"Really?"

"Yes. Really. And I didn't even have your excuse. Susannah made sure I had a thorough s.e.x education years before I needed it."

"So is that why you freaked out in the doctor's office?"

Portia considered this carefully. "My life is a little intense right now. I don't really want to go into the details. Look"-she straightened in her chair-"Caitlin. I'd appreciate your not mentioning what I just said to Susannah. To anyone, actually. I had a tough decision to make, just like you. I didn't share it with her at the time, and I don't particularly want to now."

"Oh." She nodded energetically. "Yeah, no problem. So...," she said carefully, unwilling to let go of this entirely, "I guess you do believe in abortion, then."

"Well, I believe in it, yes. I'm not in favor of it. I mean, it's not a good thing. But not having the option is worse. Better not to be in those circ.u.mstances in the first place."

"Totally. Hey, should we go back?"

"Oh. Yes, I think so."

Portia stood and picked up her coat. Caitlin took her parka off the back of her chair. The bottles in her plastic bag clanked together as she picked it up. "What's that?" she asked Portia as they crossed to the door. She was looking at the dark green folder Portia carried.

"It's an application to Dartmouth."

"You're applying to Dartmouth?" Caitlin laughed. "I thought you already went to Dartmouth."

"No, I just, I like to keep up with what other Ivy League schools are doing with the application format. Of course it's all online, but I just keep them in my office at school. Hey, would you like this?"

Caitlin stopped. They were outside on the pavement now, in the quickly fading light. "Really?"

"Why not? There's no harm in looking. You can apply next year if you want. You can even apply in the next few days if you get going."

"Are you kidding? They're not going to take me. I'm having a baby!"

"You're having a very unusual life experience for a teenage girl, one which is testing your character. It's already changed your life. What you have to say about that could make for a very interesting essay. Of course, I don't know what your grades were like."

Dumbfounded, Caitlin could manage only a nod. "Good. I mean, I didn't have much to work with."

"Okay, we can talk about that. Here," she said, holding out the green packet.

Caitlin took it. She stared at it. She seemed dazed. "Are you sure about this?" she said finally.

"Well, no." Portia laughed. "But stranger things have happened."

PART.

II.

READING SEASON.

My primary extracurricular activity is reading science books. I'm not an athlete, and I find groups a little frustrating, as it's difficult to identify peers who are interested in the material I'm interested in, and who are capable of discussing science and mathematics at my level of activity.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

INSIDE THE BOX.

She came home, the day after New Year's, to take inventory.

The house, from without, was dusted with unbroken snow. Mail was heaped on the porch chair, and frustrated slips from UPS and FedEx were stuck into the outer storm door. Clearly, no one had been here for over a week, and she indulged herself in a moment of extra bitterness over the message conveyed to the neighborhood: They're out of town, come on in and make yourself at home! Mark's car was gone.

Portia let herself inside, wary and prepared to be bruised, but no major changes were immediately apparent. The house seemed intact, furniture and works of art in place, one early stack of mail neatly on the hall table. He had spent time here, then, closer to the beginning of her trip than to the end. He had gone about his routines, fulfilled his ordinary duties, even as he extracted himself from the premises. Perishables had been removed from the refrigerator and the breadbox, with plastic, gla.s.s, and metal rinsed out and placed in the recycling bin. A copy of The New York Times, dated the day before Christmas, had also been responsibly recycled. There was a local number written in pen on one corner of the front page, but Portia resisted the brief urge to dial it. Real estate agent? Moving company? Surely he knew Helen's number by heart. Oh, thought Portia, wounded by a new thought: Attorney?

