Personal Statement (2 page)

I don’t really hate anything.

But I don’t love much of anything, either. The only things I even half-enjoy are texting and riding horses. Witness what I’m doing right now: sitting on my bed reading
Horse and Rider
and texting Emily—who I saw less than an hour ago at Pinkberry. (Texting Emily is not that taxing, and can be done while simultaneously writing a thesis paper about Shakespeare; it consists of one-to-three word replies interjected into her monologue, like virtual nodding:
Wow. No way! WTF?! What’d U say? Crazy!
) We’d been texting non-stop (more of her college ranting) since she dropped me off but I haven’t heard from her in twenty minutes. The last thing she texted was, “Holy crap! R u watching CNN? This is what we’ve been waiting for!” I asked her what she was talking about but never heard back, so I let it go. Now I’m lost in an article about the emerging market in calming supplements for nervous horses, daydreaming about my life after high school.

Save the lone horse magazine in my hand, the bed is awash with college brochures. Every day a new one arrives, sometimes an exact copy of one I got a week earlier. I keep them visible in case my mother casually wanders by, attempting to disguise her snooping—which she does all the time, even when I’m
not
around, I’m sure. I thumb through them once in awhile, dog-earing a random page or two, so it at least
looks
like I’m giving the Ivy League serious thought. But it’s only out of fear, dreading the inevitable conversation with my parents. I hate confrontation, avoid it like the plague. So I’m holed up in my room doing my two favorite things, hiding it from my mother at all costs.

If I could figure out a way to just ride horses and text for the rest of my life, I’d be a happy girl. No further ambitions, no unfulfilled needs, no drive to take the world by storm the way Emily does.

My family, however, has bigger plans for me. And it doesn’t help that I have a preternatural ability to take tests. I’m not bragging—I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the smartest girl at our school. I just understand how to take tests. Especially standardized tests. I got a 235 on the PSAT sophomore year and was a National Merit Scholarship finalist. As a junior, I got a 2300 on the SAT. My parents want me to take it again because they think I can get a perfect score of 2400 (I’d done so on several practice tests in the Kaplan course they insisted I take), but I’m fine with my first score. That plus my GPA should be plenty to get me into a decent school.

My first choice is Sweet Briar College in Virginia. It has the top-ranking women’s-only equine studies academic program in the country, and according to Go Equine (the world’s largest equine portal site), Sweet Briar’s “acclaimed liberal arts education is second only to their equestrian education.” In addition to their acclaimed riding program, students can specialize in farm and stable management and riding instruction. Sounds perfect to me. Plus it’s in the middle of nowhere. Flying or driving, from Fairwich you’re looking at an eight-hour trip door to door. I saw how bad it was for Morgan at Princeton only ninety minutes away, my parents making an excuse to see her at least once a month. If I go to Sweet Briar, my mom won’t bug me every weekend, like she would if I went to
her
top choice, Yale. (Less than an
hour
away!)

I haven’t told anyone yet, not even Emily, but I’m not applying to Yale. Or Princeton. Or
any
of the Ivy League schools. After twelve years of non-stop academics, lectures, and tests, I can’t imagine anything worse than having to do it all over again. For another
four years
! I’d rather be grooming Misty at the barn and texting Em about how hard it is for her at Harvard.

I know it’s not the norm for kids like me (good grades, private school, wealthy parents) but I have zero interest in college or scholarships or anything like that. It’s weird because excelling at school and crushing the competition is like Emily’s entire reason for being. Some people think it’s strange that we’re best friends. But I’ve known her since we were six—when she wasn’t so tightly wound. Oh, the seeds were planted, for sure. Witness her tenacious resolve to get a female elected to the head of the PTA… when she was eight!

But I love her. She’s the only one who gets my sarcasm. And the only one I don’t have to
pretend
to about “how hard these tests are.” Some of the capital B’s at our school aren’t so forgiving.

