The Admissions (15 page)

Ten milligrams.

Coach Don had to leave unexpectedly for a family emergency, so practice was canceled. He wanted them to do an easy five on their own if they were so inclined.

Angela was so inclined—she was very inclined, Angela was always inclined, and she wasn’t going to do the five easy, either, she was going to hammer it—but she wanted to get some of her homework done first. Besides the regular load
(formidable)
and the Harvard application hanging over her (like a
specter
), she was trying to figure out what to do about the term paper for AP English. Topics due in a week.

Angela was thinking about all of this as she walked home. If she’d been a high school kid in a movie walking home on a fall day there might have been brilliant foliage framing her and a carpet of fallen leaves she could nonchalantly kick through. That would have to be an East Coast movie, though. They didn’t have that kind of
variegated
foliage in California. Much to Angela’s mother’s
chagrin.
She talked a lot about missing foliage in the fall where she grew up. This fall in particular.

Angela was about to step onto the bike path when a car pulled up alongside her, a midnight-blue BMW. She walked a little faster—it could be a rapist or a kidnapper, even in Marin, and Angela was fast but she wasn’t very strong. Then she heard someone say, “Yo, Angela!” so she looked over and the car came to a complete stop. Which, in retrospect, wasn’t that smart, because presumably rapists also knew how to say
yo.
Though they probably wouldn’t know her name.

But it wasn’t a rapist or a kidnapper: it was Edmond Lopez from school, and he was nodding and smiling and reaching over to open the passenger-side door and it looked like he was gesturing to Angela to get in.

Her brain said,
No, thank you,
but her mouth, surprisingly, said,
Sure. Why not?
And she got in the car, feeling more jittery and weird than she did when she thought about Maria’s poems being published in those journals. (“Quinceañera,” one of them had been called. Geez, how was the white child of two white parents supposed to compete with that? Angela didn’t have anything to write a poem about. Her poem would be called something dull and ordinary, like “Making My Bed.”)

Once Angela was in the car Edmond turned to her and said, “Want to come over?”

“To your house?”
Duh.
Edmond smiled. His teeth made him look like he’d just stepped out of a Crest Whitestrips ad. He was wearing a baseball cap and a dark blue shirt with the sleeves pushed up past his elbows, and she could see the muscles moving in his forearm when he turned the steering wheel.

“Sure. Yeah. Nobody’s home.” Edmond smiled lazily. (She could hear Ms. Simmons:
Think of a better way to say it. Can a
smile
really be
lazy
?
Really?
Angela might fight that one. She thought a smile could be lazy. Edmond’s was. Lazy and beautiful.)

In the Lopezes’ driveway she closed the car door carefully and slung her backpack over her shoulder. Or should she leave her backpack in the car? But that would make it seem like he was driving her home, and maybe he wasn’t. If she ran home, she could get a couple of her miles in that way. But what about the backpack?

Oh my God, what was
wrong
with her?

She’d leave it in the car. No, bring it. She brought it even though she felt weird about it, like she was carrying a puppy into a church.

Edmond’s house was a converted Craftsman, which Angela knew her mother would call “one in a million” or something else equally corny and
hyperbolic.
Still, it was a really nice house.

Angela left her backpack by the front door and followed Edmond into the kitchen. He offered her a beer from his parents’ fridge, which she declined—beer made her feel bloated, never mind the fact that she had at least three hours of homework to do when she got home, plus the run—and then he opened one himself and tipped half of it into his mouth. It was called Super Chili Pepper Madness and on the front of the bottle was a chili pepper dressed in a superhero costume. Soon enough, Edmond tipped the other half into his mouth and said, “You sure you don’t want some?”

“I’m sure,” said Angela. Even if she liked beer she wouldn’t have liked the spicy kind.

Did her father and Abby the Intern ever drink beer together?
Ugh.

He did the same with the next beer, but he’d turned his head respectfully away from her when he burped. (She was starting to hope he
wasn’t
driving her home.) After he was done with that one, he took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair until it looked adorably rumpled.

