Admission. Part 34

"Leah Felder," she read, reciting the student's identifying number for Martha. "Darien High School. We have fourteen applications from this school, and Leah's GPA ranks twelfth out of two-fifty. Dad a broker, mom a professional fund-raiser, younger of two siblings. Leah wrote a very moving essay about her brother, who survived cancer. She plays soccer and swims on varsity squads. Summers: part-time job, language program at Dartmouth, trips with family. She is hardworking and active in her school community. Her recs convey how very likable she is, but don't single her out for academic promise. First reader marked 'Only if room' with an arrow up. Second reader agreed." She looked around the table. "Are there questions?"

"Anything that stands out in the athletics?" asked Deepa.

Portia pretended to look, but she didn't have to look. "No."

"Okay."

They voted.

"Sarah Lenaghan," read Portia from the next folder. She had chosen Sarah very carefully. They were going to love Sarah. Sarah was going to put them all in a good mood. "Second in a cla.s.s of forty-two at Winsor School, five-year count: ninety-eight applied, fifteen accepts, nine attends. Dad's an attorney employed by MIT, mom is a homemaker. Sarah has run the Boston Marathon every year since the age of fifteen. She is a poet who edits her school literary magazine. Winner of the Bennington Young Writers Compet.i.tion last fall, also an honorable mention in the Princeton compet.i.tion. SATs 800 verbal, 720 math, AP fives in English, French, History and Latin. Summers, she is part of a tutoring program in Roxbury, Harvard Summer School, and her teacher there said she was one of the best young poets he'd ever taught. Raves from GC and her English teacher. I'd like to say that these were two of the best essays I read this year. And her mom's PU Cla.s.s of '89."

Portia looked up. She noted, with satisfaction, the effect of this. Legacy status was never a reason for admission, but it could be a tipping point. Not that Sarah was going to need a tipping point.

"Did she send in any work for evaluation?" asked Corinne.

"No," Portia said.

"I wonder why not," said Corinne.

"Well, the creative writing faculty judge the poetry compet.i.tion. I think that's an endors.e.m.e.nt."

Corinne nodded almost grudgingly.

"She also loves Princeton. She said she wishes she could have applied ED, but since she can't, she'd like us to know that she would definitely attend if admitted."

Portia picked up the reader's card and read aloud from her summary. "Sarah is going to be somebody's great roommate, fun to be around but also cerebral and involved. Recs love her, gifted poet. Would be great here." She had checked "High Priority-Admit," and she told them that, too. "Second reader concurred. She wrote: 'Fantastic kid.' "

Portia smiled at Corinne.

"Yes," said Corinne. "I remember her."

"Okay," said Clarence. "Let's vote."

And Sarah Paley Lenaghan was admitted to Princeton.

And then there were eight in a row. Members of the team. Partic.i.p.ants in the club. Pretty good writers with pretty good scores. Wonderful kids who made up the chorus, voices indistinguishable from one another. Portia paced herself. She read each summary slowly, as if she didn't know they weren't going to get in. They were students with kind but vague recommendations, "a pleasure to have in cla.s.s." They were the backbone of the woodwinds section, active in the church youth group, the kind of student you could always call upon to help with the Martin Luther King Day activities. And one after another they were turned away.

Around the table, there was the faintest sense of unease. It was not, of course, that eight in a row would be denied, but eight such easy calls-no debate to speak of, no real questioning. Corinne was frowning into her pink-tinged water. Clarence, as was his habit, tapped his fingertips together, and Portia could make out the gleam of his well-tended fingernails as they caught the overhead light. Even Dylan was avoiding her eyes, intent on some doodle he was grinding into his legal pad.

She placed the last of them in the pile and opened Jeremiah's folder.

"Jeremiah Balakian. This is our first applicant from Quest, a new school in rural New Hamps.h.i.+re which I visited last fall, so no available statistics on college attendance and no admit rates. Quest is an extremely interesting school. I would call it experimental, but academically rigorous. The founders have come from other prep schools, and they've brought with them the most successful elements of their former schools. I was really impressed with the students I met there, and with this applicant in particular."

