The Admissions (21 page)

She was letting her mind wander now. Too much? It was a delicate balance, to let your mind wander just enough to keep it off the pain but not so much that you lost focus. Exquisitely difficult.

God, it hurt. Her lungs, her legs. Even her eyes stung. How much longer?

It would be better, of course, if Angela were in front of these two, but it was early. Only—she checked her watch—only five minutes in. Five minutes into a race that would last (hopefully!) fewer than eighteen minutes. Seventeen-thirty, if she had a good day. But what if the Harvard coach
was
here to see Casey? And what if Casey beat Angela in front of him?

Okay, Casey from Novato,
thought Angela.
You’re history.

Deep breath, suck in all the air you can.

Quick feet, big blast.

And Angela had passed Casey from Novato. She kept the speed up for five extra steps to make sure Casey didn’t pass her right back, then she settled in. Casey might have cursed; Angela wasn’t sure. Maybe she was just wheezing.

Eight minutes down. Almost halfway. Ten minutes, then eleven. Lungs bursting, maybe broken. Casey hadn’t gained on Angela, but Angela hadn’t gained on the girl from Tamalpais. The course turned again, into a single track, up a hill: where was she?

Then! The course turned back on itself just ahead. A flash of green through the woods, a glimpse of black hair. There she was. She was maybe thirty seconds ahead of Angela.

Ten minutes down. Seven to go.
You can do anything for seven minutes, Angela Hawthorne. Anything. So pick up the fucking pace.

She picked it up. She was gaining on the girl in green…gaining…gaining. She was invincible. She was the champion, louder than the lion.

And then the unthinkable happened. She slowed down.

Angela Hawthorne—Harvard applicant, a runner of such talent that in middle school the
high school
coach had seen her at the Fourth of July road race and
recruited
her while she chomped a banana and gulped from a bottle of Powerade handed to her by a race volunteer…. Angela, who had once (embarrassingly, in a moment of extreme weakness that had now become, to Angela’s great chagrin, part of family lore) pushed a fellow preschooler from the top of the slide because she wanted so badly to be first—had slowed down. She was bonking. Everything around her started to blur, and she felt so light-headed she thought she was going to pass out. She blinked hard, shook her head, tried to make her legs go. But her feet were two bricks now, and lifting her legs felt like lifting two logs out of a swamp. She couldn’t go faster. She was moving backward! She looked up, but all she saw were the redwoods, stretching their way to the sky.

More footsteps behind her, like a herd of antelope running through the plains. More heavy breathing. One of the girls sounded like she was on the edge of cardiac arrest. But she wasn’t, because the next thing Angela knew she was passing her, and then more girls, not just Casey from Novato but other girls too. More than Angela could count, or wanted to: they were antelope no longer, now they were wolves, running in a pack, urging one another on.

And the final humiliation was that the last one to pass her was Henrietta Faulkner, who had the nerve to tap Angela on the shoulder and wheeze, “Good race!” as she went by.

No!
It wasn’t too late. Was it? Fourteen minutes in, fifteen. There were girls behind her and girls ahead of her but Angela Hawthorne might as well have been on an island. Marooned.

She didn’t have it. She had no gas. Nobody heard her roar.

She crossed the line looking straight ahead and went immediately for her bag. She pulled on her warm-ups. Her legs were lead. She didn’t look for her parents, didn’t look for her coach, certainly (God no!) didn’t look for the Harvard coach. The girl in green from Tamalpais was throwing up in the grass while her mother (Angela supposed it was her mother) stood next to her, rubbing her back and holding a water bottle. Casey from Novato was joking around with a teammate. Henrietta Faulkner was checking her phone, studiously not seeking out Angela. She knew better.

“Eighth,” her mom said cheerfully later, on the way home, Angela stony-faced in the backseat, but also surprisingly hungry, as though she, not the girl from Tamalpais (Meghan Green, it turned out), had been the one to throw up. But she hadn’t run fast enough to throw up! She wanted pancakes, and she knew her parents would take her anywhere she wanted, do anything to make her feel better. She could ask for the most expensive pancakes in all of San Francisco, she could request solid gold pancakes, and her parents would get them for her.

But she didn’t deserve pancakes, so she didn’t ask for them.

“I mean,
eighth,
” said her mom. “Sure, I know you would have preferred first, but eighth out of how many? Like sixty, right?” Her mother was rubbing at her temples and inspecting her eyebrows in the rearview mirror.

