Admission

by Julie Buxbaum

  My life as I know it is officially over.

  Delete. Delete. Delete.

  Flush.

  I scan through my texts one last time before powering the phone off. Just to double-check.

  But no. I was right the first time.

  There isn’t a single word from Shola.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Then

  I take the SAT at a nondescript building in West Hollywood next to a marijuana dispensary advertising THC gummies. A bald man with a long, unkempt brown beard, a tie-dyed Phish T-shirt, and Birkenstocks meets us at the door and introduces himself as “Proctor Dan.” He’s friendly and warm, less taskmaster and more stoner camp counselor, and he moves his coffee mug to his armpit to shake both my and my mother’s hands. I guess an accommodation doesn’t only guarantee more time, but a chiller vibe all around.

  He doesn’t ask me for ID, even though I have it ready. Once we reach the classroom where I will take the test, my mom hands me a lunch sack and grabs my cheeks, eyes shiny, like it’s the first day of kindergarten.

  “I had Cristof pack lots of extra protein to keep your energy up,” my mom says. “Just do your best. That’s all I ask.”

  Cristof is our chef, who I’ve never actually met, though I eat his food almost every night. He cooks three mornings a week in our kitchen, while I’m at school, and then leaves his food behind in our fridge in glass containers—my mom says Cristof is anti-plastic for hormonal reasons, not environmental ones—all of which have adorable chalkboard labels that list the ingredients. Sometimes Isla and I write back notes: Please ignore Mom. More real food. Less salad. Thanks!

  “Okay,” I say, because that’s the only word I can get out. I’m too nervous to talk. I think about Levi, hoping the excitement of last night’s revelation will counteract today’s nauseating fear, but it does the opposite. I feel like my entire body is on sensory overload.

  I notice Proctor Dan’s exposed toes, which sprout hairs at fixed intervals, like a doll’s scalp.

  “You’ll do great, honey. I know it.” My mom is, as usual, way more confident than the occasion calls for, as if enthusiasm alone is all I need to understand complex mathematical equations. I realize with a start that this is the exact tone I use with Cesar whenever he catches on a word he doesn’t know when reading, and it makes me wonder, for the first time, if we all turn into our mothers one day.

  “Let’s get this party started,” Proctor Dan says, and drum-rolls the desk.

  “Can I stay?” my mom asks, looking around the room for a chair.

  “Mom! Get out,” I say, and I cringe because I sound like a tween on a Disney show. Since she hired Dr. Wilson, my mom’s become obsessive about this college admissions process, and she’s driving me bananas. I usually like the feeling of my mom being invested in my life, but with the applications, the tenor feels different.

  Did my mom really think she could sit in on my test? Next, she’s going to want to pitch in when I don’t know the answers.

  “Sorry. It’ll be hours. I’ll text as soon as I’m finished. Promise,” I say. “Go shopping or something. What will be will be.” I echo Linda, who is in Hong Kong and sent me a text this morning reminding me to fill in an answer for every question, even if I have to guess.

  “Okay, sweet pea,” my mom says kindly, as if she’s unbothered by my initial outburst, or maybe she’s in public mode, that tone shift that happens whenever we leave the house. Who knows what tabloid connections Proctor Dan might have? We are in LA, after all.

  “Sorry again,” I mutter. “I’m nervous.”

  “Me too,” she says, and kisses my cheek, and only later, after she leaves, will I wonder what she has to be nervous about. She already got into college.

  * * *

  —

  About two hours later, I’m working my way through the third section of the exam while Proctor Dan sits behind a desk and noisily reads a newspaper. Each time he turns a page, the crinkling disrupts my focus. Couldn’t he read the news on his phone like everyone else?

  The “math, no calculator” section is the part that always trips me up the most. I see Linda’s floating head on FaceTime: First identify the kind of question. Okay. This is what they call “passport to advanced math.” Now what? The equation—numbers and letters and symbols I don’t understand—swims on the page. My heart pounds, loud and arrhythmic, and my chest tightens. I wonder about the mechanics of the human body. If my blood can break free of my throbbing veins and drown me. I put my head down on the desk and close my eyes to stop the undulating.