Obviously, they weren't married. They had talked about it once or twice, then let the subject drift away without resolution. It seemed clear that neither needed the ceremony, but at the same time, there was a wealth of doc.u.mentation between them. They shared ownership of the house and the checking account and served as primary beneficiaries of each other's wills and life insurance policies. They had been more responsible, she had sometimes thought, than many of the married couples she'd known, in which one or both partners had such anxiety or control issues about money that they couldn't meld accounts or t.i.tles, couples in which his paycheck went to him and hers to her, in which he held t.i.tle to the condo while she kept the weekend place in her name. She and Mark had shaken their heads about these couples, over their shared breakfast at their shared table. They had felt superior to the husbands and wives they knew who seemed not even to like each other. She had always liked Mark. She had not, of course, always wanted to tell him everything, and she'd supposed that was all right. Was it not all right? Had he not, as she'd a.s.sumed, told everything to her, or at least everything important? He had an ex and a child and complicated relationships with both. He had a sister he did not like, who had a husband he did not like even more. He had a sense of frailty about his body (which, when they'd first met, had been a very English body, thin chested, gangly... scrawny, she supposed, though she had always found it comfortingly awkward), an atonal voice, teeth that had not benefited from fluoride, in the water or anywhere else. He had a secret appet.i.te for whodunits and became irritated if the mysteries were too obscure or too obvious. He had a tender loyalty to the sound track of his youth, a truly shameful parade of Top of the Pops offenses: Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, Bananarama. Even, G.o.d forbid, Wham! She had been known to come home to these affronts, opening their door to George Michael, informing her (at his most repellent) that he wanted her s.e.x. Mark kept this stash of small embarra.s.sments by the CD player in the kitchen.

They were gone. She discovered this after she had stopped looking for things that were gone, things she thought he might have taken with him, that she could be angry or bereft not to find in their places, but those things were all where she had left them: the watercolor of dunes they'd bought the summer they rented a cottage in Wellfleet, the huge and heavy copper stockpot he'd found at the Lambertville flea market, an insane bargain at ten bucks, even the 1820 edition of Sh.e.l.ley's Prometheus Unbound, which Mark had bought from an Oxford bookseller with the windfall from some student prize. Portia was amazed to find this last item in its place. And when she did find it, on the bookshelf in their bedroom, she sat on the bed, stunned by an intense feeling of relief.

Past the anger at his betrayal, the humiliation of knowing he was already-or would soon be-squiring a visibly pregnant Englishwoman around campus, the as yet unexplored jealousy she had desperately been holding off, it was only at this moment clear to her that she wanted him not to have left, or at any rate to be coming back now that he had made his point. (His point? Portia thought. That he was finding her lacking in some way? That he wanted another child? Perhaps, as Clarence Porter had so succinctly put it, that she required a little "shaking up"?) She doubted very much that this would happen. Mark was nothing if not decisive. Every decision they had ever made-from their moving in together, to accepting jobs at Princeton, to far less significant things like whom to invite for dinner or what movie to see-had been made deliberately and not revisited. He wasn't leaving her, in other words. He had already left.

Portia, not surprisingly, soon discovered that she did not much like being home. The house, despite its eerie absence of absent things, was not a comfortable place, and there was nothing compelling her to be here. She had no wish to stay and face the obvious tasks: doing laundry, making shopping lists, clearing a path to the front door through settled, heavy snow. The number of messages glowing in red on the answering machine could not yet be faced, and she wondered if it wasn't possible to just start over with a new machine and a new number. (Surely the phone company was well versed in domestic upheaval. Surely the abandoned were eternally lined up at Verizon and Sprint, claiming they could never start fresh without seven altogether different digits, or at least the same digits in a different order.) Failing this, she could simply toss both and decline to replace them.

Standing in the dull silence of her foyer, Portia understood that she had no clear idea of what to do with herself, except to get away from this place. Methodically, she considered and rejected other places to be, including the gym, the supermarket at the end of her street, any public s.p.a.ce downtown. At any of these, Mark and Helen might be lurking, ready to display their happiness and gestational glow. With each locale, indeed, came a jolt of distress, like a shot of black ink through the system, feathering out to each extremity before fading. It was the return of pain, its forces rested and restored during her short distraction and ready with a reconsidered battle plan. Considering her new circ.u.mstances, there seemed to be only one place she could retreat to, and realizing this, Portia duly began her retreat, locking the front door behind her and picking her way over the hard snow, back to her car. She had been home less than half an hour. She had been able to stand being home for only half an hour. She had the sense, suddenly, of running before a wave.

