Getting In: A Novel by Karen Stabiner

the seniors made life choices that did not require a diploma, one or two of them always drafted by the freelance pharmaceuticals rep across the street. Even so, it was a great wave of teenagers. Yoonie had the chance, on increasingly intermittent Wednesdays, to watch them grow up, to be reminded—not that she ever forgot, not even for an instant—that in three years, in two years, next year, she would be able to walk on the beach every week. She opened her checkbook register to the little calendar printed on the back, to get an idea of how many Wednesdays there were between now and college, but Elizabeth swung open the passenger door and plopped onto the seat before she could finish counting.
    Liz . Yoonie corrected herself. On the first day of senior year, Elizabeth had informed her mother that she preferred to be called Liz.
    “You have anything left to eat?”
    “No. I’m sorry.”
    Liz settled into the passenger seat, carefully set her water bottle into the cup holder her father had built for her out of a beheaded Big Gulp cup and some duct tape, and reached down at her feet for her mother’s new book bag, which sported the logo of the wrinkle filler whose manufacturer was courting Dr. Joy. She pulled a Sharpie out of her own backpack and began to color over the pharmaceutical logo with black ink.
    “You’re not a billboard,” she told her mom, as she had when she had blacked out the logo on the previous book bag, “and you really ought to carry a regular purse separate from lunch. What if something spills?” Yoonie watched her daughter with frustration. She was proud to carry the bags from the pharmaceutical companies, just as she enjoyed wearing the pastel scrubs that Dr. Joy liked the nurses to wear instead of plain white, but Liz always marked outthe logos anyhow. As she turned the bag over to start on the other side, the flagged Fiske guide slid out of the bag onto her lap. She riffled through to see what schools were marked.
    “Where’d you get this?” she asked. “Why did you flag all these?” She picked a page with a blue flag and held it up for her mother to see. “Duke? You’re not serious.”
    “Dr. Joy gave it to me,” Yoonie said.
    “But we’re not interested in any of these schools.”
    “I know,” said her mother. “When I read some of it I felt even more sure that we are not interested.”
    Yoonie pulled carefully into traffic and headed for home, a small stucco cottage in a corridor of rentals sandwiched between the Santa Monica freeway and the gentrified neighborhoods to the south. She and her husband and her daughter lived on a street where gang members still sprayed their initials on fences, where the neighborhood market stocked a dozen kinds of salsa but not a single jar of danmooji. Her second cousin, who lived in Koreatown, liked to remind her on a regular basis of exactly how crazy she was not to move, but Yoonie ignored her. She and Steve had moved here for the schools, because the district served the overpriced beachside communities as well as the few remaining blocks at their margins that had not yet been remodeled. They had endured thirteen years of kids smoking who knew what on their front lawn after school, of boys walking flat-headed, spike-collared dogs that growled at anything that moved, of sirens that screeched to a halt in their neighborhood, all so that Liz could attend a halfway decent public high school. In a year, she would go to Harvard, and then perhaps Yoonie and her husband would move onto her cousin’s block, where people understood that Eun Hee was pronounced with a breath in the middle.
    Liz flipped to another flagged page, read silently for a moment, and tossed the book onto the floor of the backseat. “Can we go to Coffee Bean?”
    “Yes,” said Yoonie, who had yet to develop a taste for even the most doctored of coffee drinks, but would never turn down such an invitation. “But look again in the bag and see what I got you.”
    She pulled into