“Ugh,”
said Angela. She didn’t want to look at it that way. Her mother twisted around in the front seat to look at her. Her father remained silent. He had said almost nothing after the race, just clapped her on the back in a manly way that made her feel like they were office coworkers and said, “Hey, nice job.” They both knew he was lying.

She didn’t say anything about the Harvard coach—she couldn’t stand to tell her father that. That would crush him like a candy cane caught underfoot.

“That’s okay,” said her mother now. “Not every day can be your day. That’s just how the world works.”

“That’s a stupid course,” said Angela. “I
hate
that course, you can’t see where you’re going. It’s such an advantage to the home team.” Angela wanted to claw at something. She settled for kicking the back of the seat the way Maya did when she got mad. Her mother managed to ignore this so she kicked harder and felt a little bit better. But not much.

Her mother was looking out the window and gnawing at her thumbnail. Odd: her mother was not a nail biter.

To her father her mother said, “Can you get Cecily from Pinkie’s and Maya from Penelope’s after you drop me at home? I need to jump in my car and be in the city in—let’s see”—she scrunched her nose and tapped her fingers on her wrist, though she wasn’t wearing a watch—“let’s see, in forty-five minutes. Geez, I hope the traffic isn’t too bad. Do you think it will be bad?” Her mother’s voice sounded odd, more frantic than usual.

“Shouldn’t be,” said her father.

Angela looked out the window, pressing her forehead to the glass. The sun had come out after the race. Its brightness was a slap in the face. Where was the mist, the fog, the cloud cover?

She wanted to take a long, hot shower and crawl into her bed and sleep for the rest of the day and into the night. But she had a massive psychology project due on Monday, and she didn’t have time to sleep.

“The pedestrian traffic on the bridge is going to be crazy. But the car traffic shouldn’t be bad.” To Angela’s ear her mom sounded a little panicked. Angela’s mom was made of velvet wrapped around steel, but, man, she could sometimes be undone by the weirdest things.

“Right,” agreed her father. He glanced in the rearview mirror but didn’t address Angela. What if he knew about the Harvard coach? Should she tell him, just to get it over with? Then again, maybe Henrietta was wrong. Maybe the coach had never shown. “When the weather’s like this, everybody and their brother wants to walk across the bridge.”

“We haven’t done that in a long time. I mean, as a family.” Now her mom was inspecting her teeth in the mirror. Once she had gone to a showing with a minuscule piece of an almond between two teeth and she still wasn’t over it. “Remember that time when we tried to go when Maya was too young and she started crying that she couldn’t make it? And we were smack-dab in the middle?”

Angela looked at her cell phone. A text from Mrs. Fletcher, who knew it was last minute but wondered if Angela might possibly be available to babysit that night. She texted back:
So sorry my parents need me at home 2nite.
Thinking about the Fletchers gave Angela a stomachache.

Her father said, “Hmmm…,” and her mother fiddled with the car radio. Comforting, Saturday-morning National Public Radio voices.

Angela tried not to notice that her parents’ lives were continuing. They didn’t seem to notice that hers was over. Her mother was heading to a showing. Her father was going to pick up Maya and Cecily, and probably Pinkie too, and bring them back to the house, which would be annoying on the one hand but also okay because Angela didn’t want to be alone with her father. Maybe Cecily and Pinkie would watch a movie or go outside and tool around on their scooters. Maya would play with her American Girl dolls. Maybe someone from school would text Angela, see if she wanted to go out, maybe felt like going to that party at Jacob Boyd’s house (his parents were in Napa for the weekend). But the thought of the party at Jacob Boyd’s just made Angela feel more tired. She didn’t want to see Edmond Lopez. She did, but she didn’t. Mostly she didn’t.

Also, there was one time just after the
debacle
at his house when he’d jostled against her leaving AP English and she’d looked up at him (more hopefully, more expectantly, more
girlishly
than she meant to) and she was pretty sure he’d sneered at her. He had definitely sneered at her. And what had Angela done? She hadn’t sneered back, no. She hadn’t even avoided his gaze altogether. She’d smiled! The stupidest, most vulnerable, most needy and ridiculous smile, a smile that said,
Give me one more chance. Oh master.

Just to make sure her humiliation was complete.

Besides all of that, Angela was hopeless at parties. She was self-conscious in the truest sense of the phrase: so freakishly conscious of everything she said or did that she couldn’t enjoy herself.

Her mother twisted around in her seat again. Angela saw now that she was wearing her real estate makeup: eyeliner, a hint of shadow. Mascara. Of course. She probably had a pair of heels stashed in her car, along with a lipstick. She probably wouldn’t even need to go inside the house; she’d just get in her car and go.

