Admission (69 page)

“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 Cassandra Wiley,
a dancer who commuted into the city every afternoon to take class 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 entitled 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 brandishing 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, crushing 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 bypass 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, brandishing
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 Cumberland 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
classmate 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 shifting 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 assistant who sat in the antechamber outside his office.

As it happened, Portia knew Abby’s password 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 analyst 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 password 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,
banishing 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.

She walked softly, rubber soles on carpeting, down the hall and then the staircase, closing the doors carefully behind her
so they didn’t click, as if there were anyone there to hear it. Then she made her way to the ground-floor office and, solely
by the glow of the emergency light, entered the office security code and went inside.

The deny files were stacked in a room off the office, awaiting shredding. It was a room without windows, but when Portia switched
on the light the blare of it unnerved her even so. She started to look around quickly. There were thousands here, of course,
about seventeen thousand, and the folders nearly filled the space, covering two long tables and lining a bookcase against
one wall; but they turned out to be neatly sorted, state by state and school by school where there were multiple applicants.
New Hampshire—St. Paul’s and Exeter aside—was not exactly a breeding ground for Princeton applicants. Portia had little difficulty
locating the file. She extracted it and nudged the pile it had come from into place. Then she went back into the main room.

The admit files were arranged alphabetically in file boxes on the same table where those appalling vegan “health bars” had
once resided, waiting for someone brave enough to eat them. There were, naturally, far fewer of these, and she had no difficulty
finding Jesse Bolton: Princeton legacy, future journalist, future Yalie. Portia went to the supply cupboard past Martha’s
desk and took out two unused orange folders. Then she carefully peeled back the color-coded stickers from Jeremiah’s and Jesse’s
and affixed them to the new folders. She slid the contents of each—reader’s card, application, transcript, school report,
and recs—into the new folders and clumsily folded and stuffed the old folders into her coat pocket. Then she took a red pen
from Martha’s desk, checked “Admit” on the front of Jeremiah’s refashioned folder, and slid it into place, snug between Babbitt,
Christopher, and Balthazar, Henri-Paul.
Babbitt, Balakian, Balthazar.
Portia shook her head. Then, quickly, she checked “Deny” on Jesse Bolton’s new file, slipped back into the adjacent room,
and placed it with the files of his rejected schoolmates, just behind the appropriately declined application of Sam Aronson.
I’m sorry,
she told it, and she found that she truly was, because Jesse Bolton had deserved to know that the admissions officers at
Princeton thought he was wonderful and hoped that he would choose them, bring his undeniable gifts to the
Prince,
carry on his father’s valued tradition. One application among these thousands, multiplied by seventeen years. Could it really
be as wrong as it felt?

When she let herself outside, the air felt clammy and unexpectedly cold. She turned up her collar and walked through the campus,
past the art museum and the mansion that had once been home to the university president, then out through the arches to Prospect
Avenue, where the eating clubs faced off in a row. They were larger than the fraternities at Dartmouth and looked considerably
more solid—less Animal House, in other words, than Animal Mansion—but Portia often wondered how Princeton managed to retain
its reputation of gentility when Saturday nights on Prospect rivaled any debauchery she had ever seen in Hanover. Tonight,
however, no one stirred, and she walked quickly down the moonlit street, leaving the clubs behind and beginning to pass the
neat, pleasant homes of faculty members and university administrators. One bore the after-effects of an Easter egg hunt the
previous weekend, with discarded plastic eggs and hastily removed bits of foil soggily embedded in the lawn; another was lined
with little plastic flags bearing the logo of an electric-dog-containment company and the words
Puppy in Training
. Finally, at the end of the avenue, she came to Gordon Sternberg’s home and stopped for a moment to look. Perhaps it was
not as abandoned as it appeared, she thought. Perhaps some of those dark windows had sleeping Sternbergs in them, Gordon’s
wife or kids returned to sort through his things or start the wrenching process of moving out. She had met the kids, she was
fairly sure, at some of the parties, but she doubted she would know them now, nor would they know her. Gordon himself had
barely registered her. She had only been Mark’s not-even-wife, not pretty enough to be noticed, not clever enough to talk
to about his work, which was the only thing he truly liked to talk about. Whenever she reminded him, as she often did, that
she worked at the Office of Admission, he lurched into cruel discourses on the doltish students who had dared to attend his
classes, charity cases, he supposed, or the opposite: children of too much wealth and too little brain, who had obviously
bought their way in.