Admission. Part 33

THE AMAZING AND THE EXTRAORDINARY.

Portia's first rule of committee preparation had nothing to do with public speaking and nothing to do with strategizing. It was: Don't drink too much before the meeting. This applied especially to coffee, even if you have been up for hours, getting ready to face your colleagues in this most secret, fraught, satisfying, and, yes, irritating of arenas, and a few good mugs of caffeine-enriched coffee might have made the whole process go a little more smoothly. But Clarence had brought with him most of the rituals of the Yale department from which he'd sprung (and been sprung), and one of them was: If you left the conference room to use the facilities, you sat out the vote for the applicant on the table, no matter how little of the conversation you'd missed.

It was fair, Portia thought, and it did keep things moving (which became more paramount with each year that pa.s.sed, as the pool grew and grew), but it added yet another layer of fretting to an already stressful process. In addition to worrying about how to wield her own votes, how and when to show goodwill to her colleagues and curry it in return, she had to frequently ask herself where her vote might be less valuable to an applicant and so plan to pee accordingly. For a kid whose application she'd read and intended to fight for, she couldn't afford to be absent, but for a kid who, from the very top of the discussion, was going to be an easy call-Siemens winner, published author, Olympic hopeful-she could safely slip out, as long as she did it fast.

Murmuring apologies, Portia entered the committee room behind Robin Hindery (one of Clarence's most recent hires and less than a year out of Princeton herself) and took the last open seat at the far end of the long table from Clarence. There were bottles of water (from which she automatically averted her eyes) in the center of the table. It was nearly nine-thirty. A late start. A bad sign.

"Is that everyone?" said Corinne, pointedly not looking in Portia's direction. She was, also pointedly, sitting at Clarence's right hand and dressed for battle in a severe gray jacket (so unadorned with detail that it could only be expensive) and her ill-advisedly jet black hair ramrod straight and lacquered into place behind her ears.

"I'm sorry," Portia said again, disliking herself for saying it.

"Me too," said Robin.

Clarence was looking over his legal pad. Beside him, his a.s.sistant, Abby, regarded them all above the screen of her open laptop, her hands poised over the keys like a court reporter, which was more or less the function she served here. They were all a.s.sembled, except for Victoria (who handled the overseas applicants and was returning from a recruiting trip to India today) and Jordan (like Robin, a new Princeton graduate, called home to Virginia over the weekend for a family emergency). Which left them with seven on this particular committee, some colleagues Portia had worked with for years, some she barely knew, some she liked and admired, others she would have been thrilled never to make small talk-let alone life-altering decisions-with again.

"First," said Clarence, interlacing his fingers over the stack of folders before him, "the good news. Our numbers, as you know, are up another nine percent from last year, and we're seeing spectacular applicants, as you also know. I couldn't be more pleased with where we are at the outset. I'm saying this now," he added, chuckling, "before things get ugly."

Portia made a point of smiling at Robin, who was looking just slightly terrified.

"And so, to the bad news, which is a lot like the good news. Up nine percent. Spectacular kids. That means hard decisions. And of course, we get attached to these applicants. I'm saying this especially to you, Robin," said Clarence, "and I'll say it to Jordan when she gets back tomorrow, because it's your first time through. Some of them are not going to get in. Actually, a lot of them aren't, and we can't help that. But these are great kids and they're going to end up at great colleges and they're going to be fine. We do not imagine that the only path to their success goes through us. We have far more respect for them than that."

He looked down at the printout before him. "We will move quickly and carefully. We will ask and answer questions respectfully. And then we will vote. We no longer have time to defer decisions. He picked up a yellow Post-it from the cover of his uppermost folder and gave it a dubious look, as if he expected whatever it contained to suddenly alter. "One note, if I may, before we get started. I am urged, in yet another phone call from my good friend Mr. Salter, to impress upon you all the gravity of his circ.u.mstances, by which he means that the Jazz Ensemble is about to graduate its entire complement of saxophone players." Clarence raised an eyebrow at Jordan, who had himself wielded a trombone for the irascible Mr. Salter only a few years earlier. Jordan shook his head and laughed.

"Poor Mr. S."

"Indeed," said Clarence. "But this being the case, I have promised to keep an eye out for saxophone players. If he does not get them, he is going to be very unhappy, as a result of which he has vowed to make me very unhappy. Unfortunately, he knows that I am a purist about jazz, so please. For him. For me," Clarence said, woefully, "bring me saxophone players."

