The Admissions (18 page)

November

Nora carried Cecily’s dress bag, and Cecily carried the bag with her shoes (light and heavy), her socks, her makeup, snacks (carbs and fats), water (bubbly and still), a variety of bobby pins (long, short, medium), and her iPod Touch, on which she had loaded her solo music for last-minute practices, as well as some Taylor Swift for inspiration and Shakira for energy and good vibes.

In the car Cecily put in her earbuds and stared out the window. It was a long drive, all the way to Sacramento. Gabe and Maya had gone to Angela’s meet instead and then they had to hustle over to Maya’s soccer game. At one point Nora turned around and said, “What’s up, sweetie? You don’t seem like your usual peppy self.”

Cecily shrugged. “Just nervous, I guess.”

“You’re never nervous,” said Nora.

“I know. But this time I am.” Cecily could usually dance her heart out no matter if she was in the studio practicing or in front of the harshest judges in the world. That’s what made her so good.

By now Nora had been to enough
feises
(“Pronounced
fesh,
” a helpful, more experienced mother from the Seamus O’Malley School of Irish Dance had explained to Nora five years ago when Nora, seeking to harness some of Cecily’s astonishing energy, and to make contact with her own latent Celtic roots, had first stepped foot inside the studio) that they no longer overwhelmed her in the same way that they once had. Still, there was something unsettling about the scene: the girls with the ringlets of their wigs bouncing, the sparkles on their solo dresses catching the light (Cecily’s, handmade by someone always referred to reverently just as “Gareth,” no last name, too famous for that, like Madonna or Cher or Prince, had cost $2,300,
significantly
more than Nora’s wedding dress). The youngest girls in plain navy or black jumpers, like Catholic school girls set free for recess.

And so much makeup everywhere: on the girls themselves, on the mothers, and also on the younger set of female adjudicators, who were themselves recently retired from such competitions and who dressed, for reasons Nora had never been able to fathom, like they were going out to a secret Manhattan nightclub. They wore dresses or skirts that went no more than halfway down their thighs, and heels higher than Nora had ever dared to wear in any circumstance. They had a proliferation of long hair, as though their tresses, so recently liberated from the confines of the competition wigs, were celebrating their hard-earned freedom by showing the world what they could do.

And the mothers! If you looked closely at each one you might see some variation among them but they were, as a whole, a downtrodden lot, following behind their daughters like handmaidens behind a queen, scooping up items that had dropped, dispensing tissues and sock glue (this, a whole separate phenomenon, actually
gluing
your clothing to your
body
), and holding hand mirrors, their vices clearly on display, whether they be diet soda or nail biting or constant smartphone checking. Nora’s was a Starbucks concoction, a venti salted caramel moccachino with an extra shot, which rang in at more than five dollars. (Worth it.)

There were dozens of teams in Cecily’s age group, and Cecily’s was third to last, but Nora didn’t mind a bit. She loved watching ceili dancing. She found herself a good seat with Molly Flanagan, the only Seamus O’Malley mother who did not entirely stress her out.

Nora loved the ceili dancing even more than the solo dancing. She loved watching the girls synchronize their steps. She loved the way the dances were the same no matter where you saw them, step for step, beat for beat. She loved that the dances were, at heart, social numbers, their roots firmly set in the Old Country.

Cecily’s team was performing the High Cauled Cap. Nora had seen this dance so many times she thought she could perform it herself. Eight girls, four dancing the ladies’ part and four dancing the gentlemen’s part. The steps themselves were not difficult, compared to some of the things these girls did in their solo dancing, but it was the precision that counted: Were the arms all raised at the same level? Were the stationary dancers pointing their toes at the same angle? When all eight dancers stamped and clapped, were they stamping and clapping at the exact same time? To earn a spot at Worlds (in London, next year! Nora already had two restaurants picked out, and she had secretly booked a hotel room. Totally refundable, of course), not only did Cecily’s team have to get recalled into the second round, they had to place in the top ten once they did.

Which shouldn’t be a problem. This particular team had been dancing this particular dance for two full years. They were like sets of identical twins who knew each other so well they could complete the other’s sentences. They had it
down.

