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.
Not even Harper Everly, with her two million subscribers, could change that.