Getting In: A Novel by Karen Stabiner Page B

satisfied, surely, because Liz had accomplished more than she and Steve could ever have dreamed, but satisfied did not make the bench any more comfortable.
     
    Chloe had just sat down with two iced blendeds when Lauren blew in the door, and she instinctively placed a protective hand over each drink as her friend dumped her purse and backpack on the floor and sank into the empty chair across from her, legs splayed, seams askew. Chloe thought that Lauren dealt with the stress of junior and senior year better than anyone else she knew. Some girls ate too much, others ate too little, and the fringe element dabbled in drink or drugs or random sex or all three. Chloe had tried each of the standard remedies right up to the point where she scared herself, and since then she had settled for dripping sarcasm, the refuge of the timid but angry. Lauren was smarter; she let stress seep right out of her pores. It untucked her uniform shirt and ripped her hem, derailed her center part and sent her hair cascading, kept her knee jiggling no matter how hard she tried to sit still.
    She took a long slurp of her drink, sat back, and cupped her hands under her breasts, oblivious of the effect she was having on the Coffee Bean employee whose job it was to wipe down the tables and refill the napkin dispenser.
    “Get this. Ted the Great says I am top-heavy. Top. Heavy.” She waggled her fingers at Chloe, who laughed so hard she had to wave her hands at Lauren to get her to stop. If she tried to open her mouth to speak, she would have sprayed her drink all over her friend.
    “I want too many schools that don’t want me, is what he thinks. So my mom is in full fret mode, like, ‘What’re we going to do?’ and my dad doesn’t know what to say, and Ted wants me to goto, I don’t know, maybe night school?” Lauren paused to take a breath, which became a sigh, which became a sullen weight at the back of her neck. “It was totally depressing. ‘You’re a terrific kid—except wait, now that we think it over, oh, sorry, you’re a failure.’”
    Chloe’s mood turned appropriately somber. “He didn’t really say that. You’re not a failure.”
    “You’re not a college counselor. Do you have a college counselor?”
    “A college counselor. Well, almost. I of course got assigned to the loser one, basically she’s the receptionist.”
    “Would you stop it?”
    “Would you stop it?” Chloe had left Crestview at the end of her sophomore year, when, as she liked to put it, her parents had decided that it was more important to send their divorce lawyers’ children to private school than it was to let her graduate with her friends. That was not fair, and she knew it—her father had moved into a vacant dingbat apartment in a building his brother owned, and her parents did most of their fighting outside of the lawyers’ offices to keep costs down. Like any other overextended family with exploitable assets, Chloe’s parents had available to them all the usual resources for creating cash: a house whose equity they could borrow against, credit cards they could max out at ever-inflating interest rates, investment accounts they could raid. All that really stood between Chloe and a Crestview diploma was the specter of monthly finance charges or a chunk of added income tax on the investment money, and her parents willingly would have paid the extra freight to assuage their mutual guilt. In fact, it had been Chloe’s decision to switch to public school. In the spring of her sophomore year, her parents had gotten into a loud argument in the Crestview parking lot after the school play, in front of witnesses, and the next day Chloe had informed them that she would not be returning the following year.
    The problem with the truth, though, was that it was dire, and decidedly not funny. As Chloe had no interest in being the object of anyone’s pity or sympathy, she made up the business about the divorce lawyers’ children and stuck with it. The line