Me: Love you too you big nerd
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Now
Five days after my mom is arrested, the first encrypted group text arrives via Signal, an app Isla downloaded to our new cells. She says it’s a less dangerous, more private way to communicate, and so this is how she and I talk when not face to face. Through software used by spies and terrorists.
Kenny agreed that this was a smart precaution. We don’t want to risk hacking or wiretaps.
I still don’t quite understand how it has come to this: that I have my own lawyer, that he didn’t think it paranoid or ridiculous to imagine that my phone could be compromised, that criminal charges against me are still entirely possible. That I receive encrypted messages from other kids targeted by the FBI.
The first one arrives with a mellow bloop, and there it is: my first introduction to my co-scandalees.
PhinnyB: Welcome to this fully encrypted group text chain for those of us I could locate who are also caught up in this thing. RULES: Do not show your parents. Or lawyers. Delete each message after reading. Leaks will not be tolerated. No discussion of legal strategy. OK? I figured we could all use a friend to vent to
ALC: Did you guys know?
Slyse: No idea. I feel so stupid
ALC: Me too. My twin sister knew I think, but I didn’t. How screwed up is that? We’re 17 by the way. In the clear, probs. Delete this
Slyse: I heard they sent target letters to some of the kids. Is that true? Can anyone confirm?
PhinnyB: Yup. Got one. I’m 20
ALC: I’m not allowed to talk to my mom. Like it’s currently court ordered that we can’t talk about the case
Slyse: I never want to talk to my parents again
PrettyPen: This is a nightmare. I keep waiting to wake up. I can’t go back to school. It’s humiliating
TheIgster: I think they’re going to kick me out. I guess it doesn’t matter. My grades are dogshit anyway
PhinnyB: Ig, you in college too, bro?
TheIgster: Sophomore. Yale
PhinnyB: SCC junior. We’re so screwed
After the first text breaks the seal, the messages come in fast, one after the other, so quickly, I can barely keep up. Is this legal?
I scan the handles in the group and it’s not hard to trace each of them to the complaint, which I finally read yesterday, peeping through the fingers I held over my eyes. Reading it gave me one specific sort of rare victory—it felt exactly as bad as I had anticipated.
PhinnyB is Phinneas Black III, the heir to the KetoBagel fortune; ALC is Apple Lennon Chesterford, whose dad is the head litigator at a large New York Law firm and whose mom is a well-known health influencer; Slyse is Sly Sanderson, whose mother runs a hedge fund in Connecticut (dad unmentioned); TheIgster is Igancious Smith Wollingham IV, who is the son of two real estate developers in the Bay Area; and PrettyPen is Penelope Grace Giffords, whose mom is a famous supermodel married to an ibanker. Usually Penelope goes by Penny Grace. She posts makeup tutorials on YouTube that Isla and her friends like to watch.
ALC: I can’t imagine my mom going to jail. She’s vegan and only wears organic fabrics and has, like, a zillion allergies. Do they accommodate that stuff in jail? I mean she needs a special pillow at hotels or her eyes get puffy
I decide to jump in. I’ll stay away from the topics Kenny warned me not to talk about. No confessions. No details about what happened last fall. But maybe this can help me, a support group of sorts, the opportunity to find safety in numbers. They are the only people in the world who understand what I’m going through, how it feels.
Yesterday, I sent Shola a text from my new phone.
Only five words: I’m scared. I miss you. Chlo
She hasn’t written back.
I try to shake off that sickening hum of terror, the unfolding of my dirty crevices of guilt, the words that play on repeat in my brain: Well, you got what you deserved.
Me: NO ONE is going to jail
PhinnyB: Welcome Missy’s kid! I feel like you might have this worst of all
Me: Umm, thanks?
PhinnyB: I meant the paparazzi. Every five minutes I get a news alert about your mom. By the way, it took mega-balls to wear that SCC shirt when she was arrested. Nice one
Me: An accident
ALC: Your parents didn’t sit you down the night before?
