On the Road to Find Out (2 page)

Afterward I tell him he looks like a drowned rat. I rub him down with a washcloth and then roll him up in it and turn him into a little vermin burrito. Then I blow-dry him on a low setting until he's fluffy. “You're no longer a dirty varmint,” I say, and he looks up at me with the face of love. Then he starts licking himself again.

Yes, the man of my dreams is the size of a salami. I know there are stereotypes about kids who have rats: They are the loners. They are the misunderstood. They are the weirdos who use their animals as freak flags. But honestly, the reason most folks have rats is because they're fantastic companions, especially when you consider the list of other “pocket pets”:

  1.  Hamsters: Aggressive little a-holes who, when they're not sleeping, which they do for about twenty-three hours a day, will bite you and draw blood.

  2.  Gerbils: The neurotic Ben Stillers of the rodent world, all jerky movements and self-doubt.

  3.  Guinea pigs: Stupid. I know you're not supposed to say things like this, that not everyone can be in the gifted and talented program, but, well, not everyone can. Some of these guys even look dumb, with hair that grows in different directions and seems to need product. And they make creepy noises.

  4.  Ferrets: Freaking stinky. Even if you de-nasty them by surgically removing their scent glands, they still smell musky and rank. Plus, they kind of look like snakes with fur.

  5.  Rabbits: High maintenance. You have to feed them salad every day and then they poop out these round pellets that look like something animals should eat and not expel. And guess what? They do eat them!
Coprophagy
(“eating feces”). Rabbits have supersoft fur but don't like to be held, which strikes me as obnoxious.

  6.  Mice: I have to admit to a fondness for mice. When you see a whole bunch of them in a cage in the pet store, it looks like a city. Everyone's on the move. Everyone's busy. Sometimes there will be three or four guys on a wheel running in one direction and another guy scrambling the other way, and that guy ends up riding around upside down and it looks like they're all having a blast. Mice have a lot going on. But cool as they are, they're not rats.

Rats are the smartest, most social, and all-around best pet. If you don't believe me, ask a veterinarian or someone who works in a laboratory. They all say the same thing: rats are the best small mammals.

And Walter is the best of the best small mammals ever. He's clever and sweet and loving. He has a great sense of humor and an even deeper well of empathy. He was on my lap last month when I found out I had been rejected—not even deferred—Early Action from my dream school.

I sat at the computer, stunned. Walter crawled up my shirt and nestled on my neck, licking the tears from my face. As I stared at the screen, I could picture the word stamped in red on my application and felt like it was now tattooed across my forehead.

Alice Evelyn Davis =
REJECT.

I am unaccustomed to not getting the things I want.

As the sole offspring of two conspicuously consuming professionals
riddled
(“filled or permeated with something unpleasant”) with guilt about working too much and not paying enough attention to their precious child, I am often the beneficiary of bouts of excessive spending. For the record, I get plenty of attention, often more than I want. But my mother likes everything to be perfect, including me. So my room, the entire third floor of our house, is a luxury suite far too fancy for a seventeen-year-old girl.

It's not that I'm not grateful for all the ways my life is made cushy and nice by my parents—okay, by my mother; my father would be happy living in a hovel as long as he had a bunch of books and a
New York Times
crossword puzzle on his iPad—but to be honest, I just don't care that much about stuff. Maybe that's because I have so much of it.

I realize that this is a first-world problem. While my parents aren't private-jet rich or own-a-pied-à-terre-in-Manhattan rich, the fact is, they have a lot of coin. They make up for it by being extra-liberal in their politics and doing charitable giving. A lot of dough still comes my way. Unlike many kids from my school, including Jenni, I won't have to worry about being able to pay for college. I just have to worry about not getting in anywhere I've applied.

My bedroom has a big four-poster bed covered with a soft blue-and-white Egyptian-cotton quilt and a ridiculous number of pillows. What I've gathered from my mother's “shelter porn” magazines is that the richer someone is, the more pillows of different sizes and shapes she has on her bed.

