The Admissions (34 page)

It was official. Angela Hawthorne was the stupidest smart person she knew.

She was stupid in too many ways to count but, okay, she’d give it a try.

Let me count the ways,
said Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Fine, Elizabeth. Ms. Browning, if you prefer. Here we go.

First, she was stupid enough to think she was smart enough to get into Harvard. Which was the biggest mistake, and she’d been making it for
years
now. So sure of herself, so oblivious. Nobody got into Harvard. Well, people did, obviously, probably about eight hundred people had gotten in yesterday, when she’d been rejected, but nobody she knew. You could be valedictorian, you could be the smartest person in your school, you could be the person who worked the hardest and studied the longest and wanted it the most and ran the fastest and fluted the best and all that didn’t matter: nothing mattered.
Nothing mattered.

Because there were so many high schools, and each one of them had a valedictorian, and there were so many families, and each of them had a smartest child. There were cross-country teams everywhere, and each of them had a fastest person. There were so many people who had already gone to Harvard, and
those
people all had children, or at least most of them did, and there wasn’t room for all of them to get in. So they did not all get in. Which was not breaking news, because she wasn’t
stupid
(see aforementioned), but still. Not everybody could be chosen. And she had not been chosen. So she was smart, sure. But she wasn’t smart enough. (
See me,
Ms. Simmons had written on her extended essay.) Angela didn’t even want to think about that essay. Of course Ms. Simmons had noticed, and had called her out on it,
of course,
and Angela had cried like a baby in front of her. She definitely didn’t want to think about that essay.

Second, she had no backup plan. Not one single backup plan. Every time in the past year, two years,
five
years, she’d started to think about this moment, and what would happen if it
happened,
if she got
rejected,
she hadn’t let herself get this far. Her mother had tried to get her to, but Angela had pushed her off with both hands. Ms. Vogel had tried to get her to too, but same deal. Double push.

Rejection.
Not an SAT word. But such an awful word. Ugly and mean. Not
deferred,
as in wait until our regular admission time and we will reconsider your pathetic little application again, when we have not forty-five hundred people you are competing with, but more like thirty-five
thousand
people who all want exactly what you want, and who all think they deserve it as much as you do. Nope: just flat-out, don’t-bother-us-again, your application is going right in the trash or the recycling bin or wherever it is we put the real losers.

She must have blown it with that Susan Holloway way worse than she’d thought. That was all bullshit, Susan pretending to like her handshake, to like her honest answer about not having read a book for pleasure since she was a toddler. And for sure she
never
should have asked that question at the end. Susan Holloway had probably flagged her application. There was probably some special red flag, like a dark red, that meant: Stay really far away from this one. That flag meant: Don’t even think about it.

Third, she’d blown practically the entire gift certificate Aunt Marianne had given her on this one stupid, pointless, terrifying trip. She’d rented a car from a really shady place far from the airport because it was the only place that would rent to you when you were younger than twenty-five. And she still had to get home. Eventually.

Fourth, here she was, standing outside the Harvard admissions office, waiting for Timothy Valentine, admissions officer for the Northern California region.

I bow to him,
she’d told Cecily.
Like he’s Mecca.
Well, maybe she should have.

The stupidest smart person in the world, right here. Angela Hawthorne. Allow me to shake your hand because I’ve been told I have a wonderful grip. Pleased to meet you.

But whatever flaws she had as a Harvard applicant, she was an excellent stalker. Because here he came now.

Timothy Valentine was a tall man, ginger-haired, thin, with a build similar to that of Angela’s cross-country coach, Mr. Bradshaw, which meant that he had a slight stoop to his shoulders that owed something to a deficit in upper-body fitness: the curse of the carb-gulping long-distance runner.
Marathoner,
thought Angela.
Does Boston every April, I bet.
How scary could this man be, if he was a marathoner? And yet he scared the crap out of her.

In one hand Angela clutched the printout of the email from Harvard, and in the other the keys to the dubiously obtained rental car.

