Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  Satisfying Chloe was a relatively straightforward process, as long as the manufacturers of cars and oversized handbags and ankle boots and makeup reminded her at every opportunity that personal fulfillment was a credit card swipe away. Finding contentment was trickier for Katie, who already owned the original version of every knockoff Chloe lusted after, frequently in multiple units, for any truly great pair of shoes was worth having in more than one color. She was not profligate. She did not have a pair of peep-toe knee-high boots in her closet, as Chloe did, because it did not take much common sense to figure out that peep-toes were for good weather and boots were for bad. She did own everything that met her standards.

  Mere stuff was like aspirin, though, strong enough to get past the normal headaches of daily life but no match for the last few weeks, which were the equivalent of a migraine. Katie required a stronger ego boost than any of her current possessions could provide, so she turned her energy to becoming the most breathtaking senior at the Crestview graduation. Anyone could get a manicure and a pedicure, a haircut and a blow-dry, and she would, and everyone was stuck having to wear a plain white dress under her graduation gown, and hers would cost more than the other girls’. These were familiar thrills, even with new shoes thrown in. Katie wanted to set herself apart, so she asked herself, What resource do I have that nobody else has?

  Her mom.

  Katie went into her bathroom, flipped the makeup mirror to the magnifying side, turned on all the bathroom lights, and looked for trouble, which even an eighteen-year-old could find under wattage more appropriate to an operating room. She convinced herself that there was a furrow between her eyebrows and went downstairs to look for her mother, who was sitting on the patio, trying to compensate for a tanned adolescence with a layer of SPF 45 sunscreen and a wide-brimmed SPF 25 hat, under a patio umbrella big enough to shield her entire office staff. Katie’s mother was always on her guard when she was out of doors, but she always sat on the patio for an hour on the weekend, fully dressed, exposed face and hands slathered, because it struck her as something a hard-working professional woman ought to do.

  “Mom.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I want you to Botox my forehead.”

  Joy glanced up.

  “Why?”

  “Can’t you see?” said Katie.

  “Not really.”

  “I hate it when you don’t take me seriously.”

  “Let me take a look,” said Joy, who lately felt the need to ask permission before she made physical contact with her daughter. She stood up and placed a professional thumb and index finger at the inner tips of Katie’s eyebrows, pulled the skin taut, counted to 5, and released it. On a forty-year-old forehead, the pull flattened out the furrow, but the release brought it back. With elastic teenage skin, there was nothing to flatten in the first place, nothing more than the slightest hint of vertical tension between Katie’s brows. If the forehead had belonged to anyone other than her own daughter, Joy would have recommended stronger sunglasses to prevent squinting and delayed intervention until the patient was in her late twenties. But Katie already wore sunglasses, and there was nothing wrong with Botox if you knew what you were doing. Joy emphatically knew what she was doing.

  “My professional opinion is that you don’t need it,” she said. “You might not even notice the difference by graduation.”

  “But if you say ‘the difference,’ then you must think there’s going to be one,” said Katie.

  Joy smiled. “Got me there. Fine. It certainly never hurts. I’ll give you the family discount.”

  “Right. After school Monday, then.”

  Katie disappeared before Joy could think of anything more to say, or at least that was what Joy told herself. She decided that this was a positive sign. A mother who no longer had an issue to broach was clearly a mother who had done a good job, and a daughter whose needs had dwindled to erasing a nonexistent wrinkle was a daughter who had benefited from that good job.

  Dr. Joy liked to group her forehead appointments in a block whenever possible. She walked into an exam room, appraised a forehead, and double-checked the solution levels in the syringes that Yoonie had laid out in advance, even though there was no reason to do so. She asked the patient to frown, hard, and marked a pattern of injection sites with a blue washable marker. A half-dozen Botox injections, the standard warnings about not lying down for an hour and no rubbing the forehead, and she was on her way to the next exam room to do the same thing. By the time she got done with the patient in room 3, there was a new patient ready to go in room 1. She ran laps all afternoon.

