Early Decision (35 page)

Anne turned. Sadie was there, glossy lips and glossy hair, belted coat, flats so encrusted with crystals she looked like she'd been wading in geodes. “So much for going out,” she said dispiritedly. “Can we just do this quickly? Who's he?”

Anne was thinking furiously. One dollar. “One dollar,” she said out loud to William. “Everywhere, even at Starbucks, I think. Sadie, this is William Kantor, another student of mine. William, Sadie. He was just on his way out.”

“I know, but it's not the same as nabbing it, sorry,” he answered her, shaking Sadie's hand. They did this, these seventeen-year-olds, meeting like miniature versions of their parents. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

“Where're you applying?” Sadie asked him.

“Well, that's just the problem, actually,” he answered her.

Sadie studied him. “Ohhhh,” she said. “You should stay!”

She dropped her overcoat and stepped into the room in a black dress, looking little and clipped, like a paper doll. William drew back into the apartment behind her. For a moment Anne was embarrassed to be caught so obviously without plans, but there was excitement enough here that neither teenager seemed to notice.

“So what're you deciding between?” Sadie asking him, scanning the room.

“Long story,” he told her. “How about you?”

“Duke, Middlebury, Yale, Richmond, Georgetown, Tufts, UVA, and Hamilton. But that's all settled. It's just that my parents just read my essay and they hate it.”

“It's a little more complicated than that,” Anne told her.

“No, it's not. I said some really stupid things.”

Again, thought Anne. Like a goddamn compass needle, Sadie twirled back to her mother's side whenever an argument arose. Margaret Blanchard told her how to feel about what she'd written, and she agreed.

“Well, I disagree,” Anne said, with as much reserve as she could. “But what matters is that you feel confident about your essay, so we'll work on it.”

William dropped down opposite Sadie in Anne's chair and kicked his feet onto the blanket chest that served as a table. Sadie had crossed one skinny leg over the other and then hooked her fancy shoe around again behind her calf, as though to ensure she took up as little space in the room as possible. She flexed her hands and folded them in her lap. She was tiny and commanding. Her wealth calmed him: he knew these girls. And her problem, naturally, interested him. “So what's wrong with your essay?” he asked.

She sighed. “I don't have a good handle on my priorities,” she answered, sounding notes of recitation on “handle” and “priorities.” “What's wrong with yours?”

He smiled at the floor. “Hard to say, really. Or not, I guess. I wrote about being gay, and my dad saw it, and he kicked me out. So that's sort of it.”

Sadie gasped. “Holy shit.”

“Oh God,” Anne said quietly. “William. What happened?”

He looked up to where she was standing, by the boarded-up mantel of a fireplace that had been filled in for decades. There was no room for her to sit, with these two on either side. “My college counselor told Mum how great she thought the essay was, didn't know that about my family blah blah, and Mum asked for a copy and I guess he just saw it tonight.”

“And he kicked you out?” asked Sadie. “What does that even mean?” She was bolt upright now, two dazzling feet on the floor, her lower jaw thrust forward in an unconscious imitation of her mother's most unfortunate feature.

“He told me I was betraying my ancestors. He told me that nothing in his upbringing prepared him for a son like me. Then he told me to get out.”

“Just, like, leave?”

“Yep.”

“And go where?”

“I don't think he really cares.”

Silently cursing his school counselor, Anne asked, “William, did she not understand . . . ?”

But he thought she'd meant his mother. “Mum's not like that. I mean, she doesn't care so much about . . . But with Dad, there was nothing she could do.”

“What
did
she do?” asked Sadie. She was hanging on his words, this real-life crisis of her own kind, in her own city.

“Told me to drop the whole Vassar thing,” he explained, looking up at Anne, to whom this would make sense. “Just pretend it didn't happen. She gave me some cash. Maybe for a hotel.”

“God, my mom did that tonight, too,” said Sadie.

“Oy, you, too? Why?”