  I try some of the box breathing I learned from my meditation teacher. In for four, hold for four, out for four. Or something like that. Even that information has been wiped clean.

  “You okay?” Proctor Dan asks, but I don’t answer. My body is slick with sweat, and I have the adrenaline shakes that always precede my puking.

  I cannot throw up on the SAT. How do they even score an exam that’s drenched in vomit? No. Not going to happen. I’m better than this. I box breathe some more. I channel Isla, Shola too, their coolness under pressure. Their shared ability to stuff the fear away, into a pocket that can’t be reached.

  “Chloe?”

  I nod, though my head is still down. I lift one hand, a single finger, as if to say as politely as possible without words Give me a second, please.

  “It’s okay. We have unlimited time here. Take as much as you need. No rush,” he says, so calm, I wonder if maybe he has a stash of those gummies from next door. Clearly he’s talked hundreds of students like me through panic attacks. I wonder why I couldn’t have had Proctor Dan the two previous times I took the test. I didn’t freak out then like I am now—mostly because I didn’t know how badly I’d bombed until I got back my score—but I could have used the general support. Maybe I needed this accommodation after all. “Just skip what you don’t know, and you can always go back to it later. Not a prob.”

  I lift my head and wipe my forehead with my sleeve. Sniff at my wrist, where my mom rubbed some lavender essential oil she bought off Goop to relax me. The question rearranges itself into a normal-looking equation. Still, no amount of time or essence from the Provençal region is going to give me the answer. The SAT is written in a language I don’t speak.

  “I’m all right,” I say. “Thank you so much.”

  “That’s what I’m here for. Want to stop and have a snack?” Proctor Dan throws a peanut in the air and catches it in his mouth. He has an array of food laid out in front of him. Trail mix, chips, Doritos, even Fig Newtons. The munchies, I think.

  He tips a container of sour cream and onion Pringles toward me, and I reach in and grab a couple. I open my lunch bag and take out apple slices and a small glass tub of homemade almond butter. I offer him some in return.

  “Nice. Brain food,” he says.

  Obviously, this is how everyone should take the SAT. With a kind, likely high dude like Proctor Dan suggesting you take a beat and share some snacks. With extra time to breathe through your fear and the perfect pick-me-up prepared by Chef Cristof.

  The whole thing is way more humane.

  * * *

  —

  My mom takes me out for ice cream after the test. We go to Scoops, the same place we used to go after doctor checkups when I was little, the reward for getting shots. She doesn’t eat any, of course, not even a sample, but I get a double to self-medicate. We sit outside at the picnic tables, and I tip my head back as if to absorb the healing powers of the sun. The test took me six hours, and despite my snack breaks and lunch, I feel undernourished and vitamin D deficient. As if the testing center spun and baked me via its fluorescent lights, like a rotisserie chicken at the supermarket.

  “So how’d it go?” my mom asks. I admire her restraint. She waited a whole forty-five minutes—until I had a treat in my hands—before starting her interrogation.


  I want to shrug off the question. I don’t want to tell her the truth: It was a disaster.

  “I was reading about this school the other day: Colorado Mountain College?” I tell her instead. “I bet they don’t ask for the SATs. They have an adventuring program.”

  “I have no idea what that is.”

  “Me neither,” I admit, and take a giant bite of mint chocolate chip. I can sense an ice cream mustache forming on my upper lip. I’m feeling childish and churlish, so I leave it. “But I like being outside and adventure and Colorado. I’d probably get to snowboard a lot.”