Timothy Valentine, exiting the
vaunted
halls of 86 Brattle Street, didn’t look around to see if anyone might be following him. He didn’t walk particularly quickly, though his legs were long enough that Angela had to hurry to keep up with him. He seemed like a man who was out walking a dog, or strolling through a shopping mall. Timothy Valentine didn’t seem like a man with the fate of thousands of high school seniors resting on his narrow shoulders.

Timothy Valentine crossed the street and arrived at a burnt-orange Prius with a Patriots sticker in the rear window.
Fortuitously
(SAT word, not that it mattered anymore), Angela had parked just a few spots away. Angela’s mother was big into the Patriots. She was always going on about Tom Brady, but in their house she may as well have been speaking to the deaf, because nobody else in the family cared about football. Her father watched tennis and golf, and they all followed the Giants.

Now that she had found Timothy Valentine, Angela noticed things about her surroundings that she hadn’t had a chance to notice when she’d arrived at 86 Brattle Street just a short time before, and at Logan before that. The evening felt different here than it did at home—it wasn’t just the chilly quality to the air, though that was part of it, but something was different about the sky, too, which Angela, if pressed, would have described as a heaviness. A
gravity.
Angela had once heard her mother, fueled by a couple of glasses of Cabernet, describe to dinner guests what she viewed as the essential difference between the East Coast and the West Coast: the East Coast had been settled by people who were
escaping
something (persecution) and the West Coast by people who were
seeking
something (gold). “I mean, come
on,
” Nora had said. “Doesn’t that just say it all, right there? Isn’t that the crux of
everything
?”

There had been an early snow in New England, and vestiges of it lingered in the parking lot in the form of dirty ice chunks and ugly piles pushed against light poles. Christmas was only—what? Nine days away.

Timothy Valentine’s Prius purred to life. What else was there for Angela to do? She had flown all the way here. She’d forked over a lot of money at Payless Car Rental. (Although, because of her age, she’d actually Paid Way More. She’d Paid a Lot.) Angela climbed into her rented Hyundai Accent and followed Timothy Valentine into the Cambridge twilight.

She’d always thought San Francisco was difficult to drive in—all those hills! But Cambridge was a real bitch: small side streets giving way to other streets that were bigger but not exactly freeways, which then gave way again to more side streets. Everything seemed to be a one way going the way you wouldn’t expect.

In the early evening—
civil twilight,
Angela had heard it called, though there was nothing civil about her current situation—the headlights of the cars coming toward her seemed to merge with the taillights of the cars in front of her into one big soup of red and yellow. Angela took a second to wonder if she needed to get her eyesight checked. But there was no time for lingering thoughts: Timothy Valentine shifted lanes without warning and Angela almost lost him.

He pulled over at a 7-Eleven and Angela slid into a spot where she could see him but that wasn’t close enough for him to see her. (This stalking thing was complicated. And exhausting. She hadn’t slept on the plane.)

Timothy Valentine emerged from the 7-Eleven with a half gallon of milk and a package of Lay’s potato chips.
A family,
thought Angela, about the first item. And:
A vice,
about the second. She watched as Timothy tore into the Lay’s with an enthusiasm and delight that almost made Angela like him. Except he had ruined her life, so there was no way she was going to
actually
like him.

He pulled back onto the main road—Route 2, the signs told Angela—and she stuck with him for fifteen minutes, maybe longer, until he turned off of Route 2 and followed a bunch of smaller roads, eventually pulling up in front of a two-story red house. Cute house. A farmhouse without a farm. The house was on a street of homes that were different enough from each other to avoid the cookie-cutter label. Angela looked at it with her mother’s appraising eye and thought,
This neighborhood has character.
They were all two stories or more, which was one of the things her mother liked about architecture out here compared to at home. Though she said that only in private, of course. Never in front of the all-powerful Arthur Sutton.