Moments later, she was cruising downtown for a parking spot. The town was wide open, and she pulled in opposite Na.s.sau Hall, telling herself that it was really a rational, laudable thing to go to work late in the afternoon on a day when the rest of the campus was still and stony silent. This time of year, after all, was not a vacation for her. The application deadline had only just come and gone, and so had commenced reading season, a tunnel of stress and weighty decisions, ringing phones, an e-mail in-box that filled at a rate of four messages per minute: students terrified they had mistyped their Social Security numbers, guidance counselors duty bound to report that the applicant (along with the rest of the football team) had just been given a citation for disorderly conduct, and always-always-parents. Parents! Susannah had been entirely uninvolved in Portia's own college search. She remembered one heated discussion about applying to Smith-reactionary playground for future Republican wives or hotbed of radical lesbianism?-but apart from that, it had more or less been her own show. Had Susannah read her essays, checked for spelling errors? Had she offered to hunt down friends or cousins of her own friends or cousins with connections to the various admissions offices (misguided though that surely would have been, even back then)? Had she, G.o.d forbid, herself called up the offices, demanding to speak to whoever was in charge about the brilliance and promise of her daughter?

Compared with the parents Portia was dealing with now, Susannah looked like a saint.

Portia hauled her bags of folders through the FitzRandolph Gate. Na.s.sau Hall, Princeton University's nerve center and, for a few heady months in 1777, home to the infant U.S. government, looked majestic in the failing light, with its great preening tigers and fluttering ivy, and behind it the campus unfurled, stalwart buildings linked by deserted walkways. Looking up at West College, she saw no lights at all: not Clarence's corner office (he and his partner were in New Haven with friends), not Dylan's (visiting his parents in Houston), not Corinne's (with the kids on some island). That she was here after nightfall was not in itself unusual. In January, February, and March, as the intense period of reading gave way to the still more intense period of committee meetings, all of them frequently worked late into the night, percolating along in a fittingly collegial rhythm. She had sometimes, certainly, been the last one out the door, intent on making it through western Oregon or the Archbishop Mitty School or the imperious baseball coach's most urgent requests before allowing herself to head for home. But coming in like this, alone, in the darkness, to an empty building-in all these years, it was a first. The unbroken line of dark windows was definitely disconcerting, but at the same time she felt some relief. There would be no one up there to question her.

She opened the door with her own key and went first to the administrative warren in the back of the building, pa.s.sing the abandoned receptionist's desk. She turned on the lights as she went, bathing the nondescript corridor in harsh fluorescent illumination that picked up every ding and mark on the walls, pa.s.sing the silent photocopier in its alcove. Against one wall, two of the fax machines were lit and humming, neatly depositing pages and pages into their trays. In the cubicles, screen savers pulsed and danced. The smorgasbord of ill-judged baked goods had been cleared away, only a spattering of crumbs left behind. On Martha's desk, a phone purred forlornly, five times, six times, then went silent. It was all, in fact, very silent.

She hoisted her bags onto the counter below the staff mailboxes and began to lift out handfuls of files. There were a few she'd flagged to remove at this point, and she went hunting for them now, quickly locating the fluorescent pink Post-it notes on their covers. These were folders she had questions about for one reason or another, small items she might already have dealt with if Susannah were not such a Luddite, who refused to own a computer. Because she was, however, and because she did not, and because Portia had declined to drive into Hanover to undertake this sensitive business on some public terminal in Baker Library, she had merely flagged the files to come back to.

One of these was a boy from a private day school near Boston, whose guidance counselor-a woman Portia had met when she'd visited the school last spring-had declined to answer two notable questions on the secondary school report: "Has the applicant ever been found responsible for a disciplinary violation at your school, whether related to academic misconduct or behavioral misconduct, that resulted in the applicant's probation, suspension, removal, dismissal, or expulsion from your inst.i.tution? To your knowledge, has the applicant ever been convicted of a misdemeanor, felony, or other crime?" Almost always, the answer to these questions was no. Sometimes it was yes, and sometimes that was not in itself the kiss of death. There were kids who'd made mistakes and grown from them. There were victims of excessive "zero tolerance" school rules, suspended for carrying a loaded water pistol or pointing a finger and declaring, "Bang." There was even the occasional Jean Valjean crime of necessity. (She had never forgotten the boy from Oregon who had shoplifted liver for his family. Liver! If only he had been a stronger student.) But she could not remember a single instance in which the guidance counselor had declined to answer the questions. It could, of course, be an oversight-a typo. But at this school? With tuition upward of twenty-five grand a year and a student parking lot crowded with Lexus coupes and BMWs? Portia suspected not.

