Admission (6 page)

“Oh,” Portia stammered. “But… well, we had an appointment.”

“I’m so sorry,” the man said. He got to his feet. “Can I help? I’m John.”

“Portia. I’m here from Princeton.”

“Yes,” he said, looking at her intently. “I remember you.”

“Our appointment was for two. I’m a little late. I got lost. Perhaps she couldn’t wait.”

“Perhaps she simply forgot,” he said, notably irritated. But at the missing Deborah, Portia thought. Not, she was fairly certain,
at herself.

“I apologize,” said John, confirming it. “This is terrible. Deborah… you know, she’s a great educator, but prone to distraction.
And you’ve come so far.”

“From Deerfield, Massachusetts. Not that far,” she said, loosening up a little. “So, what should we do? I’m happy to give
my presentation if you’d like to round up your eleventh and twelfth graders.”

He stood in the center of the circle and looked down at them. The kids were variously arrayed, supine, cross-legged, stretching.
Some had put down their notebooks, but the boy who had spoken earlier read on, unruffled. He sat with his book unfurled across
his lap, head tipped forward, thick black curls so shiny that they almost reflected back the sunlight. Curious, Portia tried
to make out what he was reading and was just able to decipher the legend at the top of the page.
Edie: An American Girl.
The incongruity of that, here, beside a cow pasture in deepest New Hampshire, struck her as odd. Then sort of hilarious.

“What do you say, guys? Are you up for some college guidance?”

Portia looked at him. “Is this your eleventh and twelfth grade?”

“Not all. A few are doing other things. We’ll ring the bell. Caleb? Would you ring the bell?”

A lanky kid got to his feet. He had an acne-spattered jaw and a blond ponytail. He walked off without a word.

“All of our sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds should attend, I think. We’re trying to learn how to do this, actually. Our first
students are just coming up to graduation this year. We’ve been focusing on other things.”

“I see. Well, I expect you’ve had other colleges visit.”

“Oh dear.” He smiled ruefully. “Would it complete your already terrible first impression of us if I told you you were the
first? I know we’ve put in a call to Hampshire. And Goddard.”

“I think Goddard has closed, actually.”

“Ah. Maybe that’s why we haven’t heard back.”

“Maybe.” She smiled. She was surprised to discover that she wasn’t, actually, pissed off. She ought to be. But she wasn’t.
It had warmed up through the day, and the air smelled of hay and the best version of cow. At the very least, this was going
to be interesting. “I’ve brought a short film. Can I use your television and DVD player?”

“Oh, I wish we had them. It’s on our donation list. To tell you the truth, I think there’s some resistance to the idea.”

“Resistance? Do they think if they let in a TV, the students will all sit around watching
General Hospital
?”

“Essentially.” He laughed. “You know, our parent base is part Luddite, part day trader. It’s hard to get consensus on some
things.”

“Well, never mind. They can watch it on my laptop. They’re a small enough group.”

“That would be great,” he said. “We’ll go in.”

Atop the barn, a bell creaked to life. The volleyball game stopped. Out in the fields there was movement as students slouched
toward home. “That’s a useful thing,” Portia said.

“It’s our original bell. It was once used to call the cows home for milking.”

“Interesting metaphor for education.” She smiled. “How long have you been here?”

“Me?” John asked. “Or the school? Well, it’s moot. I was here at the birth. Six years. Eight if you count the time it took
us to get set up. We were refurbishing inside and getting accredited. Some of us lived in trailers on the site. Thankfully,
that’s over.”

“You must be very dedicated,” Portia said, stepping carefully. Her leather boots, so understated that they virtually disappeared
on the streets of Princeton, seemed absurdly urban in this setting. She felt as if she had left the familiar world, the world
of Starbucks and cabs and
Vanity Fair,
and wandered through a hole in the backdrop, emerging in the dazzling light of 1967, or 1867, where the old bell rang to
call in the cows and the farmers of both genders wore feather earrings. The students, save the still immersed reader, stirred
and got languidly to their feet and began to amble across to the barn. She saw kids coming in from the fields and the volleyball
court. There were a few adults now, looking curiously in her direction. Everyone wore jeans and had a sun-kissed, genially
bedraggled air. Or almost everyone. The comparatively prepped-out John’s white shirt seemed blindingly clean. It made him
look as if he’d wandered seriously off course, somewhere between Groton and Brooks Brothers.
Mr. Chips Goes to Woodstock,
Portia thought, suppressing a smile. He had dark blond hair, thinning but oddly rakish. He wore a watch on a cracked plastic
band. At least he wore a watch, she thought.