“No no, I mean, just for taxis. You just reminded me. Anyway, sorry.” She shook her head. “I thought Vassar was all girls.”

He snickered. “Right now I wish it was.”

“Wow,” she said, sitting back. “I thought
I
was frustrated.”

“William, I am so sorry,” interjected Anne.

He was too kind to blame her, but he did give himself the luxury of ignoring her apology. He got up and walked to Anne's kitchen.

“Got anything to drink?” he called back, over his shoulder. There was a miserable lilt in his voice. Anne let him have the moment to blink away his tears.

“Not much,” she said. “You could look—”

Then William stuck his hand around the kitchen door, Old Nassau dangling. “What the hell is this?”

“It's a fish,” Anne replied. Sadie swiveled. “Please put him back.”

He held it up to the lights. “Are you going to eat it?”

“No.”

“Then why is it in your freezer?”

Sadie crossed the room to where William was standing, the bag up over his head. She rubbed frost off the outside and peered in. “Wow. Cool. And kind of gross.”

“It's a long story,” said Anne. “Please put it back.”

She heard William rummaging.

“When my dad has cocktail parties,” Sadie informed them, “he has the caterers put little sprigs of herbs in the ice.”

“Can I have a Diet Coke?” called William.

“Of course.”

“Do you have any ice without things in it?”

Anne didn't answer this. “Can I ask you guys something? If you were me, and one of your students had all of his applications complete but was just not able to get them in, what would you do?”

“What do you mean ‘not able'?” asked William.

“Not willing.”

Sadie asked, “You mean they're all finished, spell-checked, whatever, but he won't submit?”

“Right.”

“Let him,” she said.

“Easy,” added William.

“Even though it means he won't have anywhere to go to college next year? Even though it means his parents might sue me?”

She didn't really believe this second part, but it was a remote possibility. Perhaps Gideon Blanchard would take the case.

Sadie replied, “Yeah. Totally. You can't submit for him. Isn't that illegal or something, anyway?”

“I mean, if it weren't, my dad would have applied to Penn, like, last year,” said William.

“Oh my God, my parents at birth,” added Sadie.

“But what if we're taking the long view on his behalf?” Anne pressed. “Should I really let a momentary act of defiance cost him the beginning of college?”

She wasn't sure if these two were the best or the worst people to ask.

“You're a tutor, not a truancy officer,” announced William, emerging from the kitchen with two glasses. He extended one to Sadie. “So, anyway,” he asked her, “what's your thing?”

“Thanks,” said Sadie. She stirred her drink with a finger and decided to take the confessional line. It was rapidly proving that sort of night. “So, my dad's a trustee at Duke. So I'm totally supposed to go there. Which is fine. But he's, like, obsessed with my essay, and my mom's kind of even worse, because it matters to them that all their friends are going to see it. Like, everyone's been waiting for me to apply, and now here I am, so what am I going to say, you know? And I wrote some stuff that I thought made sense at the time but really I was just tired and kind of annoyed with them over this silly thing, so now it's the night before it's due and I have to rewrite it and I'm just fried. Plus it's New Year's Eve and that sucks.”

“What kind of stuff did you write?”

Sadie produced a wad of paper. “Well, here.”

William reached across, unfolded the page against his knee, and began to read: “ ‘When T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruelest month,” we can be sure he was not thinking of college admissions.' ” He paused to smile. “ ‘But for today's eighteen-year-old, it's hard to read that line of his poem and think about anything else.' That's funny. What's wrong with that?”

“No, not that part. It's a ways down—stuff about my parents.”

He scanned the page. “Oh, here,” he said. “ ‘This is a lesson my parents reinforced by choosing to have major careers even though that means not a lot of time with my brother and me. When you come home from school, do your homework alone, and put yourself to bed every night, you learn to be self-sufficient from a young age.' ”

Sadie cringed. “Yeah, that's it.”

“So what's wrong with that?”

