The Admissions (35 page)

“Hot sauce?”

“But it doesn’t make a difference at all, of course.”

The girl tugged on her father’s pant leg. “Come
in,
Daddy,” she said. Angela saw now that one of her front teeth was missing, and that there was a little stump of an adult tooth coming in. That could be an awkward look on some kids, but this girl pulled it off. God, she was cute. Angela would babysit for this girl in a heartbeat.

Timothy crouched down to the girl and said quietly, “I’ll be right in, sweetie. Listen, can you take this milk and bring it inside to Mommy? It’s heavy, you have to hold it with both hands. Can you do that? And can you bring Bella with you?” At the sound of her name the dog bounded back over to the crew on the front lawn. Timothy kissed his daughter on her sweet little head. Angela felt like she was witnessing something very private and profound, something from which she should look away, and yet she couldn’t look away. Not only was Timothy Valentine a dog owner, he was a really nice dad. Both of these things made it hard to hate him. But he had ruined Angela’s life, he and the rest of the admissions board, so she would try to hate him anyway.

Timothy Valentine stood up. He let out a small groan and Angela thought,
Tight quads.
He was definitely a runner. He probably ran at lunch, around the Harvard campus, or right out along the Charles. That’s what she would do, if she worked at Harvard. Then, as though there had been no break in their conversation, he continued. “No, you are not the first to follow me home. You wouldn’t believe the things people do, both before and after their application is considered.”

Timothy Valentine may as well have taken an oversized pin and placed it in the center of Angela’s body: everything about her deflated.

“You mean even in my stalking I’m unoriginal?”

“Something like that.”

A little stinging behind her eyes: tears ready to jump out. Angela blinked them back. She felt like she had to say what she said next. He was waiting, even though there was a child inside, a dog, probably dinner. Something hearty and New Englandy. (Chowder?) He was waiting patiently on his front lawn in early winter.

“I thought I was special,” she said finally. It wasn’t a whine, it was a statement.

Timothy cleared his throat and frowned down at his shoes and said, “Do you want to know a secret?”

“Um,” said Angela. “Sure?”

“Everybody in your generation, you and all of your peers, you all think you’re special. But how can every single one of you be special? It is literally impossible.”

Angela’s head was staring to hurt. She blinked again, and the backs of her eyes felt hot. It was dark enough that she’d be able to hide the tears if they fell, but still. As a point of pride she’d rather keep them back.

“I thought you were going to tell me a
good
secret,” said Angela finally, and Timothy Valentine smiled. So at least there was that.

She looked to the sky, where the darkness was stripping away the remains of the day. It was odd to Angela to look around and see trees everywhere, along the highway, all through the neighborhoods, instead of open sky or mountain ranges or the San Francisco Bay. It felt like the landscape was closing in on you, instead of opening up, but the closing in felt comforting, the way it felt when you were little and your parents leaned in from two opposite sides of the bed to kiss you goodnight. Most of the houses on this street had Christmas decorations up; the lights were just starting to come on.

Timothy Valentine walked over to his mailbox and opened it. He peered inside, and then removed a stack of envelopes, some catalogs. Angela thought that he was signaling to her the end of their conversation, but then he said, “You know who gets into Harvard?”

She shook her head. She didn’t know the answer.
(Will this question be on the test, teacher?)
“Nobody?”

“No, not nobody.”

“Right,” said Angela. “Of course. That wouldn’t make sense.”

“The students who get into Harvard are something beyond the extraordinary, because unfortunately the extraordinary has become commonplace. We get so many applications from students who are broadly accomplished, but not always deep. We are looking for the deep. The extraordinary and the deep.”

Angela said, “I see.” She, Henrietta Faulkner, the rest of the Oakville High senior class (except for Maria Ortiz), they were all too broad and not deep enough, every single one of them. All those hours on soccer fields, in field hockey helmets, puzzling over foreign languages and instruments and algebraic equations—they weren’t enough. They had all come to nothing. Or, rather, they had come to this: Angela as stalker, Angela as desperate Harvard reject, clutching a rental car key and a printout of an email.