She focused on the reader's card, summarizing its contents to the group: Jeremiah was an only child. Parents both worked in a supermarket, and neither attended college. This was apparently not a family in which academic success was stressed. His first three years of high school at the local public school in Keene were a disaster. He seemed to have been unable to adapt to a school environment, and his grades certainly reflected that. Frequently, he was in danger of failing individual courses.

"Now," she said, looking up at them, "just in case you're wondering why you're listening to this, Jeremiah is also a self-described autodidact since the age of eight. He is widely read, in texts far beyond what his cla.s.ses were doing. He had no plan to attend college until this past fall, when he switched schools and came into contact with teachers who were willing to teach him the way he needed to be taught. He took the SATs and eight AP subject tests last spring."

"Wait, so he did have AP cla.s.ses?" Dylan asked.

"No. None. He scored an 800 verbal and eight AP fives."

"Whoa," Dylan said, but under his breath.

"Math was significantly lower, I think," said Corinne.

"Yes," Portia said tersely. "This, of course, is a highly unusual applicant. This is a kid who had zero guidance. Nothing. Not at home and not at school. But he was brilliant. And I don't think it occurred to him that there was a community of scholars.h.i.+p-of his kind of scholars.h.i.+p-available to him. I think he believed he would get some kind of blue-collar job somewhere and spend his life reading books and thinking about them. Then he lucked out. He met someone who recognized his potential. So he comes to us with a pretty bizarre track record. No extracurriculars. A miserable transcript, nine through eleven. And these tests he just sat down and took."

"And absolutely no guarantee that he'd put in any more effort here than he did in his high school," Corinne reminded them all.

"How were the essays?" said Clarence. "Can he write?"

She told them yes. Then she read to them from Jeremiah's essay: Since then, I've noticed that, in other cla.s.ses, I tend to get stuck on questions that are raised in the very first chapter of the textbook: What is life? (in biology). What is a poem? (in English). What is the past? (in history). To be honest, I've never understood how people get beyond those questions to what comes later. It's not that I'm not interested in what comes later: I'm very interested! But I just haven't been able to get there on my own. Of course, I realize now that my unwillingness to play by the rules in my cla.s.ses is going to end up hurting me, probably in ways I never considered when I was blowing off my homework. I wish I could go back and make a different decision, but if I could do that, I'd probably know so much math and physics that college would be a little redundant.

When she looked up, Dylan was grinning. "Love this kid," he said.

Yes, please, she thought.

"I'm sorry," Corinne said. "I'm not disputing his intelligence, but we're all highly aware of what's available for kids like this. There are organizations with searchlights, looking for these kids. At the very least, these students know that they can get quality teaching in college. I mean, how many of our applicants actually start community college while they're still in high school? Couldn't he have taken some courses outside of school if he wasn't getting what he needed? Couldn't he get on the computer?"

"He doesn't have a computer," Portia said archly.

"Well, at the library, then. I just don't see how we could take a student like this, who for all we know isn't going to be able to handle an intense academic community. I seem to remember the guidance counselor at his old school saying he couldn't grasp that if he didn't do the paper or sit the exam, he was going to fail. He can't get away with that here, no matter how brilliant he is."

"The teacher at his new school doesn't think that will be a problem. Listen," she said, sounding-to herself, at least-as if she were just slightly losing them. "Let me find this," she said, noting the breathlessness. She paged through the folder. "Here. 'Without question, he is capable of performing academically at the highest levels. With faculty to engage with him and fellow students to challenge and influence his ideas, his work has begun to show focus and immense depth. When I think of Jeremiah at a place like Princeton, I am elated, not just at the notion of what the university can do for him but for what he can bring to the right cla.s.sroom environment. This is a remarkable, special, brilliant young man who is just coming into his own.' "

"Too many unknowns." Corinne shook her head. "We don't know this school at all. We have no idea how their idea of a well-qualified student is going to do here."

"It's a chance," Portia admitted, looking not at Corinne but at Clarence. "I mean, is he going to be on the football team and sing in the glee club? No. Is he a campus leader? I would say not. But this is the kind of student our faculty love. Maybe, from our perspective, he could have done more, he could have made himself more of a resume and a paper trail, but he got himself from nowhere to where he is now."