  She was rounding the hallway to begin her third circuit when Yoonie stopped her outside the exam room door.

  The nurse spoke so softly that Dr. Joy missed what she said the first time. She leaned in closer and asked Yoonie to repeat herself.

  “I am sorry, Dr. Joy, but there must be a mistake.”

  Dr. Joy waited.

  Yoonie tipped her head ever so slightly toward exam room 1.

  “Katie is in there.”

  “Yes.”

  “I put a Botox tray in there.”

  “Yes.”

  Yoonie waited for her boss to recognize the obvious error. She had read an article about using Botox for chronic shoulder and back pain, but Dr. Joy was a dermatologist, not a sports doctor. She had no idea how to place those injections, and she was not foolish enough to try an unfamiliar procedure. Katie could not possibly be here for a cosmetic treatment, but she and Dr. Joy were behaving as though she was. When Dr. Joy reached for the exam room door, her bewildered nurse did what she always did—followed the doctor into the exam room, gave the patient an acknowledging but deferential nod, and stood beside the tray, ready to hand over the first needle.

  Joy gave her daughter a disposable headband with a Velcro closure to get her hair out of the way, and wiped a cotton ball soaked in an antiseptic cleanser across Katie’s forehead. She wiped again in the other direction, for no reason, while she waited for a slight, queasy flush to subside. There were two possible explanations for the way she felt, neither of them welcome—either this was the first wave of hot flashes or the next escalating step in her chronic indigestion. Joy hoped and intended to get the empty nest out of the way before her hormones or digestive tract betrayed her, but she made a quick vow to read up on the latest hormone replacement studies and buy a wedge pillow, just in case.

  “Is there something wrong, Dr. Joy?”

  Yoonie had the first needle in her outstretched hand.

  Joy reached for it and pretended to study the liquid inside. She turned to her daughter, who, with her upturned face and closed eyes, looked like a six-year-old trying not to peek at a birthday-surprise bicycle until her parents said it was all right.

  “Katie, I’m sorry, this isn’t the right concentration for you.” She spun around and handed the syringe back to Yoonie. “This isn’t what I wrote down.” Dr. Joy grabbed the tray and hustled her nurse out of the room, with a hurried, “Hang on a minute,” thrown over her shoulder at Katie on her way out. She ushered Yoonie down the hall to the lab and shut the door behind them.

  “It is the right—” Yoonie began.

  “Make up a set with normal saline. Just enough to puff up the site for a while so she thinks I did something. That’s it. Normal saline.”

  “No Botox.”

  “Of course not,” said Dr. Joy, an edge of impatience in her voice. “Have you ever seen me use Botox on an eighteen-year-old?”

  “No.”

  “Then it was a mistake, so let’s fix it.”

  She was out the door, heading down the hall, before Yoonie could reply, not that she ever would have asked Dr. Joy, whose mistake it had been. Yoonie filled a new set of syringes as instructed, headed back to the exam room, and stood by while Dr. Joy went through the motions until all six syringes were empty.

  Katie giggled and smiled at Yoonie.

  “Now you can’t tell Liz, remember,” she said. “Doctor-pa
tient privilege, right, Mom?”

  “Absolutely,” said Dr. Joy, flashing her own brand of conspiratorial smile at her nurse. “Everything that happens in this room is a secret.”

  She and Katie slipped out of the room together while Yoonie discarded the used supplies and prepared for the next patient. All this deceit, and Yoonie made to go along without anyone asking her what she wanted to do. Such stupid happy people. She slammed the supply cabinet too hard, heard bottles fall on their sides, and allowed herself to pretend for a good thirty seconds that she was not going to open the cabinet to straighten things out.

  chapter 18

  The Chaikens woke up every morning hoping to find that they had arrived at the fifth station of grief, only to realize that acceptance of Lauren’s fate as a registered UCSB freshman was still miles down the road. Sundays were the worst, because there was no workday routine to sop up the excess funk, and because everything that had once been fun suddenly was not. Lauren still slept until almost noon, but it felt more like hibernation than coziness. Joel’s attention span was shot; instead of poring over the newspaper, pencil and pad at the ready, he drifted through descriptions of bogies and eagles and jump shots and clay court prowess and wished that he cared. Nora went to the farmers’ market and shopped by rote, and when she came home she skimmed too many cookbooks looking for new things to do with cauliflower.

