Getting In: A Novel by Karen Stabiner

distraction unless it got on a plane and landed in a dorm in Boston or Palo Alto.
    In the fall, television was little more than white noise. Ted had no time for anything but admissions. He got his hair cut shorter first semester than he did during the rest of the year, so that he could cancel his standing monthly appointment if a crisis arose without the head of school making nervous jokes about Ted’s Afro. He rarely ventured past the prepared-foods counter at Whole Foods, except to buy precut and prewashed produce and bottled dressing, and he paid extra to have his dry cleaning and laundry delivered. He burned up his Netflix queue and barely remembered what he had seen. Every morning he donned a crisp pair of Ralph Lauren khakis and a starched, striped broadcloth dress shirt, unless one of the Ivies was visiting, in which case he hauled out one of the two equally dark gray Zegna suits that a grateful couple who owned a boutique had purchased for him on one of their buying trips to Florence.
    During college application season, Ted was distilled to an efficient essence: He was not black, not male, not forty-five, not short, not slim, not a lapsed Baptist, not a Democrat, though all these things were true. Ted was his results.
     
    The big lesson of Ted’s childhood boiled down to “Don’t,” a command uttered and obeyed long past the point of humiliation, though he never once complained. Ted Marshall grew up at the intersection of urban unrest and geographical misfortune; ten years or ten blocks in either direction and everything would have been different. He paraded in front of the television set, as proud as any baby who had figured out how to get the appendages to do something more than wriggle, while his parents and both sets of grandparents watched the Watts riots that kept them indoors fora week. He enjoyed a few seasons of dusk basketball after they fled to a tiny apartment in nearby Compton, only to be hustled indoors by his parents once the Bloods and the Crips designated his block as one worth fighting for. His father started walking Ted to and from middle school before and after his postal route, while his grandfathers split the responsibility of escorting his younger sisters. The girls loved the attention, but twelve-year-old Ted was ready to unfasten the latch that held him to his childhood, which mattered not at all to his terrified parents.
    They moved again at the end of his sophomore year at Compton High, this time to the barely affordable fringe of Baldwin Hills, a middle-class black suburb where no one, as far as they could tell, cowered in fear. For the first time in his postponed life, Ted was allowed to walk to school alone. It was too late to matter. The students at his new school did not want to make friends with a boy who undoubtedly had a gang past, or at least knew gang members who might come looking for him some night; their parents told them to keep their distance, just as Ted’s parents had instructed him to stay away from two previous neighborhoods’ worth of trouble. His father might as well have continued to walk him to school and back for all the good his new autonomy did him. The only thing Ted could control was homework, which he went at with a vengeance. When he got a scholarship to UCLA, he took a perverse pride in knowing that some of the families that had snubbed him were probably having second thoughts.
    His background gave him a certain cachet in college, as long as he was careful about discussing it. Ted could claim to have witnessed crucial moments in Los Angeles’s black history only if he was among people who knew nothing about it, as his first-hand experience involved being marched away, quickly, from whatever was going to make the next day’s headlines. He was smart enough to let people mistake his solemn silence for depth of feeling, though, and he managed to get more than one date with girls who assumedthat there must be a great deal of emotion right underneath the