The barn was thoroughly renovated. They walked down a corridor flanked by classrooms, each fitted with a single long table.
“One of our earliest decisions,” John said, noting her attention. “We took ideas from everywhere, as long as they were good
ideas. One of our board members went to Lawrenceville. Every classroom had a long oval table. No one gets lost at an oval
table. We implemented that. We also borrowed our farming model from Putney and our all-school runs from Northfield.”

“You’ve obviously thought long and hard about everything.”

“Oh yes. We had a lot of time to think. And argue about things, it has to be said. After all, we were working on the school
long before we had our first student. And we still learn something new every day. We’re constantly tripping over places where
rules ought to be, then we have to write the rules and implement them. That’s a consensus process, so it takes time, but we
get there in the end. I know we look like
Lord of the Flies,
” he said apologetically, “but I can assure you, we’re legit.”

“I didn’t doubt it,” Portia said, though of course she had.

The corridor ended in a meeting room. A wall of new windows overlooked the cow meadow. The view was stunning, pristine. It
was a jolt back into that other world: a room a millionaire might insist upon for his rustic New England retreat, though perhaps
without the shabby, mismatched sofas that filled it.

“Our commons,” said John.

“It’s beautiful. Like something out of
Architectural Digest
.”

“I’ll let our designer know you said that,” he said. “He’ll be over the moon. Technically, he specializes in reclaimed spaces
and green construction, but the truth is, he’s a secret consumer of shelter mags. When you go to his house, there’s a hidden
stash of architectural porn in the cupboard next to the compost toilet. I swear I found it by accident,” he said.

“I didn’t ask!” said Portia, laughing.

The room was flooded with light, which made the challenge of showing a movie on a laptop all the more acute. She placed her
computer on a table and inserted the DVD. Acceptable, but far less satisfying than the state-of-the-art equipment she’d been
given at Deerfield. The room was filling with older students who drifted to the sofas and talked in loud, unself-conscious
voices. No one here, it was obvious, was trying to impress the visitor from the Princeton Office of Admission. She saw the
reader come in, a finger protectively inside his book, holding his place. John was talking to another teacher, a heavy woman
in overalls with two fat, graying braids. The woman left the room without introducing herself and with—was it possible?—the
faintest whiff of hostility.

“My colleague says that Deborah told her about this a couple of days ago,” John said, returning. “I honestly don’t know what
happened. She’s going to go take the younger students out to the field. Usually the older kids are in charge of afternoon
milking, but we think this is more important.”

“Oh,” Portia said, both perturbed to be placed in the same category as a cow and relieved to have at least come out ahead.
“Okay. Can we get started?”

He turned back to the kids and gravely raised his hand, palm front, as if he were a crossing guard. He said nothing, but as
each student noticed him, he or she stopped talking and did the same. Gradually, a forest of hands were raised. The talk thinned
to scattered voices, then one resistant pocket of girls in a corner, and then nothing. When there was silence, the hands came
down, John’s first.

“Thank you,” he told them. “Now, we have a visitor. I’d like you to welcome her and give her your respectful attention. This
is Portia Nathan.”

He went directly to one of the couches, where the students compressed themselves and made room for him. Watching him, Portia
found herself somewhat disconcerted, not so much by his quick departure from the stage—or the nondescript patch of floor that
served as a stage—as by the fact that he had somehow remembered not only her first name, but her last. It took a further instant
to decide that she could not remember having given her last name at all, though this was not a good enough reason to stand
here, distracted, before the already dubious and unprepared students who were waiting for her. Of course, the elusive Ms.
Rosengarten must have briefed her staff: Portia Nathan would be coming from Princeton. And now Portia Nathan was standing
here, dumbstruck by the incongruity of social etiquette in a cow barn.
You’re such a snob,
she just had time to tell herself. And there was no reason to feel so… bothered. But she was still bothered.

