The Admissions (4 page)

“Oversaturate,” supplied Gabe.

“Right. Oversaturate the application pool.”

Nora was perplexed. Wasn’t this the point of the college counselor, to know these things, and to tell them to the ignorant and the blind? She and Gabe were ignorant
and
blind. Angela was too. The three of them were floating on a warm sea of confusion, and they needed people like Ms. Vogel to anchor them. She was sure Ms. Vogel wasn’t like an evil witch in a fairy tale. Nora should have been there, she should have been the one to take what Ms. Vogel said and to turn it into something her two crimson-colored family members would understand and listen to. She looked again at Cecily. One two three
four
one two three
four.
She reached over to Maya and pointed sternly at the meat. Nora swallowed the last of her Double-Double and said, “But, Angela. That’s exactly why you need to have the rest of your list ready. You can’t just apply to one school! I thought we talked about this in the spring. I
know
we talked about this in the spring, the last time you talked to the counselor. You need to cast a wide net!”

“Cliché,” murmured Angela, and Nora closed her eyes, scrunched up her face, and tried her hardest to remember how sweet Angela had been in the halcyon days of her toddlerhood, before she knew enough to correct her parents.

“What she needs,” said Gabe, “is to focus on Harvard between now and November first. She can’t apply anywhere else at the same time anyway. So we’ll get through this part, and then we’ll reassess as needed.”

Nora had lots more to say about all of that, but her cell phone buzzed again. It looked like family dinner was over anyway, so she reached across the counter and picked up her phone. Arthur Sutton? Arthur Sutton’s assistant, Grace?

No.

“Nora. Lawrence Watkins here. I thought you’d have feedback on the showing by now. I thought we agreed that you’d call me after each showing, immediately after each showing, and give me feedback.”

“Lawrence!” said Nora. She gave to Gabe the universal signal for
I have to take this call
—a vigorous nodding and pointing at the phone—and repaired to Cecily and Maya’s room, which had more privacy than the rest of the house, owing to its position near the back.

Lawrence was one half of the formidable Watkins couple—the other was Bee—who had had the Cooper Sudecki built ten years ago and who had insisted on pricing it at $8.8 million, which was approximately one million more than it should have cost. Sellers overestimating the value of their homes was about as common as ninety-five-degree temperatures in East Bay towns like Danville and Walnut Creek, but the prevalence of the practice didn’t stop it from being the ultimate challenge for every real estate agent in the business. Nora had tried to talk the Watkinses into pricing their home lower to begin with, when they’d first listed the home with her.

She’d tried to talk them into a price adjustment after the property had been on the market for twenty-eight days, and then after forty, and she’d tried to talk them into it after the usual June rush had yielded a total of zero offers. Zero! She was out a ridiculous amount of money from marketing and advertising at this point, and untold man-hours. Woman hours, too, and mom hours: hours of all kinds, hours she didn’t have. July grew slow, as it always did, and August even slower. (As slow, anyway, as the market in Marin ever got.) She’d tried to talk Lawrence and Bee into a price adjustment before September. They’d gone a little lower—$8.5 million—but they ignored Nora’s pleas that the number should begin with a seven.

However! A conversation with Lawrence Watkins was something she could feel confident about right now. True, she had neglected to call him, but she could convince him to overlook that. She closed the bedroom door. She tried not to look around the room, but she surveyed anyway. On the floor was a rubber band loom surrounded by zillions of tiny colored rubber bands. Nora took a deep breath and knelt on the floor near the rubber bands. She said, “Lawrence! I’m so glad you called.” (She wasn’t.) “The showing went long, that’s all.” (It hadn’t.) “Which is a good sign. I was just letting all of the information
gel
in my mind before I reached out.”

“And?” said Lawrence.

“It went well,” said Nora. She started to gather the rubber bands into a pile but then she realized that Cecily probably had some complicated system for laying them out the way she had and that Nora had better not mess with it. “Very well,” she said to Lawrence. “They were already talking about making changes, and you know that’s an extremely good sign, when a client can envision—”

“Hang on,” said Lawrence. “What changes?”

Backpedal,
thought Nora. “Oh, not much. That’s not my point, I just mean that they got to that level of conversation very quickly, and typically that’s a very good sign—”

“But what changes?” insisted Lawrence. “It’s a
Cooper Sudecki,
Nora. It doesn’t need any changes. That house is fucking perfect.”

Nora tried not to be offended by Lawrence’s language—he swore lustily and often, like a sixty-two-year-old sailor—and she tried not to be distracted by the giant
Riverdance
poster that hung on the back of the girls’ door
(The hottest event on 160 legs!).
She tried not to notice that Maya’s backpack was zipped up tight, which meant that she hadn’t taken out any homework, which meant that Maddie had, once again, not done her job. She tried to channel Arthur Sutton—his smoothness, his fearlessness, his lack of fatigue, though she herself was very, very tired—and she said, “Lawrence, it was just something about the outdoor kitchen. They wanted to add a pizza oven, that’s it. No big deal. They don’t want to change the essence of the house. They agree that the house is perfect. My only point is that these people could be The Ones. I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I got a good feeling. That’s all. I’m going to follow up with them tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Not tonight?”