"I hope you're not implying that he gets special credit because he's poor," said Corinne.

"No, of course not. What I mean is that even the idea of academic success was just... not there in his life. Not in his family and not at school. He educated himself, purely by instinct. I think, of all the students I've read this year, maybe all the students I've ever read, he's the one who will get the most out of his education here. I really, really..." Portia looked at them. They looked disengaged. They were waiting for her to finish. "I believe in him," she said. "I want him here."

It couldn't have been plainer. It was tantamount to saying, Give me this one. I've been good. I've worked hard. Give him to me.

But they didn't. The vote was 52. Only Dylan had voted for Jeremiah.

"I'm sorry," said Dylan.

And then they went on to the next.

Every sacrifice of my parents has been for my brother and me. When we came here, my father could not use his university qualification from Beijing University for engineering work. He became a waiter in a restaurant owned by someone his cousin knew, and we lived in a room over the restaurant. My brother was born here. I have tried to make the best use of my education, not only because it is my dream to be a doctor, but to show my parents, my father especially, that I know what he did for me and I will forever be grateful for that.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

A FOR ADMISSION.

One afternoon at the beginning of April, with the earliest of new green things fighting their way through well-tended flower beds all over campus, Portia found herself once again taking a hushed and tentative call from Elisa Rosen.

It had been, at least until the phone rang, a moment of near immobility throughout the office, an annual point of dead calm before the storm-the storm now carefully apportioned into nineteen thousand separate parts, all stacked up and waiting downstairs. Committee was over and the letters would shortly be printed and sent, setting off the climactic act of this annual drama. Portia and the others had reached the final stragglers only the afternoon before, most of these in files still incomplete, as if the applicants within had been abandoned on a battlefield, missing body parts or given up for dead, and indeed nearly all of them would be declined. The meetings, begun weeks earlier in angst and frenzy, had ended thus with a whimper, not a bang. Now, in their aftermath, the weight of so many separate decisions settled over everything-barely noticeable individually but c.u.mulatively ponderous.

Portia was, in fact, sitting quite still when the call came. She was looking over, in an idle way, the roster of admitted students who, while not expressly recruited for baseball, were strong players hoping to play for Princeton. The coach would do his own outreach to these boys, making phone calls after the letters went out, encouraging them to attend the hosting weekend for admitted students to be held later in April. He had been happy with his recruits, especially a pitcher from Arizona who had also been a.s.siduously courted by Yale and Cornell, and a Mississippi outfielder who possessed some batting statistic Portia didn't quite comprehend but which had made this normally stoic man seem to go limp with excitement. Barring some moral outrage, these players and the others Princeton had chosen were set to choose Princeton in return, and this list of twenty-three players from around the country (and j.a.pan!) was looking like an enviable backup roster. Some of these kids, of course, would choose other colleges, but many would come here, and once here they would sh.o.r.e up the team for the next four years and help to keep everyone who cared about these things a little happier than they would otherwise have been. She was just making a note next to the name of a Cincinnati player who was also, she recalled, the winner of his regional Math Olympiad, when the phone purred to life. She reached for it without looking and spoke.

"Oh, Portia. Hi!" It was a woman's voice. She sounded surprised, as if she were the one receiving the call. "It's Elisa Rosen? The college counselor at Porter Country Day? In Ma.s.sachusetts?"

"h.e.l.lo, Elisa," Portia said. "Not calling from your car again, I hope."

"What?" Elisa said. "Oh! No." She gave a nervous laugh. "I do have my door closed, though. My office door."

Portia sighed. The conversation was rapidly living down to expectations.

"Listen, I decided... I thought long and hard about this, before I called."

Portia nodded. Now there was a "this." Another "this." "I hope it isn't about Mr. Aronson again," she said. She was about to tell her that they were done for the year, that whatever "this" was, it wouldn't make any difference now. But Elisa had launched into a kind of litany of self-doubt and personal struggle.

"I thought... well, I was kind of expecting to hear from you sometime around now. You know... because when I took over this job? From Astrid Davis? Did you ever work with Astrid?"

