Admission

by Julie Buxbaum

  “When you did this, when you lied and cheated and scammed, did you for one single second think about what was going to happen to me when this all came crashing down? How this would ruin my life too? I’ve done every single thing right. Gave you a million silly awards for you to brag about. I’m fluent in Mandarin, for God’s sake, even though I really wanted to focus on Spanish. I was on track to run for president of the school next year, but nope, not going to happen. Now I’m lucky when I can get through the afternoon without getting bodychecked by some idiot who got rejected from SCC.” Isla, my robot sister, who’s always so self-contained and practical, who puts her head down and follows the bread crumbs her teachers leave for her until the early hours of every morning, shouts while tears stream down her cheeks. “I know what you’re going to say. This isn’t about you, Isla. You’re not the one who might go to prison. Why do you have to make everything about you, Isla? But you know what? I’m part of this family too, even if no one else seems to notice.”

  My mom looks at Isla and her mouth hangs open. Isla looks back at her, waiting for something—an apology, a hug, an explanation. Anything. They’ve had blowups before, obviously. No mother and daughter, especially ones as stubborn as these two, make it through the teen years without their fair share of screaming matches. But usually they fight over silly things—a tone of voice, Isla’s rejection of all things vegetable, Isla not getting enough sleep—and they recover quickly.

  My mom picks up Fluffernutter, places him back in her lap. She leans her head back against the couch and says nothing. But instead of grabbing her end of the argument so they can shake it out in all its epic glory, she stays there, too still. I think about Isla and me as kids, how we’d squeeze our eyes shut and put our fingers in our ears and say “lalalalala” when we didn’t want to hear what the other was saying.

  “Isl,” I say, and then she turns to me, eyes ablaze. A feral animal stuck in a trap. As if she’s realizing that no matter how much a stink she raises, she’s never getting out of this family.

  Isla is strong and smart and will be fine, by every definition of the word, and this, it turns out, might be the thing that unravels her. Because I know we’ll continue to take her competence for granted, we’ll continue to take comfort in the fact that she doesn’t need us, we’ll continue to allow her to never be satisfied with something as small as fine.

  She’s not me or Hudson. We’re the ones who have continually proven to need special tending.

  “What, Chlo? What?” she asks.

  Still it’s not fair for us to see how far we can bend her till she breaks.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and reach out to touch her, but she steps backward. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “I know you are,” she says, and walks away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Then

  Shola: The Littles rocked the ISEE!

  Me: YAYYYY!!!!!!!! All test practice with them paid off! You’re Teacher of the Year!

  Shola: I’m so relieved. You don’t even know. I haven’t slept in like a week

  Me: Watch out Wood Valley! Here come the Littles!

  Shola: Don’t jinx it! They still have to get in with scholarships

  Me: THEY WILL!

  Shola: We need so much admissions mojo right now. I honestly think I’m more worried about them than me

  Me: You’re such a better big sister than I am

  Shola: Yeah you’re right. I rock

  Me: You coming over today?

  Shola: I wish. Still have to help my parents. They had so much food leftover they invited everyone over again today for Thanksgiving 2.0

  Me: Come on. I’ll pull out the unicorn float

  Shola: Don’t tempt me with the unicorn. You know how much I love that thing

  Me: You love it more than you love me

  Shola: You come in a close second tho. Your dad comes in third

  Me: SHOLA

  Me: Please come over. Levi’s boarding in Vail. Argh, I’m so mad we didn’t go away this year. I’m soooo bored. I don’t want to have to swim alone

  Shola: Tough life you have C

  * * *

  —

  “Read a book for once,” Isla says when she comes into the playroom and sees that I’m still playing Xbox. My essay is in, the SAT nightmare is over, my boyfriend (I really, really like that word) is away—I’m allowed to kick back, guilt free.

  She flops down on the couch with a giant bag of potato chips—contraband in this house—and opens up a fat novel. “Nerd,” I say.

  “Do you think the My Dad, My Pops, and Me reboot is going to get picked up?” Isla asks. She puts her book down, and I see the title, Crime and Punishment. She’s reading my homework for funsies.