Edmond’s parents were at work, he said; his sister, Teresa, who had gone to Princeton undergrad, was now at Cornell doing graduate work in sociology. Edmond was (his own words) on a different track. Just that one AP English class, which, according to Henrietta, was a fluke. Honors Lab Science, which he was failing. (Even though science was her worst subject, Angela considered it
almost impossible
to fail Honors Lab Science.)

“I don’t care,” he said. “As long as I can play baseball in the spring.” He rumpled his hair again. His hair was very thick and dark and when he ran his hands through it they seemed to imprint themselves there.

“I can help you, if you want,” she said. It was just Honors Lab Science; she could ace that class with her eyes closed. Not to be braggy. But. (Was this why he’d picked her up? To help with science? That was fine, she was just wondering.)

“You’d do that?” asked Edmond. One more time with the hands and the hair and Angela’s stomach lurched. Sitting this close to Edmond, she was able to take in his scent, which wasn’t exactly clean but wasn’t dirty either.
Like the soil in a garden before anything has been planted in it.
No, she could do better.
Like the dark side of the moon.
(Ms. Simmons might say, “What does that mean, exactly?” And Angela wouldn’t really know. But it felt just right. It was from some old song her dad occasionally sang.)

Seriously, what was wrong with her? She was sitting in an empty house with a baseball player and having an imaginary conversation with her AP English teacher. Lame alert.

She said, “Definitely, I’d do that,” and stared at the mosaic backsplash that ran along the length of the kitchen (classy, her mother would say; it was all muted tans with a few hints of gold).

Edmond poured Angela a glass of water while he drank his third beer and they sat for some minutes in the kitchen, both of them drinking, and Angela felt very briefly like an adult: she was not often in an otherwise unoccupied house with just one person her own age. And by not often she meant never.

“My sister, though,” said Edmond, “man, she’s smart. She’s like you.” He fixed his gaze on Angela and she noted that his eyes were darker than dark; the pupils and the irises were pretty much the same color. She hoped her skin was behaving itself, not blushing.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Angela modestly. Teresa Lopez. Geez. “Your sister’s, like, a legend. The teachers still talk about her. She’s brilliant.”

“Yeah,” said Edmond. “I’m sort of lucky that way. My parents don’t expect anything from me. But, boy, they did from her. Still do. She doesn’t catch a break.”

Angela considered this. She had never met Teresa, but in a way she felt like she knew her. She trained her eyes on the built-ins above the kitchen desk and saw a couple of family photos—the Lopezes vacationing in Hawaii, wearing snorkel masks and flippers; the Lopezes at Tahoe, holding ski poles. Edmond looked so much like Teresa that if not for what she knew to be a five-year difference in their ages they could pass for fraternal twins.

“So, Harvard, huh?” asked Edmond, as though continuing a conversation they had started earlier. He tapped his fingers against the beer bottle. “How come?”

Angela took a long drink of her water, feeling self-conscious about the sound she made when she swallowed, and then said, “My dad went there.” She still had to finish the application. Her heart palpitated, thinking about that. Edmond scrunched up his face and Angela
intuited
that this was an unsatisfactory answer. Her breath got caught in her throat. “I mean, that’s not the
main
reason. That’s
one
reason, I should say. That’s the reason I was first interested. But when I went there for my campus visit, I don’t know, I just felt really at home there. You know?” What was hard to get across to Edmond Lopez was the fact that when her father had taken her out the previous year, when they’d driven together along the Charles River, when they’d followed the student guide from building to building, when they’d walked around Harvard Square and shopped at the Coop and stood outside the dorm her father had lived in his freshman year, everything about the world felt right and good, as though Angela were a coin that had been dropped inside the exactly right slot. But she couldn’t put that into words. Well, she
could,
but she didn’t want to. Too embarrassing. Too pretentious.

Edmond blinked; he had enviable eyelashes, just like Cecily’s. Angela’s stomach did the weird twisting thing again. Edmond said, “You remind me a lot of my sister. How you’re so smart and everything comes easy.”

Angela cleared her throat. Okay, she liked Edmond, but a misconception was a misconception. “Oh my God, that’s not true. It doesn’t come easy, not at all.”