Portia said she had not and reminded Elisa that she was new to the region this year.

"Oh, well, she retired. Well, not retired, actually, she opened up a consulting business for applicants. She keeps in touch with me, which has been great. You know, when I have a question about something. And she told me you'd probably be calling a few days before the letters go out? Like, sort of a heads-up about who you're taking, so we can counsel them about their decisions after they've heard from the colleges? And I did hear from... uh... one or two other Ivies, but not you guys, so I started to think about calling you myself. Because I... well, I thought it might make a difference if you knew this. If it's not too late."

It's too late, she nearly said. And even if it weren't too late, whatever Elisa wanted to tell her would be irrelevant, especially if it had anything to do with Sean Aronson. Surely Elisa didn't think they would take Sean Aronson over the fourteen other applicants from Porter Day who had not stolen and sold the chemistry final last fall.

As for those phone calls, Elisa had not been delusional to expect a very confidential heads-up around this time. Calls of that nature had once been a courtesy extended to schools that had always sent and would always send their graduates to Princeton. They were not entirely a one-sided gesture, since guidance counselors (or, at most of the prep schools, entire departments of college counselors) were the ones who would encourage the best students to apply to Princeton and might even push a student accepted at other top-tier schools to choose them instead. Goodwill at this point in the application cycle was greatly important for all concerned, because when the letters went out and the Web site concurrently released the admissions decisions to every applicant, it was the guidance counselors who often found themselves on the front lines of parental rage and grief. Often enough, these people would end up taking the bullet (not literally-at least, not so far) for Portia and her colleagues.

Those phone calls, however, were an unwelcome reminder of how the process was perceived as advantaging the advantaged, and though most guidance counselors had strictly withheld the information from students until the notification date arrived, it still felt wrong that the college-counseling department at Choate knew the fate of its applicants before the grievously overburdened guidance counselor at an underfunded school received the same information. Accordingly, the calls had become another casualty of changing admissions practices, and so out they had gone, landing in the Dumpster beside Early Decision and minority quotas, and leaving not a few of the counselors with whom they'd worked for years feeling not a tiny bit chagrined. "We used to have such a nice, open exchange of information," the head of college counseling at the Bishop's School had told her the year before, on Portia's final swing through Southern California before taking up her new post. "Now I'm happy when you tell me how the weather is in New Jersey."

"Why don't we schedule a call for next week?" Portia said, trying for a middle path. "You know, it's not really our practice anymore to have these conversations before the letters go out. Of course, I'd love to have your input after the students have been notified."

"Oh!" Elisa said. "No! I'm not calling you to find out. I wanted to tell you something. I know how huge your field is. I mean, it's crazy, I know that. But I thought, well, one of our applicants... of course I don't know if you've decided to take him or not, but he's not in a position to attend Princeton. It's just... I'm sure what I'm calling to tell you is totally not kosher, but I thought, if you knew it, there might be another one of our kids you could take a closer look at."

Portia frowned at her list of baseball players. "So... this is about Sean Aronson?"

"Sean?" Elisa sounded surprised. "Oh, Sean is... well, he's... technically he's on leave from Porter since the beginning of the term. He was arrested, actually. It's a very sad situation, for all of us."

Portia was restraining herself, but just barely. More academic infractions? That wouldn't involve the police. DUI? Breaking and entering? Was it even worse?

"I'm sorry," she told Elisa, meaning it. "That's a shame. I remember you told me he was a really good kid. But, Elisa, even if he couldn't accept an offer from Princeton, that doesn't really affect your other-"

"No!" Elisa cut her off. "This has nothing to do with Sean Aronson. I'm calling about a kid named Jesse Bolton. He's going to Yale. I don't know if you'll recall him. He's our newspaper editor. He works for The Boston Globe in the summers?"