Just to be clear, though, and because she sensed that she was about to lose Timothy Valentine’s attention, she asked, “Are you saying that I did too
much
? That I should have focused on just one thing, all this time? Just one thing?”

Angela thought about the last cross-country meet, and the way she’d let that girl from
Novato…just…very…gradually…get…ahead…of…her.
She thought about taking Joshua Fletcher’s pills, and she thought about how she stole Teresa’s paper.

See me,
in Ms. Simmons’s felt tip.

“What I’m saying,” said Timothy Valentine, “is that maybe you haven’t found your passion yet. Your one, single, driving passion. And that’s okay. Many people haven’t, at age seventeen, eighteen. But that’s the kind of thing that shines through on an application.”

Later there would be time for the tears and the heartache and all of the crappy pain that came out when a dream vanished. It would hurt. It might always hurt, but as much as she wanted to blame the pain on someone else she couldn’t justifiably do that. Because the worst part was that Harvard didn’t know about any of her transgressions—she hadn’t been caught, hadn’t been turned in or called out or publicly shamed. The truth was in some ways harder to bear. As mad as she was at her father, as much as she wanted to blame his lie for her failure, he hadn’t done anything to hurt her. Not on purpose. She simply hadn’t stood out; she hadn’t made the cut.

A woman appeared in the doorway, backlit by the light in the hallway, and called out, “Tim?” in a slightly impatient way that was familiar to Angela from a decade and three-quarters of being hurried along by adults. Angela could see a staircase. When she was little she wanted to live in a house with a staircase. “Tim? What are you doing out there? We’re waiting for you.”

Timothy Valentine waved and said, “I’ll be right in. Almost done here.”

So Angela hadn’t found her passion yet. Cecily was almost eight years younger, but she had! Cecily’s passion was Irish dance, and Angela had been ready to step squarely on that passion, to grind it right into the ground.
Take up fencing,
she’d told her.
That’ll get you into college.
Her mother’s passion was real estate. Her father’s passion—well, she didn’t want to think about her father right now.

Angela refocused her eyes on Timothy Valentine. Behind him the red house had become a blackish blur. The moon was nearly full. Civil twilight was over; night had arrived. The streetlights illuminated the Hyundai, and from far away she could hear the semi-muffled sounds of highway traffic.

All those people with somewhere to go, somewhere to be, a place in the world. Her North Face fleece, which had been bordering on deficient since she’d stepped off the plane, was now officially, exquisitely inadequate. She shivered and crossed her arms. She met Timothy Valentine’s gaze full-on. It was over, her long quest. It had ended right here on a suburban lawn in…

“What town are we in?” she asked.

“Concord. As in the battles of Lexington and.”

Angela nodded. Sure. Lexington and Concord, she knew. She had scored a five the previous year on the APUSH exam. She had nailed it.

“You caught me at a good time, Miss Hawthorne,” said Timothy Valentine. He peered at the mail, although there was no way he’d be able to read it in this light. “The other times I’ve been followed I’ve been less…how shall we say it? Less
amenable
to offering advice. But there are many, many options out there, available to an intelligent, accomplished, lively young person like yourself.”

Angela thought,
Lively? Really?
She didn’t feel lively. She felt ancient. She imagined the little blond girl building a snowman, sticking a carrot in it for a nose.

The dog barked twice. The door opened again and the woman called, “We have to start without you! Sarah and I are starving.”

Sarah. That was a nice name for that child, very New England Puritan. Sarah Valentine, whose father worked in admissions at Harvard and who lived in a farmhouse without a farm. What a lucky little girl.

“Listen,” said Timothy Valentine. “I have to go inside now, my family is waiting. Miss Hawthorne? Do you have somewhere to go? I’m assuming there’s an adult with you?”