Another worrying application was from a Rhode Island girl whose complex, mellifluous essay was somewhat at odds with her low English grades and poor score on the writing section of the SAT, not to mention the fact that the favorite book listed in the "Few Details" section was Pride and Priviledge by "Jane Austin." Portia, accordingly, wanted to check the girl's tribute to Fannie Lou Hamer against their data bank of essays for sale. (These were gleaned mainly from Internet sources-where they were billed as teaching tools and slathered with disclaimers-but supplemented by an Iowa entrepreneur with an essayist-for-hire business. This unpleasant individual had decided to publish his expertise in book form and closed up shop by mailing his entire backlist of custom essays to every college his clients had ever attended, plus People magazine.) Of course, the Rhode Island girl might simply have risen to the challenge of her essay, taking her time, thinking through her points, and checking her sentences carefully to avoid grammatical errors, but there was something in the ease of the language that worried Portia. Correctness, after all, was achievable with sweat, but in her experience it was nearly impossible to drill grace into prose.

There was also a boy from Boston Latin who had furnished a list of Princeton philosophers he wanted to work with and an essay of such dense philosophical prose that Portia had had no idea what he was talking about. (In fact, she could have sworn, when she'd read it at Susannah's kitchen table days earlier, that it had something to do with zombies. What next? she'd thought. Mummies and vampires?) She had decided to send the essay to David and ask him to sort it out. Philosophers seemed to have a knack for recognizing their own kind as well as the impostors in their midst.

Finally, there was the Connecticut boy whose long list of school government offices, dramatic roles, community service projects, and baseball positions had ended with the words "National Judo Champion." It might, of course, be true, but in Portia's previous dealings with bona fide national judo champions (and not a few had indeed applied to Princeton), this accomplishment did tend to be noted in recommendations and to require enough practice time to preclude student government, drama, and varsity baseball. National judo champions also had a tendency to write about being national judo champions. They solicited their coaches for references and supplied newspaper reports attesting to the fact that they were... well... national judo champions. It would easily be settled by Google, Portia thought, finding the file at the very bottom of the stack and setting it aside. Why anyone would bother to lie in the age of Google was baffling.

"We are trusting skeptics," her first dean of admissions had told her years before. "We believe what they tell us, but they'd better be telling us the truth." This was Harrold McHenry, the soon-to-be former Dean of Admissions at Dartmouth, who had hauled her aboard the profession in the spring of her final Dartmouth year. Harrold's sense of fair play-fair play he sweetly a.s.sumed everyone else likewise embraced-had been one of his most endearing qualities. He had a horror of the so-called new rules of admissions, the outsmarting and end runs and decoding now rampant out there, the snake-oil salesmen promising to package and sell your kid to his or her school of choice. For as long as he could (and longer, perhaps, than he should have), Harrold stubbornly regarded each application as an open, invigorating conversation between his staff and the applicant, in which there could be no dissembling on either side. He expected total candor from each applicant and maintained that expectation even after little wildfires of scandal broke through the industry in the 1990s-kids getting other kids to take their SATs for them, applicants who wrote their own recommendations, people pretending to be Rothschilds and ranch hands. These events had been personally wounding to Harrold, but he had stayed the course, doing his best to ride the new waves, trying to maintain his personal honor code.