Me: ?
ALC: Apparently the feds gave advanced warning or something to everyone. I swear when my parents told me, it was like learning there was no Santa Claus. They were like—it’s about to get real, buckle up. And I was like, Mom, stop talking like your Twitter feed
Well, at least one thing is explained. Why my mother seemed to be expecting eight FBI agents at our door that morning, though clearly she assumed they’d be fashionably late. My fear, a sticky thing, a constant sheen on my skin, turns rancid and transforms into a burgeoning rage. I feel the prickle of sweat at all my pressure points.
How come my parents didn’t warn me? Is it that they didn’t trust me? Or they assumed I was too brainless to understand?
PrettyPen: I didn’t even want to go to college. My parents made me apply
TheIgster: You really think no one is going to jail?
PhinnyB: I think they’re all going. Every last one of them. But only the adults
ALC: Me too
TheIgster: YOU are an adult, Phin
PhinnyB: Nah man, like a real adult. We were kids following along with our parents. We had no choice. No one wants to see us go to jail
TheIgster: Hope you’re right
PhinnyB: I hate to say it but I think people want to see Missy in stripes tho
Me: I’m out
PhinnyB: Wait, come back. Just being honest. Sorry
Me: I get enough crap already. I don’t need it here
ALC: I don’t think he was trying to give you crap. I think he was saying this is all a pr disaster and people are like, super obsessed and mad. So much madder than I would have guessed they’d be. Like people pay to get into college all the time. They build buildings and endow departments. Why is this any different?
Slyse: And your mom is famous, so…
TheIgster: I don’t even understand how this is illegal. How could this be mail fraud if no one sent anything through the mail? I don’t even know HOW to send a letter
PhinnyB: Seriously, I’m sorry, Chloe
PrettyPen: Hey will you guys hit up my Insta page? I’m losing followers by the minute
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Then
Levi holds my hand as he walks me to my locker. It’s casual, a loose link, like we’re not trying to make a big fuss.
“We need to celebrate your new score,” Levi says, and bumps my hip with his. Every time he touches me, I can hear the tiniest click in my mind: it’s me taking a picture to capture the moment so I can savor it later like I’m my own paparazzo. “I have a student council meeting after school and then tennis and an AP physics quiz tomorrow. So crap, we won’t be able to do it today.”
“Remember when they promised us that senior year we’d get to coast?” I say.
“I don’t know who they are, but they definitely lied.”
“The patriarchy. A bunch of lying liars who lie,” I say, which doesn’t even make sense, but Levi laughs anyway.
“I can’t even think about coasting until I have an acceptance letter in hand, and even then, did you know they can rescind it if you don’t keep up your grades?” Levi asks.
“The patriarchy can rescind your college admissions?”
“You just like saying the word patriarchy.”
“I also like the words onomatopoeia and solipsistic. Those are my top three, I think. Ooh, and rabble-rouser,” I say, but he doesn’t take the banter-bait.
“Can you imagine you finally get into your dream school, and they’re like, ‘Nope, sorry, we changed our minds because you blew that math test’?” Levi’s getting into Harvard, just like Shola. He’s never blown an exam in his entire life. The more time we spend together, the more I realize that that which he has always made seem effortless is not effortless at all. This boy likes to work.
When he rubs his eyes, that habit that unravels my insides every time, it’s because he’s exhausted. I actually feel a weird relief in seeing all of the effort behind his success. It gives me an easier, albeit still uncomfortable explanation for my being toward the bottom of my class.
Watching Levi, I consider for the first time that maybe I’m not not-smart, I’m lazy.
I think about his Nope, sorry, we changed our minds, and I wonder if that will happen here, between us. He’ll rescind this hand-holding and the kissing, and for me, he’ll turn out to be another overreach. My heart will be destroyed in all its onomatopoeic glory: blam, splat, kapow.