Absently, Portia nodded. She did not need reminding about who Jesse Bolton was. Jesse Bolton, indeed, was one of the only two from Porter Country Day's fifteen applicants to be admitted to Princeton, the other being a girl named Ca.s.sandra Wiley, a dancer who commuted into the city every afternoon to take cla.s.s at the Boston Ballet. That these two had come before the committee less than an hour after Jeremiah's application had been rejected gave their admits a glow of reflected pain, but Portia would be the first to say that they were extraordinary young people. Jesse in particular had won a national award for high school journalists from the Scripps Foundation and submitted some very impressive clips from the Globe. He had also written a razor-sharp essay about the day laborers who tended the lawns and commercial plantings in his wealthy community. His description of a grim Latino man using a leaf blower to blow leaves against the natural surge of a windstorm, the futility of that effort and the negating of that labor, was one of the most searing images she had encountered in the thousands of essays she had read this year.

"I see," she said carefully, giving nothing away.

"He got in early," Elisa said, sounding furtive again. "He pulled all of his regular decision applications, but his dad went to Princeton. Of course, you know. And Dr. Bolton insisted Jesse keep that one in. Jesse stopped in to see me yesterday, though. He's definitely going to Yale."

Portia sat back in her chair and looked up at the bulletin board over her desk. She found the photograph of the 2003 Princeton baseball team and thought how the boys on the list in her lap, or some of them, at least, would be in a picture like that. The 2009 Princeton baseball team. The 2010 Princeton baseball team. She had never seen any of the students in the photograph play, it occurred to her. She had never gone to see a single baseball game at Princeton, though she had helped admit most of the team members. She had never liked baseball, really.

"That's too bad," she heard herself say, and it really was. Too bad that they had blown an admit on a kid they'd never had a chance at. Too bad there was a Princeton dad out there who wanted his kid here more than he wanted his kid happy. Of course, there were students who had done far worse, like received an early admit and then trophy-hunted the rest of the Ivy League, only to accept the original offer. It was poor form, but it wasn't illegal when Yale's offer wasn't binding. And it did sound as if Jesse had wanted to do the right thing.

"I know. What a waste." And she could hear Elisa Rosen's thoughts, as clearly as if they'd been spoken aloud: Since Jesse's out of the picture, would you take another of our kids? "Anyway," said Elisa, "as I said, I really thought about whether you ought to know this. And I decided... I just couldn't see a downside, you know? To keeping the communication going."

And Portia, very suddenly, wanted very much not to keep the communication going, not with Elisa Rosen or any of the others at any of the other handsome, moneyed schools populated by Seans and Jesses and their thoroughly ent.i.tled parents. She felt her empathy for the college counselor leave her in a rush. She pictured Elisa Rosen walking a plank over snapping, hungry, angry parents, each one brandis.h.i.+ng their broken contract: You said if I paid the tuition, you said if he got a rave from his biology teacher, you said if he got 750 or above on the math SAT, dug a ditch in Costa Rica, lettered in swimming, wrote about the brace he wore for scoliosis in the eighth grade, the most gruesome, painful, crus.h.i.+ng personal experience of his life, he would get in. You said. And I wrote those checks. And he did those things. And they turned him down. And I will never forgive you for lying to me.

With whatever strength she could muster, she thanked Elisa Rosen for her time and said good-bye. Then she got up out of her chair and went to the window.

That morning, for the first time since fall, she had opened the window, and now the remarkably mild air was moving through her little office, smelling rich and damp. There was only the briefest season of ugliness in this town, and it was over now for another year, with the mud sinking back into the earth and the black squirrels starting to wake up. Outside, the mostly buried armament poked its end out of Cannon Green, and a couple walked behind it, their winter coats unzipped and lifting behind them in the breeze. These two, like every one of them, every one of the thousands in their rooms, or eating dinner, or going to rehearsal or practice right now, all over campus, had been weighed and measured and talked through and voted on, then they had disappeared into the maw of anonymous data in the registrar's computer. And unless something happened-unless one of them plagiarized or got a Rhodes or picked up a bullhorn and led a rally out on Cannon Green-neither Portia nor her colleagues ever thought of them again. They were simply gone from the collective ken of admissions, their files unceremoniously transferred to the registrar's suite of offices in a caravan of file boxes, their names replaced by thousands of other names, with their thousands of other needs and wishes and difficulties, when the fall rolled around again. As for the other folders, the deny folders, they were shredded.

