Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  What he liked best were the groups of kids who flew by as one, their attitude toward him always defined by the pack’s luckiest member, because no one was about to betray anxiety in front of friends. As Brad and his friends rolled past, Ted ran a private tally and decided that this might be the most successful constellation at prom: Brad at Harvard, where an admissions officer faced with a $350,000 donation quickly found the vacant slot that of course should have gone to Brad all along, what an unfortunate oversight, and his date at Yale, a bit of information Ted had picked up in a congratulatory call to Trey; Katie and her date, Mike, both at Williams; Paul at Princeton and Chloe, the volume winner according to Lauren, going to Santa Cruz, which was fine for an Ocean Heights kid.

  As for Lauren, she had managed so far to use disappointment to her advantage. When people asked her where she was going, she replied that it would take her every single minute until May 1 to decide. She did not say that it would take that long because she had no good options, so the other seniors assumed that she must be facing a deliciously tortured choice, Northwestern or Columbia, Northwestern or NYU, Northwestern or whatever school had just turned the listener down. Ted had no idea whether she was going to pick Santa Barbara or Irvine, because her parents had stopped calling and Lauren had stopped dropping by. Ted figured they were in the purgatory known only to families who were figuring out how to put a good spin on bad news.

  Lauren had less than a week until the truth narrowed down to the truth, and she had to send a commitment letter and a check to one school or the other, but for tonight she looked like she belonged at the best table, her status enhanced by her last-minute escort, Jim, whose longtime girlfriend had been sidelined by a herpes sore that made a public appearance unthinkable. Jim and the girlfriend, now there was a happy ending, both of them safely enrolled at Wesleyan despite the remarkable similarity in their end-of-semester papers on King Lear. Ted preferred to dwell on the victories instead of the failures, not that Lauren was a failure, but she certainly was not on the list he had drawn up to show his private clients, currently five of them confirmed, with another five sure to sign up by week’s end. The welcome letter that he intended to send out, as soon as he had his official chat with the head of school, talked about Brad and Katie and Jim and his girlfriend, about Paul and the girl who ditched Harvard for Stanford. Lauren was the cautionary example on his list, anonymous, of course, the girl who had it all, except that other candidates had a bit more.

  He watched her search for her table with the others, the girls’ long dresses floating behind them, lapping at the boys’ tuxedo pants. That is the way prom is supposed to look, Ted thought, gowns and tuxedos and upswept hairdos that won’t last the night. When he started out as a college counselor, everyone dressed that way, but in the last couple of years a style chasm had begun to develop between the top kids—who were either going to their first-choice schools or adept at faking that a second-choice school was really their favorite—and the rest of the seniors, who had never dreamt upper case dreams in the first place. The chosen few stayed formal, the boys in tuxedos or in Grandpa’s vintage white dinner jacket and the girls favoring the Greek goddess look, usually in no stronger a color than gray. As for the rest, the boys wore suits and ditched their ties before dessert. The girls wore short, shiny dresses that showed lots of leg and lots of cleavage, made of satin or taffeta tortured into pleats and ruffles and ruches, all of it in neon pastels—not buttercup but egg yolk, not peach but salmon, not sky blue but turquoise, and never pink if that little strapless number with the corset top came in coral. Their caterpillar eyelashes were heavy with mascara, and their lips were so thick with gloss—Ted tried and failed to censor himself in time—that a boy’s boxers would likely stick to his penis after the blow job.

  He took a deep breath to try to empty his mind. He vowed next year to fake a bad cold and stay home, and then he reminded himself that by next year, with luck—no, with continued effort—his attendance at the Crestview senior prom might no longer be required. Thanks to the speed with which Harvard had reversed itself on Brad, Ted had regained his balance. He planned to submit his resignation letter about a week before graduation—early enough to promote the illusion that he cared about letting Dr. Mullin start the job search before everyone scattered for the summer, late enough to avoid an endless stream of anxious calls from the parents of juniors.

  Katie’s family had stopped drinking tap water about five years earlier, when her father returned from a golf weekend to find a forgotten glass of water on his desk, a half-inch of the liquid equivalent of smog settled out at the bottom. He walked into the kitchen holding the glass at arm’s length between thumb and forefinger, as though it were a dead rodent, and announced to his wife and children that he was going to order a water purification system for the entire house so that even the bathwater would run clear.

  Away from home, the Dodson family drank only bottled water. The recent pro-tap backlash was for people who worried about the larger environmental consequences of all those plastic bottles. Dan Dodson’s priority was his family’s personal eco-system, which was why Katie carried a larger purse to prom than the other girls did. She polished off one bottle of Evian before the entrée arrived, handed the empty to the waiter who placed her salmon fillet in front of her, and leaned down to fish a second bottle out of her bag, which sat on the floor at her feet.

  Chloe reached over for Katie’s untouched water glass and took a long swill. “Am I glowing yet?” she said.

  “Pick your poison,” said Katie.

  “So’s your dad going to pop for a filtration system at the dining hall?” Chloe asked.

  Katie smiled at the extent of Chloe’s ignorance. “Somehow I’m thinking they have bottled water at Williams,” she replied. “There’s no need to make fun.”