  They were hiding out and unhappy about it. When the doorbell rang just before eleven, which the doorbell never did on a Sunday unless a Realtor was trolling for listings, neither Nora nor Joel rushed to answer it.

  “Did you invite somebody over?” asked Joel.

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  “You get it,” said Nora.

  She retreated to the stairwell to eavesdrop, for it was always comforting to hear a Realtor explain that any house within three miles of the beach was recession-proof. Instead, she heard Joel utter “Ted,” in a tone of surprise and fear—did the UCs ever revoke acceptances?—so she ran her fingers through her hair and tried to look as though the most pressing issue on her mind was whether to scrape a fresh vanilla bean into the batter for the French toast.

  “Ted,” she said, striving for calm. “We were just going to have a late breakfast. Let me warm up a baguette for you, or would you rather toast. Come sit in the kitchen with us.”

  “Coffee cake, she’s got a new one,” Joel said, pretending that the new automatic espresso maker required him to do anything more complicated than drop a premeasured pod into the pod receptacle.

  “Guys,” said Ted. He settled in at the long table at the back of the kitchen. “I’m not here with bad news. Quite the contrary.”

  They both stopped dead and stared at him.

  “What, I only get fed if you’re nervous?”

  On cue, they went back to what they were doing. Nora sliced the coffee cake and set it in front of Ted. Joel put down the cup and saucer he had in a death grip and remembered to offer Ted steamed milk and sugar. For a long moment they floated on the promise of “quite the contrary.” They experienced great contentment without knowing why.

  Ted was perfectly happy to savor the anticipation, so he waited a long moment before he asked, “Is Lauren home?”

  “God, of course, we are so stupid,” said Nora. “I’ll go get her right now.”

  “It’s fine,” said Ted, but Nora was already bounding upstairs.

  She closed Lauren’s door behind her and hissed in her ear, “Honey, get up.”

  No response.

  “Lauren, you have to get up.”

  Lauren groaned and spoke without opening her eyes. “Mom, why are you doing this to me?”

  “Ted is here.”

  Lauren pulled the pillow over her head.

  Nora lifted its corner. “Did you hear me? Ted, from school, is downstairs eating your share of the coffee cake.”

  Lauren threw the pillow toward the end of the bed and sat up, furious. She did a very good job of pretending to be comfortable with her fate as long as no one took her by surprise. “Well take it back, because what exactly did he do to deserve it? Why is he here anyway?”

  “Stop. He says he has good news.”

  “They moved UCSB to Chicago?”

  Nora sighed. “Throw on some clothes and we’ll find out.”

  She went downstairs and puttered until she heard Lauren on the stairs, and then she stationed herself against the kitchen island because it felt good to have something to lean against.

  “Mr. Marshall,” said Lauren. “What’s up?”

  Ted got up and came over to shake Lauren’s hand.

  “Congratulations, deserving person,” he said. “You’re in at Northwestern. The email comes tomorrow.” He turned to Nora and Joel. “Sorry about the UCSB deposit, which you’re going to have to eat because they won’t refund it, but I figure you won’t mind.”

  “I’m in?” asked Lauren, taking up a secure position next to her mother.

  “How can that be?” asked Nora.

  “For sure?” asked Joel.

  Ted chuckled. “You guys are a hard sell. Listen. I’ve been working with someone in the admissions office there, really campaigning on Lauren’s behalf, and he called me this morning to say that she’s in. I didn’t tell you what I was up to because I figure you’re tired of the roller coaster, but it’s over. Happy ending. Like I said, the official word comes tomorrow, but on a perfectly selfish level I wanted to see your faces when you got the news. I figured you wouldn’t mind finding out a day early.”