Finally: Cecily’s turn. Nora took a big sip of her salted caramel moccachino. She forgot about how many calories and grams of fat and sugar were lurking in each sip. She forgot about Angela’s Harvard application, wending its way through the admissions process. She forgot about the French doors in the Watkins home and the fact that Maya couldn’t read. None of that mattered.
This
was what mattered. This was what it was all about, all the lessons, all the driving, the washing of the practice clothes, the doing of the hair (those wigs didn’t put themselves on; nobody but an Irish dancer and her mother knew what really went on under there, the tributaries of small ponytails, the stacks and crisscrosses of bobby pins). It all led to this. The pleasure in the action itself, the joy in the doing.

But something wasn’t right.

Cecily’s team was off.

Their timing was scattered. A toe pointing a fraction of a second too soon, one girl’s arm lifted too high. Not by much, but still. Not perfect. Not top-ten perfect.

And then. On the most basic of steps, a simple side step, one leg became tangled in another. The dancer stumbled, tried to recover, though truly there was no recovery from a stumble. And then she was down.

Nora gasped. Molly Flanagan grabbed Nora’s hand and squeezed. The audience inhaled collectively and loudly.

Cecily.

A knock on the door. Cecily. Her mother had said they must all be extra-nice to Cecily, after what had happened at the
feis.
In fact, said her mother, if Cecily doesn’t bring it up we shouldn’t bring it up either. Pretend you don’t even know about it. Talk to her about something different, like…oh, I don’t know. Movies.

Movies? Cecily never went to the movies. She was always at dance practice, or hanging out with Pinkie, looking at the screen on Pinkie’s iPhone.

Earlier that day her father had taken Pinkie and Cecily and Maya and Maya’s friend Penelope out for ice cream, to Lappert’s in Sausalito,
ostensibly
to cheer Cecily up. She had gotten her favorite, guava cheesecake. Pinkie had probably gotten
her
usual: rum raisin. Maya got vanilla bean no matter where she was, or just plain vanilla if there was no bean available. So boring. Angela didn’t know Penelope well enough to predict. And Angela’s dad would have gotten one of the coffee flavors, probably the Kauai. Angela’s mother had an open house and Angela herself had declined the invitation. She had masses of homework. Now she was upset with herself: she loved Lappert’s.

But the rough draft for the AP English term paper was due the following day, and Angela had. Not. Even. Begun. Even after nearly an entire day spent in her bedroom, contemplating Virginia Woolf, she had. Not. Begun. What was going
on
with her? She never struggled with papers like this; she was
never
behind. She never just plain didn’t start.

The knock repeated.

“Come in!”

“Hey,” said Cecily. She was wearing flannel pajamas, not dance clothes. Seeing Cecily out of her dance clothes was like seeing a dog without its fur. She simply didn’t look right. The pajamas made her look young and Christmas-morning innocent. They had pictures of smiling snowmen marching across the top. Cecily loved Christmas. I mean, duh, most kids loved Christmas. But Cecily really,
really
loved Christmas.

Angela said, “Hey.” The cheating would be easy, she’d determined that much. Like taking candy from a baby. Which, when you thought about it, was an odd expression, because babies were not supposed to have candy. She knew that from all of her babysitting at the Fletchers’ house, back when the children were young. Also just from general common sense, of which she had plenty. Babies and candy equals no.

She used to have plenty of common sense, but then again she used to be someone who would begin a term paper with enough time to complete the assignment properly. She used to be someone who would not steal a paper from a girl’s bedroom while an extra-hot baseball player snoozed in the room next door.

“We’re not going to Worlds, Angela. The ceili team.” Cecily slumped against the wall. Angela motioned toward the bed but Cecily shook her head and remained standing. “I know Mom already told you and you’re pretending not to know.”

“I’m not pretending not to know,” said Angela. “I’m just…”

“Just what?”

“Just not bringing it up.”

“Well, it’s up,” said Cecily. “It’s all kinds of up.”

“I’m sorry, Cecily. I really am.” Angela
was
sorry. While she had never quite understood the appeal of Irish dance (it freaked her out that they didn’t move their arms, and that they didn’t smile), she knew how important it was to Cecily. And she didn’t like seeing Cecily in this state,
downtrodden
and
forlorn.
Cecily was uniformly happy and easygoing. That was her role in the family unit. The way Angela understood it from the psychology class she’d taken junior year, the middle child, especially the middle child of siblings of the same gender, could be either the dissenter, sowing drama and conflict wherever she went, or the stabilizing force. The peacemaker. Cecily was definitely the peacemaker.

Setting Cecily aside for a moment, Angela’s mind clicked on along its own invisible, inevitable track.