Or something to that effect. That’s a mash-up of the greatest hits I heard in the hall freshman year or in the girls locker room before field hockey practice. By tenth grade, I learned to fake it. I’d crack my books and spill coffee on the pages, letting them dry in the sun. Then I’d highlight all the assigned chapters (randomly, while watching “Friday Night Lights”) and show up on test day with ink stains on my fingers complaining about another all-nighter cramming.

But Emily didn’t care. She never saw me as competition. Because for her, I wasn’t. That girl was always naturally smart
and
she worked like a beast. She’s had one of the highest GPAs in our class since they started keeping track in seventh grade. Plus we have the same size shoe.

“Damn, Rani—what’s an Indian girl doing with such big feet?” she said to me before gym class in sixth grade.

“What’s a Korean girl doing with shoes the same size?” I said right back. “I thought you all had to bind your feet in wooden boxes from birth.”

Emily cackled that wonderful throaty laugh and I think that’s when we actually cemented our lifelong friendship.

But lately, she’s gone a little crazy, even for her. Sure, it all started with the
other
Emily Kim, Stanford-E.K.,
my
Emily’s self-proclaimed nemesis. But it’s more than that. As our senior year approaches, she has a drive that’s beyond getting into Harvard. It’s like she wants to
attack
Harvard. Put it in a pillowcase and beat it against a wall, then cook the bashed-up bits into a pie and eat it. It’s vicious and aggressive and it’s starting to get on my nerves. But I roll with it. I let her vent and complain like she did today at Pinkberry. In three or four months she’ll get that Early Action acceptance letter and this will all be over. And deep down I wonder how much we’ll remain in each other’s lives after that.

A soft knock on my open door startles me. I deftly shove
Horse and Rider
under some college brochures, careful to leave Yale and Brown on top, and attempt to appear unfazed.

“Hey sweetie,” my mother says, standing in the doorway. Although she’s been a vehement stay-at-home mom ever since she had kids, I’m always surprised to see her at home in the middle of the workday. She never gave off the “homemaker” vibe. She’s too elegant for that, resembling a slightly older Aishwarya Rai (the Miss India and Miss World winner-turned-actress) but with a cutthroat personality.

My parents, Mira Iyengar and Douglas Caldwell, met at Wharton and moved to New York right after graduation in 1986. He landed a job at Drexel Burnham. She was a strategy consultant at Bain. But when she had my sister Morgan at 29, my mother dropped her high-octane career and opted to be a fulltime mother. Instead of making headlines in the
Journal
for advising Fortune 500 companies, she made them by organizing the first ever “nurse-in” on Wall Street. After I was born five years later, my dad cofounded a multi-strategy hedge fund in Fairwich, and our family reluctantly left the 900-square foot Charles Street apartment for a 5,000-square foot colonial in the boonies. My mom quickly made her presence known in the neighborhood by staging a
Titanic
-themed fundraiser for Trevor Green (Morgan’s ridiculously overpriced Pre-K–2’s program). Why a school swimming in money needed a fundraiser is beyond me, but the event raised nearly $200,000. When I was finally “of age,” I was admitted without any sort of interview or entrance exam.

When she’s not pressuring me about colleges or homework, my mother is nudging me to follow in her epically charitable footsteps. (Though they don’t seem completely “charitable” to me; there’s something disingenuous about a bunch of rich ladies throwing fancy parties under the guise of raising money. Or worse, raising
awareness!
) So even though she doesn’t fit the stay-at-home mom type, it’s all I’ve ever known, her always being there, helicopter parenting, forever in our business, making our organic lunches, shuttling us to and from school because she doubted Inga the au pair’s driving skills. It’s hard for me to imagine her as one of the rising strategy consultants at Bain two decades ago. But once in a while (like now), she comes to me with a look on her face that I’m sure she reserved for clients and I can see the hard-nosed businesswoman she once was.

“What’re you doing?” she asks.

“Nothing,” I say, trying to sound casual, my pulse quickening.

“Any closer to a top choice?”

“Um…. It’s tough because they’re all so good?” I say, my voice rising at the end like a question.

