Admission

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10017

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  First eBook Edition: April 2009

  Lines from “Dartmouth Undying” reprinted with permission of Dartmouth College. Copyright 1931 Trustees of Dartmouth College.

  Two verses from “The Applicant” from Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1963 used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55763-4

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  Part I: Travel Season

  Chapter One: The Good News of Princeton

  Chapter Two: Inspiration Way

  Chapter Three: The Worst Kind of Failure

  Chapter Four: What We Let Out

  Chapter Five: Chicken Marbella

  Chapter Six: Academic Folk

  Chapter Seven: Teammates

  Chapter Eight: Fictions of Lives

  Chapter Nine: An Actor Prepares

  Chapter Ten: The Knack for Isolation

  Chapter Eleven: This Concerns You

  Chapter Twelve: The Dreaded Thing, the Average Man

  Part II: Reading Season

  Chapter Thirteen: Inside the Box

  Chapter Fourteen: Aren’t There Things to Talk About?

  Chapter Fifteen: A Few Details

  Chapter Sixteen: Small World

  Chapter Seventeen: Content to Be Led

  Chapter Eighteen: I’m OK, You’re OK

  Chapter Nineteen: The Land of the WASP

  Chapter Twenty: Fair Is Kind of an Imprecise Concept

  Chapter Twenty-one: Once There Was and Was Not

  Part III: Vox Clamantis in Deserto

  Chapter Twenty-two: A Thing for Jewish Girls

  Chapter Twenty-three: The Low Door in the Wall

  Chapter Twenty-four: The Destination Board

  Chapter Twenty-five: I’m Not Here Now

  Part IV: Decisions

  Chapter Twenty-six: Who Among Us Has Died?

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Short Stories

  Chapter Twenty-eight: The Amazing and the Extraordinary

  Chapter Twenty-nine: A Highly Unusual Applicant

  Chapter Thirty: A for Admission

  Chapter Thirty-one: 99 Percent Pure

  Chapter Thirty-two: Prometheus Unbound

  Chapter Thirty-three: A Sense of Being Drawn In

  Acknowledgments

  ALSO BY JEAN HANFF KORELITZ

  The White Rose

  The Sabbathday River

  A Jury of Her Peers

  For Ann and Burt Korelitz

  PART I

  TRAVEL SEASON

  When I think of Princeton I think of many images:

  ivy-covered buildings, students arguing philosophy in the dining hall,

  shadows in the Yard. It is truly a great privilege to attend

  a school like Princeton.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE GOOD NEWS OF PRINCETON

  The flight from Newark to Hartford took no more than fifty-eight minutes, but she still managed to get her heart broken three times. This was a feat at once pathetic and, bizarrely, something of an underachievement, Portia thought, making a painful note on the reader’s card of an academically unadmittable Rhode Island girl and shoving the folder back into her bag. Any of her colleagues, she thought ruefully, might have had their hearts broken by twice as many applicants in the same amount of time.

  In the real world, of course, Portia was no slower a reader than anyone else. She could fully scan The New York Times while waiting in line for her habitual (and necessary) Americano at Small World Coffee, half a block from the FitzRandolph Gate of Princeton University. She had even, once, completed Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy during a weeklong visit to her mother in Vermont (when, admittedly, the whole point had been to evade Susannah, especially when she wanted to talk). Fifteen hundred pages in seven days—not too shabby. But she was well aware of her reputation as the slowest reader in Princeton’s Office of Admission (singular, nota bene—not plural), and she probably deserved it. With an application open before her, Portia could almost feel herself decelerate, parsing the sentences and correcting the grammar, fixing the spelling, rereading to make sure she at least knew what they’d managed to say, if not what they’d meant to say, even as she took the temperature of her anxiety at falling behind, because she couldn’t stop herself from lingering, lingering, lingering… on the kids.

  She wasn’t supposed to think of them as kids, she knew that. Few of them sounded like kids, they were trying so hard not to be young. They were ventriloquizing the attorneys they thought they wanted to be, or the neuroscientists, or the statesmen. They were trying to sound as though they already worked at Morgan Stanley, or toiled at a feeding station in Darfur, or were due in surgery. But so often the newness of them, the flux of their emerging selves, would poke through the essays or the recommendations, stray references to how Jimmy had grown since his difficult freshman year or Jimmy’s own regrettable use of the word awesome. Their confidence was sometimes so hollow, it practically echoed off the page. They were all so young, even the ones who had already seen so much.