I also have a whole other space with two big couches positioned at a ninety-degree angle and a marble coffee table between them. I'm supposed to use coasters if I put a drink down on the fancy table. Instead, I don't use it. The couches face a huge flat-screen TV hung on the wall, which I can see perfectly well from my bed so I rarely sit in the sitting area. The couch closest to my bed is where Jenni sleeps when she stays over, which she does a lot. She hunkers down in this old red flannel sleeping bag with drawings of cowboys on it. It belonged to Dad when he was a kid. He refused to throw it out, even though Mom threatened to divorce him if he kept bringing it downstairs. I was happy to rescue it, and Jenni loves sleeping among the eternally young boys who wear chaps and throw lassos.

I have bookcases filled with books I've read and reread a zillion times and dressers crammed with clothes I never wear. A large number of the books used to be my dad's. For years I've been raiding his shelves and
appropriating
(“taking something for one's own use, especially without the owner's permission”) his collection. The clothes come from my mother's shopping jags. Some still have price tags on them. Mom thinks if she finds a hundred-and-fifty-dollar sweater for me and buys it for half price, she's saved money. I try to tell her I don't want any more clothes, but she doesn't listen. We end up doing a purge once a year and all these brand-new purchases go to Value Village, and she writes it off as a tax deduction. I've seen kids at school wearing the clothes we dropped off.

My closet has built-in shelves for sweaters and jeans and cubbyholes for shoes. It also has in it a big ugly gold velour overstuffed armchair from our old house. My mother tried to get rid of it and I pitched a fit. After my too-many-pillowed bed, it's my second-favorite place to read.

My desk is in a nook by the bay window and I have a chair that's supposed to be good for your back named after the designer who came up with it and convinced people to spend a bucketload of money on something not very attractive.

Attached to my room is a bathroom with a heated marble floor, a Jacuzzi tub I never use, and a shower I do. The shower is actually great; it attacks you with streams of water from all sides. And, because Mom did a tour of Europe after college and became smitten with French bathrooms, there is a bidet.

If you don't know what this is, you probably don't want to know. Here's a hint: sometimes I threaten to give Walter a bath in the bidet because it's meant for those with dirty tails.

Walter has a cage, of course, a three-story deluxe playhouse. Like me, he thinks his accommodations are a waste of space and spends most of his time in the tiny sleeping hut Jenni made for him. When I'm home, we have an open-door policy, and he's welcome to go wherever he wants. The great thing about a room this big is that during free-range-rodent time, Walter gets plenty of exercise and can stimulate his brain with explorations. However, he usually wants to be where I am.

Most often, I am in the chair in my closet or in bed, reading, or with my laptop looking up stuff or playing Snood. I play a lot of Snood even though it's not that much fun. I'll play a few games, and forty-five minutes later, I tell myself I'll just play one more.

And then I play another.

And another.

It's hard to quit once I've started. These days, I haven't done much reading or looking stuff up. Snood is about all I'm good for.

Last year Mom kept saying that computer games don't count as extracurricular activities on college applications. I hate it when she's right.

Walter is happy to sleep on my shoulder or my chest, but what he likes most is when I'm lying down and my legs are straight out in front of me and he can burrow in between them right above my knees. He has a tendency to nibble on my jeans, and I have tons of tiny holes in my favorite pair. When Mom complains, I remind her people pay a lot of money for jeans with holes in them. I tell her I might rent Walter out to the high-end designers she likes to support. It would be good for him to have a job, I say.

Mom just lets out a big sigh when I say stuff like that and shakes her head to remind me that I am not the perfect daughter she was hoping for.

Walter trails me to the bathroom. He usually follows me around when he's not in a deep, curled-up sleep. He's more doglike than many dogs. He does tricks. He can push a marble around the floor with his nose and can climb anything. He comes when you call him. He has a special dance he does for broccoli, a joyous twirling, circling ballet of love. He's a rat of many talents. If there were a gifted-and-talented school for rodents, Walter would be the valedictorian.

 

3

That first run was so depressing, and being reminded about Yale was so icky, that I stayed in the shower for a long time, probably in the misguided if unconscious belief that I could wash some of the shame off.

