Admission

by Julie Buxbaum

  I’ve had an intense, debilitating crush on Levi since seventh grade, and I’ve been relegated to the friend zone for just as long. Which is totally fine. We can’t get everything we want. Deprivation builds character.

  Levi and I hang out sometimes and text constantly—about school, about our existential crises, and of course about all the girls he likes, because life is cruel and though this may not be a Siberian labor camp, high school has its own indignities. Shola’s convinced that Levi is just as in love with me as I am with him, but as my ride-or-die, it’s her job to feed my ego when the rest of the world craps on it.

  I do the same for her, because even though Shola is the best person on earth, high school isn’t a place known for recognizing out-of-the-ordinary greatness or for celebrating true nonconformity. They only seem to like the intentionally cultivated, Instagram-friendly kind. Shola’s literally too cool for school.

  Levi, on the other hand, has found his venue here at Wood Valley. I’m not the only girl who watches wistfully as he walks down the hallway. He’s half Indian, half white, and has unruly brown hair and big brown eyes and a grin that spreads so deliberately and sensually, it feels like he’s unzipping a zipper. He’s president of our class, is a National Merit Scholar, and takes five APs on top of playing two sports. But sometimes he rubs his eyes with his fists, like babies do when they’re tired, and it is so cute and guileless that I die a little. I suspect he knows how I feel, has always known, and I also suspect that he likes to stoke my crush, because it’s fun being on his end of its unrequitedness. I don’t blame him.

  “What do you think, Chloe?” Mrs. Pollack asks, but I’ve been off in Levi land, so I have no idea what she’s talking about.

  My face flushes hot.

  “Um, what was the question?” I hate being caught out in class. It’s embarrassing enough when our tests get handed back and I have to flatten my palm over my inevitable B minus so that no one else sees.

  “Crime and Punishment. We know from history that Dostoyevsky is rejecting Russian nihilism,” she says. She’s trying to help me out here but it’s not working. I have no idea what nihilism is. “This is a deeply moral novel about a murderer. Amazing, right? How he garners our sympathy—or is it empathy?—despite the fact that from almost the very beginning, we know Raskolnikov’s capable of monstrous things. We don’t have to like him. People forget that about novels. It’s not our job to like our main character. It’s our job to try to understand them. Let’s be honest, most people are deeply unlikeable.”

  “Yeah, totally,” I say, but I’m not sure I agree. Sure, when I turn on the news, I see that our government is filled with truly disgusting people, but that doesn’t seem to apply to my daily existence. Am I deeply unlikeable? What would happen if I wrote a book about my life? It’s hard to imagine anyone caring about the life and times of Chloe Berringer. There are no dead bodies, no deep dark secrets, no real intrigue. I have, thus far, murdered approximately zero people. Most of the plot would consist of me eating fro-yo with Shola and making sad doe eyes at a boy who doesn’t like me.

  Poor little rich girl in unrequited love.

  Even I can hear the orchestra of the tiniest violins.

  “Right,” Levi jumps in, and my appreciation for him rescuing me almost supersedes my embarrassment. “It’s because we get to watch his slow descent into crossing a sacred moral boundary. Also, I think there’s simply the benefit as a reader of being in his head and having access to his innermost thoughts. He may be a deeply flawed person, but we see, at the end of the day, he’s still a person. Just like us.”

  A few months ago, Us Weekly ran a photo of my mom at the Whole Foods salad bar in their “Celebrities: They’re Just Like Us!” section. In the picture, she looks impossibly glamorous despite wearing head-to-toe spandex and wielding tongs to dish out baby spinach.

  My guess is that Paloma staged the picture. That it was orchestrated perfection. A gaslighting of sorts, because I doubt that a single woman who saw that photo came to the same conclusion as the headline: that Joy Fields was “just like her.”

  “How does it feel to be forced to see a murderer as a person?” Mrs. Pollack asks Levi, and I realize with relief that I’m off the hook. I keep writing anyway so it looks like I’m listening.

