Getting In: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

fall apart once they got there. “Eggs,” the admissions directors called them, or “teacups.” They were too fragile; they tended to crack. He spun the bookcase back to its original position and hoped that Nora would not ask him what he was looking at. His role in the college drama, as far as he could tell, was to defend against this kind of peripheral information, to edit out any stressful data that did not directly pertain to Lauren.
    Joel had designed his first magazine when he was eight, a single-issue, four-page, hand-colored and-lettered publication called Pet, full of pictures and articles he had drawn and written about the dog he did not own but wanted his parents to acquire for him. He had worked on the student newspaper in high school and college, and, after a brief stint writing news items for a restaurant trade magazine, he had settled in at Events , where he had been ever since. He had been the west coast editor for ten years, which meant that he knew a small amount about a great number of subjects, information that had served him well until very recently; he could sit next to anyone at a dinner party and keep the conversation afloat through Nora’s dessert course.
    And then, for reasons he could not name, gradually, imperceptibly, Joel had shifted his focus from what he knew to the gaping maw of what he did not know, most of which had to do with his daughter. He had plenty of research at his fingertips—school rankings, acceptance rates, online slide shows of dorm rooms, average financial aid offers, all of his daughter’s statistics—but it refused to congeal into anything resembling a point of view on what Lauren ought to do about college. He worried that the true curse of middle age was not thick yellow toenails or progressive bifocals or sore knees. It was not the creases in his long, thin face, because men could get away with craggy. It was not his salt-and-pepper hair, because George Clooney had single-handedly made gray desirable. No, Joel feared that middle age brought an absolute and terrible clarity: he understood, finally, that information was not the same thing as wisdom, no matter how much of it he compiled. He wanted Ted to help them create a plan almost as much as he wanted print media to survive until after he was dead. He could only hope that the odds of the former were better than the odds of the latter.
    Ted’s office door swung open.
    “C’mon in,” he beckoned, with a calibrated enthusiasm. “How’s the master baker?”
    “Oh God, I didn’t think,” said Nora. “I’m so sorry, and I had these little apple charlottes, how could I…”
    “Hey, I could lose five pounds. Lauren will still get into college, I promise. Maybe not the college of your dreams…”
    Joel saw an opening. “And if Nora delivers a chocolate cake by noon tomorrow?”
    “Any school you want, early decision,” laughed Ted. Lauren was not an Ivy League candidate, but he had plucked her off another counselor’s list because he had a fairly good contact at Northwestern—she was going to need help—and because he was curious about Nora, or rather about Nora’s midlife career change. Ted’s current fantasy involved ditching his job someday for something better, though he had no good idea what that might be. He could write the insider novel to end all insider novels, but he worried that what he knew about college apps would only scare off potential readers. He worried that no one would make a movie out of his novel, so he would have to keep his job—except that parents would refuse to work with him out of fear of being ridiculed in the sequel. He could write an original screenplay instead, but one screenplay was not enough to subsidize his freedom, and he had no idea what the second screenplay would be about. Ted could not figure out how to turn desire into advantage, but Nora was proof that it could be done. She had switched over from magazines to baking. She knew something he did not know, which