Admission (67 page)

She went back to the top of the pile and began again, skimming: crew champions, choreographers, fencers, editors of the literary
magazine (
Expressions
), kids cheered by their counselors as the soul of the school or cited by their teachers as the best they had ever taught.
This time, she was not looking for weakness, but willing the best among them to make themselves known, and slowly they did.
There were many of the best of them. Most of them, by any standard, were the best of them. And when those best pulled away
and were placed one by one into a stack of their own, there were only about twenty left.

The ordinarily qualified.

The usually brilliant.

The expectedly talented.

Portia took a deep breath. She would begin with one of these. Then, one from the larger pile. Then, seven… no, eight of the
ones everyone would see were not incredible enough. And then… Jeremiah. Her colleagues would be ready to listen by then. They
would have begun to wonder: Where were the great applicants from the Northeast? They would want to say yes to someone, or
at least be willing to say it, though it would still be very hard to push Jeremiah through.

She didn’t sleep well that night and was up early, putting unprecedented thought into what she wore and how she arranged her
hair. She worried especially about Corinne, who had made it through almost three weeks of twelve-hour committees without,
it seemed, putting a hair out of place, while all around her the rest of them—and even, a bit, Clarence—wilted and sweated
and, as the day wore on, took on a washed-out, acrid cast. Corinne brought from home clear glass bottles of water infused
with some rosy liquid, and this she poured out, bit by bit, into a matching tumbler, sipping through the hours until the drink,
whatever it was, was all gone. No one ever asked. When she was hungry she eschewed, of course, the Dunkin’ Donuts Abby sometimes
brought and the bowls of M&M’s Deepa liked to set down in the middle of the long table but withdrew from her black leather
bag a container of Greek yogurt or a package of rye thins or a perfect blushing pear. She never raised her voice but managed
to communicate disapproval with a flickering glance, and Portia was never once surprised to see how she voted.

She chose, finally, a brown dress she had bought at Ann Taylor in Palmer Square, an item so plain that it was above reproach
and, since it had never been worn, as unsullied as the day she’d acquired it. She wore stockings and black leather loafers
because she did not have brown, but Rachel (who followed things like this) had once told her that black and brown were considered
chic when mixed. Portia decided to put her faith in this, though she knew that Corinne would never go so far as to think her
chic. She pulled her hair off her face and pinned it into a bun and then, after considering the finished effect in the mirror,
cinched the billowing midsection of the dress with a black belt. It was meant to be belted, she remembered now. The saleswoman
had said so, though perhaps she had only been trying to sell a belt.

Portia badly wanted coffee, but she resisted. She wanted a script she could memorize, but there were too many unknowns, too
many factors, so she walked along Nassau Street with her hands clenched in the pockets of her overcoat, trying to think of
nothing but the breath she made, visible before each step. She fell in with Jordan, crossing before Nassau Hall, and gave
her a comradely grin. “End’s in sight,” she said brightly.

“Oh, my God. I had no idea anyone could get this tired.”

“Don’t worry. They bring in a team of massage therapists on the last day of committee.”

“They do?” said Jordan. She was a tiny girl with a white blond pageboy.

“Sadly, I jest,” said Portia. “I wish it were true. But we do get to go home and take a bath and order a pizza.”

“Well,” Jordan said, laughing, “I guess that’s something.”

How was her father? Portia asked as they passed the Henry Moore sculpture beside their building. (It looked like a lethal
and deformed doughnut.) Her father’s heart attack had been the family emergency.

“Quitting smoking,” Jordan said wryly. “About twenty years too late, but I’m glad he’s doing it now. Of course, I’m also glad
I don’t have to be within a mile of him when he does it.”

They opened the door to West College and went inside. Corinne was standing in the hall outside the conference room, towering
over Deepa, who held a ceramic mug of tea. Deepa was nodding distractedly, but she was glad to focus on Portia.

“Well, you look nice,” said Corinne, but she sounded very surprised about it, which rather offset the compliment.

“Thanks,” Portia said. “Don’t want to lose any of my kids because I’ve got ring around the collar.”

“Please!” Deepa laughed. “If it were up to that, there’d be no southern students in the Class of 2012.”

“Portia,” said Corinne, “did you get the note I sent you about the Loomis Chaffee girl?”

Portia, who had seen but not read the e-mail, took a guess. “The one with the suspension sophomore year?”

Corinne nodded. Her black hair shone fiercely in the overhead fluorescent light. “I have a close friend at Loomis, so I asked
about it. It was just a smoking infraction.”

Portia took a steadying breath and smiled carefully. Boarding school suspensions were tricky things, as often to do with smoking
and dormitory rule breaking as with far more serious (from an admissions perspective) honor code violations or outright crimes.
But looking into applicants from her area was not Corinne’s concern. Talking to anyone at Loomis, even a “close friend”—
especially
a “close friend”—about anything admissions related was a serious overstep, an act of aggression. She felt herself nodding
like an idiot, even as a variety of caustic statements hammered at her to be spoken. But this was not the time for them. Instead,
she summoned every ounce of grace she possessed and said, “Thank you. I ought to have done it myself. I’m going to make a
note.”

And she walked swiftly upstairs, as if intent on doing just that.

In the office, she threw her coat over the chair in the corner and just breathed deeply for a moment. There was nothing surprising
in this, Portia told herself. Corinne had never pretended not to be enraged about having been moved to California, and more
than likely she had had her own eye on the New England district. But with her children now ensconced at Andover, even she
must recognize at least the appearance of impropriety in that. Or did Corinne imagine she could evaluate her own children’s
classmates? Was she that myopic?

Breathe,
Portia told herself.
Not now. You don’t have time for this now.

She gathered up the stack of folders on her desk, flipping through one final time to confirm the order, then she went back
down.

This time, she helped herself to coffee. With her own geographic area on the table, they could hardly go on without her, and
she took an absurd amount of pleasure in the caffeine buzz that went directly to her head.

“Howdy,” Dylan said from across the table. He looked upbeat, as if, with only the Northeast to go, he had allowed himself
to believe that the hardest part of the admissions cycle was nearly done; but that was like coming to a final leg of the triathlon
and realizing you still had a marathon to run. There were more applications from the Northeast than from any other part of
the country. They hailed from the lousiest underfunded and overcrowded public high schools and the greatest private schools
in the land and everything in between. Princeton could pretty much fill its class from this district alone and had once done
precisely that. There would be thousands of them, and she felt responsible for them all. But she cared about only one.

“Good morning,” said Clarence, taking his customary seat. He appeared, as usual, as if he had just been released by his valet,
and the still pleasant smell of lavender he wore settled over the room. Portia found that she was trying not to look at him.

Instead, she looked down at her pile. Last night, when she had not been sleeping, she had been imagining this, wondering if,
at the last moment, she would find herself shuffling the folders into random order, denying Jeremiah even this illusion of
an advantage. But she did not. And then, at last, it was time to begin.

“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 class 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 Competition last fall, also an honorable mention in the Princeton competition. 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 Class 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 competition. I think that’s an endorsement.”

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. Participants 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 class.” 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 Hampshire 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 classes 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 classes?” Dylan asked.

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