Admission (38 page)

“I just have so much work to do,” she said, coming back to her default position.

“Are you sleeping? You don’t look like you’re sleeping. You certainly don’t look like you’re eating.”

Portia looked down at herself, perplexed. What was Rachel talking about? She wore three layers at least: long-sleeved cotton
shirt, turtleneck sweater, a fleece pullover with a zippered neck. The fleece had a small stain, she noticed, by the right
wrist. From food? She couldn’t imagine. Actually, she had only put the fleece on this morning, and she couldn’t remember eating
anything so far today. The shirt and sweater she had worn for a couple of days.

“Don’t be silly. Just, you know, catching meals whenever I can. Do you know we have eight hundred
more
applications than last year? Do you know the median SAT is up another twenty points? It’s out of control.”

“I stopped at your house on the way over here. I looked through the window. Portia, I’m very concerned.”

“I’m busy. Mark was the neatnik, you know.”

“That’s not what you always told me.”

“Really? Look, Rachel, I’m dealing with things. I just have work right now. And I’m lucky nobody cares what I look like.”

“It’s the fact that you don’t care what you look like that worries me.”

“I just talked to a guidance counselor in Massachusetts. She called me from her car. She didn’t want to call me from her office.”

“This is a non sequitur, Portia.”

“No, but it’s interesting. She wanted me to know that her advisee got caught cheating on his chemistry final. They think he
sold the answers to his classmates, too, but they can’t prove it.”

“So what’s the problem?” said Rachel, humoring her. “Why even talk about it?”

“She couldn’t tell us on the application because the student’s father threatened to sue. So they had to, you know, sup with
the devil. Can you believe it?”

“Of course I can,” Rachel said, setting down her coffee. “I just can’t believe we’re talking about that and not about the
fact that you’ve just split up with Mark, you look dreadful, and you haven’t answered my increasingly hysterical phone messages.”

“But isn’t it sick that the parents have become so powerful? And she’s in her car, on the phone! Like a police informant or
something.”

“Portia,” Rachel said intently.

“The thing is,” she rolled on, “I sort of understand. This kid. They must all be, just,
crazy
with this thing. It must be terrible to go through this now. The pressure from the parents and their peers, and the schools,
too. Is it any wonder that some of them screw up? The real question is why more of them don’t. Or maybe they do! How would
we know? I mean, how do we even know they’re taking their own SATs and writing their own applications? Next thing, ETS is
going to ask for a fingerprint or a strand of hair before they let you have the test booklet. And the sad thing is, these
applicants… they’re just teenagers. And teenagers are supposed to fuck up. I mean, when else do you get to do that? But if
they fuck up, or if they fuck up and they get caught, like this one, it’s the end of everything.”

“Fine, but that doesn’t change the fact that he did fuck up,” Rachel observed. “If he did that here, we’d throw him out. You
know that.”

“Yes, I understand that,” she said, blithely deflecting the logic of this. “But what I mean is, this particular kid, who got
caught, probably isn’t any worse than the ones we’re going to let in instead of him. Maybe he’s the best of the lot and we’re
going to pass him over. And these parents, I know they’re awful, but I feel for them, too. Because, you know what’s weird?
They’re not older than we are anymore. All these years, I’ve been reading applications from high school seniors whose parents
are twenty years older than me, ten years older, five years older. Now they’re my age, Rachel. If I’d had a kid, like, at
the end of college, he’d be this age now, in twelfth grade. He could be applying to Princeton right now. Do you see how weird
that is?”

Rachel was looking steadily at her, hands in her lap, lightly holding the now empty coffee cup.

“You know,” Portia heard herself say, “he hasn’t called me once. He hasn’t come to the house. It’s like… boom! Sixteen years.
I mean, doesn’t he want a couch or something? Aren’t there things to talk about?”

Rachel leaned forward in her chair, her calf nudging a tilting pile of folders. Instinctively, Portia reached out to shift
them.

“Yes,” said Rachel. “There
are
things to talk about. Even if Mark doesn’t seem capable of talking about them, maybe you need to talk about them. And if
not with him, and if not with me, then what about someone else?”

“Oh, Rachel…” She sighed. “I’m
fine
.”

“Oh, Portia,” Rachel echoed, “I do not think so.”

When my church group arrived in the small Mexican town where we were to spend a week building houses, I looked around and
thought, this is a town? I saw hovels made of cinderblocks, without windows or floors. Women and children carrying what looked
like very unclean water from a pond about half a mile away, dogs and cats everywhere. Everyone looked hungry. I’d known there
was poverty in Mexico, of course. But I couldn’t believe people were living this way. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t realized
people were living this way.

I
n February, she came face-to-face with Jeremiah Balakian, twice in the same grim week.

First in the pile at ten on a Monday morning, three hours into her day. Her door was shut, her jeans stiff with wear, last
night’s snow from her trudge through town drying into white rings on her boots. The folder began, as always, with the test
sheet. It showed that the applicant had taken the SATs the previous spring. Verbal was an 800—common enough in this applicant
pool. The math was lower—680—but respectable. There were no SATII test results, but there were plenty of APs. Eight in all,
likewise taken the previous spring. They made an unbroken line of 5’s.

She turned to the second page of the application, where extracurricular, personal, and volunteer activities were listed and
defined. More often than not, Princeton applicants overflowed the available seven lines with their debate teams and varsity
sports, volunteer work and church activities. This applicant’s was entirely blank except for a two-word notation on the top
line: “Independent study.” She wondered if she might be missing something.

