“So, Hunter,” she said finally. “Do you want to go to college?”
He glanced at her and said nothing, then aimed a disbelieving smile into his lap.
She continued, “Or would you prefer to do something else next year?”
“Is that a joke?” He winced, appearing embarrassed for her and how little she understood. “Of course I’m going to college. Do I want to go to college? Ha! That’s funny.”
“No, I mean it,” Anne said. “Do you want to go? A lot of people never do, you know. Some of them go to technical schools, or they spend a few years at a community college, or they just get a job. You could just start your life. You’re almost eighteen. You could head right out that door and rent a little apartment in the city, get a job, meet someone special, the whole nine yards.”
Hunter slumped back in his chair and folded the brim of his cap low over his temples.
“Yeah, okay, right,” he said. He was worried he was being set up. And he was, of course; as flaky and hormonal as they were, teenagers always caught the trick. Hunter shot back: “I’ll take the meet-a-woman part.”
Anne said nothing.
“I mean, yeah, of course I want to go to college.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He was incredulous. “Why? Everyone goes. I mean, my parents . . . my friends, like, everyone at my school goes to college. It’s how you get a job? Plus there are keg parties.”
Anne was quiet. The traps—sex, booze—she let pass. She was still too close to the kids’ age to speak to them of such things.
“My parents would kill me if I didn’t go to college,” he added.
“Actually,” Anne said, “at this point, they’d kill me if you didn’t go to college.”
Hunter looked her square in the face for the first time, and permitted her to look back. His eyes, she saw, were green. Then he laughed.
“Okay, yeah, you’re right about that! Cool.”
“So, listen, work with me here. Let’s say you could do anything in college. I mean, anything. Go anywhere, study anything, not study anything. What would it be?”
“Does my essay suck or something?”
“No, it doesn’t suck. But it is kinda boring. And I think that’s because it bores you to think about college, because it’s like all the other things you have to think about: SATs, summer reading, preseason, all stuff you have to do. Not stuff you want to do.”
“Maybe.”
“Because I know you’re not boring. You’re sitting there next to me and I know you’ve got things you’re thinking about, and I’m guessing maybe someone special on this trip to Montana, or—”
“She couldn’t go,” he said quickly. “She’s a freshman. Well, sophomore now.”
Aha. Thank heavens for girlfriends. “Did you tell her about it?”
“Totally.”
“About the litter and stuff? The Ziploc bags? The fragile ecosystem?”
He jerked his head back. “No. Dude. Why would I talk about that stuff?”
“Then why write about it?”
He blinked at her.
“Has she ever been to Montana?” Anne asked quickly. She couldn’t risk losing their thin détente.
“Nicole? No. Idaho, once, I think. Sun Valley.”
“Man. Too bad. It’s gorgeous.”
“Oh my God! Montana was so insane. They have these rivers—braided rivers. Have you ever seen those? So, it’s a river made by glacier melt, the runoff. When it heats up the water just runs down from under the ice, but it’s not always this steady stream, so as the current gets stronger it moves around, like a snake, sort of, over time. So you’ll be standing in this huge riverbed, it’ll be, like, gravel from here all the way to where you can see, and there are, like, these seven little rivers running through it. And they switch and cross and go back and all, like a braid, is the name. It’s like the best watering spot imaginable for elk and moose, tracks everywhere, and just—these rivers that move around! It’s so amazing. You never see them changing. They just do. Constantly.”
“And the mustangs?”
Here he paused. “What about them?”
Anne backed off a bit. “I’ve never seen them, is all. Are they big?”
“Oh. Like normal horses. But just—they’ve never been ridden. You can’t ride them. They’re totally wild, like horses used to be, you know? No saddle, no ropes. They were just hanging out there in the middle of this crazy field. I shouldn’t even say ‘field’ because it, like, never stopped. There was just this wire along the side of the road and then, like, grass forever. And they were hanging out out there, just chilling in this big circle. Like I wrote—and we tried to feed them, but they weren’t having it. Which is cooler, I think.”
“Are they protected?” Anne asked.
“The ranger said these ones are.”
“But in some places they’re not?”
“I don’t know. Do you think? Where else do they have them?”
“I don’t know.”
“I hope not. That would suck,” he said.
“It would.”
“But what’s the deal with the essay?” Hunter asked.
“Well, forget about the essay for a moment,” Anne told him. This was the best way with boys—try to make them forget they were writing at all. Girls preferred to drill down; boys needed to be distracted. It made using their voices safer. “Can we just think of writing a—I don’t know, let’s say an e-mail, from Montana? To . . . Nicole. Is that right?”
“Yeah.” He dropped his head so fast it was as though he’d sustained a blow. He really liked this girl.
“So you’re writing to her, to tell her about the stuff you’re seeing in Montana. And why it’s cool. And why you don’t want to come back to Winnetka, and why you wish you could just send for your stuff and mail farewell postcards to all your teachers. Right?”
“Totally.”
“So just write that e-mail. But send it to me. Okay?”
“What?” he asked.
“Just an e-mail. To me. And I’ll see you next week.” Anne began packing up her bag.
