ONE Eileen
The letter arrived the morning of December twenty-first.
Eileen wasn’t expecting mail addressed to her. No packages, because she hadn’t ordered art supplies for two years. No Christmas cards, because who the hell sent those anymore? Extended family members, maybe—grandparents and great-aunts—but Eileen didn’t have those. She definitely wasn’t expecting a press-and-seal business envelope with a law office for a return address and a red-ink note on the flap that read, OPEN IMMEDIATELY.
Eileen was affronted. She didn’t take orders, especially not from goddamn attorneys and their red-ink pens. She had a bad history with letters, and she didn’t want to know what this one had to say—whether she opened it immediately or in ten years. So she threw the envelope out, dropping it in the trash can beneath her desk. Then she left the house for her Safeway shift.
Soon, she’d forgotten about the letter.
She forgot about a lot of things when she worked, and especially when she drank.
That was the point of both full-time occupations.
* * *
That night, back at home, Eileen was filled throat-high with Jack Daniel’s. She’d ended up horizontal on the floor of her converted-garage bedroom, and that’s how she found herself facing the trash can beneath her desk.
Music was playing on her boom box, fuzzy through the ancient speakers. “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses had been on repeat for half an hour. It was a terrible song. It was the best song. Eileen hummed along.
Her mouth tasted like regurgitated milk. It was gloomy outside—typical Oregon. Mom had left that afternoon for the Bahamas. But none of this bothered Eileen. She was numb to every bad thing. She wiggled her ankles to the beat of the music and, through blurry eyes, read the address of the trashed envelope.
Ms. Eileen Sullivan.
The “Ms.” really got to her. Ms. Eileen Sullivan. If those fancy attorneys could see her now.
Eileen pawed at the rim of the trash can, tipping it over and grabbing the envelope.
It was already opened, and Eileen didn’t remember doing that. Then again, she did a lot of unmemorable stuff when she was drinking.
She laughed at the envelope—at the “Ms.”—while tugging the letter out of its torn top.
Pretty soon, the laughing stopped.
TWO Claire
At the same time Eileen was reading the letter, Claire was being rejected from her dream college.
She stared at her phone and the ugly words written on the admissions portal homepage.
Maybe my thumb slipped, she thought, or I entered someone else’s password.
She’d been telling herself that for six days.
Delusional.
Ms. Hopkins, Claire’s guidance counselor, had said Yale would be a long shot. But Ms. Hopkins wasn’t familiar with Harper Everly’s YouTube videos. She didn’t know what it meant to be an Exceller. If she did, she wouldn’t be working for the Emmet, Oregon, school district, and she wouldn’t say, “Good grades and letters of rec aren’t enough for places like this.” She wouldn’t bring such negativity into Claire’s life.
That was what Claire had been telling herself from October to November to December fifteenth, when she’d received the e-mail from Yale, instructing her to check the Internet portal. She’d been so nervous, she’d messed up the password entry twice. That’s why, when she’d finally logged in, she’d thought the rejection was a mistake. She’d told herself it had to be wrong, even the second time she’d checked, and the third.
And the fiftieth.
The official letter had arrived in the mail the next day, telling Claire what the Internet had: You’re not good enough.
Still, Claire logged in to the portal every day, hoping for a change in reality, a discovery that it had been a technical error.
Doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results—that was the definition of insanity, right?
Or of perseverance.
It only took one yes. Harper Everly said that, and Harper’s word was gold.
She also said, “Don’t plan for failure, or failure is what you’ll get.”
Harper was confident making that pronouncement, with her glistening teeth and jewel-toned statement necklace. She was confident for a reason: She’d succeeded. She was only twenty, and she had over two million subscribers, plus the resultant commercial sponsorships. She’d been named a “Young Entrepreneur to Watch” by Cosmopolitan, and to top it off, she’d grown up without anything, in a nowheresville town that may as well have been Emmet.
Harper knew what she was talking about.
So why was Claire staring at a rejection?
No.
Not even waitlisted. A sturdy, solid no.
How did you reject someone with a perfect 800 on her SAT reading and writing section and a 4.0 GPA? A saint with hundreds of hours of community service and letters of recommendation from her AP teachers, saying what a natural-born leader she was? How did Yale reject Claire Sullivan, a brilliant, well-rounded, blue-collar girl who was also gay? Didn’t they understand she needed a way out? She had to be in a beautiful, broad-minded, intellectually stimulating place. Everything Emmet was not.
“Fuck you, Yale,” Claire said, hurling her phone from the bed onto the pink shag rug.
Immediately, she regretted it.
“Fuck” was an ugly word, used only by Settlers.
It felt wrong to say, a betrayal.
But Yale had betrayed Claire first.
She’d been so sure. If Mom, a Settler, could win a Bahamian cruise through sheer luck, then Claire, a tried-and-true Exceller, would absolutely make it to New England.
Now there was no New England.
No snow-blanketed winters or historic gray-stone archways.
No Socratic dialogues around a crackling fire.
No Ainsley St. John, and no perfect first kiss.
Claire lay on the bed, at last allowing the heavy truth to leech into her body, slog through her veins, thunk against her heart.
She should have seen this coming a month ago. That was when Claire’s perfect facade of a future had started to crack. She had opened Instagram to find a new post by Ainsley, her arm slung around the shoulder of a beaming blond girl in a baseball cap. The caption read, “♥ my girlfriend.”
Girlfriend.
A girlfriend who wasn’t Claire.
That wasn’t in the plan.
Still, Claire had told herself, girlfriends were only girlfriends. Not fiancées. Not wives. They would last a few months, or mere days, and Claire could wait that out.
She’d done what Harper had said and not planned for failure. She’d ignored the Instagram post, because she refused to be worried. She hadn’t applied to a “safety” school, because what was the point? It was single-choice early admission to Yale, or bust. She wouldn’t be caught dead with her name on an application to U of O.
And now?
It was too late.
She wasn’t going to get the girl.
She wasn’t going to Yale.
She wasn’t going to college, period.
Everything Claire had worked for these two years was gone—specks of snow that lived for one moment in her imagination, now dissolved into a useless puddle.
Claire was a planner, and her plan had failed.