Admission

by Julie Buxbaum

  “I’ll do it if you do it.”

  “Well, sharks, obviously. So, nine, small spaces. I’m claustrophobic, for real. Eight, that spinning ride at Magic Mountain where you stick to the walls, which is probably related to number nine. Seven, dying,” he says.

  “Only number seven? I feel like that’s most people’s number one.”

  “Definitely seven. The inevitability, and some near misses we won’t get into, somehow make it less scary.”

  “You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” I say. I know I won’t be able to rattle off my own fears as easily when it’s my turn.

  “What else am I supposed to do late at night when I can’t sleep?” Levi asks, and I try to picture his bedroom, a place I’ve never been. What color is his comforter? Does he have posters on the walls? Are they of athletes or rock stars or, God forbid, inspirational quotes? I imagine leftover Lego model sets from childhood, a few debate team trophies, and a stuffed animal that he still sleeps with, like I do with Funny Bunny. I bet he has a Harvard pennant hanging above his bed, the thing that keeps him motivated in that fifth hour of the daily grind of homework when he goes for the extra credit. I wonder if he has an illicit Adderall prescription. Maybe he also got extra time on the SATs, but then I remember he was there, a few rows back, the first time I took the test.

  “Watch Law & Order. Works like a charm. I hear that chick-chick sound and I’m out.”

  “I’ll have to try that.”

  “So, number six?” I ask.

  “Six, rats. Five, black holes. Four, cats.”

  “You are not afraid of cats,” I say, and grin at him, and he flashes one back, like a gift.

  “I hate them, and that hate commingles with fear. Also, I’m super allergic, so they could actually kill me.”

  “Kittens too?”

  “Kittens are cats, Chlo.”

  “I’m starting to think you’re secretly a wuss.”

  “Oh, not so secretly. Where was I? Three. Getting shot at school.”

  “That’s dark.”

  “That’s America. Number two, losing my mom or dad or, God forbid, both, and then my number one biggest fear—drumroll, please…” I tap out a beat on his dash and look over at him. He’s staring out the windshield. I’ve always liked his profile—strong and hard-jawed, a profile worthy of a Roman statue. “Disappointing my parents.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, and I realize it’s super messed up. Like losing them should come before disappointing them, but for me, if I’m honest, it really doesn’t.”

  “I get that,” I say, because I do. I mean, my own list is totally different: I’m not afraid of rats or kittens or small spaces, and I love a good Gravitron. I’m not even sure I know what a black hole is or if it is something to be afraid of. But I do worry about my parents, about their inevitable disappointment and embarrassment, because I will not one day rise, like they have both risen from the ashes of their past.

  I do not come from ash.

  Rising for me involves a different sort of calculus.

  A vision board is not going to get me into a top-tier school, and so very soon, there will be a reckoning. A moment when my mom will have to admit to Aunt Candy that despite the wizardry of Dr. Wilson, I’m still going to clown college.

  We are off to the side of the PCH, and Levi pulls into a parking spot in one of those lots right up against the beach. He takes my hand and holds it properly in his.

  “Your turn,” he says. Our fingers lock into place, and my mind goes blank. I turn to face him, and I look into his eyes, which are brown like mine, but a more interesting brown. With depth and flecks of gold and a burning black center. Curious eyes.

  “I don’t know,” I say, and before I need to be clever and come up with my own list, which if I was going to be honest—and despite my full-disclosure tendencies, I wasn’t going to be—would be topped with I like you too much, Levi leans across the seat and kisses me.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Now

  My new lawyer, Mr. Lowe, shakes my hand and insists I call him Kenny, which is a kid’s name on a cartoon, not a professional’s. He comes armed with a legal pad but nothing else—no laptops like the legal team my parents have assembled—and asks to borrow a pen, since he left his in the car. I think of Linda, my SAT tutor, and how she complimented me on always remembering my pencils.

  This is not a reassuring start.

  We’re meeting in my dad’s office—and I’ve told Kenny nothing more than my birthday—when shouting erupts in the living room.

  “Are you kidding me? No. Just no!” my mom screams, hysteria in her voice, and so Kenny flips over his pad and we both get up to see what’s happening. My mom’s lawyers are assembled in a row on the couch, and despite their suits, they look like seventh graders waiting to get yelled at by the high school principal. Paloma stands near the fireplace, and for once the buds are out of her ears. She hugs a clipboard, and something about the way she holds it like a shield reminds me of the FBI’s bulletproof vests. I feel a deep unsettling in my bones.

  My father runs into the room at the same moment we do, though he comes from the kitchen and he’s double-fisting pastries. Apparently, we’re all turning to carbs in this time of crisis. Isla claimed she saw my mother eating a bagel with cream cheese yesterday, and not the Tofutti stuff, but strawberry flavored. An actual bagel with what my mom would call, with disgust, “sugar-cheese.” But I won’t believe that until I see it with my own eyes.

  “What’s wrong? What’s happening?” my dad asks me, and then looks over at Kenny. “Who’s he?”

  “My lawyer,” I say, and my dad nods at me, like this is completely reasonable, the fact that I have my own legal counsel. “Isla’s idea.”