“Um, oh-kay. Whatever,” he sang at her.
But it was a false challenge. Hunter had taken off his hat and was working the brim again; he was already thinking. This was keen distraction in the guise of apathy. A classic teenage feint. He didn’t look up to say good-bye, and Anne let herself out the wide front door. Through the window she saw him lower his head to the shiny dining table and rest it there, as though exhausted. Hunter Pfaff was in agony. It was a very good sign.
THE OFFICES OF Blanchard, McHenry, Winsett & Blair formed the anchor tenant of a landmark building on Grant Park, overlooking the long, low roof of the Art Institute and, to the east, the bright crescent of Lake Michigan. August heat silvered the city. Anne wore a dress. Three secretaries passed her back into the labyrinth, through doors they unlocked with sliding cards. She settled outside the big door with a fresh Vanity Fair and lemon water from a glass pitcher.
“Anne?” asked a voice.
She looked up. It was a very young man. For a moment she was so puzzled her mind went blank, and she felt her arms begin to prickle with nerves. But then the picture snapped back into focus: this was not Gideon Blanchard but a colleague, must be a very junior assistant, whom Anne had known—where? In high school. Must have been. She scrambled for his name.
“Oh, hi!” she replied.
“Don’t get up,” he said. “I’m just running somewhere. But I thought that was you and I wanted to say hi. Listen, what are you doing here?”
Anne thought that an impertinent question to ask in a high-powered law firm, but she must not have looked terribly distressed—or high-powered. “I have a meeting with Gideon Blanchard,” she told him. Her mind was flipping through files, trying to pull up anything at all. He was tall and very lean, with a sharp chin and oddly angled cheekbones that she remembered from the long afternoon class they’d shared. Some elective, senior year. He’d been younger by a
year. Ian? Liam?
“Oh, the big man!” he replied, openly impressed. “Well, have fun with that. He’s a great guy. I really admire him. You a lawyer?”
“Nope, no. Are you?”
“Yeah, second year. It’s a grind, what can I say? But this is as good a place as any, so it’s cool. You a journalist, then?”
The question smarted. She had no interest in law, but journalism was a sometime dream. “Ah, nope. Just working with Mr. Blanchard on a private project.” She always protected her clients’ confidentiality, though Gideon Blanchard’s feelings weren’t the ones at stake here.
“Got it. Okay, well, cool. Good to see you! You look great, by the way.”
“Thanks. So do you. Really good to see you, too.”
He disappeared down the fluorescent corridor. What if, Anne thought, what if I were sitting here waiting to interview Gideon Blanchard, instead of being interviewed by him? She turned the bright candy pages of Vanity Fair. It was an impossibly pleasant fantasy, and an impossible one. There was no way to get there from here. Maybe I should be meeting with Mrs. Blanchard, Anne thought wryly, for a little coaching myself. Call down my dream. And just then the big door opened, and Mr. Blanchard stepped out, his hand extended. He was big indeed, tall and slim in a beautiful suit and French cuffs; Anne caught a flash of enamel at his wrist when he held the door for her. She recognized him immediately. Slightly long in the jowl, but with a wide smile and quick, intelligent eyes. “So, you’re the independent college counselor,” he sang, as though hanging a bit of bait. “Coffee?”
“Yes, I am, and no, thanks.” She sat where he gestured. There was a college crest on the carved chair, but she hadn’t had time to make out which one.
He settled himself behind his enormous desk. His smile remained huge but his teeth made her think of arctic ice—gleaming cold and perfectly opaque. “And just how does one get into that sort of work? I’d never heard of such a thing before my wife brought it up. Sounds a little belabored, to be honest.”
It was not uncommon that something competitive cropped up with the husbands. You’d have thought it would be with the wives: here was Anne, single, in her twenties, skinny, free, able to shape-shift between the grown-ups and the incorrigible teenagers. But the mothers clung to her. They met her at the door in their bathrobes. They called her from their cars in the grocery-store parking lot and told her the horror story about the valedictorian who got in nowhere. When, as happened on occasion, students got busted drinking or smoking weed, Anne was the first call the mothers made. “How will we handle this on applications?” they asked, choking on their tears. “Can you come over tonight?” No, it was the fathers who wanted to lock horns with her. Her theory was that they believed that the story of their success had begun in college—Harvard Yale Amherst Williams—and that college was, therefore, part of the real world, which was their domain: the world of business and banking, of 6 A.M. wheels-up flights to conference rooms in Cleveland and Bonn, of expense reports and younger associates grinding out the midnight hours; the world, in other words, of adults. Finally their children were emerging from the localized haze of elementary education and the harrowing irrelevance of high school to a track they recalled and could, they imagined, predict. What did this girl think she knew about all of that? Had she ever even had a job, anyway?
“For two years I taught at a very selective prep school, English composition and Shakespeare,” Anne told Mr. Blanchard. He nodded gamely. “My seniors were always asking for nights off from their homework so they could work on college applications. So I assigned those essays as homework, and made them bring them into class, and they were terrible. We worked on them for weeks. I created a course on the personal essay, and both years, for whatever reason, all my kids got into their top choices. Then their mothers started calling about siblings, and word got out, and now here I am.”