Didn't work.

But I stayed in so long Walter decided to check up on me. When I dropped the soap I saw him standing on his back feet with his paws against the glass of the shower stall. He left tiny handprints in the steam. Looking at him made me feel better. I begged him to answer the question, “How can anyone be so cute and wonderful?”

I named Walter after our family friend Walter.

Not after him in the sense of paying tribute, but more because I thought he would find it annoying. I like to annoy him and he likes it when I annoy him. I call Walter the man
Walter-the-Man
and Walter the rat
Walter
.

Walter-the-Man is a lawyer who works at the same law firm as my dad. He lives down the street. He eats at our house most weekends and many weekday nights and has done ever since I can remember. He's usually parked in front of our TV watching college basketball, especially Duke, which he follows with a fervor that knows no bounds or reason—or football or baseball or golf or Wiffle ball—and drinking a beer.

Walter-the-Man is like a human piece of furniture, comfortably overstuffed like my closet chair, and like my chair, a bit worn down. He spends what little vacation time he takes going to see the Barenaked Ladies or the Dave Matthews Band.

I tell him it's kind of sad, a middle-aged man traveling around the country to hear middle-aged men sing.

He tells me nothing's less appealing than a jaded teen.

Sometimes, when I say something sassy, Walter-the-Man will secretly flip me the bird. I'll respond by shaking both my middle fingers at him and we keep this up until we're afraid that one of my parents will see us. Then we'll giggle and Mom will say, “What? What's so funny?” and Walter-the-Man will say, “Nothing. Alice and I were just discussing the trade imbalance with China and the federal-budget deficit.”

Walter-the-Man was in a long-distance relationship with a woman named Deborah for a couple years. I never met her and they broke up in the spring of my freshman year, though they have remained friends. She is dean of admissions at some university in North Carolina. They saw each other infrequently but apparently talked on the phone for hours. Walter spent a lot of time telling us her stories “from the front lines of the bloody college-admissions battle.” He'd tell them in a news-announcer voice.

Last year, when I had to pretend to be interested in schools other than Yale, Walter-the-Man offered to have Deborah talk to me and give me some advice.

I didn't think I needed any. All the crazy things he told us about what the students and parents did to get in had nothing to do with me. Because:

  1.  I am the top student at my high school.

  2.  My SAT scores are 780, 800, and 800.

  3.  I have high 700s and a few 800s on my SAT IIs.

  4.  I am a National Merit Semifinalist.

  5.  I've taken the handful of AP classes offered by my school and got 5's on the AP tests.

Most kids from our school who go to college—and not all that many do—end up at one of the state universities and many of them start out at a community college. The National Honor Society kids go to the U.

Hardly anyone applies to fancy-pants colleges, but both my parents grew up in New York City and went to Bowdoin, a dinky private college in Maine, which is where they met. They both have graduate degrees from Duke. They aren't snobby or anything, but they have told me since I can remember that while they have chosen to live here, I should probably go some place more
urbane
(“refined”) for college.

I figured you couldn't get more urbane than Yale, one of the oldest schools in one of the oldest states in the country. But that wasn't the reason I first got interested in it.

My favorite book is the tattered copy of
The Norton Anthology of Poetry
Dad used in college. Sometimes he and I sit around and read poems aloud and then analyze them. I know how nerdy that makes me sound, but really, it's what I like to do. Dad likes it too, and I like to make him happy. We especially love Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost and Theodore Roethke. I adore Sylvia Plath.

I was obsessed with
The Bell Jar
for a while and asked my family to call me Esther, but it didn't stick. Dad doesn't love old Sylvia. She's a tad too nutty for him, he says.

Once I noticed how many poets had gone to Yale, I decided that's where I would go to college. This was in the days when I thought I might want to write poetry. I had a great English teacher in eighth grade, Mr. Brooks, and he made me think I could be a poet. I've since given up on that and am happy just to read poetry and talk about it with Dad and Ms. Chan, my English teacher this year, but the Yale part stayed with me.