Timothy Valentine pulled into the driveway and Angela parked the illegal Hyundai in front of the house across the street. She watched as the front door to the farmhouse without a farm opened and a golden retriever bounded across the lawn. She heard a voice call, “Daddy!” And then, more quietly, as though its owner had turned toward the bowels of the house, “Daddy’s home!” Except for the rapidly diminishing daylight, Angela could have been watching a commercial for life insurance. Timothy Valentine held the half gallon of milk aloft like a prize and turned toward the voice. He reached down and, with his free hand, rubbed the head of the golden retriever.

This is it,
thought Angela.
This is my chance.
She closed the door of the Hyundai, looked both ways, and crossed the street. She cleared her throat twice—she hadn’t spoken to anyone since the rental car place, so she wasn’t sure if her voice still worked—and said, “Mr. Valentine?”

He turned, squinted. His bewildered face was almost funny. He put a hand on the dog’s collar—the dog was lunging toward Angela, but in a friendly way—and said, “Can I help you? Do I
know
you?”

“I’m Angela Hawthorne,” she said. She extended a hand, which was ignored (out of necessity, she told herself later, because he was trying to control the dog). “I was an early applicant in November. I recently received this email”—she thrust toward him the printout of the rejection—“and I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute.”

“Oh,” said Timothy, understanding. “
Oh.
I see. And you came from—”

“California.”

“Cali
for
nia?”

“Northern,” she said, as if that explained anything. “Marin County. And I just thought if I could talk to you, then maybe—”

Timothy looked with dismay at the dog, who had loosened itself from his grip and was now making a large deposit in the center of the lawn.

“I’m sorry, Miss—?”

“Hawthorne,” Angela supplied, too eagerly.

“Miss Hawthorne. I’m sorry, but the decisions of the committee are very, very carefully thought out. They aren’t made by one person acting alone.”

“I’m not crazy,” she said. “I don’t have a weapon or anything, I swear. I’m just…” Here she momentarily lost control of her voice; it began to wobble, and she had to pause and take a deep breath. “I’m just
confused.
”

Timothy Valentine sighed and grimaced, not unkindly. Angela had the thought that if they could sit down together, or, better yet, go for a
run
together, if he got to know her, then he would recognize that there had been a mistake, that she should have been accepted. “I don’t remember your application specifically, Miss Hawthorne. But I’m going to take a guess that it was loaded with fantastic grades, extracurricular activities, astronomical test scores, varsity sports…am I right?”

“Yes,” said a tiny voice that Angela didn’t recognize as her own. “I have a copy of it right here.”

“I don’t need to see a copy,” he said. “As I said, the decisions of the committee are final. And I’m sure your application was stellar. Nearly every application we receive for the early-action deadline is stellar. So we find ourselves in the fortunate position of being able to choose from the best of the best of the best. And some of the best don’t get in.”

A small girl bounded out of the house and up to Timothy. She had bright blond hair and a smattering of freckles so perfect they looked like they’d been drawn on. All of this Angela could see because the path leading up to the red house was perfectly lit by a series of small lanterns.
God.
Timothy Valentine had great taste, too. Or his wife did.

The little girl reminded Angela of Maya.

“Let me ask you this, Angela,” said Timothy Valentine. The girl leaned against her father and wrapped one arm around his skinny leg. Oh, to be five again! The girl regarded Angela and said, “Who’s
that
?”

“Nobody,” said Timothy, and Angela tried not to be insulted.

“Do you think,” said Timothy Valentine. “Do you think you’re the first applicant who’s shown up at my office, followed me to the parking lot?”

“Um,” said Angela. “I’m guessing no?”
Speak with confidence during the college interview process,
came the voice of Ms. Vogel, college counselor extraordinaire. (
But not extraordinaire enough for me,
thought Angela.)

“You’re not even the first one who’s followed me home. It’s happened to all of us. Harvard applicants do some really crazy things. They send us stuff—”

Maybe Angela should have sent something. “Really? What kind of stuff?”

“You name it. Socks, hats, shirts, arts and crafts, music videos. Hot sauce.”