“Hello, I’m Portia,” she finally managed. “I’m from Princeton. I’ve brought a film—”

“Isn’t that a college?” said a muscle-bound kid in a Phish T-shirt.

“A university,” she said. “Princeton University. It’s in Princeton, New Jersey.”

“How’s that different from a college?” said a girl from the nearest couch.

“A college doesn’t have graduate schools or graduate students. A university does. We have graduate students in many departments,
so we’re a university. Has anyone been to Princeton?”

None of them raised a hand.

“Have any of you begun looking at colleges?”

None of them raised their hands, but one boy said, “I’m going to UNH to study animal husbandry.”

“UNH is great for that. It’s not something we teach at Princeton.…”

With this, whatever authority she still retained seemed to dissipate. The mood in the room shifted.

“I’m not really convinced that college is necessary,” one girl said from the back of the room. She was skinny as a stick,
with a military haircut. Military for a guy.

“No?” Portia said, detecting the slightest of wobbles in her voice.

“No. Look, a college degree can cost a fortune. Why should we? It’s like buying something you don’t need, that happens to
cost… What does it cost to go to Princeton?”

“Most of our students receive financial aid,” Portia said tersely, deflecting the question.

“A lot of money, anyway. A ton. For a piece of paper and a couple of letters after your name.”

“Well… ,” Portia began. She found that she had let the thread of this surprising conversation escape her. Now, she was having
a problem orienting herself. There was something about the cows outside, the intensely blue sky through the huge windows,
and these kids, sorting out for themselves who she was and what she wanted, as if she were not standing here, ready to explain.

“Look,” said the girl with the military haircut, “please explain to me why I should be applying to an elitist institution
with a history of antiblack, antigay, and antifemale oppression.” She got to her feet. She was tall, with narrow shoulders
lost in an absurdly large lumberjack shirt. “I might concede that a college degree is necessary if you want to pursue the
societally approved definition of success—you know, three-car garage and framed degree on the wall and a twenty-thousand-dollar
watch. But what if that’s not your goal? What if all you want is to lead a fulfilling life and make the world better? If you’re
not going to work for a corporation or run for office or be a lawyer, aren’t you better off sitting in a room reading books
for four years? That doesn’t cost anything.”

She looked at them with a certain growing unease. Nearly a decade at Princeton, and before that a six-year stint at Dartmouth,
and she couldn’t remember an encounter quite like the one this was shaping up to be. They were a little slovenly, of course,
but you saw slovenly kids everywhere, even in the most rarefied of prep schools. She was used to piercings, tattoos, revealing
clothing, even attitude, but the point was, even in the toughest high schools, the schools where educators were trying frantically
to get their students out the door holding a diploma and not a baby or a gun, even there, the ones who bothered to turn up
at her presentations were the very ones who wanted what she had to offer—or not just wanted, but yearned for, dreamed of.
They knew the road to a different kind of life could be found weaving through Harvard Yard or Yale’s Old Campus or under the
Princeton archways. She didn’t doubt that there were kids like this girl at every school she visited, but they tended to give
her presentations a miss. They were not forward thinking. They did not have three-car garages on their minds, for better or
ill. Or issues of elitism. Or ambitions of self-fulfillment that went beyond the immediate. She just never saw them. They
were off smelling the roses or breathing deep the first joint of the day or plotting mayhem against their enemies. Or if they
were in attendance—compelled by school requirements or ordered by parents—she supposed they just kept their mouths shut and
amused themselves, watching their striving classmates try to impress the Princeton rep. Was it her responsibility to encourage
them to apply to any college, let alone Princeton? Wasn’t it hard enough to find the hungry kids, whose families were not
educated, who lived without privilege, to let them know that there were still a few, a very few, magic portals in the world
that led from one socioeconomic class to another, and she was standing next to one of them?