That was probably the moment when she understood what she was going to do.

Already, the office felt empty. It was a rare lull in the admissions year. It was the perfect time to do this one small thing. Many of her colleagues, in fact, had dispersed. Deepa was in Georgia, visiting schools and speaking to parents' groups in Atlanta and Athens. Dylan had gone to see the University of Texas, where he'd been admitted to a graduate program in Latin. Jordan had gone back to Virginia for the weekend, to be with her mother while her father had bypa.s.s surgery. Corinne had decamped for Andover to watch her daughter in a cross-country meet. Clarence was around, of course, but he had left for the day, brandis.h.i.+ng tickets to the Met.

Portia returned to her chair and sat, very still, listening to the quiet, trying to think it through. Of course she would be found out. That was not in question. But if she could do it well enough, she would not be found out right away. Four days, five days... that was all it would take, long enough for the letters to go out, because once they were out, Clarence would have to stand by the offer. If she could do it well enough, she might have that long, and although she could not bring herself to believe in fate, which was no better than religion, which was itself a kind of religion, she knew a gift when she saw one. Jesse Bolton, bound for Yale, was a gift.

Hours went by. She didn't move or make noise. She wasn't here. Occasionally, the entrance door downstairs gave a faint creak as the few others, and Martha and her staff, departed for the day.

Still, Portia could not seem to get herself out of the chair. She had never, to her knowledge, cheated or stolen. In fact, she possessed, like far better Jews than herself, a surfeit of guilt, and it took very little to set that off. Once, in the seventh grade, she had pretended to be ill in order to get out of an algebra test, then was so overwhelmed by remorse that she had confessed and forced her mother to take her in anyway, even though Susannah had been happy enough to let her have the day off. Among her high school friends, swiping candy bars from c.u.mberland Farms was so common as to be unremarkable, but Portia could never bring herself to do it. She had never bought a copy of CliffsNotes or even allowed herself to ask a cla.s.smate for help when she was stuck, not that she condemned those things. But she'd had to do everything alone for it to be real: mediocre and real versus superlative and false. Good for you, she thought sourly. And look where it's got you.

What time it was when she finally got to her feet she didn't know, and that was strangely encouraging. Some black hour in the s.h.i.+fting middle of the night, silence in the building, silence even on the campus: It must be very late or very early. She put on her coat, opened her office door, and shut it quietly behind her.

Admissions officers had access to the data files, of course, but they were not empowered to register decisions in the system. Only one person could register an admit, and that wasn't Martha, who had perhaps the farthest-reaching overview of what was happening. It wasn't even Clarence. It was Abby, the a.s.sistant who sat in the antechamber outside his office.

As it happened, Portia knew Abby's pa.s.sword for access to the system, but even if she hadn't, it wouldn't have been difficult to guess. Abby's daughter, Louisa, had gone to Russia as a Bear Stearns a.n.a.lyst ten years before, met a Muscovite doctor named Grisha, and moved there permanently. Two years later, she had given birth to a wide-eyed boy named Aleksei, whose image (dipping his toes into the Baltic Sea, grinning before St. Basil's) papered the cubicle of his adoring grandmother. One day the previous year, when Abby was home sick with flu, she had asked Portia to help Clarence extract some bit of data he needed, and Portia had not been at all surprised to learn that her pa.s.sword was Aleksei.

When she got to the desk, she sat quietly in Abby's seat and turned on the monitor. The screen flickered alarmingly to life, banis.h.i.+ng its vaguely psychedelic screen saver and replacing it with yet another photograph of the blissfully smiling boy, this time on the first day of school, holding the traditional bouquet for his teacher. With a fingernail, she carefully entered the letters, and the system welcomed her.

It was not difficult. She went first to Jesse Bolton's entry, overwriting the A beside his name with a D and hitting Return.

D, she thought, for Don't even think about it.

Then she found Jeremiah and did the same thing, in reverse. A for Admission. Also: Amoral. Also: Absolutely against the rules.

She exited Abby's account and put the terminal back to sleep, watching little Aleksei's face disappear behind coiling, swirling comets of purple.

Breathing, Portia got to her feet.