  In this batch, on this brief flight, already there had been a wizened seventeen-year-old who lived with her younger brother in an apartment in South Boston, their parents back home in Taiwan. She wrote of the microwavable meals she prepared for her bisected family and the bureaucracy she had learned to manipulate for herself, the weekly phone calls from Mom, who had never been able to attend a parent-teacher conference, being unable to speak English and, incidentally, on the other side of the planet, but wasn’t it worth it? Because she had six AP scores of 5 and four more exams still to be taken? Because she was first in her class of four hundred, with a very realistic chance of getting into a first-tier college and achieving her dream of becoming a doctor? And the boy from Holyoke whose mother had left her two oldest children to cross the border for her day job in a medical supply factory and her night job at Wendy’s, whose father was described as “Unknown/No Information,” who was a physics whiz and captain of the soccer team and All-State, who was applying not just for admission to Princeton, but for admission to America. And this last, from a girl in Greenwich, Connecticut, who was smart enough to know that she wasn’t smart enough, only just very, very smart, and wrote with preemptive defeat about her hospital internship and the inspiration of her older brother, who had survived childhood cancer to attend law school. Smart enough to know about, or at least imagine, the ones she would be compared with, who had been handed so much less than she, and done so much more with what they had, while the children of privilege were penalized for having been fortunately born, comfortably raised, and excellent in all of the ordinary ways. Sometimes those were the ones who got to Portia most of all.

  It was a sparsely occupied flight, of course; if it hadn’t been, if there were, for example, a businessman or grandmother or—
worst of all—high school–age kid within sight of her seat, she would never have extracted from her bag and opened, and then studied, the contents of these very private, very freighted files. Instinctively, Portia closed the folders whenever the single, tight-lipped attendant cruised the aisle, glancing at people’s laps. She dropped her white plastic cup of tepid coffee into the attendant’s proffered garbage bag or made the appropriate noises when he said they were ten minutes from Bradley, holding her place with a finger as she held the folders shut. This was the unwritten code of her profession and Portia’s own inclination for secrecy, neither one more than the other, really, as if the numbers, letters, declarations, and aspirations within each file outweighed the secrets of governments or espionage cells—which, to the teenagers they represented, they surely did. Outside the window, beyond the ridge of the descending wing, the autumn trees of New England sharpened: electric red-and-yellow branches and spiky green pines divided by the highway. This trip, late in the season for its kind, would be her final airing before the approaching cataclysm of paperwork. In this post–Early Decision era, there were no longer any foothills in Princeton’s admissions calendar; there was only flat land, then Everest, and the twenty orange folders in her bag were merely the first-from-the-gate forerunners of the onslaught to come. When that bell curve hit its apex in a month’s time, she and her co-workers would simply disappear into their offices or their homes, emerging only sporadically until midwinter, before finally crawling out the other side, pale and gasping from beneath all that aspiration, all that desperation, in April.

  But today, this brilliant New England day, would be calm seas before the storm. Today, Portia would preach the good news of Princeton to the preemptively converted, and with a glad heart, because at long last she was here in New England and shot of the West Coast, in whose intense, teeming schools she had toiled for the past five years. She had been waiting for the New England district to open up, waiting for her colleague Rand (actually Randolph) Cumming to vacate the helm, something he had shown no inclination to do. Rand had never once set foot beyond the charmed circle of venerated and wealthy educational institutions, not since the day his parents dropped him off at a certain tradition-draped boarding school (as, Portia liked to imagine, a howling babe, “untimely ripped” from his mother’s breast). In due course, he had swanned off to Princeton (BA) and Yale (JD) and then, as if the whole notion of practicing law had been merely a whim, straight back to the (literally) ivy-covered walls of his alma mater’s Office of Admission, where he spent the next two decades tending the very prep school garden from which he had sprung and becoming, more or less, the very personification of what most people imagined an Ivy League admissions officer to be: bow-tied, well groomed, class ringed, and always ready to be of service to an old classmate or a classmate’s chum, whose fine young son was a rising senior with a letter in squash and a winning way with a sailboat.

  Rand was, in fact, one of those boulders around which the waters of Ivy League admissions had parted, leaving him in a wake of soaring academic standards and dizzying diversity. He had bristled through every clank of progress, every painful adjustment in policy that aimed to transform the university from its dunderheaded Jazz Age uniformity to its rightful place as the best of all possible universities for the best of all possible students. The new Princeton, so wondrous and varied, so… multicolored, was not his Princeton, and his suffering was evident. He was an angry man, a furious man, beneath his veneer of irreproachable manners.

  He had been waiting himself, Portia supposed, for the retirement of Martin Quilty, his chief antagonist in the struggle of tradition versus merit and the dean who had brought coeducation and surging minority enrollment, so that he could begin the slow but necessary work of turning back the clock; but when that blessed event finally arrived, Rand had found himself passed over in the most offensive way possible. He soldiered on for a year or two, making his opinion on just about everything known to the new dean whenever possible, and then, quite suddenly, the previous May, he had left—completing the circle of his unadventurous journey by taking the post of college counselor at his very own prep school.

  And there, Portia knew, he was destined to prove as irritating a voice in her ear as when he’d occupied the office just down the hall from her.

