Getting In: A Novel (15 page)

Nora should have questioned the order when it first came
in. The talent agency that was one of her biggest regular customers wanted its usual Halloween party order, three dozen each of the pumpkin mini-cupcakes, the white chocolate ghost cupcakes, the gravestones made from iced slabs of sheet cake, the chocolate skulls with edible pearls where their eyes used to be, the gingerbread bats—and eight dozen of the mini-coffins made out of chocolate wedges robed in powdered nuts.

No, they wanted three dozen of everything, as always, which the delivery boy discovered when a new agency assistant, who had spent her first workweek enduring all manner of verbal and psychological abuse, started her second week by unloading on him in the agency’s towering two-story lobby. The eight was obviously a three. The delivery boy could turn around with those extra boxes and take them right back where they came from, and the screeching assistant was going to watch for the bill to make sure nobody tried to pull a fast one on her.

So the delivery boy came back to the bakery, dumped the extra boxes of chocolate coffins on one of the prep tables, repeated exactly what the assistant had said to him, punctuated by the frequent repetition of the epithet “that little bitch,” and stormed out without another word to take the rest of the afternoon off. Nora gave a dozen coffins to each of her two bakers and a dozen to the woman who had taken the order, because everyone made mistakes and it was just as likely that the agency kid was being obnoxious
to cover her own error. She took the last two dozen home with her, hoping that they would give Lauren a laugh, and that a laughing Lauren would take the overstock to school.

On any other night, Nora would have regaled her family with the story at dinner, complete with an impression of the delivery kid doing an impression of the assistant, but ten o’clock that night was midnight in Chicago, the last minute of the November 1 deadline for early-decision applications, and for some reason Lauren had yet to send off her application. Nora intended to keep as low a profile as humanly possible, to get her family fed, fast and early, so that Lauren could get back to work.

She was in hiding in her bedroom when Nora got home; still in hiding when Joel breezed in the front door an hour later. He tossed his briefcase on the couch, pulled a sheet of paper from it, and came toward his wife with one of his big, lifesaving smiles.

“You have to take a look at this,” he said, “because it’s going to keep us from going nuts. Somebody at the office printed these up.” He yelled, “Lauren!” and turned back to Nora. “Where is she?”

“Upstairs. The better question is what she’s doing, and…” She broke off when Lauren appeared in the doorway.

“Dinner ready?”

Joel held up the sheet of paper, puffed out his chest, and began to read.

“The
Jeopardy!
list of famous college dropouts. Listen to this. Tolstoy. Rush Limbaugh, okay, nobody wants you to grow up to be Rush Limbaugh, but how about Carl Bernstein. Yes, indeed. No degree after his name. Or Bill Gates.”

“Joel…”

“Dad…”

“Okay, I have more, which do you want? Stupid people who went to great schools or great people who went to stupid schools?”

Lauren covered her face with her hands.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Joel, triumphant. “You go to a great school, you start a war over oil. You go to a crappy school, you start spending money on women’s health.”

Lauren grabbed the piece of paper out of her father’s hand, crumpled it up, and threw it into the kitchen sink. “Okay, I get it. Great school, bad person, not great school, better person—wait, if I don’t go to college at all I can be the best me ever.”

“Lauren, honey, I don’t think your father…”

Lauren glared at them. “I’d be worried if I were you two. If I get into Northwestern who knows what might happen? I might turn into…”

She hesitated, and her parents waited, silent, rapt.

“A spoken-word poet. And I could have a geeky boyfriend and you’d never know it.”

Joel and Nora waited to see if additional threats were coming, but Lauren had run out of steam. She moaned, “Really, I can’t believe you did that,” and then she slumped onto a kitchen chair.

Joel sighed helplessly. “I thought it would give you a laugh,” he said. “Take the edge off. Clearly, I miscalculated.”

Nora was stuck several steps back. “Why a poet?” she said.

“Why not?” said Lauren. “You don’t really think you get to pick out my entire future, do you? Call me when dinner’s ready.”

The house was locked down before nine, the dinner cleared, the dishwasher loaded, the daughter, despite her parents’ attempts to find out how she was doing, once again sequestered in her room. There was nothing left for Nora and Joel to do, so they retreated to their room and pretended to read sections of the
New York Times
, which could just as well have been upside down for all the information they retained.

Since the start of Lauren’s senior year, Nora had set aside time each night to read the international and national news,
with the same grim diligence with which she approached the stationary bicycle. Before Lauren was born, Nora had had an opinion about everything, but once Lauren arrived she settled for asking other people questions and switched her attention to whatever Lauren happened to be reading in school. It was a conscious and happy choice. She could have done a better job of keeping up with the news, but she preferred to be ready in case her daughter ever felt like chatting about fate and free will, or social caste and destiny, or
Jane Eyre
or Daisy Buchanan or anything at all.

