Getting In: A Novel by Karen Stabiner Page A

surface. In fact, Ted had seen enough of what happened to people who got caught up in the thick of things—who found themselves the target of a cop or a rival gang, trouble either way—even if his vantage point was the sidelines. He wanted no part of it. He dreamed circumspect and solitary dreams, because any other instincts had long since atrophied.
    He graduated with a BA in English and an agenda that involved a first novel and a first love, the former about to be written, the latter, he was sure, about to be met. A year later, he had ninety pages of unfinished manuscript, and a year after that, he had barely broken a hundred. Ted could no more step out of his head than his younger self could step off the curb without his father’s permission, so he accepted his parents’ offer to stake him to a teaching credential and got a job at a big public school, where he saw some of his students for the first time on the day he gave the midterm. Three years of that and he answered Crestview’s ad for an English teacher. He told himself it was a temporary move, an advantage, really, in terms of raw material for his novel. Thanks to his parents’ watchfulness, Ted had no serious misfortune to peddle. A detoured life as an English teacher might lack the exploitable depth of genuine bad luck, but it would have to do.
    Inevitably, one of the seniors asked him to read a draft of her college application essay, and when she got into Stanford early, she and her parents let everyone know that Ted had made all the difference. He got so many requests for help that the head of school cut his teaching load in half and made him the junior member of what was then Crestview’s two-person college counseling team.
    He never wrote another page of his novel. The true love part of his fantasy eroded as well, when his most promising girlfriend broke up with him midway through his first early-decision season as department chair, as though her biological clock could not have kept ticking for a few more weeks, until he saw how theapplicants shook out. He dared to suggest that she was not being reasonable, as his deadline was absolute and hers was not. She stomped out of his place, and he never heard from her again. His acceptance rate that year was 10 percent higher than his predecessor’s had been.
    He had a gift for other people’s success, if not his own, so he let the job take up more and more of his time, until it eclipsed his old ideas of who he would turn out to be. Crestview parents generously assumed that he had secrets and occasionally speculated as to what they might be, but in fact he was a lower case enigma. Ted let them wonder, for whatever they imagined had to be more interesting than the truth.
     
    Ted read Brad’s flying essay one more time, wrote, “Nice writing, but let’s get on course” in his notes, and moved it to the bottom of the stack, more irritated than made sense. He read an essay about solving the health crisis in Africa, “One of thousands,” he wrote on his notepad, though when the boy came in Ted would make a flattering plea for something that better reflected the boy’s dynamic range of interests. He read one about a personal epiphany inspired by the discovery, in the garage, of the applicant’s parents’ Pete Seeger albums. “Reed or Hampshire,” wrote Ted, “and change epiphany.” Lots of people rewrote their kids’ essays, even if they swore their children had asked for input and all they had offered were copious notes, but subtlety was key, and “epiphany” was not a subtle word. He read a long essay by a girl who thought that buying only local produce, even if it meant forgoing apples in the middle of summer, qualified as profound self-sacrifice.
    Katie’s essay could not possibly be any worse than those. The last draft had been fine, and at this point he was reading only to buy her parents another week to persuade her to switch to Williams. He riffled through the rest of the stack and plucked