“School year’s about to start,” my mom reminds me, stepping into my room, casually lifting things off my desk and inspecting them like a cop. “Then you’ll be busy with homework and extracurriculars and pretty soon those applications are going to be due and—”

“I know, mom. I don’t want to rush into a decision, that’s all.”

“It’s not like this is sneaking up on you, Rani. Your father and I have been talking to you about college since you were in eighth grade. Everyone at Fairwich seems to have made up their minds. Most choosing early action or early decision. Emily has known her first choice since freshman year.”

“Before
that
,” I mutter.

“What?”

“Nothing. Mom. Please don’t worry about it. I’m fine. Really.”

“It’s just… when I see you
lying
around reading
horse
magazines—”

“I don’t—what?”

“—while all of your friends are so driven and motivated—”

“Mom. I’m never going to be like Emily, okay?”

“I don’t want you to be like Emily. I’m just saying, a little… get up and go!”

As if on cue, I hear a car skidding into our gravel driveway. “Speak of the devil,” I say.

Even though I know who it is (no one else skids into our driveway like that), I hop off my bed and lean across my desk to peek out the window. I see Emily close the door to her Infiniti G convertible, her sweet sixteen reward for having the highest GPA sophomore year (and my ride to school every day, so thankfully she got it before the dreaded “B” in Mr. Harper’s class), and walk purposefully toward our front door.

I shrug at my mom like,
I’d reeeally love to chat more about my future, but… Emily’s here.
Before I hit the hallway, Emily breezes in the front door downstairs, calling out, “Hello, Caldwells! Anybody home?”

It’s always been Emily’s way to walk into our house without knocking as if it were the most natural thing in the world, a trait that would ordinarily irk my mother but one she somehow finds winning and charming in Emily—the daughter she
wishes
I were.

“Up here,” my mother calls out as if Emily was here to see her. While Emily makes her way up the curving staircase, I lean against the railing and greet her with a casual, “What’s up, dude.”

“Grab your Hunters and a rain coat,” Emily says, all business. “We’re driving to Cawdor.”

“Um.
What’s
in Cawdor?”

“Emily! Hello,” my mother gushes.

“Oh, hey, Mira,” Emily says, strutting into my room. “Didn’t see you there.” Emily greets my mom with a hug and a vague kiss on the cheek, another habit my mother finds irksome except in Emily. She’s also the only one of my friends allowed to call my parents by their first names. With everyone else it’s Mr. Caldwell this, Mrs. Caldwell that. But Emily not only calls my parents Mira and Doug, she’s been doing it since she was six.

“So what’s this I hear about a road trip?” my mom asks, trying to sound cool.

“Cat 3 hurricane is headed to coastal Connecticut,” Emily pronounces like an Aaron Sorkin character. “I figure Ran and I get on the front lines with the pre-storm relief effort. Not only a morally and spiritually nice thing to do, but a final boon to our college applications. Makes for some great essay material, too.”

“Just what the Ivies like to see,” my mom says, literally nudging me with her elbow.

“Are you serious?” I ask.

“Yes,” they say in unison, causing my mother to giggle.

“Seriously, Ran,” Emily says. “This is like getting in on the ground floor pre-Sandy. If those Jersey kids could have foreseen what was going to happen in their state and do what
we’re
about to do, not only could they have prevented a lot of damage, but right now they’d be packing their bags for Stanford and Columbia.”

“Mm-hm,” my mother says, nodding like a bobblehead doll.

“So…” I say to my mother, “you’re cool with me and Emily driving to some small coastal fishing town where a major hurricane’s about to hit? Just the two of us?”

“I think it’s a
fab
ulous idea,” my mom says, beaming. “It’s exactly what your sister did the summer between
her
junior and senior years. And,” she stresses, grabbing Emily’s arm for emphasis, “I know that Morgan’s time at LifeBuilders is what gave her the edge with Princeton Admissions.”

Emily nods vigorously, raising her eyebrows at me. “Exactly.”

I shake my head and absently check my Facebook page on my phone, to see if anyone liked the photo I posted of me and Emily at Pinkberry. Nothing.