“Sweetie?” she said. “It’s just one race, you know.” Her voice really did sound odd, almost the way a voice sounded when its owner had been crying. But what would Angela’s mother be crying about? “It’s not the end of the world.”

Angela snorted.

Then, because she felt bad about snorting, she said, “I know it’s not.” She meant to speak nicely, but the words came out like they had knives attached to them. Also, she didn’t believe her mother. It did feel like the end of the world. The end of something, anyway.

She texted back to Mrs. Fletcher.
Nvr mind, sorry I can do it

Gabe was in front of the house, inspecting the variegated sweet flag for signs of rust. It was a golden fall day, Indian summer, though in California Indian summer was a different beast altogether—not brief, as the term implied in other parts of the country, it could last most of the fall here, up until the rainy season, which passed for winter out here. Earlier that day, just for kicks, he’d checked the weather in Laramie: a high of 38, a low of 15. Snow possible in the late afternoon. He allowed himself to picture, for a moment, the ranch in winter. The cold! Biting at his fingers, at his toes, at any exposed patch of skin. Feeding the cattle from hay hauled in on a flatbed, when they couldn’t get to the grass because of the snow. A hard, brittle life. No country for old men, that was for sure. And here he was, standing barefoot on his emerald-green lawn, wearing a short-sleeved gray T-shirt and jeans. He could have had shorts on if he’d wanted to. Angela, headed out for a long run with her team on one of the rare Saturdays without a meet, was in a tank.

In California, people did not put
weather permitting
on their invitations to outdoor events. In California, the weather always permitted.

Gabe knew that Nora, even after so many years out here, still missed the (ridiculous) weather patterns of the East Coast, the unforgiving humidity, the extreme cold. The snow. But not Gabe. He woke up most days and thanked God (in whom he did not believe) that he’d done what it took to land himself out here, build a family, keep them there. In paradise. Some might say against all odds.

He heard his name and turned around to see Anna Fletcher marching toward him. He raised a hand in greeting. They never saw the Fletchers anymore, not since the divorce. Which was a shame: they lived right across the street! In happier times they’d gone back and forth to dinner at each other’s houses. Sometimes it was just impromptu drinks and apps. Angela used to babysit all the time for them; they had quite a social life, from what Gabe remembered, until Alan Fletcher woke up one day, walked into the kitchen, announced that he wasn’t cut out for family life, and took off for a bungalow in Oceanside.

Gabe gave Anna Fletcher a big welcoming smile—looking at her, he felt a tug of wistfulness for those early days, tortilla chips and sangria on the Fletchers’ patio. He almost hugged her.

“Anna! Long time no see.”

When they first knew Anna she had been voluptuous and sensual, with a short and daring haircut. (“I never say no to dessert,” she’d said once, and Gabe couldn’t help it, he thought that was one of the sexiest things a woman could say. Though not sexy enough, apparently, for Alan Fletcher.) Now she was three shades paler and twenty pounds lighter (“Divorce diet,” Nora said). She’d grown out her hair, too, into a disappointingly ordinary style. And she was most definitely not smiling.

“Gabe, hello. I was wondering. Is Angela here?”

“Out for a run. But I can pass on a message!” He was still trying to be jovial, still attempting to coax a smile out of her. She had had a gorgeous smile, back in the day. It really stood out against the shorter haircut. “Are you looking for a sitter? I don’t know her sched—”

“No.” Anna shook her head. “I am
not
looking for a sitter.” He saw now that she was holding a small green bottle. “I am looking, in fact, for my son’s medication.”

“Excuse me?” Gabe dropped the joviality; he was genuinely confused.

“For my son’s medication. For Joshua’s Adderall, which he takes for his ADHD. And which Angela has stolen from him.”

“Which Angela has
what
?” Gabe’s hackles were raised now: somebody was accusing his little girl! “Uh, I’m afraid you must be mistaken.”

Anna sighed and looked heavenward, then leveled her gaze at Gabe. “There used to be thirty pills in this bottle. Now there are twenty-two. Angela is the only person outside of my kids and me who’s been in my house lately. And I don’t keep medicine where my kids can reach it, believe me.”

Gabe backed away from Anna; he backed right into the variegated sweet flag, which was really, come to think of it, quite delicate. Even if he was barefoot. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why would Angela take Joshua’s medicine?”

“Are you kidding?”