“Tomorrow,” said Nora firmly. She hoped Gabe had picked up the kitchen. She couldn’t believe he and Angela hadn’t created a list of colleges with Ms. Vogel! A colossal wait to get on her calendar, and they hadn’t created a list. What about all those lovely small East Coast colleges Nora knew Angela would adore if she only gave them a chance? What about Mt. Holyoke, Smith? Or, Heaven forbid, a
different
Ivy?

“Why not tonight?” asked Lawrence. He was starting to sound like one of her children, pecking at her for something she couldn’t give them. She had an email to send out to the other parents in Maya’s class soliciting last-minute donations for the school auction. Cecily needed a reminder to take a shower; she’d let it go for days if given half a chance. Had anyone unpacked Cecily’s and Maya’s lunch boxes? And Maya’s soccer game had been moved to a different time on Saturday; she’d have to put that in her calendar before she forgot.

“Because,” she said soothingly, “they need time to gather their thoughts too. They need to sleep on it. I will touch base with them tomorrow, Lawrence. I promise you. Now you and Bee go have a glass of wine on that gorgeous deck of yours, and I’ll be in touch.”

“A goddamn pizza oven,” said Lawrence Watkins. “How come I never thought of that? That sounds fantastic.”

“Oh my God,” said Henrietta. “Edmond Lopez?
Angela.
He’s not your type at all. He’s a total jock.”

Angela and Maria Ortiz and Henrietta Faulkner were walking on the bike path on a Sunday morning. It seemed like a funny thing to do, like they were old, like their parents. Going for a walk made more sense if you had a dog, but none of them did. Henrietta had an ancient albino rabbit named Gus, which didn’t help because you couldn’t walk a rabbit on the bike path. The walk had been Maria’s idea and, like most things Maria suggested, people went along with it, because she offered her ideas with style and conviction. Angela’s interactions with Maria were sporadic and based entirely on what Angela thought of as TWOM: The Whims of Maria. Take lunch, for example. Sometimes Maria Ortiz ate lunch with Angela and Henrietta and a few other girls from the cross-country team, though Maria was not a runner. Sometimes Maria ate lunch in an empty classroom, working on her poetry. Sometimes she ate outside under a tree, where she spread her papers and her journals out around her and let her long dark hair loose to blow in the breeze. Maria Ortiz was so cool that sometimes Angela couldn’t even look at her. Ergo, when Maria beckoned, Angela responded.

“What, are you hanging out with Edmond Lopez now?” asked Maria.

“
No.
Not…hanging out with.” (Who had the time?) “Just noticing.”

Looking at. Admiring. Getting smiled at by, sometimes. Lusting after, if she knew how to lust. Which, by the way, she didn’t.

“His sister, Teresa, is a genius,” said Henrietta. “That’s all I know. She’s, like, a legend.”

“Yeah,” said Angela. “I knew that part. Anyway, he’s not a total jock. He’s in AP English.”

“Fluke,” said Henrietta.

“You can’t
fluke
AP English,” said Angela.

“You can if you got on the track early, and never stepped off when you were supposed to,” said Henrietta. “I bet you his sister writes his papers for him.”

“I’m sure Teresa Lopez has better things to do than write high school English papers,” said Maria wisely.

Angela returned to Henrietta’s original point. “I don’t think I have a type,” said Angela. “Do I?” She didn’t have enough experience yet with boys to have a
type.
Jesus. Silly middle school stuff, then that fumbling with Jacob Boyd at one of the after-prom parties junior year (awkward), and the guy from Phoenix she’d tried to flirt with on the cruise to Alaska in the summer (better, but short-lived). She wished she had a type. But ultimately she’d been too busy with school and cross-country and flute and volunteering et al to figure out her type—let alone to find someone who met that criteria. Maybe she would acquire a type in college. Yes. She would acquire everything she was now lacking once she got to college! “Also, I was only asking what you
knew
about him. You don’t have to freak out about it. I didn’t say I was going to do anything. I was just curious.”

Angela and Maria and Henrietta were all holding Starbucks cups. Whenever Angela took a sip—hers was a latte, though Maria
of course
had ordered four shots of espresso poured over ice, unsweetened, while Henrietta had a hot chocolate with whipped cream and chocolate syrup—she saw her grandmother’s disapproving face. Her grandmother was consistently horrified at the amount of caffeine
today’s teenagers,
as she called them, drank; when the Hawthorne family visited her in Rhode Island, Angela was served a glass of milk at each meal along with her sisters, as though she were still a little girl. “Coffee will stunt your growth, honey,” she told Angela. “You shouldn’t have it until you are absolutely fully grown. And even then, in moderation.”