  “Probably. Why?” I ask. I can’t remember the last time I voluntarily spent a night at home with Isla, but I do that constant math that seems to follow me everywhere these days: only six months left of the two of us living under the same roof, and then probably never again for the rest of our lives, so I pause my game to sit with her.

  “Is it wrong that I kind of don’t want it to?”

  “It’s what Mom wants, so yeah, I guess,” I say, surprised. The reboot is definitely a good thing—it could kick my mother up a notch, move her from B list to, well, B+. I’m proud of my mom’s success, even if other people denigrate her work as fluff just because it’s targeted to girls. (I’ve noticed that no one seems to crap all over the men who star in action movies.) Also it’s not easy to sustain a career in Hollywood like she has, especially when you’re an aging woman.

  “I feel like, I dunno, and you probably won’t understand this, because you two are besties so it’s different for you, but I mean, she hasn’t even asked how junior year has been going.” We never talk about the fact that I am closer to our mom and she’s closer to our dad. I will not insult her by pretending I don’t know what she means. I nod. “Still, this is it. The most important year of high school and she’s totally checked out.”

  “Come on. You’re Isla. You’re acing all of your classes and kicking Wood Valley ass.” I wonder if my mom and Isla aren’t as close because my mom has decided that Isla is like one of those low-maintenance plants. The more you tinker, the more you mess her up.

  “Still,” she says, and so I pat my little sister’s head, like she’s Fluffernutter.

  “Sorry, dude. Your success gets tedious. But fine, I’ll bite. How’s junior year been going for you?” I wonder if maybe for the first time my sister could be struggling. Did school suddenly get hard for her like it did for me? I was fine in seventh grade and even mostly in eighth, and then in ninth I started to sink under the weight of all that homework and expectation. I became resentful that every choice I made—classes, sports, extracurriculars, even summer break—was tied not to what I enjoyed the most, but to what everyone thought would look best on a résumé. And I can’t even blame my parents. It was everyone. Activities turned professional and hardcore. Dabbling was no longer allowed. No more being bad at stuff and doing it anyway just for fun.

  “Kicking Wood Valley ass, of course,” she says, smiling. “Like you have no idea. My advisor wants me to consider adding an extra AP to my schedule.”

  “I hate you,” I say, and she shrugs, like It’s all in a day’s work.

  “Seriously, though, you really don’t think things have gotten a bit out of control here lately? Like a little gross?” Isla asks.

  She waves a hand, and so I look around to see what she could be talking about. The pool guy outside skims leaves. My dad practices his golf swing in the backyard. My mom is at Dr. Roth’s, her second home, getting a laser peel.

  “I’m not following,” I say.

  “Your sneakers came predirtied and cost like eight hundred dollars.”

  “Your point?” I ask. Dad calls Isla “our goo
d little liberal” because she’s always making us recycle and bought us water bottles made of cork with aluminum straws, and last year, when we flew on Aunt Candy’s private jet that one time, she tried to convince my parents to offset the environmental damage with carbon credits. She gets into arguments with my dad all the time about the need for affordable housing in Los Angeles and calls him a NIMBY-ist, which was a term I had to look up. Apparently, it stands for Not In My Backyard and means that you are pro-liberal ideas, except when they directly impact you or your house or your wallet. To be fair, she nailed him.

  “That’s a lot of money. A lot of families in the United States don’t even have eight hundred dollars in their bank account. I bet Cesar’s family doesn’t.”

  I groan, because this is a low blow, bringing up Cesar. I examine my sneakers.

  “They aren’t predirtied. They’re strategically dirtied, which is a whole different thing.”

  “Also, you don’t have ADHD, Chloe.”

  Here’s what this is all about. Not my Golden Goose sneakers. That was only the appetizer, her opening segue. My stomach knots up, and I feel my face redden. Of course, even though I never specifically told her about my accommodation, Isla lives in this house and so has overheard me and my parents endlessly discussing the SAT. I guess there was no way to keep it a secret at home.