Around the table, everyone relaxed. With a dramatic flourish, Clarence crumpled the Post-it and dropped it on the table beside him.

"Ladies and gentlemen? Deepa? Are you ready?"

Deepa nodded. She looked exhausted, Portia saw, and a little unkempt, which was unlike her. She unfolded her gla.s.ses and gently shook them open, then she put them on and solemnly opened the first folder in her substantial pile. "Yulia Karasov," said Deepa. "Cla.s.s rank two of four hundred and fifty, magnet school in a suburb of Atlanta, five-year count eighty-three applications, fourteen admits, eleven attends. Family emigrated from Russia ten years ago. Yulia is the youngest of three, older sibs are at Yale and Emory. Dad is a radiologist. Mom is a lab technician. Russian and English spoken at home. Yulia is captain of the cross-country team, sports editor on the school paper. One summer at CTY, one on a language program in France. Math 760, verbal 710, AP fives in chemistry, history, biology. Helen writes that she has known she wanted to be a doctor since the age of five, but a CTY teacher moved her in the direction of research, and it was a struggle to let go of the image of herself as a doctor. Good writer. Recs all mention her extreme work ethic. She'll rewrite a paper even after it's been graded, not for credit."

"Very driven," said Dylan, who had been second reader for the applications from the South. "But I loved what she wrote about giving up being a doctor. It felt very honest."

"This transcript is loaded," said Deepa, gazing down at it. "She's done everything she could here, but the recs aren't special. They admire her, but they don't love her."

"Is this a kid who's going to contribute?" asked Corinne. "Will she write for the Prince?"

"It's hard to say," Deepa said. "The only pa.s.sion in the application was for something she was giving up. Obviously, she'll be fine academically...."

Deepa's voice trailed off, but her point was made. Yulia Karasov, accomplished and dedicated as she was, would not be offered admission. Clarence called for a show of hands. It was swift.

Abby entered the information in her laptop. The folder was closed and the box marked "Deny" was checked on its cover in Clarence's fat red pen. And then they were on to the next.

Andrew Powers. Beloved at his private school outside of Memphis, the kind of student any teacher would be grateful to have, the kind of son any parent would be proud of. There were letters from his father's partner, Princeton '64, and his mother's cousin, Princeton '78, praising his character and skills on the lacrosse field. He had taken the SATs four times, topping out at 700 math, 690 verbal. His essay of praise for his grandfather's war service felt stretched to fit the most general of prompts. The alum who'd interviewed him noted that he had few questions about Princeton and didn't seem to know much about the place. "Why are you applying?" she had asked him. "To see if I could get in," replied Andrew Powers. The vote to decline was unanimous.

Mary McCoy, Columbia, South Carolina, first in her cla.s.s of thirty, the first violinist in the state youth orchestra, first in her family to attend college. "Students like Mary are the reason I wanted to be a teacher," said the woman who taught her multivariable calculus. "Students like Mary make me a better teacher." Ten students from her Catholic girls' school had applied to Princeton over the past five years, with none admitted. Mary would be the first.

All that morning they moved through the southern states, painfully, student by student. Portia sat very still, willing herself to be like a wind chime, letting the information move over her, raising her arm when the moment called for it. She asked few questions. She was afraid of showing her hand, which had only one thing in it. Every young man and young woman, every flutist and chemist and dancer and track star, every tempered plea, was an opportunity to lose the sole thing that mattered to her, every blossoming young person a young person who might take his place and her own chance to make rest.i.tution. This girl who dreamed of bringing technology to rural Africa. This boy who lived for political commentary. The girl who had fallen in love with Italian cinema. The boy who designed and built a waste management system for an off-the-grid community in Alabama. If she said yes to them, would there still be room for Jeremiah?

Of course she said yes to them. She had to say yes. She wanted to say yes. But every time she did, it took something out of her.

She looked around the table. Corinne had a husband and her two children. Deepa, a widow, had remarried the year before in a West Windsor temple, a ceremony Portia had attended. Robin, less than a year out of Princeton, had a boyfriend in the Music Department. Clarence's partner had come with him from Yale, a slender, bespectacled man, every bit as well dressed as Clarence, who wrote political biographies and seldom came to campus. Portia doubted he would know her if they met, say, at McCaffrey's or Small World. But she knew him.