  Liz broke in, determined to find common ground. “At Yale the residential colleges each have their own dining facility,” she said, “although I imagine that college food is college food.”

  It did not matter that Katie was done with Yale and done with Brad, that in her assiduously rewritten life story neither her ex-first-choice school nor her ex-boyfriend had measured up. Liz seemed completely satisfied with both of them—and that, combined with a room that was suddenly too warm, salmon that was too rich, and a band that was too loud, made Katie feel the need to reestablish her personal equilibrium. She had worked hard to forget that she had ever preferred Yale, and she needed to make Liz just a bit less thrilled with her choice.

  “All the boys at Yale are gay,” said Katie. She glanced at Brad. The last time she had asked, he swore that he was going to tank a math test for her, but what if he was lying to get her to leave him alone? She should have asked to see it, as proof that he had kept up his end of the bargain. Perhaps she ought to let him know—a little coded comment, nothing obvious—that she had not forgotten their deal. “So the dozen guys who are straight have to be sleeping with everybody. That’s going to be weird. Who would you rather go out with? A slut or a gay guy?”

  Brad stretched his arm protectively across the back of Liz’s chair, and Lauren nudged her foot under the table to poke at Katie, but Katie smiled and took a nice, long moment unscrewing the cap on her water bottle.

  “At least you know they’re gay,” said Chloe, desperately hoping to prevent trouble. “At some places there’s a saying, Gay by May, like these boys show up having no idea what they are and just about the time you figure out which one you’re interested in, it turns out he’ll never be interested in you. But I never heard that about Yale. I don’t know about Santa Cruz. I figure I’ll save myself the agony and just wait for sophomore year to fall in love with someone.”

  “Check it out,” said Brad. “Maybe I’ll transfer. Improve my odds.”

  “Yeah, like you’d go to Santa Cruz,” said Katie.

  “Hey, don’t bash my someday alma mater,” said Chloe. Katie ignored her. Katie was staring at Liz, who was staring at her plate, and in that moment Chloe rec
alled all the times Katie had condescended to her, whether the issue was Chloe’s grades or her figure or her prom dress. The only difference was that Liz was too polite or too surprised to give back as good as she got, and Chloe was not.

  She addressed Katie with an eager venom, slowly, so that no one missed her point. “But, Katie,” she said, “I thought you were dying to go to Yale. Lauren, didn’t you say Katie was so mad at her parents for…”

  Katie took a long sip of water, long enough to glare at Chloe and then turn and glare at Lauren through the bottom of the bottle.

  “I considered it last fall,” she said. “It may be right for some people. Not me.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Mike, who had been idly figuring the odds of getting Katie to himself, and beyond that, of determining exactly where that dress undid. He knew that his chances of getting past the dress improved with the appearance of interest in something other than sex, so he made the occasional comment to preclude being dismissed as a boy who had but one thing on his mind. “I don’t get it” was not one of his best, but it implied at least that he was listening, while he figured out whether that little gray knot on the side of the dress was decorative or functional.

  “I mean,” he continued, leaning toward his date to get a closer look, “once you’re talking Williams and Yale, how can there be a wrong school?”

  Katie rustled herself into a more authoritative posture. “Reputations change. Policies change. Schools make decisions that don’t work out in the long run and maybe that school ends up not the great place it was in its heyday.”

  “Heyday,” said Lauren. “There’s a word you don’t hear much.”

  Katie turned her laser gaze on Lauren. “My father uses it,” she said, “and I think it’s appropriate. Look at Yale, if we’re going to play this out.”

  “Oh,” said Brad, in a low, warning voice, “let’s not.”

  “Look at Yale,” said Katie, ignoring him. “One of the top three schools in the country forever, and like everyone else they’re facing an upheaval…”

  “Hey, upheaval, watch out,” said Chloe, clutching at Paul as though to steady herself.

  “Facing an upheaval in terms of numbers of applicants and quality of applicants and diversity…”

  “Somebody stop her,” said Lauren. Brad reached under the table and patted Katie’s knee as quietly as he could, but he might as well have set the tablecloth on fire.

  “You know,” Katie went on, ignoring all of them and picking up speed, “I’m sure everyone wants to do the right thing, but you cannot turn around, having evaluated applicants purely on the basis of quality forever, and suddenly you decide that what you need is a…a…a buffet of students. As though variety matters more than excellence.”

  “There’s nobody at this table who isn’t quality,” said Chloe, “except maybe me, who is not who you’re talking about.”

  Katie grabbed a roll from the basket, swiped a point off the star-shaped butter pat, slathered the butter on the roll, and took a ferociously big bite. The others waited while she chewed, all of them but Chloe hoping that the carbohydrates would slow her down, Chloe spoiling for the next outburst. No one spoke. Katie finished the roll and attacked the wild salmon in champagne sauce, and slowly, the others picked up their forks and began to eat, one eye on their plates, one eye on the dormant volcano that was Katie. They talked about summer plans, about jobs and internships and family trips. When it was Liz’s turn, she said that she had a job at the Gap for the summer, but she was quitting a few weeks early because her father had decided to drive across the country to Yale.