(Once she had stage-whispered to Angela’s mother, “Do you think that’s why she’s so petite? Because of the coffee?”)

“It’s different now, Mom,” Angela’s mother had said. “You wouldn’t believe the hours of homework they have. It’s a different world than when we were kids.”

Angela adored her grandmother, so she played along, drinking the milk, ignoring the stage whisper. Though sometimes she poured the milk down the kitchen drain when nobody was looking.

“I have a type,” said Maria.

“Yeah?” said Henrietta. “What’s your type, Maria?” Henrietta was so
eager
that sometimes it just killed Angela to watch her. She was like a puppy—no, more like a little kid dressed up as a puppy for Halloween, overdoing the licking and the jumping for effect. Maya had been a puppy for Halloween when she was five. So Angela knew what was involved.

Maria was six inches taller than Angela, with long dark hair that curled up just at the ends, without even being asked to. She was often mistaken for a college student, or older. She had a long, regal nose and the kind of cheekbones that people pointed out constantly because they were totally noticeable underneath Maria’s caramel-colored skin. Maria Ortiz was a walking venti mocha. She didn’t play a single sport, never had, didn’t care. Even when they were nine, ten, all of them playing soccer, she hadn’t played. Her dad owned a fleet of gourmet taco trucks that parked themselves around the city at key times; the lines could go on for a block or more. They were loaded.

Oh, and! Besides the poetry, for which Maria was practically famous, she had the singing voice of an angel. Not just any angel, an angel who had beaten out all of the other angels in Heaven’s version of
The Voice.

Inferiority complex, activate!

Maria was bad at math, though. So there was that. Angela’s GPA was higher. Her SAT scores were higher. She had the daughter-of-an-alum card in her pocket. Maria, applying to Yale, did not.

“My type is older,” said Maria. “Twenty-two, minimum. High school boys seem
so young.
Don’t they?”

Angela tried not to let on how in awe of Maria she was. It was too embarrassing. It sort of seemed like Maria was a different species, living in captivity, and that Angela was some kind of lame tourist wearing khaki shorts and a sun hat and taking photos of her with her iPhone.

Soon enough they happened upon a bench, and huskily, like she was asking them to elope with her, Maria said, “Let’s sit.”

They sat. The bike path was packed with people of all shapes and sizes. A man rode by and immediately behind him was a little girl on a bike with training wheels. The girl said, “Daddy,
wait
!” in a strident voice that reminded Angela of Maya. Maya had just learned to ride a bike the previous year. Angela hadn’t helped her. She’d helped Cecily learn to ride a bike, but by the time it was Maya’s turn all of Angela’s extra time had disappeared into the great black hole that was homework and extracurricular activities and sports practices.

“Listen,” said Henrietta. “I was thinking about it. Do you think there would ever be a tie for GPA? In our class, I mean.”

Angela stretched and yawned. Man, she was tired. She was having trouble focusing on Henrietta’s words.

“So, do you?” persisted Henrietta. She pulled a pen and a Starbucks napkin from her bag and scribbled some figures. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that two people started with a weighted GPA of 5.63.”

Angela closed her eyes and felt her heart constrict. Did Henrietta have a 5.63? There was no way. If she did, Angela would have known it. Right? There was no way Henrietta had gotten ahead of her without her knowledge. It killed her that Henrietta was applying early to Harvard too, that she was
oversaturating
the pool. Applying early to Harvard had always been Angela’s thing, always always. For Henrietta just to come in like it was nothing and apply too…well, Angela couldn’t help it. She thought that was pretty shitty of Henrietta.

“And the other person has a 5.64. But then person A takes her health requirement, nonweighted, and person B takes an AP/GT class. Both get As. But. Person A simultaneously gets an A minus in a
different
AP class while person B gets an A plus in an AP class. Is it possible for them then to pull exactly even, even if the GPAs were calculated to the thousandths place? Which they’re not. But if they were, I mean, what would it take for that to happen?”

“Oh my God,” said Maria. “You are giving me such a headache.”

“Only an idiot would take their health requirement first semester of senior year,” said Angela.

“But for the sake of argument,” said Henrietta. “Is all I’m saying. Just humor me for a sec.” Henrietta was still writing madly on the napkin. She held the pencil awkwardly, her middle finger hooked over her index finger, and a memory greeted Angela of their kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Doyle, standing over Henrietta and correcting her grip, again and again. All that correcting, all that reminding, and still Henrietta’s grip was wrong. Was it bad that that made Angela a little bit happy? Just a tiny bit. It gave her just a
modicum
(SAT word) of happiness.

