Admission (68 page)

“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 scholarship—of
his kind of scholarship—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 classes, 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 classes 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 classroom 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 résumé 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 5–2. 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.

O
ne 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 cumulatively 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 assiduously 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 Japan!) 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 shore 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 Massachusetts?”

“Hello, 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?”