“When you send in your acceptance, just say no backsies. It works for the cooties.” I throw my books into my locker, and Levi laughs again and brushes his lips against my cheek. If kisses could talk, this one would say: I enjoy you. And if it wasn’t weird, I’d say: Please don’t stop.
“No backsies,” he says.
“Chloe Berringer, report to Mrs. Oh. Chloe Berringer, report to Mrs. Oh,” the office receptionist announces over the loudspeaker, interrupting our moment.
My stomach clenches. Of course, I already know what’s to come. Mrs. Oh will sit me down in her office and will make official what I already suspect: the College Board screwed up my results. I did not get a 1440. Moron status reconfirmed.
I think about my parents’ inevitable disappointment. Crap. This morning, my mom ran around the house chanting SCC! SCC! SCC! despite the fact that even with these new scores, it’s still a big long shot.
“Uh-oh,” I say.
“I’m sure it’s nothing.” Levi kisses my cheek a second time, like he can’t resist, and I melt, despite the anxiety surging through my veins. “Okay, got to get to class. But: Saturday. You, me, celebratory tacos.”
“No backsies,” I call after him, and then for no reason at all, maybe because it’s my default factory setting, as soon as the words are out, I feel like an idiot.
* * *
—
I sprint to Mrs. Oh’s office. If my entire future is about to unravel, let’s rip this Band-Aid off fast.
“Chloe,” Mrs. Oh says, and I can’t read her face. She’s in her thirties, and wears tortoise-shell glasses and wide-legged linen pants. Something bulges from her chest, and it takes me a minute to understand: she’s holding a sleeping infant in a sling. She sways side to side. “Come sit down. I’m going to stand and rock and pat. It’s a whole routine and we don’t want to wake the little monster.”
“I don’t know how this happened,” I say, fumbling, because how do you say, Well, it was fun while it lasted. Back to Planet Mediocre? Mrs. Oh smiles at me, puts a comforting hand on my shoulder, and then goes back to her rocking.
“I wanted to congratulate you,” she says.
I’m unable to stop my right leg from bouncing up and down, a nervous habit that drives my mother bananas when we go to restaurants. “Stop that jackhammering,” she’ll say in a whisper under her breath, because of course she can’t yell at me in public. And I’ll stop, until ten minutes later, when she puts her hand on my knee and I realize I’m doing it all over again.
Maybe my shaking leg is how I got an accommodation. Maybe not everyone has so much constant, nervous, unfocused energy. Maybe I’m not lazy, I’m wired.
I wonder if I will accidentally wake the baby. I can’t see its face, but a puff of black hair sprouts out from Mrs. Oh’s elbow, like she’s sporting a Troll doll.
“Fourteen forty. A two-hundred-forty-point increase is practically unheard of. I love seeing hard work pay off,” Mrs. Oh says. She opens my file with her free hand. It’s all spread out on the desk—my grades, my extracurriculars (even a photo of Cesar), my scant AP classes (I took world history because it has the highest pass rate), and these scores. All my measurements taken and then used to determine whether or not I am worthy of a particular brand of future.
“Do you think? I mean, could there be some mistake?” I ask.
Mrs. Oh peers at me for a moment with a bizarre intensity, and then as if coming to some sort of decision, she throws her head back and laughs.
“I wasn’t kidding,” I say.
“Chloe, you did it. You worked your ass off—pardon my French, little monster,” she mutters to the baby. “And you did it. The College Board has never once, at least since I’ve been doing this job, had a mix-up.”
“I guessed on a few questions.” I don’t confess to how many. I don’t make clear the reason that this score report feels like an impossibility is because I’m pretty sure it is one. Or if not impossible, then magical. I’ve never been good at probability, but I’d put me guessing my way into a 1440 at similar odds to my winning the Powerball.
Then again, people do win the lottery sometimes. And when they do, they don’t call it a mistake; they call it luck.
