Look no further, p.1
Look No Further, page 1
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN 978-1-4197-5740-2
eISBN 978-1-6470-0436-1
Text © 2023 Abrams
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Chapter 1
NIKO CASTADI
This rejection envelope is bigger than I expected it to be.
I weigh it in my hands, eyeing the Ogilvy Summer Art Institute logo on the front, the small metal seal on the back. Actually, the envelope could be described as more of a packet. It’s like there might be a folder in here with documents inside. Documents that aren’t just the sentence “No, and also who do you think you’re kidding,” phrased in a fancier way.
I tear the envelope open. My mouth grows dry.
No way.
“Niko, honey?” calls a voice from upstairs. “Did you remember to take out the trash?” My mom emerges on the second-floor landing, her long blonde hair held in one fist as she prepares to tie it back in a ponytail. She stops at the top of the steps when she sees my face. “Niko? What’s going on?”
I hold up the folder, which has a huge, orange CONGRATULATIONS! printed diagonally across an abstract background.
“I got into the Ogilvy summer thing,” I tell her blankly. “They took me off the waitlist.”
My mom lets out a small shriek and drops her scrunchie. “Phil! Phil, come here!”
My dad barges out from his office, his gray eyes wide in panic, like he thinks the house is under siege or something, and my mom starts exclaiming, and it’s all washing over me in wave after wave of disbelief. I don’t get it. Did my parents bribe someone to get me off the waitlist? My GPA is hovering in the mid-2s, and the application was such a rush job. Three days before the submission deadline, I still hadn’t written a word for either of the essay questions.
In my defense, the prompts were terrible. The first was, “Why do you wish to enroll in the Ogilvy Summer Art Institute?” In the end, I made up a generic page about wanting to broaden my artistic horizons, since I’ve lived my whole life in a tiny California tourist town. But my honest answer would have gone something like this:
Dear Admissions Committee:
To tell you the truth, my parents are forcing me to apply because they think your summer program will turn my college prospects around. Having seen my grades, you’ll probably agree this is both naïve and sad. Please reject me now so that we can all get used to the feeling of rejection early on! Thanks!
Niko
It’s not that I don’t want to go to Ogilvy. Art is the only subject at school I like anymore, the only one I’ve gotten an A in since freshman year. But I’ve looked through the Ogilvy website. With the number of times that they use the words “elite” and “high-achieving,” I thought it was obvious this wasn’t going to work out.
The second essay question was even worse: “What makes you unique?”
I mean, come on. Where do application writers get these god-awful questions? You want me to look at my entire life and describe, in under five hundred words, what makes me an individual person? You want me to know, psychically, what I’ve got that every other person in the stack doesn’t?
I don’t think I’m unique. There, I said it. The thing we’re apparently not allowed to admit on applications. I think I’m mostly the same as other people, and I’ve got no interest in sitting down and thinking about how I might be different. Is that supposed to feel good? Separating myself out from everyone around me?
If they’d asked, “What makes you similar to other people?”—now that I could answer. Like everyone who’s grown up in Landry Beach, I’m mostly sick of the town but would fight to the death to defend Egghead, that breakfast place on the corner of Seventh and Shiloh. Like everyone at school, I fill out basketball brackets in March and talk shit about my friends’ choices, and when one of us predicts a freak upset, we gloat about it for months. Like both of my best friends, I want to go to CSU Monterey Bay. None of us know what we want to major in. We’ve got that in common, too.
I do have some interests besides art. I’ve been surfing forever, and for a year or so, I’ve been pretty into weightlifting, too. I like the way my arms feel heavy when they’re sore. I’ve put on a decent amount of muscle in the last year, and I like looking at myself and feeling like I’ve got control over what I’m seeing.
But who puts this stuff into applications? I’m not making the Olympic surfing team anytime soon, and admissions officers don’t let people into programs for being excited about their hobbies. Having interests doesn’t make me unique. It makes me normal.
The Ogilvy people must have seen something unique in my application, though, because here it is. Congratulations. How to prepare for your transformative five-week Ogilvy experience.
Still, I know the truth: that I squeaked in off the waitlist. Looking down at the welcome letter, all I can see is a promise that everybody at camp is going to be an artistic genius. And then there’ll be me.
My parents are chattering excitedly now, talking about booking flights to New York and how I have to start packing soon. I nod, try to smile. I should be excited. Instead my stomach is churning, a feeling I know too well from surfing—that spinning, directionless feeling of being underwater.
“Now,” Devin calls. I pop up on my board, and the moment my feet hit resin, I can feel the whole Pacific Ocean rolling under me, pushing and pulling under six-foot-three of board.
The wave roars, lifting the three of us. Swell’s up at a head and a half, and the wind is nice and low, so the waves have been decent, no unexpected shifting or crumbling.
I stabilize myself, arms out and crooked. There’s swearing from my left. That’ll be Grayson getting tugged out to the corner—didn’t get out fast enough. He always has trouble catching lefts.