Gabe wasn’t; he was thoroughly perplexed. Anna sighed in an exasperated way.

“It’s all over the Internet, Gabe. Adderall is a stimulant. The drug of choice among high school students.
High-achieving
high school students, in particular. They use it for mental clarity. They use it to stay awake, sometimes all night. They use it as a
study drug.
Don’t tell me you don’t know anything about it.”

The variegated sweet flag crunched under his feet. The soil was still damp from the morning’s watering by the in-ground sprinkler system. “I don’t know anything about it,” Gabe said. “Really, truly, I don’t.”

Anna sighed again. “Talk to her. Look it up. Stealing prescription medication is a felony, Gabe. A
felony.
I could press charges.”

Gabe’s heartbeat picked up ferociously. He could feel the tips of his ears growing red, the way they did when he was embarrassed or scared or really drunk. A felony! “What about—what about, well, don’t you have a cleaning person?” Everybody on their street had cleaning people.

“It wasn’t my cleaning person, Gabe.”

“But—”

Anna was becoming fed up with Gabe; he felt like a chastised schoolboy. He was at a loss for words; he was at a loss for actions too. Then Anna’s expression softened; her features relaxed to create the face that Gabe remembered from the long-ago cocktail parties. “If you talk to her, if she apologizes, to me, in person, I won’t go any further than this.” This was probably the face that Alan had fallen in love with initially. “She’s a great kid. She’s always been so wonderful to my boys, Gabe. I mean, my God, she captured Colton’s first steps on video for me! You know I love her. But this is unacceptable. This needs to be addressed.”

Gabe said, perhaps too eagerly, “She loves your boys too, Anna. She always has. She always came home and told me all the cute things they said…” (Angela, in fact, had never done this. She was a responsible, solid babysitter, but it was not her great passion. She was not the person who couldn’t resist smiling at a baby in a shopping cart. Now that Gabe thought about it, actually, it
was
surprising that she’d made time for babysitting during this very busy fall…or, in light of this conversation, not so surprising.) “She’s just…I can’t imagine why she would do something like this. She’s just under such pressure this fall. Incredible pressure.”

“I’m sure she is.” Anna nodded crisply, and her features tightened up again. She shook the bottle one more time. “I mean, jeez. Harvard! That’s a big deal. What we expect of our kids these days is ridiculous, right?”

“Right.”

“But still. These drugs are not meant for people who aren’t prescribed them. It’s a real epidemic among these teenagers. The side effects are worse if you aren’t treating the underlying condition.”

Gabe said, “Side effects?”

“Stomachache. Difficulty sleeping. Headache. Appetite suppression. Bouts of teariness, when the drug wears off. That’s usually in the late afternoon with Joshua, because he needs it for school. But with these other kids, teenagers taking it to stay awake at night, who the hell knows when the drug wears off. It’s no joke.”

Gabe thought about Angela picking at her dinner, Angela with dark circles under her pretty blue eyes. Angela coming in eighth in a race she was qualified to win. He thought about Angela in prison, in an orange jumpsuit, like that pretty blonde on that series Nora had just started watching on Netflix. He felt like punching something.

Anna laid a hand on his arm. She’d always been like that, touchy-feely, which Gabe attributed to her South American roots—she was from Colombia. He didn’t mind. It was oddly comforting to have a moment where only he and someone who was now mostly a stranger knew something about Angela. “It’s okay, Gabe,” she said. “It’s really not the end of the world, I promise. But you’ll talk to her?”

“I’ll talk to her.” This was all his fault, there was no escaping it now. The pressure he put on her, to do something he’d never done himself. All his fault.

Best to get it out of the way immediately. Gabe didn’t wait until Angela had gotten herself a glass of water, until she’d stretched her hamstrings or her calves. He certainly didn’t wait until she’d taken a shower. He got to her as soon as she entered the house. Nora and Cecily had dropped Maya at a reading tutor (Nora had managed to track down an available one—not the one everybody raved about, but better, they all hoped, than nothing) and gone shopping for supplies for Cecily’s science fair project, and he didn’t know when they’d be back.

Angela was sweating, still breathing hard. She was wearing a black Nike running cap pulled down low enough that her eyes were almost obscured. Her cheeks were pink. She looked happy, content; she looked the way Gabe remembered feeling after a day out with the cattle, the satisfaction of a job well done, the eagerness for a well-deserved rest. Some of the best sleep of his life he’d had in his boyhood bedroom, aching down to the very bones, the memory of the cold still gliding out of his muscles. All the beds in the ranch house, even his parents’, had plaid flannel sheets and thick wool blankets that scratched at your chin when you pulled them up.