If Angela squinted at the right angle she could still see
that
Henrietta inside
this
Henrietta. When Henrietta Faulkner turned eleven her parents had taken her and five carefully chosen friends, Angela among them, to Raging Waters, the water park in San Jose, where they’d enjoyed unlimited fountain soda—a true indulgence, since soda was banned from most of their homes—and a Raging Birthday Cookie-Cake. That had been a good day. Angela could still see
that
Henrietta too: sunburned, laughing, the ends of her hair stiff with chlorine.

“I don’t know,” said Henrietta. “I’m getting a cramp in my brain. Forget it.” Then she said, “Do you know? Next summer is the only one we won’t have to fill with shit that will look good on our college applications.”

“Yeah,” said Angela. By next summer, obviously, she would know where she was headed. The thought made her feel sick to her stomach. She could imagine turning in her application to Harvard, but she could not imagine what it would be like to receive a response.

“My summer adviser told me about this one kid’s parents who asked a for-profit company to become a nonprofit so he could use it for a congressional award,” said Henrietta.

“That’s crazy,” said Angela, but her heart palpitated at this knowledge—new to her—that Henrietta had a summer adviser. Should she have had a summer adviser? Her father had mostly advised her on what to do with her summers, but maybe she should have had a professional. Shit. A misstep. Could she blame her parents for this one?

Maria tossed back her hair. “I’ve never done anything just so it will look good on my college application,” she said. “Never.”

“That’s bullshit,” said Henrietta. “That is complete and total bullshit. And I don’t believe you. Everyone like us does stuff so it looks good on our college applications. Everyone. That’s what we
do.
We’re semiprofessional college applicants.”

“Not me. I don’t really care if I get into Yale or not.” Maria lowered an enormous pair of sunglasses over her eyes so her expression was now inscrutable.
Inscrutable: not easily understood, mysterious.
SAT word.

“I don’t believe you.” Henrietta punched Angela on the arm. “Angela, do you believe her?”

“Ow.”

“Sorry.”

Angela shrugged. Yes. No. She wasn’t sure. “I sort of feel the same way about Harvard.”

“Right,” said Henrietta. “You’re so full of shit.”

God, it was true: Angela was such a pathetic liar. She wanted to get into Harvard so badly it literally hurt. Ms. Simmons, AP English: “
Literally,
Angela?” Yes, Ms. Simmons. Literally. It hurts so much I can hardly stand it. I want it so much that I feel like there are little pins stuck all over my body, like I am a giant, freaky, hair-made-of-yarn voodoo doll.

“You are so lucky you’re Mexican, Maria,” said Henrietta. “I would kill to be a minority. I mean, seriously. In this day and age? Applying to the Ivies? You’re just so lucky.”

Angela said, “
Henrietta!
You can’t say that.”

Henrietta snorted. “Like you’ve never thought it.”

“Of course I haven’t. That’s totally racist.”

“It’s not racist! Racist is when you say another race is
inferior
to yours. Not when you’re, like, totally jealous of the other race. Right? I mean, if I said I wish I could have been a slave—”

“You definitely can’t say that. You really can’t.”

“Fuck you both,” said Henrietta.

“She can say it,” said Maria. “Who cares?
I
don’t care.”

“So you’ve
never
wished you could check a different box on your applications? Not once?”

Angela sighed. Okay, maybe once or twice. But she’d certainly never
said
it. There was a limit to how badly you were supposed to want it. Wasn’t there?

Just the other day, her mother, visiting her in her room the way she liked to do when Angela was doing homework: “You don’t have to work so hard, honey. Give yourself a break. You don’t have to make yourself crazy.”

How hilarious of her mother. Sweetly misguided. Of
course
Angela had to make herself crazy. She was first in the class! What was she going to do, stop caring all of a sudden? Now, so close to the end?
Now
she was going to let a few things slide? God.

Angela sipped her latte and watched two gray-haired women pass briskly by, pumping their arms. Then came a guy with a golden retriever, who paused to give Maria an approving glance—if Maria noticed, she didn’t let on—and a couple of minutes after that Angela rested her Starbucks on the bench beside her, cleared her throat, and presented a question that had lately been plaguing her. She said, “Do you guys ever feel like there’s a little voice following you around?”

“You mean a voice in your head? Like a crazy voice?” Maria lifted her sunglasses and cocked her head at Angela. She had gorgeous eyebrows—surprise, surprise—with just the right amount of arch to them. Angela’s eyebrows were so pale they were mostly invisible.

“Sort of.” Angela closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sky. “But not like a crazy voice that’s telling me to
do
something, like jump off a bridge or sacrifice a family member so this unknown god can pull out their heart and eat it. It’s more like a recording of all the things that have ever been said to me, running in an endless loop in my mind.” As soon as she said it, she wished she could
un
say it. She felt just as naked as she would if she stripped off her clothes and ran three two-hundred-meter repeats down the bike path.