“Well, either you guessed correctly or got enough of the other questions right. I wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, sweetheart,” Mrs. Oh says. Hearing that expression for the second time this morning makes it no less annoying.
“Right.”
“I’ve been looking over that original list of schools we discussed last month. Now listen, I’m not going to lie to you. I think most are still a reach, but before I thought you’d be wasting the application fee even trying. Now I think it’s worth going for them.”
The baby starts to stir, so Mrs. Oh increases her rocking. It had never occurred to me that Mrs. Oh could be a mom. Then again, I never think of my teachers’ outside-of-school lives. It’s like they cease to exist as soon as I leave the Wood Valley front doors.
“So you think I could get into a place like SCC?”
“Who knows? At a certain point, it’s all a crapshoot. You’re not a legacy, right?”
“No.”
“Well, that would have helped.”
“You can say I won’t get in. It won’t hurt my feelings. I think my parents are being unrealistic,” I admit.
“Listen, are you the strongest candidate from Wood Valley who has SCC on their list? Of course not. It’s a super-popular school among our student body, and your grades aren’t stellar. But do I think you should still apply and cross your fingers? Yeah, why not? Maybe they’ll take more of us this year. Maybe they’re fans of My Dad, My Pops, and Me, or they’ll think your parents could one day be generous donors. There are all sorts of calculations here that we’re not privy to.”
I feel the ickiness I always feel when anyone suggests I might be treated differently because of my parents, like there’s no such thing as my earning something on my own. And then I tell myself I don’t care. If my mom starring on a sitcom in the early aughts is what pushes some admissions person over the edge, so be it.
I am Joy Fields’s daughter.
It’s not like it’s a lie.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Now
“Why are you keeping me locked up?” Isla asks. “If you hadn’t noticed, I wasn’t the one who got arrested around here.” We’re in the kitchen at seven a.m., the only chance to talk to our parents before the army of suited professionals arrive. They come hungry and mean, like a zombie apocalypse.
We’ve been home from school for an entire week, and Isla’s itching to get back to Wood Valley. When she’s not reading legal blogs, she catches up on homework and reads the day’s class notes, which she gets emailed daily by her friends. I, on the other hand, haven’t cracked open a book. I don’t see the point.
; I’ve sent Shola more texts, and Levi, too, and each time I hit send, I feel an irrational surge of hope that never gets rewarded.
After this, the day will turn its attention to the grinding bureaucracy of our lives falling apart: meetings and phone calls and referrals and PowerPoint presentations. The PR and crisis folks and the lawyers will jockey for my mother’s attention, a constant tug-of-war from the living room to the dining room. PR almost always wins. My mom feels way more comfortable debating the merits of a People magazine cover interview vs. a tell-all exclusive with 20/20 than facing her legal situation.
She doesn’t want to learn about mandatory federal prison guidelines.
When the lawyers insist she sit down and listen, she cries weird silent tears that fall down her face in perfect straight lines.
“I can’t deal with this,” my mom says, which has become a frequent refrain in this house, and one I understand. She reaches for the bottle of Xanax, which now lives on the kitchen counter for easy access. Before, it lived in my mother’s medicine cabinet, the pills only making a sly appearance in her silver engraved pill case for long-haul flights.
Every day, the trouble grows with a terrifying momentum. My mom has been fired. My dad has a meeting with his board of directors next week, when he too is likely to lose his position. There’s talk of a $800 billion class-action lawsuit, a sum so outrageous, my father actually laughed when the lawyers mentioned the possibility. Hudson has been MIA doing God knows what, and we pretend not to be worried about him. We pretend not to think that he might be the other shoe that’s about to drop. We’ve canceled our trip to Mexico to celebrate my mom’s fiftieth birthday, since she had to surrender her passport as a condition of her bail.
I don’t care about the vacation, but I do think about her passport. I heard my parents murmuring about an account in the Cayman Islands, how maybe they could come up with a plan to leave the country if it became absolutely necessary. I’ve always liked Zurich, my mom said.
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