Todd Simmonds of Louisville was the nephew of a Princeton trustee. Dad: attorney. Mom: homemaker. Good student, not great. Football player, but obviously not a recruit. He wrote about his love of southern history. He had done a summer internship for Morris Dees. There was a letter from Morris Dees, faint of praise, probably written by someone else, Portia thought. They put him on the wait list.

Portia, giving in to her thirst, opened a bottle of water and drank.

There was a lively discussion about Joanna White, African-American, mother a dean at Rollins College, father deceased. Joanna had attended an invitational humanities program for high school juniors the previous summer at Princeton, and there was a letter in her file from Mark, which Deepa read aloud, saying what a fine contributor she had been to the cla.s.s. Portia, listening, was struck by the kindness in the letter and thought how strange it was that the writer might have been as removed from her as any of the other hundreds and hundreds of Princeton professors, but was instead the man she had lived with for many years. Sometimes, exhausted, he had said to her, "You have no idea what I do all day," and she would roll her eyes and pretend to be sympathetic about his workload, as if her own were not just as intense. But the goodness in the letter affected her now, and it occurred to her, not for the first time, that Mark had always saved the best of himself for the people he dealt with in his professional life, though perhaps-and this did strike her for the first time-she had done that as well.

Joanna White was the kind of humanities student the summer program had been designed to find, something akin to the magnet programs for science and math that effectively pinpointed great students in those fields. But Joanna's grades beyond the humanities were dreadful and her SATs a lopsided 610/780.

"I met with her last summer," said Deepa, speaking in her typically soft voice. "During the program. She asked Professor Telford if she could speak to an admissions officer, and he called me. She's very focused and very brilliant. She knows there's a problem with her transcript, but she said to me, 'I can do so much here.' And I have to say, Mark Telford agreed. He said he was more impressed by her than by any other student who'd come through the program."

"Mom's a dean?" Corinne asked.

"Yes. Father died in Iraq."

This had an instant impact.

"Let's vote," said Clarence.

A boy from West Virginia wrote that even his application to Princeton broke a three-generation tradition for the men in his family, all of whom had attended the Citadel. But he was a painter, and the slides he'd sent had been viewed with great excitement by the Art Department. "If you give us one artist this year, give us this one," Deepa read from the evaluation form.

"Never been north of the Mason-Dixon." Clarence smiled, looking down at the folder.

He was first in his cla.s.s of over two hundred, only 22 percent of whom attended four-year colleges, and the first ever to apply to Princeton. They voted and moved on.

Lunch was sandwiches from c.o.x's, brought in precisely at noon. Portia took hers up to her office and sat at her desk, reading Mark's eulogy for Gordon Sternberg, which had been posted on the English Department Web site. It was dignified and diplomatic, full of praise for the astounding reach of Gordon's written work. It cited his humor, his forty years of devoted students, the sometimes grudging high opinion of his colleagues around the world, not a few of whom had feuded with him very publicly and for years. It seemed to imply that his life had ended not in a filthy Philadelphia alley, but at some undefined moment of triumph, as if he had suddenly succ.u.mbed to a painless death while holding forth to an immense lecture hall packed with former students, admiring members of the department, respectful rivals, adoring children, and a devoted wife. It was, thought Portia, a masterwork of tenderness and tact. And sitting at her desk with a barely touched tuna-fish sandwich in her hands, she was proud of Mark for writing it and an instant later terribly sad that she had not been there to hear him deliver it.

And then it was time to go back.

There were lots of Princeton families in the South. Princeton had once had the reputation of being the most southern of Ivy League colleges, not geographically but in temperament. It was well-known, though hardly a matter of pride, that students had once brought their own servants with them from home, housing them off campus in a neighborhood of town that was still, a century later, predominantly black; but the Princeton of 2008 was a very different construct. Through the afternoon, tie after tie was unceremoniously severed, with young men and women cast adrift from family tradition to find other places to be educated. Portia, still trying to bend and not break, could not help but be sad for these, too. She shrank from imagining the stunning impact of that slender envelope, arriving in homes where devotion to alma mater was entwined with family lore, where alumni wrote checks and attended reunions, perhaps imagining that their sons and daughters might one day live in the new dorm or take a cla.s.s from a professor in the newly endowed chair. In a few weeks' time, this group, more than any other, would flood the office with letters and calls, angry and shocked and heartbroken, but that was Clarence's cross to bear, and he seemed to manage it well.