  “Sure sounds like a good way to pick a college,” she says. My mother went to Rutgers University in New Jersey, which is a state school. She paid for it with money she won in beauty pageants during high school and earned waitressing in Manhattan. During her college years, my mom lived on ramen, and the way she tells it, she would have gotten rickets if she didn’t occasionally get taken on dates to fancy restaurants. She would order filet mignon and steamed broccoli and sneak bread into her purse when the guy went to the bathroom. My mom is proud of her scrappy rise to fame, as she should be. A million girls like her show up in LA every day trying to make it. Most head back home a year or two later. My mom, on the other hand, had a steady income acting on television by the age of twenty-three.

  “The test didn’t go well,” I say eventually, when what I really mean is I bombed. I guessed on more than half of the questions. According to Mrs. Oh, colleges take your best scores. I’ve sat through enough practice tests to know this is not going to be it.

  “I’m sure you’re not giving yourself enough credit. I bet you did better than you think,” my mom says.

  “Nope.” I lick my ice cream, fight back the tears. It’s a test. Nothing more, nothing less. Shola reminds me all the time that a score is only a score. It says nothing about the real me: how I’m a good friend and a good daughter and a good citizen, even if I’m a crappy student. Every Christmas, my reading buddy Cesar’s mom bakes me cookies, and last year’s card read Thank you for taking such good care of my little boy. He talks about you all the time, like you’re his big sister for real.

  I remind myself that Levi called me amazing less than twenty-four hours ago. I try to hold on to that boost, but it’s already slipping. He texted me this morning: BREAK A LEG SUNSHINE!!!! and I wrote back, Pls take it for me with fifteen prayer hand emojis, and he wrote back, Wish i could babe.

  He’s never called me babe before. I like it.

  “You’ll see. I have a good feeling,” my mom says.

  “Whatever.”

  “Don’t be so negative.”

  “Mom!”

  “What? It’s the Rule of Attraction. Negativity attracts negativity. You should make a vision board. Put SCC right in the middle.” I’ve long thought my mom’s woo-woo-ness must come from her being in entertainment. When you’ve been as fortunate as she’s been on that front—regular roles on not one but two long-running television series—you turn to mystical forces to explain it. I mean, she’s a great actress in the sitcom world, don’t get me wrong, but so are a lot of people. It helps to attribute your success, at least in part, to a positive attitude, to some unseen way you’re more deserving. It’s an atheist’s prosperity gospel.

  “I’m not going to SCC,” I say.

  “What’s wrong with SCC? It’s down the road. We’d be able to see you all the time. Carrie could even pick up your laundry.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s an amazing school. But I’m not getting in there. Mrs. Oh put it in the ‘likely out of reach’ category, and that was before today. She said all the schools we visited over the summer were out of reach.”

  “Mrs. Oh doesn’t know everything, Chloe.”

  “You and Dad need to be more realistic,” I say, my voice catching. I hate disappointing my parents, who have both worked so hard to give me this big, beautiful, privileged life. I will not cry about the SAT. I have my entire adult life ahead of me, and I have been nothing but lucky.

  This is nothing. A blip. A minor fail.

  I remind myself that their love is not conditional on a score.

  “Don’t say that,” my mom says, and the hopeful look in her eyes breaks something in me. “I want what’s best for you. That’s all.”

  “I’m sorry I’m not super academic like Isla. I wish reading comprehension didn’t feel like hieroglyphics. But that doesn’t mean I’m destined to be, like, a terrible failure at everything!” I scream this last bit. I’ve subconsciously opted for yelling over crying, a code-switch defense mechanism, and then I remember we’re in public. When we walked into the ice cream shop, Oville was blasting on the speakers and the scooper, a girl wearing a Bruins hat with a name tag that read JESSIE and who felt vaguely familiar from Wood Valley—was she a senior when I was a freshman?—immediately recognized my mother. When it came time to pay, she said, “When I was little, my mom and I used to love to watch you on My Dad, My Pops, and Me together, so it’s on the house,” and then she asked my mother to autograph a napkin. Before we even left, she whipped out her cell phone and said, “Ethan, you will never believe who just walked in here….”