  “So that will be our summer vacation, the three of us,” she said. “Because my father loves to drive, and there is so much we have never seen. He found a service, we drive someone’s car across the country for them and then he and my mother can fly back, because they can’t take that much time off work, of course.”

  “Right,” Katie muttered into the rim of her water bottle, “because every cab driver counts.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Katie,” said Brad.

  “You shut the fuck up,” she said. “But, see, this is what’s happening. A school like, say, like Yale, can take a freshman class from the top kids in the country. But no. They want one of everything. Suddenly how much does it matter that you’ve got perfect scores and perfect grades and all these activities and a great essay and terrific recommendations. Because if you’re me, say, if you’re this rich white girl, and it’s harder for girls…” She took another sip. “Anyhow, so you’re this rich white girl and all of a sudden that’s a disadvantage, and normally Yale would have begged me to come, but all of a sudden what if they need to diversify, you know, and I am in the position of being discriminated against for being not a minority. What kind of solution is that, what kind of affirmative action is that, if all it does is somebody new gets left out for no reason except for who they are.”

  “That’s usually the reason someone gets left out,” said Chloe. “Guess it’s your turn.”

  “Says who?” said Katie. “Says you?”

  “Katie, you would’ve gotten into Yale, so what’s the big deal?” Lauren hoped to flatter her friend into submission. “You chose Williams early, but you still would’ve gotten into Yale.”

  Katie was not about to admit that she had caved in to pressure from her parents. She slid into fiction as easily as she had slipped into her prom dress, not a snag, not a hitch, a seamless internal rewrite that transformed a months-long power struggle into an informed consensus.

  “I did a lot of research, and I chose Williams early because it seemed that anyone—anyone—might get turned down at Yale this year for no good reason. No good reason. Except that there might be a less qualified candidate who made a school feel, you know, like it was doing the right thing.”

  “I am not a less qualified candidate.”

  They all looked at Liz.

  “I am the valedictorian at Ocean Heights,” she said. “I am as qualified as anyone at this table.”

  “More,” said Chloe, trying to be helpful.

  “And what you’ve said is very sad,” Liz went on, “because I am not to blame for what has happened to you, and because you seem unable to be happy about going to Williams, which would make a lot of people very happy. You’re embarrassing yourself. We ought to change the subject, I think.”

  Brad considered blurting out the truth about his Harvard acceptance, to make himself the focus instead of Liz, but a confession, he realized, would play right into Katie’s hands. If Preston Bradley IV could not sustain the family line at Harvard without help, then clearly Harvard was using faulty criteria, which was exactly her point. The best he could do was to get Liz away from Katie before the next, inevitable outburst. He put down his fork, folded his napkin, and wished the band would start up again so that he could ask his date to dance.

  Lauren stared at her hands. None of this sounded very funny when Katie said it, not half as funny as quoting from Chloe’s phony essay over ice cream, imagining a profile built out of fake roadblocks that were only amusing to people who had never faced any. She glanced over at Jim, who had yet to say a word, but he was busy taking cell-phone pictures of the room to send to his girlfriend. Everyone else seemed suddenly obsessed with the pattern of their woven dinner napkins, mortified into silence by Katie’s behavior. Lauren was seized by the desire to speak up, to say something that would make senior prom a watershed event in their lives. To make a statement about profound advantage and the equally profound shortsightedness that seemed to accompany it.

  Wow, she thought. How pompous is that?

  She wanted to challenge her friends to consider their obligation to a world that had always been awfully kind to them.

  No better.

  What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

  Trite. Each of her parents had said that within the last two weeks and had apologized almost immediately for sounding so dumb.

  If only she could think of something to
say that did not sound like the topic sentence of a bad five-paragraph essay. She was still working on the best way to share her feelings when Katie lurched halfway out of her seat and sat down again with a thud.

  “Lauren,” she said, in a forcibly gay tone. “Come with me to the bathroom.”

  Something in Katie’s voice said that this was not the traditional retreat, in which girls headed to the bathroom to criticize other girls’ dresses and calculate the likely trajectory of the hours after the dance was over. Lauren caught Chloe’s eye, and together the three girls peeled off like drill team members working a formation. A moment later, Liz got up and followed them down the hallway. Brad, who had no interest in listening to Mike’s post-prom agenda, caught up with Liz and propelled her toward the others.

  The girls were at the door with the silhouette of a bathing beauty on it, when Lauren turned and beckoned to Brad and to Liz to hurry.

  “C’mon,” she said.

  “Inside?” Brad asked.

  “You stand outside. Liz can come in. Don’t let anybody else.”

  Lauren and Chloe stood on either side of Katie while Liz pushed open the door. Once they were safely inside, Katie sagged against Lauren, who tried to prop her up at arm’s length, motivated by a reflexive desire to save her dress from whatever was rumbling so loudly in Katie’s stomach. She inched around behind Katie without ever letting go of her entirely, and motioned to Chloe to do the same. Together they nudged Katie toward the row of sinks, arriving just in time for her to open her mouth and spew a stream of salmon in champagne sauce, buttered sourdough roll, and stomach acid into the nearest bowl.