On and on they flew. She craved the easy ones, the slam dunks: Math Olympiad finalists, congressional interns, the winner of Princeton's international high school poetry prize (this year, a girl from North Carolina), the banjo player who'd taken a year off after high school to busk his way around Europe, the amputee who'd won the grand slalom at the Turin Winter Paralympics. It felt wonderful to gather these people together, imagine them convening at the lab bench or the cafeteria table. It felt amazing to wonder whether the soprano from Savannah, Georgia, would meet the tenor from Baton Rouge in their freshman seminar on Wagner and fall in love, or whether the fiery (but, she had to admit, articulate and persuasive) neocon from Charleston would have his worldview altered, ever so slightly, by the Chilean boy whose two fathers had adopted him at birth, brought him home to Atlanta, and raised him to reimagine the world.

There was, around the table, a calibration taking place, similar to the one Portia always felt at the very start of the reading season, when the first and then the second and then the third applicant seemed equally impressive, equally compelling, and then the fourth and the fifth, and so on until you came to that one who was so amazing, so extraordinary, that the landscape suddenly snapped to clarity: Oh yes, now I understand. These impressive, compelling kids, enormously likable kids-they're the ones we don't take. This amazing, extraordinary kid, that's the kid we take. A cla.s.s of the amazing and the extraordinary. A cla.s.s of working actors and winning athletes and protoliterary scholars who had so impressed Mark Telford that he'd asked for their admission, and protophilosophers already capable of discussing zombie theory with David Friedman, and the boy whose memoir was about to be published, and the girl from Richmond who had spent the previous year in Gabon establishing a sanctuary for young women who had been expelled from their families or had no families in the first place, as well as a charitable foundation to support its operation, and the young researchers already attached to major studies, and the QuestBridge scholars, and the boy from Thailand who had made his way through every math cla.s.s the country's best university could offer him, even though he wasn't yet seventeen, and the ones who were choosing between college and the careers they had already begun, as dancers and models and gymnasts and ice skaters-careers that might not wait four years for them to return-and the violinists and oboists and trombonists and already accomplished composers the Music Department requested, calling them "simply brilliant" and "rare." They were breathtaking. And they would come here and fight among themselves and make things and learn from one another and break one another's hearts and push their professors to rise to their own level of curiosity and effort and come out of the closet and get engaged and get religion and change their religion and lose their religion and make the university better, and then make the world better. It gave her a sensation of almost calm, almost happiness. All things shall be well.... All manner of things shall be well.

But only if Jeremiah could be here with them.

"You have an aggressive tumor in your leg," said my doctor. I was twelve years old and baseball was my whole life. To be completely honest, I cared less about having the lower half of my right leg removed than I cared about whether I'd be able to play in next Sat.u.r.day's game against Freeport.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

A HIGHLY UNUSUAL APPLICANT.

She knew better than to hound him. He did not like to be hounded. He was a very organized man, very composed. Every day he appeared in committee with a new shirt, a new bow tie, and a suit that might have been new or just identical to the one he had worn the day before: crisp and fresh and dark blue with the faintest stripes.

The days went by and he gave no sign that he had read Jeremiah's file: no comment, no note, no e-mail. In the committee room, hundreds and then thousands of seventeen-year-olds were pa.s.sing before them, their names one by one a.s.signed to their final Princeton destinations: Deny, Admit, Wait List. First the South and then the Northwest, California, the Plains, the Midwest, foreign applications, country by country, and the Mid-Atlantic. New York and its suburbs would take nearly a week. Finally, only her own folders remained.

Still, he said nothing to her. There was no rea.s.surance, no "I haven't forgotten," and every day she had to ask herself, again, if she ought to be doing something: reminding him, nudging him, pleading with him.

They were moving well. Last year, Clarence had hired Robin Hindery and Jordan Cobb precisely because he had expected this jump in the numbers; the rise of the common application, the decline of Early Decision, and the peaking children-of-baby-boomers population had made for indelible writing on the wall. The tone in the committee room was elevated, generally. Portia tried to hold her tongue. She had not asked to be last at bat, but she didn't want to get there with anyone mad at her. So Deepa had argued pa.s.sionately for an academically undistinguished boy whose severe stutter (he had written) had formed his character and unlocked his love for music. Dylan had gone to bat for a girl at the Native American school who Portia was not at all certain would be able to handle the workload. Corinne seemed to have found a number of Latinists she could not live without, and Jordan pleaded for so many kids who'd had miserable lives that Clarence had had to take her aside and remind her that it was not the university's place to compensate every young person for every terrible thing that had happened to them. Kids whose parents had died, whose siblings had died, whose friends had died, whose teachers had died. Kids who'd battled cancer and depression and the aftereffects of car accidents. Kids who lived in communities without hope, who had somehow nonetheless acquired hope for themselves. Kids who gave the school's address instead of a home address, because there wasn't really what you might call a permanent home address, whose twenty-five-hour-a-week job at McDonald's or ShopRite was essential to the family income. Kids who had somehow dodged abusive fathers, schizophrenic mothers, violent neighborhoods. Kids who had kids and were desperate to make a better life for them.

