Getting In: A Novel Read Free

family. Her father had worked at the local high school in ascending positions since before she was born. Her mother was Sheboygan’s acknowledged queen of needlepoint. Her older brother taught introductory psychology classes at the University of Wisconsin and liked to mutter insufferable little asides—“Hmm,projecting?”—on the rare occasions when the whole family was together. If not for Nora’s favorite journalism professor, whose career advice had amounted to “Get out of town,” she might have stayed in Madison herself. Until she was told to clean out her desk at the magazine, Nora had assumed that she would run the research department forever.
    For a month she alternated between elation and depression, with a few side trips to abject terror, and then she began to bake, a bit too compulsively for her mental health or her family’s nutritional profile. Almost four years and a home equity line of credit later, she ran a small commercial bakery that supplied restaurants and a couple of gourmet food shops. The bulk of her fans, all of whom would be terribly upset to hear the word “bulk” used in reference to them, lived in a crescent of inflated real estate that started in Malibu and ran south along the ocean only as far as Marina del Rey, which lacked the cachet of the other beachfront neighborhoods, never having lived down its early reputation as a haven for desperate singles who refused to wear sunscreen. The customers who preferred the exclusivity of a private pool to a windblown beach lived only as far inland as Brentwood or Beverly Hills, neighborhoods where people hired a private chef and then banished her before the meal to perpetrate the fraud of a home-cooked dinner. These were the people who had made Nora a success. She preferred never to get closer to them than an order form, because they misunderstood her intent completely.
    Nora made small desserts because she could never make up her mind about whether she wanted chocolate cake, strawberry shortcake, or a flavored pot au crème at any given meal. She meant them to be served three on a plate, one chocolate, one fruit, and one creamy dessert, a medley for the indecisive. Instead, adamantly svelte hosts ended their dinner parties with individual servings of a single two-inch Nora dessert, amidst appreciative murmurs about minimalist proportions. Restaurants featured a solitary little dessert shipwrecked on a huge service plate and called it style. Nora retaliated with a line of standard-serving desserts, which the restaurants refused to order. The gourmet shops reported that people occasionally bought them for more casual events—a picnic, a backyard barbecue—and cut them into fourths.
    She might not be able to control her demographic, but she had shown herself to be resourceful in a crisis. By the time Nora got to BookWorld, she was back in charge. She rushed into the store as though Lauren had been bitten by a snake and BookWorld had the last vial of antidote, grabbed the store’s one remaining copy of the Fiske Guide to Colleges , and marched into the pharmacy next door for a pack of multicolored paper clips. She found a short, fat plastic jar with a twist lid in the travel aisle and dumped the clips into the jar as soon as she had paid for them. Nora was never happier than when she had the proper tools. It was time to get to work.
    When she got back to Starbucks, almost every table was full. A man with a laptop had commandeered the oversized handicapped-access table, because apparently he defined handicap as any situation where people did not appreciate how important he was. The two women at the next table were exclaiming loudly about the very big purse one of them had just bought at an equally oversized discount, oblivious, in their retail high, of the laptop man’s occasional glare. A quartet of aggressively cool girls sat at a window table, having long since learned how to disguise their insecurity as aloofness, but Nora was not good at