  “Smart,” he says.

  My mom sits on her knees in the middle of the living room, her hands in her hair. This can’t be about the case, because everyone keeps saying we need to wait, that these things move slowly—we’re still months, maybe even years, away from any potential trial. I know things are dire, but I find myself unsympathetic. At the moment, I have little patience for her theatrics or her self-pity.

  “Joy, what’s happening? Are you okay?” my dad asks, approaching her slowly, hands at his sides.

  “They fired me,” she says, and looks to my father, like he’s the only person in the room. Unlike what many of my classmates seem to report about their own moms and dads (or moms and moms and dads and dads), my parents are, after twenty years of marriage, still solid. They bicker, obviously: My mom wishes my dad exercised more, my dad wishes my mom would look at her phone less, and they both think the other works too much. But most of the time, they truly seem like best friends in love. They kiss and go out on dates, and sometimes, late at night, I can hear them laughing as they stream a silly movie on the projector screen in their bedroom. I’d find it all icky, except I’ve seen the flip side with friends—weekends in different houses, testifying in court about who you want to live with, fights over child support payments—so I feel grateful that I’ve never once worried my parents would get divorced. Until now, we’ve been immune to that kind of misfortune.

  “They all fired me. Blood Moon. That Biogurt commercial that was going to run in Japan. My agent said even Lifetime is shelving that ripped-from-the-headlines-murder-y thing. Twenty years of steady work, and poof! It’s all gone.”

  “What about the—” My dad looks at the assembled lawyers and remembers that the resurrection of My Dad, My Pops, and Me by Netflix is still a carefully guarded industry secret. They haven’t announced to the trades yet.

  “They’re writing Missy off. It’s over,” my mom says, and dissolves into tears all over again, which is how my mother cries, both in real life and onscreen. In discrete outbursts. My dad takes her into his arms and she clutches his shirt, twisting it in her fingers, the same wa
y she did to her television husband on Blood Moon when he drank the potion that would reverse his immortality.

  “Don’t worry. We can turn this around,” Paloma offers, and as much as I’ve always resented how much of a hand she’s had in our lives, how there have been so few public family moments that haven’t been in some way curated or manufactured by Paloma, I can’t help but admire her fearlessness. I’d be too scared to interrupt this performance. “The crisis folks are landing tonight. They’ve already sent over their initial plans. We’ll get through this. I promise.”

  “Listen to Paloma. She’s never steered us wrong,” my dad says, though I catch his eye over my mom’s head and I know we’re both thinking of that time not too long ago when Paloma suggested that my mother not dispute some tabloid cancer rumors, even though she was perfectly healthy. Why not garner some temporary goodwill in the run-up to the reunion? I’m not saying lie; I’m saying do the I ask for privacy during this difficult time thing and we’ll tip off some paparazzi to take a picture of you with a head wrap.

  That was one step too far, even for my mom—you don’t tempt the gods with fake cancer, which would be like pinning it to a vision board. But as we sit here with seven lawyers and my mother facing actual prison time, I start to think about all the small moral compromises we’ve made over the years. Not this college admissions stuff. I’m thinking of the million tiny fibs we told without blinking: how we aged my mother down five years, how we pretend she makes and eats pancakes for interviews, how we gush about my mom and Hudson’s closeness despite their being step-related.

  We’ve long assumed the actual truth isn’t relevant.

  That’s a publicist’s job, after all. To misdirect the public, allow them to believe we are better people than we actually are. I think of that photograph in my dad’s office again. That it is, or was, us too. I think about how far we’ve strayed from that image of perfection.

  “Right,” my mom says, gathering herself and standing up. She nods at the line of lawyers, suddenly businesslike, as if her outburst never happened, as if she can erase it from our minds, Men in Black style. She has switched modes, like a director has yelled from off-set, This time try it strong and proud. “The crisis folks will fix this.”

  “Reputation rehabilitation. They do it all the time,” Paloma says. “Look at Martha Stewart. She had a reality show with Snoop Dogg.”

  My mother winces. She resents Martha Stewart because back in the early aughts, Martha’s postarrest exclusive People magazine interview bumped my mom’s long-in-the-works Missy cover story. I wonder, idly, if my mother will get her own cover now.

  Is this the cycle of celebrity life?

  Kenny leans down to whisper in my ear, “Don’t worry. We can hire crisis PR for you too.”

  “No way,” I say. I’m tired of the petty lies and the spin. I never wanted to be part of the sort of family who fakes a disability to be first on Space Mountain. “I don’t want one.”

  “Google yourself,” he says. “Then we’ll talk.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Then

  I come home with sand in my hair and lips bruised from too much kissing. I’m what would come up if you did a Google Images search for the word tousled. But actually, there’s no such thing as too much kissing. That’s what I learned tonight. Not when you’re with the guy you’ve had a crush on for half your life and he takes you to a beach in Malibu to eat cheese and baguette on a picnic blanket while you watch the sun dip below the corners of the earth. My hands smell like Brie—Levi forgot a knife, so we resorted to using our fingers—and salt and boy hair wax, and if I could choose a night to live forever and ever, on repeat, it would no doubt be this one.