There were two kinds of cheating. There was the unsophisticated sort of cheating, the kind engaged in by students in standard or maybe even Honors classes. Internet cheating, the classic Google-and-copy. You found something somebody else had written on the topic. Maybe you massaged the sentences a little bit, maybe you altered the paragraphs. But mostly you just copied. Simple to perform, simple to catch. Not that everybody who did it got caught, but. Most teachers, when handed a paper of surprising quality or sophistication, plugged a few sentences into a search engine and summoned the guilty party for a confession.

Junior varsity cheating, cheating for beginners. It happened all the time.

“Because I fell. That’s why we’re not going. We didn’t even recall.” Cecily looked into the mirror and rearranged her hair. Cecily typically wore her hair in a ponytail but now it was down; that, too, accounted for her not looking quite like herself.

“You look pretty with your hair down, Cec,” said Angela. “You should wear it that way more often.” Virginia Woolf famously thought herself ugly but when Angela looked at the best-known picture of her she saw a great beauty. The solemn, hooded eyes, the long straight nose.

“Thanks,” said Cecily dully.

And then there was Angela-Hawthorne-style cheating, an altogether more sophisticated method, a multistep process requiring forethought and planning.

She had never done it before; like the Adderall, she’d never needed to.

But she simply could not bring herself to write this paper. She’d spent so much of October on her Harvard application that she just didn’t have time to do it the right way; she didn’t have time to read two works, to read the criticism, to create an original thesis, to write the thesis. The application had been electronic, but she felt like she’d boxed up her heart in a Priority package and shipped it along to Cambridge at the same time. She didn’t know if or when she’d get the heart back.

The paper Angela had taken from Teresa’s room was sophisticated, sure, but once she’d read it through it seemed perfectly reasonable that Angela might have come up with it. She was valedictorian, after all. She could recognize indirect discourse when she saw it.

“Seamus O’Malley’s teams
always
recall,” said Cecily mournfully. “This is the first time in, like, forever that they haven’t.”

When Angela was Cecily’s age, in fourth grade, she’d written a paper on imagery in
The Ballad of Lucy Whipple
(a gold rush tale) that was so good that (Cecily told her) the teacher used it as an example to this day.

Angela said, “Ceci—” and realized she didn’t know what to say next. She said, “I’m really sorry. I’m sorry that happened. But it was just a mistake! You can’t beat yourself up for a mistake.”

Teresa had referenced a critic named Gérard Genette, who’d written something called
Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method.
She’d chosen two examples from each book. There was Mrs. Ramsey in
To the Lighthouse,
thinking, about the character named Lily,
With her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously; but she was an independent little creature, Mrs. Ramsay liked her for it, and so remembering her promise, she bent her head.
And there was Clarissa Dalloway, running into Hugh Whitbread:
They had just come up—unfortunately—to see doctors. Other people came to see pictures; go to the opera; take their daughters out; the Whitbreads came “to see doctors.” Times without number Clarissa had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing home. Was Evelyn sick again?
“Woolf’s use of free indirect discourse here serves a dual purpose…”

Perfect, perfect, perfect. Two exquisite examples of free indirect discourse.

Angela had still been wavering a couple of weeks ago when it was time to have Ms. Simmons approve her thesis. She wasn’t ready to commit herself; she might still come up with her own. So it had been simple enough—too simple—to fix Ms. Simmons with a look of mild bewilderment and to say, “Oh, but you
did
approve it, don’t you remember? I’ll bring it in tomorrow to show you again.”

Teachers, like parents, were too busy to keep track of everything. Ms. Simmons forgot to ask again the following day.

“I know Mom told you already, but I’m just telling you again. Just to make sure you understand. We didn’t qualify, we’re not going to London. And it’s all my fault. Even if it was a mistake it was still all my fault.”

Angela said, “Oh,
Cecily.
I’m sorry. Really I am.” Virginia Woolf had lived in London when she used free indirect discourse.

Teresa’s paper was in the bottom of Angela’s desk drawer, in the very bedroom in which she and Cecily now stood. She had not yet copied it, had not yet handed it in as her own. She was a thief and a liar, but she was not yet a cheat. If she changed her mind she could still reverse course; she could still come up with something mildly original to say about Virginia Woolf.

Of course everything original had already been said about everyone.