Portia wanted to give every one of her colleagues whatever it was-whoever it was-they wanted. Although technically there was no such thing as quid pro quo in committee, no tacit understanding that she would give Robin the girl whose sisters and mother lived in hiding (who had possibly the lowest academic profile to have reached the committee room all these weeks, who wrote clearly and unsentimentally about the toll of violence in her family) and Robin, when the time came, would let her have Jeremiah. She did not allow herself to appear sycophantic. She gave herself a stern expression, as if she were dubious of everyone's motives, everyone's claims, but in the end she voted to admit whenever she sensed an urgency that was somehow personal, because Jeremiah would also be one of these applicants, she knew: divisive, a little worrying. And as the folders and the names and the accomplishments flew by, and as it looked more and more as if they would come last to her own geographic area, the Northeast, she knew that every one of her colleagues was running short of expansiveness. It was one thing, at the outset of committee meetings, to acquiesce against your better judgment when the cla.s.s felt wide open, with places to spare and room to make, just possibly, a bit of a mistake. But now, with thousands of such high-achieving kids already slated for denial, it was going to be harder to get a Jeremiah past. She would need all of her pa.s.sion and all of her persuasiveness and all of their goodwill.

Then, toward the end of the third week, when they had dealt with nearly everyone but the nearly two thousand students from her own district who were, in Martin Quilty's oddly endearing phrase, still "swimming," she entered her office after a grueling day to find Jeremiah's folder in the center of her desk, an orange Post-it note stuck to the cover. "Let's discuss in committee," it said.

Portia sat down heavily. It was not the response she had hoped for. She had hoped for some indication that Clarence concurred, or at least for a chance to talk to him again before having to strut and fret her moment upon the committee stage. At Dartmouth, there had long been an unwritten rule that each admissions officer got one free pa.s.s, one applicant they could bring to the dean once the decisions had all been made, and have that student's wait list designation altered to acceptance. It had been a genteel sort of tradition, and they had not abused it, because it spread a kind of goodness through the office and the enterprise itself. Because you might have a gut feeling about some kid, whose transcript was, say, somewhat under par, because his essay was the one you remembered out of thousands, and you just knew he would go on to do something amazing with his life, and you could-personally, single-handedly-make it happen for that kid. But only once a year, and only after the files had all been closed, and only for the wait list (it didn't work if the applicant had been denied outright), and only very quietly, strictly between the officer and the dean.

Not at Princeton. Not under Martin Quilty, who had turned her away when she'd tried it the first year, smiling his customary sad smile and letting her know never to attempt it again; and certainly not under Clarence, who would think she was mad.

Jeremiah was going to get one chance, and one chance only, in the last days of committee meetings, with an incoming split opinion between his first and second readers and without a gesture of encouragement from Clarence. Portia closed her eyes.

At least, it occurred to her, she could give some thought to where in the order he might fall. First folder of the day was not the place for Jeremiah, but neither was last. She went through them, one by one, reminding herself who each applicant was and what they'd done, what mattered to them, what she'd had to say about them, and what Corinne had written in response. They were all deflatingly superior, cerebral, engaged, ready to hit some college campus running and take off into their avidly antic.i.p.ated futures. Each of them had earned either a "High Priority-Admit" or a "Strong Interest" designation from her. Nearly all of them had been just as lauded by Corinne. Against their backdrop, Jeremiah was an undisciplined smart kid, flailing against authority, beating his own different drum with merry abandon. It was going to be a slaughter.

She went back to the top of the pile and began again, skimming: crew champions, ch.o.r.eographers, 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 gla.s.s 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 Na.s.sau 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 Na.s.sau Hall, and gave her a comradely grin. "End's in sight," she said brightly.

"Oh, my G.o.d. I had no idea anyone could get this tired."

"Don't worry. They bring in a team of ma.s.sage 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 pa.s.sed 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 Cla.s.s 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 soph.o.m.ore 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 cla.s.smates? 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 cla.s.s 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.