Timothy Valentine was looking at her expectantly, and she wanted (when had she not wanted this? She’d wanted it her whole life…) to give the correct answer.

“No,” she said. “I mean, yes, yes, definitely. I do have somewhere to go.”

Marianne was thinking about her current case, which she knew she was about to lose. Just the past Friday night she’d gone out for drinks with her friend Jillian at a wine bar on Federal Hill and Marianne told her how sometimes she felt like packing it all in, going to work for a cushy law firm in Providence, getting a nice condo on the river. Or giving up the law altogether! Moving out to California, where her sister lived, where the winters were mild. Not that she could afford to do that, not in a million years. Although Nora would let her have the guest room. Or even Angela’s room, once she went off to college.

“Totally,” said Jillian. “I totally get it.” But Jillian managed a women’s clothing store on Thayer Street. She didn’t get it, not really. Her biggest problem was when the overprivileged Brown students tried to shoplift.

Marianne was tired of slogging through the snow, tired of witnessing the underbelly of life, day after day after day. You could make a dent, but that was it. “It’s like throwing pebbles into the ocean and expecting to create your own personal island,” she told Jillian.

Only Monday! Such a long week stretched ahead of her. Christmas was hard for many of her clients: it made them feel even more grim and hopeless than they already felt, which was saying something.

How lucky Marianne was to have her mother nearby, her sister geographically far but emotionally close. Still, sometimes around Christmas she did allow herself to indulge in a bit of melancholy. If you’d asked her long ago to make a reasonable prediction she would have said that
she
would be the one with the kids and the husband, not Nora. Nora had been the free spirit, driving her car out to California on a whim, dating a bunch of bastards before she met Gabe. Marianne had been the worker, the voice of the little people, the loyal girlfriend through four failed long-term relationships. She was the one who’d stayed behind. She hadn’t strayed, hadn’t wavered! And yet she was alone, married only to her work.

Her house was small and bordered on shabby; when it rained a lot, water seeped in through the foundation and into the unfinished basement. Marianne had wanted to redo the two bathrooms for about five years now.

A genie grants you three wishes…

A new bathroom, just one. The other can wait.

One of those fancy blenders that chops up whole apples and pulverizes greens.

Maybe…oh, maybe (was this too embarrassing, to wish for something so childish at age forty-one?), a Christmas surprise.

As she approached the house she could see the Christmas tree, leaning slightly, through the living room window. She’d put the lights on a timer so they would be on when she came home after work. She’d have to straighten the tree in the stand or she’d wake up one morning to find it entirely tipped over.

Strange. There was a car in her driveway, unfamiliar, a Hyundai. She pulled up beside it and a small lithe figure hopped out. It looked like…no, that was impossible—her eyes playing tricks on her in the dark. She should put the porch light on a timer too. She didn’t know how to do that.

It really looked like…

It couldn’t be. But it was.

“Hi, Aunt Marianne,” said the voice in the semidarkness. “I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s me. It’s Angela.”

The cost for four same-day cross-country tickets on the red-eye this close to Christmas with an open-ended return date was three thousand, two hundred, and sixty-three dollars, but none of the Hawthornes cared. After Nora talked to Angela, after she talked to Marianne, after she talked to Gabe, who knew nothing of the whole fiasco until he finally had a chance to check his phone from the offsite, Nora booked them. There were only three more days before Christmas break. Missing three days of school wasn’t going to kill anyone. She packed what she could of the Christmas presents she’d already purchased (embarrassingly, not much) and figured she’d get the rest at the Providence Place mall.

Up, up, up. Cecily gripped Nora’s hand. They were all seasoned cross-country fliers, they went east at least twice a year, and yet Nora was surprised each and every time about how nervous flying made Cecily. Maya didn’t care at all; she chattered with her seatmate, a young college student flying home for the holiday. (Booking so last minute, they couldn’t secure seats all together, and Maya adamantly wanted the seat two rows back, so she could be “independent.”) Cecily had a fear of heights, poor thing. And yet she’d stood on the Golden Gate Bridge, looking down, looking for someone to help. Gabe’s eyes were closed. Nora had scored the window seat—Cecily didn’t want it, it made her too anxious, and Gabe didn’t care either way.