But now that she had Teresa’s paper, now that she’d gone through the trouble of
procuring
it and hiding it and admiring it and practically memorizing it, now that she knew it as well as she might know a paper she’d written herself, it seemed inappropriate not to use it. Even uneconomical.

Cecily was still talking about London, bless her skinny little self. “Some people will still go for solos, but not me. I did bad in those too, I was all messed up after the fall. Seamus wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Really?” said Angela. “What a jerk.”

“Maybe,” said Cecily dolefully. “But I see his point. He worked hard for us.”

“You know, I never trusted the guy,” said Angela. “I know Mom’s halfway in love with him, but.”

Cecily said, “Gross.”

“I think she just likes his accent,” added Angela. It
was
sort of gross to think about, her mother and Seamus O’Malley. They were both so old.

After they handed in the rough drafts they’d begin the peer-guided edits.

Cecily leaned over and placed her hands flat on the floor with her legs straight. Angela would never have that kind of flexibility, not after all the running. Cecily was like an extra-stretchy rubber band, no bones, just skin and muscle.

Cecily said, “I think I’m going to stop for a while. Stop dancing. Do you think I should?”

Perhaps a convenient absence on the rough-draft date—she
was
feeling a tickle in her throat, wasn’t she? But at that point Ms. Simmons
might
reach out to her parents to inquire why a usually on-the-ball student had faltered. Or her mother might take a peek at the school portal, where all the grades were posted.

Better not to think about it, not right now. There were a few hours left in the evening.

Cecily said, “Angela? Do you?”

Angela considered her little sister. When Cecily returned to an upright position her face was its normal olive color. Angela’s would have been scarlet. If she hadn’t witnessed, if she didn’t remember so clearly, when her mother was pregnant with Cecily, if she hadn’t seen Cecily in the hospital when she was a mere ten minutes old, reclining against her exhausted mother’s chest, she would seriously wonder if Cecily was adopted.

This was no different from when Angela had helped Cecily learn to ride a bike, steadying her, running alongside her, letting her go until her balance caught. She was helping her, pure and simple. “Well,” said Angela. “It’s not the kind of thing colleges look at. Right? Unless you’re, like, the very best in the whole world. Maybe this is a good time to pick up something new. What about fencing? You’d be good at that, I bet, from all your dancing.” She chewed on a fingernail. What a terrible habit. Ick. She wished she could break it. “Quick feet and everything. I wish I’d done fencing.” How come nobody had ever put Cecily in a Harvard sweatshirt? Or Maya? It was always Angela, every time, it was her, her, her. Sometimes it seemed so…well, just unfair. So unfair.

She was definitely feeling a tickle in her throat. If she stayed home from school tomorrow and if both her parents were at work she could get tons done on her statistics homework and figure out what she could do for her National Honor Society volunteer hours. She could sleep a little, too. God, she’d love to get some extra sleep.

Cecily said, “
Fencing?
I don’t even know what that is really. Is that where they wear those masks?” Cecily’s face looked like a crumpled version of itself and Angela understood that she had misread what Cecily wanted from her.

“Sure,” said Angela, beginning to falter. “That’s fencing. The masks, and the swords. They dress in white, usually. They wear knickers.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Why not? It’s really cool. Maybe not the knickers. And they’re, like,
giving
away scholarships for it, is what I heard. They need girls who are good at it.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” said Cecily suspiciously.

“Colleges.”

“Well, I’m not doing it,” said Cecily, with uncharacteristic grumpiness. “I don’t care about college. Fencing isn’t what I love.”

How many things in her life had Angela done when she didn’t want to, and how many other things had she stopped doing because they led nowhere? She had enjoyed swimming, for example. But to be a competitive swimmer you had to commit to it one hundred and twelve percent: early mornings, afternoons, everything. And she knew she couldn’t to that. So she stopped. And ran. The next week’s meet was a big one, regional—Angela tried not to think about that. “I mean,
no,
” Angela said. “You should not quit. You work so hard at this, Cecily. You’re so talented.”

Angela placed her hands on Cecily’s shoulders and pulled her toward her. She looked deep into Cecily’s brown eyes. She could feel Cecily’s shoulder blades through her skin. Cecily had grown taller this fall; she was meeting Angela’s gaze almost evenly. Soon she would surpass her. “Listen to me, Cecily. Then you keep doing it. If it’s what you love, you keep doing it.”

Cecily said, “I don’t know if I love it…”

“Are you happy when you’re dancing, Cecily?”