“Sit down.”

She was confused. “What? Dad, I just got back. I’m sweating. We did eight.”

“I don’t care if you did eighteen. Sit down.” He motioned to a stool at the island. Then he filled a glass of water for her from the refrigerator.

She said, “Dad?” Uncertainly.

“Anna Fletcher came over.” He watched her face carefully.

“Dad—”

“She wasn’t happy.”

Several emotions crisscrossed Angela’s face at once: hesitation, recognition, embarrassment, defensiveness. He watched as she settled on defensiveness. Inwardly, he approved (it was the mark of a smart negotiator, never to admit wrongdoing right away). Outwardly, he was livid.

“
Dad,
it isn’t what you think…”

“Oh yeah?” Gabe surprised himself with the force with which his fist hit the island (goddamn granite, on the ranch they’d had Formica, which had suited everyone just fine, though the fashionable East Coasters, hobbyists, really just weekenders, who had bought the ranch from his mother had changed that—they’d made the kitchen white. White!). “If it isn’t what I think, what, then, is it? Did you or did you not take pills from Joshua Fletcher? From an eight-year-old child?”

Angela stood, refusing the water. (Another mark of a good negotiator: don’t act like you need anything, even when you do.) Her chest was still heaving. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“It’s not. It’s pretty simple. You did or you didn’t. Which is it?”

Angela studied her feet. Then she took off the hat, placed it on the island. Bits of her hair were sticking to her forehead in a way, nearly comic, that almost detracted from her air of utter certainty and control. But not quite. She looked at Gabe squarely and said, “I did.”

“Oh, Angela. Angela!
Why?
”

“Because I needed them.”

“Why?”

“To stay awake. To study. To do the fourteen hours of homework I have every night.” (It was, in fact, just as Anna Fletcher had said. How was it that Gabe knew nothing of this phenomenon? He must be a terrible father, isolated from his children’s worlds like this. When he’d woken up that morning he had been completely unfamiliar with a drug called Adderall.) Angela took a deep, quivering breath and continued. “Everybody uses stuff like that, Dad. Everybody in the top third of the class, anyway. If not specifically Adderall, then something. Massive energy drinks, other stuff, who knows. All kinds of things.”

Gabe made his voice as level as he could manage. It was a struggle: he wanted to scream like a toddler. “Am I to believe, Angela, that the top echelon of your class has all stolen prescription drugs? That they have all committed a felony?”

Angela shuddered at the word
felony,
and briefly he felt sorry for her. She was the little girl who used to push a fake lawn mower around the yard behind him. She used to leave Post-it notes for him on the bathroom mirror every morning with messages like
SMILE ALL DAY LONG
and
YOU ARE THE BEST DADDY OUT THERE
. She was the girl who had tried to stay awake all night waiting for Santa when she was seven, and who had eventually fallen asleep in the dog’s bed, her arm held firmly under one of Frankie’s gigantic paws. Both of them drooling.

“No, but. They take them from their younger brothers or sisters. Or they lie to their doctors, fake symptoms for ADHD to get a prescription. Some kids’ parents take them to the doctor for just that reason. Some of the kids who get prescriptions, they sell them. I didn’t do that. I’m not
selling
drugs, Dad. Or buying them at school. I just…I just borrowed. Just a little bit, a couple of times, when I really needed them, just these last couple of months. Just to get through the last stretch.”

“Let’s be very clear here. You didn’t borrow, you stole.”

She sighed, started to roll her eyes. Must have thought better of it because she stopped. “Because that was the only way to do it. I never even took any before this fall. I just did it to keep up, not for any other reason. I’m not, like, some crazy drug addict, Dad. You know I’m not.”

Gabe paced the length of the kitchen. Outside, the day sparkled on, oblivious. He could see the Fletchers’ house, the English daisies in the front garden blooming ferociously. “That’s not a good argument, Angela. That makes you sound like Lance Armstrong, and look how that turned out for him. Next thing you know you’ll be acting awkward and unapologetic on
Oprah.
”

“That’s not funny.”

“Actually, I don’t think any part of this is funny.”

“I don’t either.” She folded her arms.

“Well, then.” He stopped moving, folded his arms in the exact same way as she had: a parody of a game they used to play, where Angela would try to replicate Gabe’s expressions. Happy. Sad. Confused. Scared. Silly.
(How about irate, my darling daughter. Can we try irate?)
“At least we agree on something.”