The senior partners at Elpis were going to let Gabe resign without a fuss. Joe Stone was
dead set
against that. He thought they should use Gabe’s situation to send a message, loud and clear, to anyone out there who was considering falsifying a résumé. Internally and externally. That meant, according to Gabe, that it would be actual news—an article in the
Chronicle,
who knew what else. There’d be no escaping it. But the senior partners thought he could go quietly, discreetly, tail between his legs.

“Ugh,”
said Nora loyally. “I never liked that Joe Stone, did you? He always seemed so smarmy.”

Nora pressed her forehead against the window. It was pitch-black; she couldn’t see a thing beyond the runway. But she’d done this trip in all types of weather, at all different times of day. She knew what was out there. The glorious bay. The Bay Bridge. And far in the distance, the celebrated, magnificent, odious Golden Gate. She loved it, she hated it.

This city, this city she had loved for so long, was tethered really so tenuously by those two long bridges. It had been carved out of nothing, out of the wilderness and the mountains, its fate tied to the fates of the gold diggers, the intrepid explorers, the bold and the fearless and the plucky. She imagined a roll of fog unfurling from the Transamerica building. And they were off.

It took Cecily approximately thirty seconds to fall asleep. When she was definitely out Nora reached across her and tapped Gabe on the shoulder. He opened one eye, and then the other, like a man in a cartoon.

“Listen,” she said. “I’ve been thinking. About staying out there.” No answer. She elaborated. “For good, I mean.
Moving,
Gabe. Back home, back to Rhode Island.”

Now he sat straight up and wore, for an instant, the expression he wore when he saw a snake. (Wyoming was home to two kinds of venomous rattlesnakes, and when Gabe was in elementary school a fellow third grader had died from a bite.) “Do you mean—” he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat and smoothed his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Do you mean with me, or without me?”

In another row, a baby cried. Nora remembered what that was like, flying across the country with babies. Awful. (Nobody ever said,
I’m afraid you’re going to hurt the baby.
) A flight attendant made her way down the aisle, tapping the tops of the seats as she went. The seatbelt sign shut off: no turbulence.

“Of
course
I mean with you.”

Gabe sighed and took her hand and closed his eyes again.

“I mean, what have we got to lose, right? I’m fired. You’ve resigned. Cecily and Maya are young and adaptable. Who knows where Angela is going to end up…”

Gabe held up his hand: the universal signal for
Stop talking.
Nora sat back. This seemed unfair. After the day Nora had had. The month she’d had! (The year.) She felt her temper begin to rise; she was about to get her Irish up. Then Gabe opened his eyes and said, “You don’t need to keep selling it, realtor of the century. I was thinking the same thing. I’m in.”

“You
are
?” She leaned forward. Never in a million years had Nora expected it to be that easy.
Don’t sell it,
Arthur Sutton always said,
when it’s already sold.
“You’re
in
?”

“I am,” said Gabe.

“Wow.” Nora sat back. She had a whole box of unused arguments in a corner of her mind. “Wow,” she said again.

She and Cecily and Gabe and Maya were the reverse gold rushers now. They were heading east to seek their fortune. They were the opposite of the bold and the plucky, and yet it felt plenty brave to Nora, to do this.

“Do you think we could get a puppy? Gabe? I’ll take care of it, I’ll do all the work, I’ll clean up all the accidents, I swear. Gabe?”

This time he didn’t answer; he was asleep.

She poked him, but gently. “Gabe?”

Definitely asleep. Maybe once he was really zonked out, totally dead to the world, she’d whisper a story to him. Tell him about the time she let Maya fall on her head.