by the security guard’s kiosk, brandishing a sheaf of papers that had to be the calc test. Katie said that all they had to do to get straight As was stay awake and turn in the work, but she had underestimated the school’s commitment to its stars. From the look on Mr. Winter’s face, a candidate for valedictorian could stay awake, turn in the work, leave an entire page of problems blank, and get away with it.

  “Brad, Brad, I’m so glad I found you before you went home,” said Mr. Winter, his face pasty with fear. He was a first-year teacher whose sole ambition was to be a lifer at Crestview, and he was not about to draw attention to himself by costing Preston Bradley IV his near-perfect GPA. He had just opened escrow on a pillbox condo an ungentrified mile from the wine bars of Culver City, and in forty-five days he and his PhD were finally moving out of the garage apartment behind his parents’ bungalow. There was too much at stake to be done in by a careless boy. He put his hand on Brad’s elbow to make sure he did not get away.

  “I don’t know how this happened, but your test, your copy of the test, look at this, a page missing, everyone else had six pages and you, you, look at this, page six is missing. I am very sorry. I don’t know how this happened, but we’re going to set it right, right now if you have fifteen minutes. Ten. C’mon.”

  Brad took the test and noticed two tiny punctures below and to the left of the current staple. In his haste to remove the original staple and the blank sixth page, Mr. Winter had failed to align the new staple over the old staple’s holes, not that Brad could call him on it. Mr. Winter was trying to save Brad. He could hardly accuse his teacher of lying and confess that he had intended to leave the whole page blank.

  That, he realized, was his mistake. If he had left one problem blank on each
page, Mr. Winter would have had no choice but to deduct those points from his total score. The whole page gave his teacher a way out—and Brad had never stopped to consider that Mr. Winter’s determination to save Brad from himself was as strong as Brad’s desire to cut himself loose. Stronger. He sighed and patted the man on the shoulder.

  “Y’know, Mr. Winter, I wondered how I got it done so fast. I mean, I get the material…”

  “Which is why I came looking for you.”

  The teacher herded Brad back toward the math wing, relieved at how willingly the boy went along with the charade, pleased that he had found a way for Brad to redeem himself.

  “Here we are,” he said, opening the door to his classroom and putting a blank sixth page on the nearest desk. “I’m going to sit here and give you ten minutes, which is what I budgeted for this page when I made up the test, so you finish up, it won’t take you that long, and that way no one will come down on my head for failing to give the valedictorian his whole test.”

  “Oh, Mr. Winter, nobody was going to come down on you. I can survive a C. Teach me some humility.”

  “No, no, not on my watch, I don’t think so. Let’s save the life lessons for after you graduate.”

  Brad rooted around in his backpack for his pencil case, his eyes squeezed shut. The boardroom in his brain was getting crowded—not just the Bradley men but Ted and Katie and Liz and Lauren and, now, his math teacher. He blinked hard, sat up, and held a pencil aloft to show that he was ready. Mr. Winter looked at his watch, pointed at Brad, and said, “Now.” Five minutes later, Brad handed him a complete and completely accurate page of answers, guaranteeing both his GPA and his math teacher’s ability to keep his new job and pay his new mortgage.