Edmond seemed to take that in. Or not. Then he said, “How you’re so
serious.
”

Angela felt a whisper of an insult at that. “I’m not always serious.” She could be goofy—with her sisters, with her parents, with her friends. She could definitely be goofy. Silly.
Fatuous.

“I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean it like you know what you want, you’re not wasting time on stupid shit like a lot of people do. I like that.”

“Oh,” she said. Better. She did actually pride herself on not wasting time on stupid shit.

“Plus I think you’re really pretty.”

Oh!

“Yeah?”

Yeah.

She ducked her head and felt a blush creep to her cheeks.
(Corny? Yes.) “Thanks.”

“I’m serious about baseball. Come to a game in the spring, you’ll see.”

She smiled. “Maybe I will.” She reached over and lifted Edmond’s beer from the counter, took a sip. Just one sip. It was terrible. It burned going down. The actual chili pepper in the actual beer was much less friendly and accommodating than the superhero chili on the label. She coughed and handed the bottle back.

“What are
you
doing next year?”

“Gap year,” he said. “Somewhere in Colorado, to work at a ski resort.”

The first time Angela had used the phrase
gap year,
her father, in a deeply uncool way, had thought that people were taking a year off to work at the Gap.

“Wow,” she said. “That sounds awesome.” Edmond Lopez thought Angela was pretty. That wasn’t nothing. That was definitely something.

“Yeah.” He stood. “Want to see my room?”

“Sure.” She followed Edmond obediently down the hall. Some of the doors (office, bathroom) were open, but others (master bedroom? sister’s room? Edmond’s room?) were closed.

Edmond said, “This is where the magic happens,” and opened a door at the end of the hallway. Angela tried to look like that was cool with her, even though she was a little embarrassed for Edmond, for having said that. Then he said, “I’m totally kidding. I saw that in a movie once and always wanted to say it.” Then she felt better.

Angela said, “Ha,” or at least tried to, but it came out sounding like a noise an asthmatic troll might make.

Edmond’s room had the same turned-over-earth smell that she’d noticed in the kitchen. On the wall across from the bed was a poster of a Giants player that read
JUAN MARICHAL
across the bottom in bright orange. In the corner of the room was a pile of laundry, presumably dirty, and on the plain brown wooden desk sat a baseball in a clear glass case. On the nightstand was a condom in a white wrapper. No, not one condom, two.

Geez.

Did he keep those there all the time, like it was so inconvenient to reach inside a drawer?
In the heat of the moment.
Was this his regular after-school activity when baseball wasn’t in season, luring nerdy girls into his room and having his way with them? Didn’t his
mother
ever come into his room or a
cleaning lady
who might take a moment to tuck the condoms into a drawer? Should she be
nervous
? She patted the back pocket of her jeans to make sure she had her cell phone with her.

No wonder Edmond Lopez was failing Honors Lab Science. How the heck was he surviving AP English? Well, he probably wasn’t surviving it.

Angela tried for a moment to be
outraged/insulted/apprehensive
but when she looked at Edmond she saw that he was shifting his weight from one foot to the other in a way that reminded her of Maya when she had to go to the bathroom, and she felt a spasm of tenderness for him. Also. He really was hot.

Edmond crabwalked over to the nightstand and performed a maneuver that caused the condoms to disappear into the nightstand drawer. He walked back toward Angela and said, “Sorry about that.”

His voice was a little blurry, probably from the beers, and his face was very close to hers. His skin was beautiful, olive and extremely smooth-looking. She wondered what it felt like to touch it. She
wanted
to touch it. She wished she’d had one of those horrendous chili beers after all, for courage. Edmond must look all kinds of great in a baseball uniform. She’d never been to one of the high school baseball games. She should go. She would go! By baseball season, she’d have gotten into Harvard. Or not. Oh, God, what if the answer was
not
? Not the time or the place for those thoughts, Angela, not at all.

She said, “No problem.”
Nonchalantly,
as though it happened to her all the time, having to look discreetly away while a really hot baseball player hid his condoms.