Getting In: A Novel Read Free Page B

a growing assortment of Lauren mementos. The fact that the older boxes remained sealed in no way discouraged Nora from packingup everything, from Lauren’s favorite books to a large stuffed elephant. The first generation to move far from their parents did not travel light, after all: for Nora and her husband, half a garage of unused possessions provided welcome ballast, a movable sense of place.
    There was no good reason to wake Lauren up, so Nora sat, grateful for an excuse to hold still, and watched her sleep. Lauren’s long black hair tumbled over her face; what a peaceful face, Nora thought, no impatient glare, no pout, no scowl, just intersecting planes of pale skin and a rosebud mouth that looked like it was about to smile. Joel had called her Snow White when she was little, because of her coloring, but he stopped before she started preschool because he did not want anyone else to do it. No kid of mine, he told Nora, gets named for a girl who is dumb enough to take unwashed fruit from a stranger, wanton enough to live with seven little guys, passive enough to need a handsome man to straighten out her life. They adored Lauren with the abandon of two adults who had been raised in tailored households. They liked the idea that there was nothing they would not do for her.
    When Lauren was a baby, Joel sometimes took her for a drive in the middle of the night to help her fall asleep, which worked fine until he pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine, and the sudden absence of noise and vibration woke her right up again. A pitying friend bought them a contraption that hooked onto the side of the crib and mimicked the hum and soft motion of a car, ending the late-night commute, but it was a story they told once too often, so Lauren made contradicting it an element of her growing autonomy. If her parents thought she always fell asleep in the car, she would make sure she never fell asleep in the car. Sometimes she stayed up so late doing homework that Nora begged her to sleep on the half-hour drive to school the following morning.
    “I don’t sleep in cars,” Lauren said.
    Nora considered waking her daughter up, considered lettingher sleep, and realized that it made no difference. Lauren would be embarrassed and defensive either way. Nora sank into the angle of her seat and the door, trapped, and quickly gave in to her own exhaustion. When Joel got out of the airport cab a half hour later, he found both his wife and his daughter asleep in the car. He put his bag and briefcase inside the house, grabbed the mail out of the box, and sat on the front stoop, sifting through the junk mail for anything that might require attention, wondering whether the driver’s or the passenger window was the right one to knock on.

SENIOR YEAR
chapter 1
    Crestview Academy lacked both a hillcrest location and a panoramic view. The school sat in the curve of a Culver City slough, on land that the Los Angeles River had carved out and then abandoned in its reconsidered meanderings down to the beach, and the vista from the school’s west-facing windows was not of rolling hills but of the concrete swoop of a freeway on-ramp. Its founder had come up with the name Crestview when he moved west in the late 1960s, intending to put it on a plaque above the gated entrance to the hillside mansion he would purchase once he left Pittsburgh and high school English lit classes behind for a new life as a Hollywood screenwriter.
    He had three speculative scripts and the name of a studio executive whose nephew had been in his advanced placement class, but the closest he ever got to the movies was a series of meetings with men who were far more interested in his educator’s past than in his story pitches. They wanted to buy his expertise, to stake him to a new prep school, because they could not get their children into the city’s old-guard private schools, where “entertainment money” was code for Jewish. Those men liked the name Crestview, despite