That’s Claflin Academy in a nutshell: private, elite, and bleeding bullshit from every red-bricked building. Not that I’m not happy to take advantage of the school’s desire to appear generous. I attend Claflin on an almost-full-ride scholarship, thanks to my skills at rowing and lower-middle-class “sob story.” My mother is an elementary school teacher, which is apparently tragic. Single mom, too. I am shrouded in scandal. Anyway, I look great on paper for the school, and even better at the national championships.
I check my phone one more time before ducking into journalism class, in case the Harvard admissions office has decided to cap off lunch by pulling the trigger. It hasn’t.
And for good measure, I tap on the camera and switch to selfie mode. The stubborn cowlick at the back of my head is a lost cause, but the rest of my dark blond beachy waves are on point. I don’t bother with more than mascara and blush most days, funneling all my focus into my alarming collection of lip glosses. Today I’m wearing an Anastasia Beverly Hills gloss I couldn’t really afford, but when Avery gasped and told me the peachy shimmer was perfect on me, I had to buy it. There is no greater peer pressure than that experienced when shopping with your friends at a Sephora. I expect an angry call from my mom in a few weeks when she sees the credit card charge. She won’t care that I chose the least among evils—the relatively cheap lip gloss over the Becca highlighter and Fenty foundation the girls were pressuring me to buy.
I’m the last one inside, about a minute past the bell. The journalism teacher, Ms. Vasquez, looks up from her computer screen, one brow carefully arched, and lets me go without any consequence. She knows it’s ED day. We’re all distracted.
I scoot past the U-shaped desk in the middle of the room, where six of the staff reporters type away on their laptops, and make my way to the back corner where the Beasts live. The beautiful, hulking desktop towers, each with their own twin thirty-two-inch monitors on their own desk. I pass behind Ethan, who is clacking away on his keyboard, the Ledger website back end pulled up on the left-hand screen, his newspaper email on the right.
“Hi, Ethan,” I say as I pull back my chair. I aggressively jiggle the mouse for my computer to bring it awake. The InDesign layout for the December special edition pops up on my right-hand screen. Ethan and I are co-editors in chief—he handles the online edition, while I handle the print one. It should have all been mine—the Ledger never split editor in chief duties before. But during coronavirus quarantine, when all of Claflin was sent home to complete the semester online, Ethan jumped in to beef up and innovate the digital edition, impressing Ms. Vasquez. So while the outgoing editor in chief normally chooses their replacement, this time around Vasquez thought it only fair to reward Ethan for his digital savvy.
On the one hand, I prefer the print edition. On the other…it burns that I have to share the title on my applications.
Still, I enjoy the work. I know the print edition is antiquated and not at all helpful for most future job prospects, but I love creating the layouts on the screen, dragging and dropping heds, decks, pull quotes, and images to create the perfect reading experience. The website content management system is so soulless, comparatively. And you can’t hold the finished product in your hand. I keep every issue I’ve produced in a box underneath my bed, and when I put together my clips for my portfolio, they look so much more professional with the newsprint and the byline right by the headline and subhead copy. Ethan likes to tease me about being a journalistic grandma.
Now he swivels his chair around to face me. “You look like you swallowed a frog, so I’m guessing the decisions aren’t out yet?”
“There’d be screaming in the hallways right now if the rest of the Ivies had dropped,” I reply as I check the editor’s in-box.
I steal a glance at him to see if he’s looking at me, but naturally he’s not. This is a one-sided crush, I remind myself. Ethan is as unfailingly polite as befits his Canadian pedigree, and even though our competition for editor in chief got pretty ugly—and ultimately led to our split duties—he treats me as his peer. But I know to him I’m nothing but a psychotically competitive boarding-school bitch. He transferred to Claflin in junior year, by which time my reputation as an Ivy preceded me. We make small talk, but he’s never bothered to ask me about my background, what I really think of this place, my friends. Why would he? I’m cordial in class and don’t acknowledge him at all outside it.
But I can’t help wanting him to want to know me. He’s one of the few people who aren’t entangled in Claflin’s high-stakes elite college admissions game. He’s told me a million times that Canadian universities only require grades and test scores. He’s free of the kind of bullshit that infects most of this place. It’s refreshing.
“What are you working on?” I initiate the small talk this time.
“Waiting on the same stuff as you, probably,” he says. “Bella’s review of the new drama club show, Brent’s holiday movie wrap-up, and the ED list.”
I pull up the spread I have reserved for the early-decision college results for the senior class. Congratulations, Class of 2021! the left-hand page reads. The right side is blank, with a three-column box faintly outlined in pink, waiting for me to copy and paste in the final list. Typically, the Ledger comes out on the fifteenth of every month, but we always hold the December issue until right before the winter break so we can print a list of the schools everyone got into early.
I drag the layout onto my left-hand screen, which is angled so as not to afford Ethan a complete view. I type carefully.
Harvard, Olivia Winters. My eyes scrape over each letter; I whisper the words, feeling them on my tongue. God, I need this, and I’m dreading it. If I get in and Avery finds out I applied behind her back, she will literally kill me.
“Didn’t you apply to Penn?”
I jump a good foot in the air. Twist around to find Ethan leaning over to peer at the screen. I jab aggressively at the backspace key.
“I was just—” I start to hedge, but then Nisha Khan begins screaming.
“I GOT INTO MOTHERFUCKING NORTHWESTERN!”
“Nisha, language!” Ms. Vasquez snaps. Then she breaks into a wide grin. “But congratulations! That’s amazing.”
We all chime in, congratulating Nisha on the good news. Northwestern is one of the best journalism schools in the country. My stomach turns over, and I feel my lunch inch up my esophagus. It’s starting.
This was a mistake. I should have applied early decision to Penn, the way I was supposed to. It’s an incredible school, with this independent Writers House thing that would be absolutely perfect for me for journalism. I’ve been communicating with the recruiter there, like a good girl, and I probably would have gotten in.
But Penn’s early-decision program is binding, and Avery and the other Ivies don’t understand how stressful it is for me, not knowing if I can afford a school that has a binding admissions decision. Harvard’s single-choice early action offers me an out—I don’t have to decide right away. If I get in, I can still apply to other schools regular decision and then pick the one with the best financial aid package in April.