But Devin and I slip down onto the face no problem. Foam hisses at my side and back. Salt air washes into my mouth so I can taste it.
Ten feet away, Devin’s steady in a low crouch, his board holding at the bottom. I’m hanging in the steepest section, seawater flecking my bare back, the wave peeling beautifully to my side. The hollow of the wave is gorgeous, steady and supportive, the roll of thousands of pounds of water somehow easy to balance under the soles of my feet.
Ahead, some kids on the golden strip of beach are pointing at us, and I glimpse the tropical green of Hailey’s towel and the relaxed incline of her body. The June sunshine is full but not too bright. For the first time since the Ogilvy letter arrived, I feel relaxed.
Devin lets out a whoop as the wave runs itself out, leaving us both in the shallows. “Next one?” he calls, a wide smile on his sunburned face.
“Might be the last one in the set,” I say, squinting back at the ocean. The tide’s coming down, and we’ve gotten lucky the last twenty minutes.
“Hey, wait up, assholes,” Grayson calls as he paddles toward us.
“Nothing to wait for,” Devin calls back, kicking a splash of water at Grayson. “We’re heading in.”
Sticky with salt and sweat, we slope up the beach. Devin’s board slips off his shoulder, and he gropes to replace it, his lanky limbs all over the place. Grayson, who has twice Devin’s muscle, laughs and shoves Devin’s board out of place again, and soon they’re getting into a fake tussle. As usual, they’re starting to make idiots out of themselves as we approach Hailey and her friends.
I don’t blame the guys. Even now, after a month of us dating, it’s unreal to me that Hailey Maxwell towed her friends across town just because I told her I’d be surfing today. I still think about her like that sometimes, with the full name, Hailey Maxwell, like she’s still an impossible crush instead of my girlfriend.
To be fair, she’s full-name Hailey-Maxwell to everyone else at Landry High. Back in the first month of freshman year, our class of three hundred somehow magically decided which dozen kids everyone was going to admire, envy, and gossip about for the next four years. Hailey topped the list.
So, this February, when Mr. Elliott rotated our seating chart in English and seated me next to her, I already knew way too much about her. I knew which law firm her dad owned. I’d heard about her ex-boyfriends—both captains of varsity sports named John, a weird enough coincidence that the entire school joked about it. And I’d watched Hailey pulling up to school in the morning dozens of times. It’s always this whole production. Every day at 8:15, she and Gigi Pace and Kelsey Whitney slide out of Kelsey’s Tesla in unison, beautiful and laughing and holding lattes, their perfect hair shining around their shoulders. They are the girls who define the phrase “out of your league.”
When Hailey started talking to me before English, I told myself it was nothing. Then she started taking a longer way to Precalc so we could keep talking after class. That was harder to ignore. Soon there were arm touches, and eye contact, and other things I thought about obsessively at home while failing to focus on algebra.
By April, we were doodling on the edges of each other’s notes, and on the last day of school before spring break, we walked down the hall from class in silence, then stopped at the spot where we usually split ways. Hailey shook back her hair and said, “So?”
“So what?” I said.
She reached out and tugged one of the straps dangling from my backpack. “So, Elliott’s going to rotate the seats after we get back. I won’t get to read any more of your essays.”
I laughed. “Yeah, how are you going to survive?”
She raised her eyebrows. Hailey can get away with that sort of stuff, raising her eyebrows instead of responding, like it’s your job to entertain her. The thing is, it feels good even for her to do that—to want more from you.
“I could text you essays about how the surfing’s going,” I said, casually as I could.
“Do that,” she said, handing me her phone.
Now, as we stop beside the girls, Hailey levers herself up on her forearms and lifts her sunglasses onto her golden hair. Her eyes are the kind of blue you hear songs about, the kind that get compared to oceans or skies. “Do I know you?” she asks.
“Mm . . . I don’t think so. Kind of weird that you’re lying on my towel.”
It’s the right answer. She and her friends laugh. Around Hailey’s group of friends, there’s always a right answer, and you can always tell when you give the wrong one—one that isn’t cool or clever or careless enough.
Devin and Grayson complain about that, but I don’t have a problem with it. It’s like a game. No reason to mind, if you know how to win.
“How were the waves?” asks Kelsey with an ironic edge. She says most things with an ironic edge and never sounds curious about anything. It’s more like she lobs questions at people to see how they’ll embarrass themselves.
“Waves were great,” I tell her. “Why, you want to get out there?”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve been super excited to drown lately,” says Kelsey to Gigi, squeezing seawater out of her dark hair. Gigi laughs. This seems to be Gigi’s main interaction with her friends: laughing and agreeing. Hailey says she’s shy.
“We’re about to head out,” says Grayson in the voice he always uses around girls. It’s deeper, slower, self-consciously manly. It sort of gives me secondhand embarrassment, but I never say anything about it. Grayson is five-foot-four. Things are tough out there for short guys.