Portia went back to the reader’s card, where Martha’s downstairs staff had pulled the relevant grades from the high school
transcript, inserting them into a grid for each year: A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s. It was a shocker. Mostly C’s and several
D’s; nothing higher than a B. And no AP courses at all. But how, she wondered, given his scores on the AP exams, could that
make sense? She had sometimes seen this kind of syncopation on the exams of homeschool applicants, but the applicant had clearly
attended high school. She paged forward, past essays and signed forms, to the guidance counselor’s portion of the paperwork
and found, as she’d expected to find, an official transcript and forms. They were from Keene Central High School and were
accompanied by the customary brochure about the school and its demographics, lists of clubs and teams (“Go Lions!”), and roster
of colleges attended by the last five years’ worth of graduates. Then, tucked behind these, she found letters related to the
applicant’s senior year at the Quest School. A page of densely written course evaluations from various teachers. And letters.
The first letter was from John R. Halsey, humanities teacher and student adviser.

So. Yes, she nodded, shivering in her layers of dirty clothing. Here was Jeremiah.

She returned again to the front of the reader’s card and looked at the Academic and Non-Academic rankings, finding herself
entirely unprepared to choose one. Academic 1’s were kids who had 800 SATs and job lots of AP 5’s. Academic 5’s were kids
who had barely scraped themselves through high school. Jeremiah, apparently, was both of these. She resisted the momentary
impulse to average everything out and give him a 3. Clearly, whatever he was, he was not a 3. Not that these ratings were
in any way binding. They were a signpost, not an evaluation, a little shorthand to the reader as he or she embarked on a thorough
consideration of everything in the folder; but setting Jeremiah up with a rating of Ac 3/NonAc 5 would only make everything
an uphill battle, at least for the readers who followed her. She decided to leave the ratings aside for the moment. Instead,
she began to read the application itself, slowly and with judgment suspended to the best of her ability.

Balakian, Jeremiah Vartan. She hadn’t realized, when she’d met him, that he was Armenian. She didn’t recall having heard his
last name at all.

Home address: Keene, New Hampshire.

Possible area of academic concentration: “Humanities: art, history, languages, literature.”

Possible career or professional plans. This he had left blank.

Place of birth: Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Ethnicity: Caucasian.

The address of the school she remembered all too well: One Inspiration Way, North Plain, New Hampshire.

His father was Aram Balakian, occupation retail sales, employer Stop & Shop, Keene, N.H. He had an associate’s degree, Keene
Community College.

His mother was Nan Balakian. The space for education was left blank. Retail sales. Stop & Shop, Keene, N.H.

No siblings.

Portia turned over the reader’s card and wrote, “Mom and dad: grocery clerks. No sibs,” in the “Background Information” section.
Then she wrote and circled the letters
NC,
meaning that the parents had not attended college. Jeremiah, if he managed it, would be the first.

She left the spaces for “Academic” and “Non-Academic” activities blank.

Under “Summers” he had written:

For the past two summers I have been employed full time at a supermarket in Keene, rotating among various positions, from
stocker to warehouse to checkout, none of them particularly taxing. I wasn’t very optimistic about the job at the outset,
but I came to discover that examining someone’s groceries is a strangely intimate and fascinating activity. When you know
what people are putting in their mouths and on their bodies, you know a great deal about them: physically, emotionally, even
politically. Sometimes I’d want to confront them about their choices:
Don’t you know what this food is going to do to your blood pressure? Don’t you know this manufacturer has one of the worst
environmental records in the world? Did you know that for the same price as this fake cheese you could get real cheese?
But of course, a humble checker can’t say such things. We scan and pack and take their checks or food stamps or credit cards.
I learned a great deal, and I hope I’ll never have to work there another day in my life.

She smiled. She flipped back in the application to check the “Work Experience” section for the name of the employer: Stop
& Shop. He had worked for his parents’ employer. Under “Summer” she wrote, “Grocery Clerk, FT X 2,” meaning that he’d been
employed for both of the past two summers, the ones Princeton cared most about. Then she turned back to the application and
frowned at the “Few Details” section.

This had been a fairly recent innovation, part wink to the applicants (See? We have a sense of humor!), part palate cleanser
between the nuts and bolts of the front-loaded information at the beginning of the application and the essays to come. The
questions changed a little every year, but they generally asked the kids to name their favorite books, music, sources of inspiration,
films, mementos, and words. (The words tended to be fairly grotesque. In the past month alone, she had come across “defenestrate”
more times than she cared to remember.) This year’s tweak was “Your favorite line from a movie,” which had reaped hundreds
of sentences Portia had never heard before and many, many citations of the classic
Godfather
line “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

Jeremiah’s choices, to say the least, were unusual. His favorite book was Wiesenthal’s
The Murderers Among Us
. His favorite source of inspiration: “Whatever book I’m reading at the time.” Under favorite Web site he wrote, “I’m sorry,
I don’t have a computer.” His favorite line from a movie? “Now tell me, do you feel anything at all?” from
Sunday Bloody Sunday
. She hadn’t seen the film in a decade, at least, and yet, reading the line here, so out of context, she was amazed at how
quickly and fully this opening line came back, spoken over a black screen: just that male voice—Peter Finch’s voice—and then
the image of a hand—Peter Finch’s hand—palpating the bloated abdomen of a middle-aged man. It was a ringing, terribly bleak
line, sharply foreshadowing the ninety-odd minutes of interpersonal desolation to come. The adjectives he’d chosen to describe
himself were “loner (but not the scary kind)” and “fervent.” Being a loner was not, she thought, something the modern teenager
was often eager to admit to. “Fervent” she had never come across before.