  I tell myself I have nothing to be ashamed of. A doctor diagnosed me.

  “A doctor diagnosed me,” I say, but it comes out too practiced, too defensive, like I said it in my head first.

  “Right,” she says. “Listen, I’m glad you did great. Seriously, I am. But—”

  “But what? It’s really none of your business anyway.” Isla took the PSAT last year and she scored so high that had it counted, she’d be a National Merit Scholar. Still, she’ll be putting her hours in with Linda soon, learning the tricks to aim for a straight 1600.

  Isla picks up her book again, as if she’s done talking about this. And then she looks at me, square in the eyes, like she’s lining up a shot: “Did you tell Shola about your accommodation?”

  Another low blow. My sister has terrific aim.

  “Why would I?”

  “I don’t know. Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Because,” I say.

  “Well, I think it’s generally a good policy never to do anything that you’re too ashamed to tell your best friend,” she says, and I take a deep breath while I let the urge to punch her in her smug face pass. “Or, you know, your sister.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Now

  Paloma decides it’s time for me and my mom to leave the house. She’s not worried about our mental health, even though sometimes at night, my mother and I pass each other wandering around upstairs, restless and hollow-eyed, eye masks tented on our foreheads. The Beverly Hills version of the undead. During the day, we do much the same, except our route stretches between the kitchen and the playroom and our eye masks are discreetly packed back in our nightstands.

  Eight other parents have pled guilty to their charges, and each made the sort of impassioned apologies Mr. Spence recommended. Every time another person folds, my mom’s bargaining position weakens. Paloma and the PR team have concluded that we need to switch the media narrative.

  Even my Signal group has gone quiet now that we find ourselves in different boats, or maybe I’ve been dropped the way they dropped Penny. My mom is not the sole holdout, but she’s by far the most visible.

  “What do you think? You guys could shop at Erewhon for salads? Go to a yoga class? Get juice? How do you want to play this?” Paloma asks. We are in the kitchen, which is the room I spend the least amount of time in these days, because there’s always a man in a suit loitering around the giant coffee urn and pastries, talking too loudly on his cell.

  I don’t like to be near the lawyers. I always get the sense they’re sizing me up, wondering how I could be so dim as to need to cheat to get into college. It’s not like SCC is an Ivy, I heard one mumble once into his phone. I mean, then I might get it. But SCC, man, really? That guy was wearing crimson socks decorated with tiny Harvard emblems, and I realized you could tell a lot about a man from his ankles too.

  “What do you think, sweet pea?” my mom asks. She’s leaning on her elbows on the kitchen island, as if she can’t hold herself up on her own.

  “You okay, Mom?” I ask.

  “What? Yeah. Just tired,” she says. “Don’t worry. I surrendered the Xanax to Dad to dose out more reasonably. I know I was getting a little Valley of the Dolls.”

  “Maybe we should go to a yoga class to relax? But then everyone will look at us,” I say.

  “That’s the point. We want people to look at you. We’re going to tip off the paparazzi,” Paloma says, getting that grin she always gets whenever she says the word paparazzi. Like it turns her on.

  “I still don’t understand the point of this,” I say. I asked Kenny whether it was okay if I left the house with my mother and he said, “Sure, spend time together while you can.” After we hung up, my dad said, “Twenty bucks he bills you for that phone call.”

  My dad talks a lot about billable hours now—it’s his fallback conversation; he uses it the same way he used to babble about his last golf game. Both are equally uninteresting. From what I can gather, his annoyance about the cost of all this is not based on real concerns about our finances. Even with both of my parents out of work and mounting legal bills, we have a long way to go before we need to start worrying about money. My dad sat Isla and me down to reassure us about all of this when he agreed to step down from his firm, as if our concern about our depleted trust funds was the thing keeping us up at night. Truth be told, I hadn’t really thought about it, being much more concerned with the whole “my mom and I potentially going to prison thing.”

