“Well, I think it’s generally a good policy never to do anything that you’re too ashamed to tell your best friend,” she says, and I take a deep breath while I let the urge to punch her in her smug face pass. “Or, you know, your sister.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Now

Paloma decides it’s time for me and my mom to leave the house. She’s not worried about our mental health, even though sometimes at night, my mother and I pass each other wandering around upstairs, restless and hollow-eyed, eye masks tented on our foreheads. The Beverly Hills version of the undead. During the day, we do much the same, except our route stretches between the kitchen and the playroom and our eye masks are discreetly packed back in our nightstands.

Eight other parents have pled guilty to their charges, and each made the sort of impassioned apologies Mr. Spence recommended. Every time another person folds, my mom’s bargaining position weakens. Paloma and the PR team have concluded that we need to switch the media narrative.

Even my Signal group has gone quiet now that we find ourselves in different boats, or maybe I’ve been dropped the way they dropped Penny. My mom is not the sole holdout, but she’s by far the most visible.

“What do you think? You guys could shop at Erewhon for salads? Go to a yoga class? Get juice? How do you want to play this?” Paloma asks. We are in the kitchen, which is the room I spend the least amount of time in these days, because there’s always a man in a suit loitering around the giant coffee urn and pastries, talking too loudly on his cell.

I don’t like to be near the lawyers. I always get the sense they’re sizing me up, wondering how I could be so dim as to need to cheat to get into college. It’s not like SCC is an Ivy, I heard one mumble once into his phone. I mean, then I might get it. But SCC, man, really? That guy was wearing crimson socks decorated with tiny Harvard emblems, and I realized you could tell a lot about a man from his ankles too.

“What do you think, sweet pea?” my mom asks. She’s leaning on her elbows on the kitchen island, as if she can’t hold herself up on her own.

“You okay, Mom?” I ask.

“What? Yeah. Just tired,” she says. “Don’t worry. I surrendered the Xanax to Dad to dose out more reasonably. I know I was getting a little Valley of the Dolls.”

“Maybe we should go to a yoga class to relax? But then everyone will look at us,” I say.