  I scribble down: Criminals: They’re Just Like Us!

  * * *

  —

  “Taking it again?” Levi asks after class, nodding at my SAT prep book, which I carry around with me everywhere, tucked under my arm, exactly the same way they made us hold the robot baby for an entire month for health class last year.

  “You know,” I say noncommittally. I haven’t mentioned to Levi that I’m living in a never-ending loop of SAT hysteria. He obviously has Isla’s and Shola’s test-taking superpowers. He too was one and done.

  “I can help if you want. I weirdly love standardized tests.”

  “You would,” I say, and nudge him in the shoulder, in that flirty-not-flirty way we’ve perfected that suggests either an easy friendship or a loaded one. “I have a tutor already, but thanks.”

  The SAT would be a perfect excuse to hang out with Levi alone; too bad studying with him is my worst nightmare. My class ranking isn’t a secret—people generally know how everyone else does here—but you can chalk bad grades up to laziness or lack of interest in the material. My kind of SAT and ACT scores would make him think I was never smart enough to be at Wood Valley in the first place.

  “You going to Xander’s party this weekend?” Shola asks Levi, since she knows that I’m desperate to know if he’ll be there.

  “Yup,” Levi says, and I can’t tell if I’m imagining the eagerness in his voice when he adds: “You’re coming too, right, Chloe?”

  “We’ll be there,” I say, super casual, and I’m impressed with my play-it-cool delivery. Maybe Xander’s party will be the thing that helps us cross over that delicate line, and we’ll start flirting for real, and become more than friends, and kiss, and then go to prom in the spring and then Levi, my first real crush, could transform into my first real everything else.

  “Cool,” he says, and double taps my shoulder with his fist, the same hand he uses to rub his eyes, and I feel that zing that always happens whenever he touches me. “Later.”

  After he walks away, Shola puts her hands on her hips like Wonder Woman.

  “He’s either into you or he’s a jerk,” she declares, and I ready myself for what Shola calls “real talk,” which I’ve learned is a euphemism for brutal honesty. “He knows you like him. He flirts with you all the time. He’s either toying with you, which would make him a jerk, or he actually likes you. And I don’t think he’s a jerk.”

  She holds out her palms to me, like a shrug emoji, as if to say I rest my case. Shola’s life goal is to be this country’s first black woman chief justice of the Supreme Court, a double first, and because she is Shola, I have no doubt she’ll make that sort of herstory. I look forward to my mother one day playing a lawyer in the biopic of Shola’s rise to fame.

  My life goal, on the other hand, is way more modest, like an inversion of those people who say if they had a genie they’d wish for more wishes. My life goal is to have an actual life goal, to feel about something the sort of excitement and passion Shola seems to feel about the law, because I realize partying on a yacht with Rihanna shouldn’t count.

  “I get that I’m not everyone’s cup of tea,” I say. Shola looks me up and down, a steady sweep of evaluation, as if running a tally in her head of my pros and cons. Like we haven’t spent every day together for the last five years.

  “We really need to work on your self-esteem,” she says.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Now

  I stare in the mirror, as if I can find answers on my face, but there are none. I crawl back to my spot on the couch and lie there wide-awake even though it’s 5:30 a.m. Thanks to
CNN, I’ve been able to track my parents, so I know they’re finally on their way home. My dad met a lawyer at the courthouse yesterday afternoon, and a judge granted my mother’s release contingent on her posting $250,000 in bail. That number rolls around in my head, familiar, an echo: a quarter of a million dollars.

  The paparazzi are staked out in front of the house, so my parents’ arrival as they make their way up the walk is accompanied by a series of loud clicks, and “What do you have to say?” and “Will you plead guilty?” and other questions to which I too would like to know the answers.

  Once they are inside, my dad closes the door and puts his back up against it, like people do in horror movies. He rubs his cheeks a few times, slaps them as if to wake up, and then, without another word to me or to my mother, takes the stairs two at a time and disappears into their bedroom, slamming the door shut behind him.