  “The point is that for six weeks the headlines have been saying”—Paloma points at me with one of her pink fingernails and puts on a monotonous, newscaster voice—“Pimpleton Von Wildenstern the Eighth has pleaded guilty to charges in the college admissions scandal that has rocked the nation. Meanwhile, Joy Fields, known for her longtime stint on My Dad, My Pops, and Me, continues to roll the legal dice despite mounting evidence against—”

  “Enough,” my mom says. “We get it. Yoga. We’ll do yoga.”

  Paloma puts a finger to her ear, like she’s Secret Service, voice dropped low and serious. “Scheduling it.”

  * * *

  —

  Twenty-four hours later, after my mom has had her makeup and hair done—all so it looks like she’s wearing no makeup and that her hair was casually thrown back into that perfect ponytail—we find ourselves doing the downward dog at eleven-thirty in the morning. Paloma wants my mom to seem easy, breezy, all calm, cool, and collected. Like she’s confident she’ll beat the charge. I turned down my mom’s offer of a blowout and instead am going au naturel. I’m tired of the world thinking I’m a spoiled, entitled brat, though come to think of it, not sure the image of me looking sweaty in front of 9021-OM will help matters much.

  When I come downstairs, though, Paloma sends me right up to change.

  “Stripes are not a good idea,” she says.

  Her plan, once I’ve changed into something that can’t be used for a Daily Mail pun, is pretty straightforward. We take the class, and then when the paparazzi surround us upon exit, my mother will repeat these exact words, which she practiced more than her People’s Choice Awards acceptance speech: Unfortunately, I’m unable to discuss the details of the case at this time, but I’m so grateful for the outpouring of support for me and my family that has come from not only all over the country but all over the world. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

  Then she’s supposed to follow with a wink and her trademarked Missy line: You’re the bestest!

  My job is to stand next to her in a solid color and not throw up.
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  There has been no outpouring of support. As far as I can tell, very few people have reached out, with the notable exception of Raj, my mother’s personal trainer, who kindly passed along exercises to relieve her overworked adrenals. Even Aunt Candy has gone radio silent after her big claim that she had no idea about Dr. Wilson’s scheme, and instead used him for only legitimate consulting services. Right.

  Occasionally, during our middle-of-the-night crossings, my mom’ll murmur: “You’d think she’d at least check in on me. When she discovered that Charles had that mistress in Tokyo, I was on the first flight out.”

  I understand how my mom feels. I may not have coached Shola through an extramarital affair, but we have been through whatever the high school equivalent might be. This is the longest I’ve gone not speaking to her since we met, and often, still, I catch myself talking to her in my mind.

  “Please don’t hate me,” I find myself saying, on repeat, as if Shola can hear me. If I believed in vision boards, I’d put a selfie of us smack in the middle and write the word BFF in bubble letters.

  The only person I’ve heard from is Cesar’s mom, who a week ago, out of the blue, texted me a picture of Cesar hanging upside down in the park, knees looped over a tree branch. Her message was brief: Sorry about your troubles. Cesar says to send this. Hope you come back soon. I have reread that text a hundred times, run my fingers along the words like they’re rosary beads.

  So much unearned empathy in those three lines; they make me swim in painful gratitude.

  * * *

  —

  At first Paloma’s plan goes off without a hitch. When we walk in, a few people titter, but mostly they do that LA thing of recognizing my mom and then intentionally looking away. I imagine later they will call their friends and be like, Oh my God, you will never guess who I just saw.

  The class kicks my butt; yoga for these women is apparently not about finding inner peace, but about finding inner abs. My mom’s perfect makeup-non-makeup beads up on her forehead. Since I’ve done no exercise over the last few weeks other than lifting croissants into my mouth and walking my quiet dopey laps around the house, my body burns. Still, I tell myself this isn’t so bad, even with the covert glances. Maybe my self-imposed solitary confinement is unnecessary. Next time, though, instead of sweating, I’m going to sneak out to see Cesar, and we’ll sit in that double rocking chair my parents donated to the center for my sixteenth birthday and pretend to wear our invisibility cloaks.