I have no response to this. I want to ask her what she means by left behind. There are, in fact, many colleges that will accept me even if I don’t get my scores up. Not the kinds of schools my parents will want to flaunt with license-plate frames or brag about at dinner parties or drop into interviews on the Tonight Show. Still, Mrs. Oh gave me a long list of safeties, none of which we bothered to visit this summer but all of which are perfectly respectable schools where I imagine I’ll learn whatever it is you are supposed to learn at college to prepare yourself for adulthood.

“We didn’t pay six years of Wood Valley tuition, plus make God knows how many donations, for you to go to some no-name place,” my dad says. “This shouldn’t be that hard. You deserve this.”

“I mean, look at Philo. He got into Yale, and he’s truly an idiot, not to mention a criminal,” my mom says, which is true. Aunt Candy’s son got kicked out of Andover for dealing coke his sophomore year.

“Not when I got through with him,” Dr. Wilson says, tapping his coffee cup against my mother’s, like a fist bump. “If you read his application, you’d have thought the kid belonged in Mensa.”

“What’s Mensa?” I ask, even though I know perfectly well what Mensa is. Isla has been a member for years, because she’s ridiculous like that. I think about how this meeting will go for her next year, when she’s applying to colleges. Will Dr. Wilson suggest ADHD again so she has enough time to ensure a perfect score? To iron out any chance of minor human error? Probably not.

“Chloe,” my mother says with a defeated exhale. “Please just stop.”

“Sorry,” I say.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Now

“You know Dad could go to jail too,” Isla says without apology, waking me up from a deep sleep by sitting on my bed. The horror of yesterday seeps back in slowly. I tell myself that it can’t be that bad. This is a blip in what has been my otherwise seminormal existence. My mom’s home now, safe, and she’ll get the charges dropped like she did for Hudson a few years ago. Life will resume.

I reach past Isla for my phone and turn it on. I have three hundred twenty-six text messages and a full inbox of voice mails from various news outlets. The Today show, The View, even Dateline.

Apparently, this will not blow over. Blips do not involve being grilled by famous morning talk-show hosts.

“What do you mean Dad could go to jail too?” I ask. I swat at my eyes, which feel goopy and swollen, a reminder that I cried myself to sleep last night.