  I stand up and stare at my mother. She’s both familiar and foreign. Although it would have been impossible for her to have lost any real weight in the not quite twenty-four hours since I last saw her, she’s pale and looks somehow too thin. A plastic bag dangles from her wrist, her bathrobe stuffed inside, as she’s changed into the fleece pullover and jeans my dad must have brought to the courthouse. Her hair hangs limp around her face, the first time I’ve seen it air-dried in as long as I can remember.

  I’ve occasionally caught my mother lifting the skin around her jawline and then letting it drop when she thinks no one is looking. In this unforgiving morning light, cold and sharp, I see what she’s been worried about: midlife jowls. Her face spilling off into a frown.

  “Mom,” I say. I don’t know if I want to scream or cry, if I’m supposed to comfort her or she’s supposed to comfort me. I don’t understand how this is our real life, how we managed to screw everything up this much.

  I keep my voice low. Isla is sleeping. She ended our joint vigil when we got the text that my mom had been granted bail.

  “Processing will take a few hours. They won’t be home until crazy late,” she’d said, and like with everything else with my little sister, I wanted to ask How do you know that? Not for the first time, I thought about how Isla must have been given a manual at birth called How the World Works, and that someone had forgotten to slip me a copy. “Things are going to be a mess tomorrow. And for the foreseeable future. You should get some sleep, Chlo.”

  She said this in her resigned, martyr-like Isla way, like she’s forty and not sixteen, and like she was born into this family against her better judgment.

  “I’m going to wait up,” I said.

  “Suit yourself.” Isla went upstairs and left me alone on this couch to wait for this moment, when I would again face my mother. You would have thought in all those hours I’d lain here staring at the ceiling, I’d have figured out how I felt or what I wanted to say.

  Now that I see her, I feel only one thing: the sense of the world righting itself. Like that moment on a flight when the fasten seat belt light dings off, and you think, This will probably not be the day I die after all.

  “Mommy,” I say, a word I don’t ordinarily use that makes me think of my childhood—fairy wings and birthday parties and the unfolding of endless free afternoons. She’s been Mom for a long time.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, at that exact same moment my mom says: “You all right, baby?”

  I nod and she nods, and then she opens her arms wide. I think, I’ll be angry tomorrow. I think, I’ll never forgive her. I think, Maybe tomorrow I’ll gather the courage to ask, What have we done? But thinking is different from feeling, and at this moment there’s no space inside for any of it.

  I’m too filled up. No room at the inn.

  I want my mommy.

  I burrow into her outstretched arms and rest my face in her neck.

  We both cry.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Then

  I hadn’t planned on drinking at Xander’s party, but Levi handed me a cup and I took it and started sipping. I was nervous, and now I’m not—thank you, beer that tastes alarmingly like urine—and for the first time, talking to him is almost as easy as it is to text. Levi puts the flat of his hand on my exposed back and his fingers spread like a starfish.

  This silk tank top, which I borrowed from my mother, knows what it’s doing.

  I hope he can’t feel my pimples.

  Shola is off somewhere with Mateo, a guy from Brentwood Country Day she’s been crushing on, and I wonder if they’ve disappeared into one of the bedrooms upstairs. We’ve been to many identical parties here before, down to the playlist blasting from the backyard speakers, the same groups of kids holding red plastic cups, the same listless carrots-and-celery platter that someone, though I have no idea who—Xander? His Carrie equivalent?—has laid out on the kitchen table. Xander has rich absentee parents who keep a fully stocked bar and spend most of their time, for reasons unexplained, in Monaco. I imagine they are unaware of how many and how often teenagers traipse across their lawn and puke in their bushes.

  Xander loves to cultivate the sense that he’s a budding Hugh Hefner, so he presides over his parties in silk robes and randomly screams directions like “Down it!” or “Take it all off!” from the second-floor deck. Whenever we come here, I get a propulsive form of déjà vu, the feeling that not only have I been in this same moment before, but also that I will never not be. Which, come to think of it, is how I feel about high school generally. Like I’m in stasis, which is, so far, my favorite SAT word, at least in its secondary definition of a stoppage of flow, because it describes how I feel studying for the test.