  We didn’t do more than kiss. Levi didn’t even fumble for my bra clasp. It was like we mutually agreed without saying so that this was the beginning of something real and neither of us was in any rush. We’d have plenty of time for all that later.

  I head to the kitchen to get a glass of water—that much kissing, apparently, makes you thirsty—while simultaneously texting Shola (Omg, Omg, OMG, OMG!!!!!!), so I jump when I see my mom sitting at the banquette in the corner in the dark. Her hair is pulled back with a silk wrap so her blowout doesn’t get ruined, her face is bare, and she’s wearing one of my old Wood Valley sweatshirts with matching sweatpants. The blue under her eyes is bright despite the fact that she’s had the blood vessels shrunk with a laser, and I decide this is my favorite of her looks, even though it doesn’t appear in the book her stylist made. If I were to label it, I’d call it Home. Or maybe Mom.

  “You scared me!” I say, hand to my chest, a senseless reflex, as if my cupped palm alone could keep my heart inside my body. “Were you waiting up?”

  “Your dad went to bed early, and I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d hear how it all went.” My mom has a glass of white wine in front of her, and she sips from it. She’s not much of a drinker, because alcohol has calories, though she claims she likes the ritual. The unwinding that happens when your fingers wrap around a stem.

  I glance at the clock. It’s 11:57.

  “Three minutes till curfew.”

  My mom taps the bench, and I pour myself some water and sit down beside her, so close our arms touch. I’m actually bursting to talk about what happened.

  “I wasn’t watching the clock. I trust you. So?” my mom asks, and I rest my head on her shoulder, grinning. “That good, huh?”

  “Amazing,” I say. “Best night of my life.”

  My mom smiles too, and I watch as my joy fills her up like a balloon. My happiness is her happiness. This is one of those things about parenthood, or perhaps only motherhood, I don’t understand. I mean, I get why she’d be happy for me, but she’s not happy for me. She’s happy because of me. This feels not unlike one of those SAT logic games, the who ends up with what at the end of the day when everything is dished out in a long series of hypotheticals, though I imagine happiness is not finite or tangible. It’s a feeling, not pizza slices.

  “Tell me everything,” she says, so I do, or most of it, anyway. There are a few details I save, because I guess that’s part of growing up. Allowing some bits of ourselves to not be shared with our parents. I don’t tell her that when he drew my body closer to his, I shuddered with joy.

  I tell her about the kissing, though, because my mom, between television seasons, used to make her living making movies about magical kisses at Christmastime, and now, between television seasons, makes movies about magical kisses at Christmastime, though instead of playing the woman getting kissed, she plays her mom. Which is to say, she’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

  “It was so great, I’m not even worried about whether he’ll still be into me tomorrow.”

  “Of course he’ll still be into you. What’s there not to like?”

  “Mom,” I say.

  “Okay, fine. I’m biased. You are my favorite person in the world.” My mom says this all the time, though she says the same thing to Isla.

  “What about Dad?” I follow our script.

  “A very, very close second,” she says, pinching her fingers together, as she always does. Do all families have these sorts of inside jokes? I wonder. Once, when Isla was about four, she sat up in the middle of the night, and apropos of nothing screamed, “Lizard breath!” And so even now, every so often, one of us will shout “Lizard breath!” at random and we’ll crack up.

  “Levi Haas, Mom,” I say, because I still can’t quite believe what has happened tonight. How much my life has transformed. “Levi. Haas.”

  “I bet he’s sitting in his kitchen right this minute with his mom saying Chloe. Berringer.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, then that’s only because his mom isn’t as cool as I am. Not because he’s not thinking it.”

  “His mom is definitely not as cool as you are.” Levi’s
mom looks like the kind of wide-hipped and frizzy-haired mother who packs lunches and chaperones field trips. She doesn’t tell stories about the time when she was twenty-two and she almost had sex with Mick Jagger at a club in New York. To be fair, neither does my mother, but that’s because Aunt Candy tells them for her. Apparently, Mick passed out on her halfway through, and my mom had to yell for a security guard to help lift him off. Afterward my mom looked Candy straight in the eye and said, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” and then the two of them laughed so hard they cried.

  I don’t want to make assumptions about Levi’s mom, but I’m 99 percent sure she’s never even come close to sleeping with a rock star.

  “Next time you speak to Levi, let him know that if he decides to break my little girl’s heart, I will break his legs,” my mom says, and ruffles my hair.

  “I’m sure Aunt Candy knows a guy.”

  “We don’t need a guy for that. I’d do it myself. Don’t forget, I take kickboxing.”

  “You do have serious biceps,” I say, and I glance at my mother.

  “I would kill for you and your sister. With my bare hands if I had to.”

  “Don’t be creepy,” I say.

  “I’m serious. I’d do anything for you, sweet pea.”

  “Please don’t, you know, resort to murder, though.”

  “You never know,” she says, and flexes her arm muscles.

  Shola: OMG

  Me: OMG

  Shola: OMG OMG OMG

  Me: RIGHT? Right. I think I might be in love. Like for real.

  Shola: I don’t know. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves

  Me: The way he looked at me. I mean I’ve never had anyone look at me like that