Getting In: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

made her potentially as useful to him as he was to her.
    “Tell me it doesn’t work like that,” laughed Nora, who had already decided on the dark chocolate cake with the espresso ganache.
    “It doesn’t work like that,” said Ted. “You have to come up with much more than a cake. A wing of a building, maybe.”
    At that exact moment, Lauren blew into the room, all apologies and flying shirttails.
    “Here she is,” said Ted. “Now we can get to the important stuff. You have a list for me, young lady, I believe.”
    Lauren pawed through her backpack and extracted a sheet of paper, which she handed to Ted, while Joel quietly opened his briefcase and pulled out a copy for himself and one for Nora. Nora reached for it without taking her eyes from Ted’s face.
    Ted stared at the page for one of those long moments that seemed, to Nora, to define adulthood: the periodontist looking at the x-rays, the colorist looking at her roots, the associate publisher pretending to review her file before he followed his boss’s order and fired her. Getting older meant handing over far too many fateful decisions to people who had no vested interest in the outcome, and Nora was never comfortable waiting for the verdict.
    “Northwestern is a very popular school this year,” said Ted. It was a very popular school every year, one of about twenty schools that sat high on the U.S. News & World Report rankings and were either near a major airport or ranked in the single digits, which compensated for the connecting flight or the rental car. It was one of the schools Crestview seniors thought about without thinking about it, which made for a crowded applicant field.
    “Yeah,” said Lauren, who liked the school because the proportions felt right—far enough away to prevent spontaneous visits but closer than the East Coast, selective enough to feel special but not as daunting as the Ivy League, big but not too big, a modulated choice for a girl who had yet to be seized by an extreme desire. “It would be so fun if a bunch of us ended up there together.”
    Nora watched Ted, who did not smile enough.
    “Or are you saying it’s too popular to get into?” she asked.
    “Mom, will you stop?”
    “No, she’s right to ask. Their apps were up maybe, I don’t know, fifteen, twenty percent last year. It’s a big favorite.”
    “She’s the news editor,” said Nora. “Doesn’t that help?”
    “Mom. It’s not like I’m the editor in chief.”
    “Well, if Mr. Nelson lived in this century…” Nora was convinced that the faculty sponsor had decidedly obsolete ideas about what women could and could not do.
    “ Mom. Could we not talk about this here?”
    Ted smiled and waited. Lauren was right and Nora was right, but there was nothing to be gained from agreeing with either of them. He studied the list again and made a decisive mark with his pencil.
    “I’d say it’s a stretch unless you apply early, and early might get you even odds, but they don’t defer, so if it’s over, it’s over.”
    “Hold on.” Nora reached into her bag for a pen, despite the fact that Joel was already taking notes.
    Lauren gave her a pulverizing stare. “You know what that means. I can apply early decision and have a better chance of getting in, but Northwestern doesn’t defer you into the regular pool if you apply early. They accept or reject. No in between.”
    “Good job,” said Ted. “You want to handle my ten thirty appointment?”
    They made their way through the rest of the list that way. Ted alternated between tough love and humor, Nora asked questions she knew the answer to in case the response changed with repetition, Joel took more notes, and Lauren refused to hear anything but the optimism she needed to make it to the end of first semester. If Ted had polled each family member at the end of the half hour, Lauren would have said she was getting in everywhere but Stanford, Joel would have said she would get into more than half the schools on