As the girls pack their tote bags, I scan the beach. Everyone in Landry Beach complains about summer because of the tourists. The towels are a dozen rows deep today, and the shallows are ninety-five percent toddler. But secretly I love the whole cycle, the way the crowds pour in at the start of summer, the easily impressed kids and parents who’ll clap for anyone halfway decent at surfing. I love the closing-time atmosphere in early fall, when the vacationers trickle out and leave the beaches trampled and peaceful, the hot dog and snack stands wheeling away until it’s just the sand and sea again.
Ogilvy means five weeks away from all this. Five weeks of long distance with Hailey, too, and it’s not like we have some year-long relationship to bank on. I had plans to impress her this summer, especially on the trip we were all going to take weekend after next.
Hailey hoists her bag onto her shoulder, straight-backed as a ballet dancer, and glances my way. “What’s up, Niko?”
“Nothing.” As we wind between sunbathers toward the parking lot, I hike my board higher. “But just so y’all know, I’m not going to be in town next month after all, so I can’t do Pismo Beach.”
Devin and Grayson stop arguing about whether a chunkier board does better on hollow waves. “Why?” Devin says. “Where are you going?”
I shrug and explain the surprise Ogilvy acceptance in as few words as I can.
“Niko!” Hailey exclaims. “Why didn’t you text me? That’s amazing!” She drops her tote bag on the dunes and flings her arms around me, pressing a kiss to my cheek. She smells like sunscreen and lemon. I relax against her for a moment.
As she pulls away, Devin says, “Bro, I knew this would happen.” He shoves me with a grin. “I knew they’d let you in.”
“What? No, you didn’t. Why?”
We approach the edge of the lot and Grayson’s SUV, sand scraping between our flip-flops and the surfacing asphalt. “You know,” Devin says. He makes a jittery little gesture at my face. “You’ll go great on their admissions pamphlets.”
The others laugh. I tilt my chin dramatically, saying, “Oh, yeah, my modeling career’s about to take off”—pretending that’s what he meant.
I don’t focus on the heated prickle under my skin.
“Wait, wait,” says Grayson, looking confused. “Seriously, Niko, why’d they let you in? I thought it was a crazy overachiever camp.”
“It is.”
Hailey gives me a playful smile. “Oh, so it’ll be a hundred other Asians. But like, legit Asians.”
The prickling under my skin intensifies. My smile starts to feel strange on my face, but I keep it in place. “Yeah, that’s probably where the admissions people got confused.”
The others laugh again. As we load our boards onto the rack and tie them down, I run my hand through my hair, suddenly wondering if it’s still got any volume in it. The back of my neck is hot, although I applied enough sunscreen to ward off a burn for the next year. “I mean,” I say, “it’s not like it’s a math camp or something, though. I think it’ll be cool.”
Hailey says, “No, of course, it’ll be amazing! I’m just teasing.”
She kisses me before we climb into the car. When her lips slip against mine, some of the heat leaches out of my body. I reach up and tug her hair out of its bun so it falls in salt-damp waves down her back, and she smiles into our kiss.
“Get a room,” Grayson says, rolling down the driver’s window. I give him the finger before breaking away from Hailey.
As we shut the car doors, Hailey launches into a story about how much she loved New York when she visited last summer. Kelsey, who went with her, chimes in occasionally from the back, sounding less ironic than usual. Gigi makes wistful noises.
I try to relax back against the SUV’s middle seat as Grayson takes us out onto the road. I’m breathing steadily. But the prickling under my skin is still there.
It feels hypocritical to get annoyed about the Asian jokes, since Hailey and my friends aren’t the only ones who make them. I do it, too, playing around that I’m a ninja on the waves, pretending to have some great understanding of the food at Lee’s Chinese. Still, school stuff feels touchy. People make so many jokes about nerdy Asian kids. In comparison to all that, it’s always felt weirdly good to be a slacker at school and more into sports. I guess the logic there is, maybe I’m an idiot, but at least I’m not a stereotype.
Anyway, I get bored of all this getting brought up. Sometimes I think, OK, I get it, I look Chinese. I don’t know why people have to talk about it so much.
When I look over at Hailey, I soften right away. Her cheeks are burned, and she gives me that half-smile, the one that makes me feel like I’m the only one who gets to know her secrets. This is Hailey. She texts me memes from across the classroom like she can’t even wait until the end of the period to talk to me. She snuck out to the beach with me at three in the morning. She gets me.
“Bro,” says Devin.
I startle and look up to the passenger seat. “What?”
He’s tying back his long hair, which looks like it’s on fire in the sunset. “I said, when do you fly out?”
“The camp’s in Manhattan, right, babe?” Hailey adds, cracking a tin of breath mints.
“Oh. Yeah. And I head over next Saturday. Gone for five weeks.” Devin whistles. “That’s fucking cool, man. You’ve got to paint me something when you’re there.”