Anne had come to her work at a fortuitous time. A combination of social and economic factors had sent application rates soaring. The sixties had opened the college gates to nonwhites and women, and all of those kids—the baby boomers—had grown up and created more college-bound seventeen-year-olds than the country had ever seen. Growing wage disparity between blue- and white-collar jobs made a degree necessary for a middle-class existence; shifting industries made it impossible to land even some blue-collar gigs without the advanced diploma. Add to that the fetishization of certain schools and the institution of the Common Application, the online form that students could submit to a hundred colleges simply by giving each a credit-card number, and you had a mad scramble for a handful of trophy campuses, a blood race buffeted by corporate hangers-on, some of them standardized testing toughs and some of them media companies producing annual publications ranking schools from one to fifty on dubious metrics pulled together from SAT scores, graduates’ tax returns, and the occasional interview with a hungover senior. And to hear of it, there seemed nothing but the darkness of outer space for everyone who fell short of the bar. In graduate school, Anne had been appalled by the teaching jobs awaiting the brightest doctorates she knew, who left Chicago for dusty towns where the state university campus had a tenure-track spot open up, and who hoped to publish enough in six years to transfer back to a city with a Starbucks. All of these brilliant young adults were installed in everyday colleges. If you just knew where to look, she thought, if a student knew what to ask for, she could have an extraordinary experience at any college in the country. But these schools Anne might have mentioned—as one father said, “Please, nothing I’ve never heard of, okay?”
The fathers often had very little idea how things had changed. Often the mothers hired her in part to impress upon them the dire nature of the college circumstance. But fathers were uneasy about Anne. She did not blame them. They made money, and she wanted some of their money, to do what? Nothing they hadn’t already paid a zillion dollars for their fancy private school to do. Hiring Anne smacked of excess, of mommy zealotry, of spit-shining and list making and competing with all the other assholes out there on the freezing sidelines of the homecoming game. She had to work to disarm them. It was on occasion even harder than disarming their teenage children.
“You went to Princeton, is that right?” asked Gideon Blanchard.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And then?”
“And then graduate school at the University of Chicago.”
Here he sidestepped the obvious question. He seemed, in fact, not to see it at all, so instead of asking what the hell went wrong, he inquired, “So, tell me: why is it acceptable for me to hire a professional to write my daughter’s college essays?”
Anne got the “hire a professional” question fairly regularly—a last gasp of liberal guilt as they pulled out the checkbook: “Why is it fair for me to hire you to help my child?” Once Anne had given a long and gentle explanation that she was the logical extension of an education that began with private preschool and intended to position the child for the greatest success. Now she just smiled a little and said, “It’s not fair.”
But write the essays? “I don’t write the essays,” she told him.
He raised his eyebrows and shifted his jaw from one side to the other. “No?”
The first response that came into Anne’s mind—Would it be okay with you if I did?—seemed rude. She was quiet for a moment, trying to think how to help him save face, although the man hadn’t blanched a bit. She tried reason. “Do you think admissions officers can’t tell the difference between my writing and that of someone a decade younger than I am?” she asked. “It wouldn’t help if I wrote the essays. In fact, it would probably ensure the student’s rejection.”
Now he was with her. The ethical question had been a feint; Gideon Blanchard was a pragmatist.
“No. I just help with the process.”
“And how do you do that?”
Anne leaned forward over her clasped hands. Feeling him clock her ringless fingers, she counted on them to make her case. “I provide
three things to your family,” she began.
“First, I serve as a buffer between you and your daughter during this difficult time. I will monitor the deadlines, the forms, the teacher recommendations, the submissions. I’ll make sure nothing gets missed. That will spare you the nagging and the asking and the keeping piles on your dining room table from now till Christmas.
“Second, I’ll be an advocate for your daughter through an immensely stressful process. She will have my e-mail and my cell-phone number, and she can contact me at any time, about anything. So can you, or her mother, incidentally. So if your wife is freaking out on a Friday night, she calls me.”
Mr. Blanchard huffed a laugh. Anne was winning him.
“Finally, the essays. Here’s the thing. Your daughter has had an excellent education, probably the best in the city.” She paused so he could agree with this. “Right? She has been taught to write book reports, lab reports, history papers . . . I bet even sonnets. But now she has to write a five-hundred-word essay that will be the most important piece of writing in her life to date. It has to be concise but inviting, bold but modest, confident but not arrogant. It has to be clever and original and authentic. Now, has she ever been taught to write a personal essay? I bet not. Why should she know how to do that? It’s a skill that will serve her well for the rest of her life, but she hasn’t learned it. And that’s what I do. I’ll put her through draft after draft until she’s got a set of essays that represent her best foot forward. Then we’ll send in the applications and see what happens. I don’t have any truck with admissions offices. I don’t call them, I don’t know them. I don’t care where your daughter ends up, as long as she is happy there. But I do guarantee that no matter what, your daughter will feel that she has given it her very best shot.”
Early Decision Page 2