  I squeeze my eyes shut and then open them again. Fortunately, no one is nearby. Still, I know I should be more careful. Last thing I need is some tabloid cover announcing MISSY’S REAL-LIFE KID’S OUT OF CONTROL BEHAVIOR ISSUES.

  “Darling, trust me. It’ll be fine. I know you think I’m wacky but let’s make a vision board together tonight. We’ll put a 1600 on it and the SCC logo and maybe some dorm room decor ideas. It will help. I promise.”

  “Okay,” I say, because the vision board thing came originally from Aunt Candy, who, after seeing the idea on Oprah a million years ago, put a picture of Steve Jobs on her own board and the next day met Uncle Charles, a billionaire, who, unlike Jobs at the time, had a full head of hair. Since then, my mom swears by the method. She thinks it’s how she landed the Blood Moon role.

  Really, she got the role because of nostalgia. The millennials who grew up watching her on My Dad wanted to see her play the immortal queen mother of a prince vampire. If she can’t be their actual mom, they want to see her continue to play one on TV.

  Also, it helps that she doesn’t age.

  I wipe my eyes with a napkin.

  “I got you, kid. You never have to worry about a thing,” my mom says, and pulls me in for a hug. And that’s when I hear the telltale click of the camera. I look up.

  The ice cream scooper puts down her iPhone.

  “I’m sorry. I never do this, I swear. Last week, Ariana Grande was here and I didn’t even blink, even though I knew my stepbrother would be mad that I didn’t get a selfie. It’s just that my mom used to love Missy. She was a book person, not a TV person, but there was something about My Dad,” she says, with an apologetic smile, and then realizing she’s accidentally said too much, she wipes at her eyes, which I notice are wet.

  My mom makes strangers cry with joy.

  “Sorry,” she says again, and then she slips back inside as quietly as she came out, taking the photograph of my mother and me, still with my ice cream mustache, with her.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Now

  Isla and I don’t go to school on Wednesday either, because no one tells us we should. I’ve barely seen my parents since they returned from court. They’re too busy with the lawyers, who’ve come wearing frowns and dark suits and have camped out in the living room with their laptops and their cell phones. They run extension cords across the rug, and my mom, who would normally freak out about possible ridges, doesn’t say a word.

  Carrie keeps ordering in food, so the kitchen table is covered first with sandwiches, and then later in the day with sushi platters. She doesn’t take the time to make either spread aesthetically pleasing. I finally meet Cristof, who keeps making healthy meals for o
ur family, though they go uneaten in the fridge, their little labels hanging off forlornly. He’s decidedly less French than I imagined—it turns out he’s from St. Louis, his name is really Christopher, and like everyone else in LA, he’s an aspiring actor. Clean cooking is his side hustle.

  Paloma, my mom’s publicist, paces around the house—long, angry strides back and forth—with her AirPods in her ears, and she shouts nonsensical, highly detailed expletives at random. I have no idea who’s on the other end of her tirades, or why she thinks they have their heads so far up their own butts that they’re coming out their nostrils and could they listen for once in their tiny miserable insignificant little minuscule pissant lives. But apparently, these mystery callers are not cooperating.

  I consider going to the backyard to get away from the madness but am stopped by the sign Paloma posted on the playroom doors. WARNING: STAY INSIDE! PAPARAZZI HAVE TELEPHOTOS/LADDERS.

  “Here’s the list of lawyers,” Isla says, when she finds me hiding out in Dad’s office picking at a muffin. I’m tired of my room, which is covered in pictures of me and Shola, and more recently Levi, too, our smiling faces like an advertisement for my former life. “Trust me. Call them. I’d start with the first guy. I wanted to find you a woman, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “Who’s going to pay?”

  “You are.”

  I laugh. I heard my dad tell my mom last night that the lawyers they hired are costing a thousand dollars an hour. Last I counted, there were at least six lawyers downstairs. “I’m serious. You’re going to pay out of your trust fund. It’s important this is separate from Mom and Dad.”

  “I won’t have access to any of that money until I’m eighteen, and then only like a tiny portion of it.”