But in a year she would be back at the adult table, so she had to get into mental shape. She relied on mnemonics to help her remember who, exactly, was trying to topple whom. If there was a story in the paper about Iraq, she chanted, “Shi-
I
-tes say,
I
am in power, while
Suuu
nnis say, Our day is coming
soon
.” She had more trouble when there was a triumvirate, because the dynamic lacked logic. For weeks she had worked hard to process the relationship between the Sudanese government and the insurgents and the Janjaweed, only to learn that the current strife was an overlay on an older civil war: same region, completely different set of combatants. How did anyone know whom to shoot at when they went to battle every morning? Did they wear colored jerseys, like sports teams? She yearned for the era when nighttime reading meant
Charlotte’s Web
, for a world where moral intervention made a difference and death had at least a glancing acquaintance with nature, but she doubted she would be invited back to anyone’s house for dinner next year if all she could talk about was the larger meaning of Wilbur’s spared life.

At nine thirty, Lauren wandered into her parents’ room to say good night, praying that they would not say anything about anything, not her dad’s list, not her reaction, not her application, not her nerves, not anything.

“So,” said Nora, cautiously. “Early night. You’re all set.”

“You bet,” said Lauren. She dove in for two quick kisses. “Night, Mom. Night, Dad.”

“Night, honey,” said Joel, who had started channel-surfing.

“I guess we officially have an early-decision candidate in the family,” said Nora as Lauren got to the doorway. “How does it feel?” She regretted having asked the moment the words were out of her mouth, but old habits died hard. Did you go potty? Did you finish the broccoli? Did you brush your teeth, floss your teeth, put in your retainer? In the early days, the last question of the night had been code for undying affection, one final maternal inquiry to bridge the time to a wakeup kiss. Lately, it felt tacked on. Nora vowed for the umpteenth time to try harder not to finish the day with a knee-jerk question, even as she waited nervously for the answer.

Lauren turned and shrugged.

“Night,” she said again.

Joel waited until he heard Lauren’s door click shut, and then he hit
MUTE
.

“You asked the wrong question,” he said. “What you wanted to know was, did she file yet. Not how does it feel. You’re always going to get a shrug with how does it feel.”

“Well, I couldn’t ask did she file yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would sound like nagging.”

Joel rolled toward her and kissed her cheek.

“And you wouldn’t be nagging, no, not you.”

“So how do we know she filed?” asked Nora.

“The deadline’s midnight, Chicago. Twenty-seven minutes. Of course she filed.”

“But how do you know that?” She turned toward him. “You like that question better? Don’t play hotshot journalist with me,
bub. Maybe I got fired, but it wasn’t because I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Joel sat up, disoriented. He had no idea how to behave in this situation, and yet it was clear that he ought to do something.

“I’m going to have coffins and milk,” he said. “Want some?”

“No. Honey?”

“Yeah?”

“See if she wants some. I mean, she’s being a jerk, but it’s a big day.”

It was still fifteen words too long. Lauren grabbed a pencil and scratched out “big,” “one of my favorite movies,” and “of course,” and then she counted the number of words in the sen
tence about the reporters who would get fired next, scratched it out, and put the other words back in.

She turned out her bedroom light and crawled into bed with her laptop and her cell phone. She had twenty-five minutes before the filing deadline, twenty-five minutes to wrestle one last time with Northwestern’s no-deferral policy. Other schools gave their marginal early-decision candidates a slim thread of hope, a deferral that dumped them into the regular applicant pool and gave them four more months to send letters reaffirming the spurned applicant’s devotion to her first-choice school. Not Northwestern: the moment she sent off the application, she made herself vulnerable to a flat rejection in mid-December, just in time to be upbeat enough to complete the rest of her applications and ace her first-semester finals.

She texted Chloe.

“What are you doing?”

“You done?”

“Almost.”

“Just do it. The moms are going to the financial aid meeting together.”

“Fun.”

“Need me to call?”

“No.”

She texted Brad.

“You are so lucky not to have early decision.”

“Filed anyhow to shut my dad up. What are you waiting for?”

“Who said I am?”

“Did you file?”

“Sure.”

“Cool.”

She thought about texting Katie and flipped the phone closed, as Katie would only make Lauren feel crazier than she already did.

9:46. She guided the mouse up and to the left until the blinking cursor sat right on top of
SUBMIT
, and her finger sat right on top of the mouse, like the guy with his finger poised over the red
KILL
button in
Syriana
, right before he blew up George Clooney and the emir and his family. He had looked like he was enjoying himself, like he was playing a video game with great resolution, concentrating hard and yet somehow unconcerned. The image on his monitor looked so very real, but there was no sense of consequence. Lauren was choking on consequence.

9:52.

What if Chloe was right and Lauren had a whole different set of priorities next spring? What if the reader thought an old movie was a silly reference?