  “He called you on a Sunday?” asked Joel.

  “See, I should’ve waited for the official notification.”

  “You got me into Northwestern,” said Lauren.

  “Now we’re making progress. Are you starting to believe me?”

  “You got me in. But everybody says the wait lists never move.”

  Ted shrugged. “We can speculate all morning on how a slot opened up, but the fact is, it opened, and you get to fill it, and suddenly you’ve got exactly what you’ve wanted all year.”

  Lauren giggled. “This is pretty amazing.” She stuck out her arm to shake Ted’s hand again, and then she hugged her mother and father, in turn. She broke the crumbly top off a piece of coffee cake and ate it, and when she smiled Nora realized that it had been far too long since her daughter had done so without the effort showing.

  “So that’s it,” Lauren said. “That’ll be me next September, strolling across campus at Northwestern. Maybe I can still get into that really nice dorm, the one we saw, remember? Or it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’ll go on the North Face site and see what the coats look like.”

  Ted glanced down for an instant, and as he did so, Nora realized that he was not yet done delivering the news.

  “Ted. What’s the punch line?” she asked, quietly.

  Ted looked straight at her, not at Lauren, and tried to maintain his tone. “Some of the freshmen get to start off abroad. Lauren’s going to get to go to Prague first quarter. It’s a terrific opportunity. Very few freshmen get the chance.”

  “Prague?” asked Joel.

  “Do I have to?” asked Lauren. “I think I’d rather start out regular and go junior year like everyone else.”

  “That’s the point,” said Nora, who truly believed that a jury of her peers would not convict her if she took her favorite cast-iron skillet to the back of Ted’s head. “You’re not a freshman like everyone else. Is she, Ted?”

  Ted sat down again. “The acceptance is predicated on Lauren taking her first quarter abroad,” he said, “and then she’ll come back and move into a dorm. The school arranges all of it. It’s not like this is the first time this has happened.”

  “But I don’t see why I can’t just move into the dorm right away,” said Lauren.

  “Why is that, Ted?” Nora assumed that she knew the answer, but she was not in the mood to let him off the hook.

  He rearranged the coffee cake crumbs on his plate. “Every school
knows that some freshmen never make it past the first term. They get mono, they get stressed, they break up with their new boyfriends or girlfriends and fall apart. They flunk out. They think nobody knows what a joint smells like. Or they decide that the perfect school they’ve been chasing for two years doesn’t live up to their fantasy, and they start chasing another fantasy someplace else.”

  “What does that have to do with me?” asked Lauren.

  “One of those people got a regular acceptance at Northwestern, and they’re going to bail while you’re in Prague, and you’re going to get their room when you get back.”

  “But there’s no regular room for me now. I won’t even know who my roommate’s going to be,” said Lauren, beginning to wilt.

  “No,” said Ted, relieved that they had hit bottom so quickly, and that now he could begin to rebuild.

  “So I’m a freshman but not a good-enough freshman. That sucks.”

  “Lauren.” Joel fretted about his daughter’s linguistic health as much as Nora did about STDs.

  “Well, it does,” she replied. “I can just hear me: ‘Hi. I’m a marginal freshman. Want to be friends? I’m going to go do homework to try to keep up with the rest of you.’”

  “C’mon,” said Ted. “Let’s stay focused here. All I’ve heard all year is that Northwestern is it, it, it. Who cares that you get to go to Prague first, which isn’t a real hardship post, you know what I’m saying? The end goal was Northwestern, and you got it. Nobody ever said, ‘Northwestern, but only if.’ It was just Northwestern.”

  “I think maybe Lauren never considered the possibility of a yes tied to a first quarter abroad,” said Nora. “We need a little time to get used to this.”

  “I don’t need any time—” Lauren began, but Ted squared his shoulders and interrupted.