  But it was worth it to have New England. She had wanted New England for years, coveting the post as she’d watched Rand Cumming glad-hand his cronies at Groton and Concord and Taft. She had considered asking for it whenever there was a district reshuffle (Rand had seemed oddly immune to these.) And she had made sure she was the first one in Clarence Porter’s office to ask for it—Clarence being the new dean in question—when the opportunity finally arose. Not only (she explained) because she herself was a product of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont—in roughly that order—and not only because her mother, now a Vermonter, was getting on in years (hint, hint) and she would be personally grateful for the opportunity to drop in on her more often, but also because the New England district featured the kind of boarding school interaction she hadn’t much experienced in the California-Oregon-Hawaii-Washington-Alaska applicant pool. That in particular was a deficit in her experience, a deficit unbecoming an admissions officer, and that embarrassed her. Serving Princeton to her utmost ability called for fluency with its traditional feeder schools: the Grotons and Choates and Andovers, whose top students the university had been cherry-picking for centuries. She had reminded Clarence of the miles she had logged for Princeton, not only along the coasts and valleys of California, but, before that, along the empty highways of the Midwest, plucking genius 4-H’ers and ambitious dreamers from the Great Plains. She had personally recruited the Inuit girl from Sitka, Alaska, who’d won Princeton’s sole Rhodes scholarship last year. She had found Brian Jack, homeschooled (self-schooled) in some barely existent Oregon town, and made sure he chose them over Yale. (His senior thesis, a novel, had just been published by Knopf, showering Princeton with the fairy dust of reflected literary glory.) She’d been about to start in on the fact that her West Coast region had boasted the highest percentage of female engineer admits for all five years she’d had it when he stopped her and offered her the job. And a good thing, too. She couldn’t have supported any claim of credit for those last admits, not really. There were simply more female engineers in the heavily immigrant population she’d overseen.

  “I was going to give it to you anyway,” Clarence had said, barely looking up from the call log on his desk. “I thought you needed a little shaking up.”

  A little shaking up. She hadn’t quite engaged with that at the time—it had seemed more advisable not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. A hearty thank-you, a formally written letter of delighted acceptance later that day, and some unsolicited advice with regard to her replacement—she had done what was expected without ever returning to this nagging, vaguely shameful moment. The exchange had not been very satisfying, in any case. There was a kind of detachment to it, given that Clarence’s mind had been more consumed by the call sheet on his desktop than by the very sincere and well-phrased request of his very present employee. His very competent employee, who had never asked for anything before or indicated in any way that she was in need of anything, required any concession or support, and was generally not in the habit of calling attention to herself. Portia had never, not ever, thought of herself as someone who needed shaking up, and it appalled her to realize that he, apparently, had.

  Clarence had come from the Yale Admissions Office, a fact more than a few Princeton alumni were still—rather comically—grumbling about. Before he had been an admissions officer he had been a professor of African-American history at Yale, in fact the head of that fractious department, where he had taught the music, culture, literature, and lore of the Delta, an immaculate gentleman in full Savile Row regalia holding forth on Howlin’ Wolf, Leadbelly, and Blind Willie McTell. He had an ever present silken handkerchief in the breast pocket of his beautifully cut jackets
and a silken voice that rumbled an accent north of the islands and west of the United Kingdom. Before an audience he was magic, his beautiful voice equally calming to the jittery freshmen at orientation and the alternately fawning and preemptively furious parent groups he addressed. He could, better than any admissions officer Portia had ever worked with, soothe an irate alumni parent whose child Princeton had turned down, and unlike every other admissions officer Portia had ever known, he was never seen hauling around great sacks of folders but seemed to be able to retrieve an astounding range of data from memory. His office, too, was always serenely uncluttered, with a perennial vase of calla lilies on the corner of his desk and a rather nice Asher Durand on loan from the Princeton University Art Museum on the wall behind him. It was a far cry from the mixed-up-files cacophony the room had been when it belonged to Martin Quilty. (Back then, only Martin’s assistant could guess in which pile or holding bin something might be stashed.) Portia, who was nothing if not supremely well organized herself, could only aspire to the minimalist mastery of her new boss. Theirs was not a warm relationship, obviously. But she did appreciate the calm. And she did appreciate that Asher Durand.

  After they landed, Portia made her way into the terminal, pulling her small suitcase behind her. There was a real chill in the building, and she held the lapels of her tweed coat together at the throat. She wore one of the outfits she now rotated for these visits: a synchronicity of tweed and cashmere and brown leather boots, überschoolgirl, Sylvia Plath minus the pearls and plus the sunglasses, but comfortably of the world she was about to enter. The previous May, on her first visits to New England prep schools, she’d learned that they had rituals of their own, with more graces and ceremony than she’d been used to in, for example, a Bay Area public school. Typically, some sort of tea-and-cookies affair followed her presentation, which took place in a slightly shabby, generations-old salon, under the watchful portraits of (white, male) alumni. The first time she’d been ushered into one of these receptions—at Andover, as it happened—she’d experienced a discomforting moment, a kind of self-detected fraudulence—clad as she was in her basic black jeans and careless sweater. No one had ever discussed wardrobe with her or suggested she might be letting down the institution with her evident sartorial imperviousness, but the plain surprise in the eyes of the college adviser, the teachers, and even a couple of the students had sent the message home effectively enough. Later that day she’d dropped nearly a thousand dollars at an Ann Taylor outlet on the way to Milton Academy.