“It makes me sound spoiled.”

“I don't think so. It's just a statement.”

“Yes, but there's the—you know, the idea that it was one way when it should have been the other way. Like, that they should have been home with me every night. And that's silly.”

“Why?”

“ 'Cause it's, like, bragging, but in a reverse way. You know? Like I'm making up a problem when in reality I didn't have any problems at all.”

William took his feet off the bench and leaned forward. He was frustrated. “Couldn't it be just part of what makes you
you
?”

“It's not like being gay,” she told him, not unkindly.

“What
is
like being gay?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Being black? You know, something that totally sets you out, and that you have to deal with in society.”

“Never thought of that,” said William.

“Well, I don't have any of that stuff,” mused Sadie. “I'm white, we have money, my parents are together, I had a full-time nanny, everything.”

“Christian, too, I bet.”

“Presbyterian.”

“Of course.”

How these kids navigated the high-tension wires of class and code that ran between them, the ones they were supposed to pretend weren't even there!
Latin or Parker?
William had asked. There were two schools in their town. There were twenty colleges to which they might apply. But there were even fewer lives they might imagine for themselves. Twenty-five years ago, one generation, a girl like Sadie Blanchard probably wouldn't have gone to college at all, education not figuring in her birthright. And a boy like William Kantor probably wouldn't have come out—certainly not in high school, and possibly not ever. College rocked the boat. It forced the issue. And how? By inviting teenagers to write about themselves? Five hundred words, give or take, where their insecurities and their learned sense of propriety ran smack up against their hormones and their hopes—a dangerous exercise, indeed.

Maybe, Anne concluded, college was best thought of as four years in which adolescents might learn to use the pronoun “I” and mean it.

“So what are you going to do?” Sadie asked William.

“I don't know,” he answered. “I'll figure something out.”

“So you don't know where you're going?”

“Well, I want one thing, my dad wants another, who knows where I'll get in. Maybe I'll pull my application to Vassar. Too much trouble. Maybe I'll just wait and see.”

“Oh. I meant tonight. Where are you going tonight. But ‘wait and see'? What do you mean?”

“What choice do I have?”

“Well,” she said, “I'm sure they only want what's best for you. I'm sure your dad is just worried that you won't be happy, being gay. Or maybe, I don't know, maybe they're worried about gossip? About it, you know, being messy?”

“My dad left his first wife when my mom was still his secretary, so no, I don't think messy bothers him all that much.”

Sadie nodded gravely. Anne watched them both: their composure, their careful compassion for each other. She pressed her back into her mantel, empty except for her grandmother's silver candlesticks, which she polished twice a year, though she'd never got around to buying tapers. Her mother had said she might as well take them back if they weren't going to be used. For the hundredth time that year, Anne felt the fool. She had nothing to offer these epiphyte children, these trained climbers, who were expected to need no grounding at all.

“Anyway, I still don't see the big deal with your essay,” said William. “I was here when your mom called. She was, like, yelling. Why does she care? You're not supposed to have any problems because you've been given a lot?”

“My parents aren't like that,” Sadie said. She lowered her voice to soften what came next. “I mean, sorry, but they didn't throw me out for being gay.”

“Try them.”

“No, no. They'd be cool. I have a gay uncle.”

“Mmm.” William smirked, folded her essay back into its tiny scrunch, and tossed it back. “So anyway, if Dad's a trustee, it probably doesn't matter what you write in your essay anyway. Couldn't you, like, write, ‘I want to go to Duke' in blue crayon and be done with it?”

This hurt Sadie, as he had intended. She shifted on Anne's little love seat and wrapped her arms around her sides. William may have been homeless, but Sadie was trapped. She simply couldn't imagine anything other than what had been handed to her. “Last summer I wrote an essay about my community service and volunteer work and I really liked that,” she said, by her tone returning them to a more formal place. “I think I'm going to just send that in.” She looked up at Anne. “The star essay.”