  Levi and I play beer pong on the patio against Simon and Axl, who are not twins or even brothers but who somehow have always felt interchangeable to me, in much the way that this party feels interchangeable with its previous iterations. This is because Simon and Axl are inseparable, and because they’re both floppy-haired, wiry white boys who golf. I know exactly what they will look like in twenty years, how far their hairlines will recede and their guts will extend, and how soon they’ll molt into Republicans for tax reasons, so the now of them feels temporary. It’s totally unnecessary to tell them apart.

  “Cheaters,” Axl yells after he chugs his beer for the billionth time and then raises his arms in victory, even though technically he lost.

  “How could we possibly cheat? You saw her throw the ball,” Levi says, and I giggle, and just like that, I’ve morphed into the scantily clad girl at the party talking to Levi, the one who, in parties past, used to make me burn with jealousy and on occasion go home and cry.

  “Turns out Chloe over here has impeccable hand-eye coordination when under the influence.”

  “I do,” I say. “Maybe I should put that on my college applications? Can’t math, but kills at beer pong.”

  “You used math as a verb,” Levi says, and I think, with sudden clarity, We’re both drunk. The college counselor is coming tomorrow morning, but it’s too late to undrink that beer.

  “Sure did,” I say, and Levi high-fives me. “We should turn more nouns into verbs. Like we’re beer ponging.”

  “You’re verbing.”

  “And we’re bantering,” I say, and then realize I’ve said the quiet part out loud. I’ve always wanted to banter like they do in rom-coms, and now that I’m actually doing it, I’m hyperaware that it’s as much fun as it looks.

  “Banter is already a noun and a verb,” he says.

  “Stop technicaliting.” Levi’s eyes sparkle and he throws an arm around my shoulders in mock apology, and it feels like the opposite of stasis. Like we are actually moving along, and he might actually kiss me. Like all the hours I’ve spent counseling him about other girls, or all the times he said things like Man, Chloe, you are such a good friend, never happened.

  And then, as I turn to Levi, wondering if my lips are chapped or if my breath is tangy or if he’ll make that mov
e I’ve long fantasized about and pull me toward him—I’m suddenly blinded, and my eyes burn with a searing pain.

  “Score!” Simon yells. He’s landed the ball in the cup right in front of me and doused my entire face in beer. I’m sure the mascara I lovingly applied earlier is quickly laying tracks on my cheeks.

  “Score: also both a verb and a noun,” Levi says before gallantly jogging away to find me a paper towel.

  * * *

  —

  What I’m thinking about while I sit with my parents across from Dr. Wilson in our living room the next morning is not college.

  I am thinking about the fact that I did not score.

  There was no kiss.

  I left the party at 11:45, and as we said goodbye, Levi drew me into one of his usual friendly bear hugs, and I wondered if my hair stank of beer. That was it. We’re still friends. Flirtier friends who banter, maybe. But still just friends.

  Or, to turn it into a verb: We friend hard.

  I consider pouring myself a cup of coffee from the elegant tray set out on the table but then wonder if that might make me throw up. If I vomit on the expensive college counselor, my parents will never forgive me. Just this morning, my mom told me we are “so lucky that Dr. Wilson is willing to meet with us.” But a few days ago, I overheard her telling Carrie to arrange his first-class flights from New York and two nights at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills and to issue him his check in advance, so I’m pretty sure his coming has nothing to do with luck.

  He hasn’t asked me a single question, so I’ve been able to marinate in my hangover, which is a new unfamiliar, unpleasant feeling—a stew of nausea and regret. The good news is I don’t need to be in top form. We’re already fifteen minutes into this meeting and I’ve only said seven words—It’s nice to meet you, Dr. Wilson—none of which is true.