There was something a little haunting about this terribly ordinary room, Portia decided. She tried, for a moment, to see it not as the generic office it absolutely was, but as the epicenter of so much fervent speculation, by students, teachers, counselors, and parents. To them, this utilitarian s.p.a.ce was the holding pen where their child and all his or her antagonists were gathered, vetted, directed, shunted into narrower and narrower corridors leading to smaller and smaller vestibules, where they were commanded to wait in mute distress, face-to-face with their most closely matched fellow aspirants: wrestlers here, legacies there, Pakistanis to the right, woodwinds, novelists, witheringly brilliant mathematicians, faculty kids, staff kids, movie star kids, movie stars, ordinary decent kids, good debaters, great debaters, boys who wanted to be Brian Greene, girls who wanted to be Stephen Sondheim, or Meg Whitman, or Quentin Tarantino. There was, for instance, one tiny chamber in which the diver from Wisconsin sat knee to bandaged knee with the diver from Maine, the lounge where the girls from MIT's Women's Technology Program were briefly, uncomfortably, reunited, the claustrophobic cubicle where the cla.s.sically trained soprano from Florida eyed the cla.s.sically trained soprano from Los Angeles and the cla.s.sically trained soprano from Cleveland. That it didn't actually work like this was not even relevant, because Portia understood the symbolic power of this place, ba.n.a.l as it was. That power was even greater, she suspected, than the symbolic power of their individual offices upstairs, the conference rooms, even Clarence's comfortable lair with its nonworking fireplace and Asher Durand.

She had been inside the machine for so long that she sometimes forgot how this-this applying to college thing-had looked from the outside, but it did come back, vividly back, when she tried to remember. It had been like watching a ma.s.s of seemingly identical sheep cram themselves into a great black building with no windows, knocking against one another, stepping on one another's hooves and over their panicked bodies when they fell. At the other end of the building, only a thin line of sheep trickled out into bountiful fields. And who were these sheep, which looked to all intents and purposes exactly like every sheep who had crowded in? What made them special? Why should they get the meadow when those others were barred? What happened inside that box was a mystery, a secret shielded from the light. She remembered how the cla.s.s ahead of her in high school had been sorted, with the most cerebral Latin geek shut out from every college he'd applied to while the cla.s.s's drug dealer of choice had his pick of Harvard and Brown, how the valedictorian who was also the student body president retreated in humiliation to his safety school while the dull-as-dishwater football player trotted off to Cornell. Who were these people in the admissions offices of Swarthmore and Williams, and what could they have been thinking when they accepted Camilla Weldon, Portia's soccer teammate and the most superficial girl she had ever met, but pa.s.sed over Jordana Miles, who wrote her own column in the school newspaper and had actually published three short articles in Seventeen magazine? But there was perhaps no mystery as baffling as that of her own admission to Dartmouth.

She had been a worried high school senior lacking in... well, anything special, really. A pretty good student, pretty good soccer player, pretty good writer, and all around nice person, Portia knew exactly what would happen to her own college application if it arrived, through some warp of time and s.p.a.ce, in this room today. With her strong GPA and merely quite good scores, busy athletic schedule, and character-building volunteer efforts, Portia Nathan's application would have left this room with a fatal designation of Academic 3/Non-Academic 4, meaning that in the real world her scholastic skills were solid, but in Princeton's supercharged applicant pool they were unremarkable, and that although she had been busy within her school community, she had not been a leader within that community (NonAc 3) or distinguished herself at the state level (NonAc 2), let alone accomplished something on a national or international scale (NonAc 1). NonAc 1's, of course, were rather thin on the ground, even in Princeton's applicant pool. They were Olympic athletes, authors of legitimately published books, Siemens prizewinners, working film or Broadway actors, International Tchaikovsky Compet.i.tion violinists, and, yes, national judo champions, and they tended to be easy admits, provided they were strong students, which they usually were. But Portia's application would have landed in the great moving tide of similar applications: great kids, smart kids, hardworking kids who would certainly do great at whatever college they ended up going to, which almost certainly wasn't going to be Princeton.

The secret of her own mediocrity was quite likely similarly held by men and women all over the industry. To wade through these best and brightest seventeen-year-olds was to be, at once, deeply rea.s.sured by the goodness and potential of the American near-adult population and deeply humbled by one's own relative shortcomings. These students were absolutely going to make scientific discoveries, solve human problems, produce important works of art and scholarship, and generally-as so many of them pointed out-give back to their communities and make the world a better place. She, on the other hand, was fit only to make life-altering decisions on their behalf. And how could that make sense?

A room like this, she thought, finally gathering up her several files and the three empty canvas bags, had secrets everywhere. Every file drawer-and there were hundreds of them-was crammed with files that were crammed with secrets that were ardently protected by office protocol. (Clarence, in fact, was such a stickler for the privacy of the process that he asked admissions officers not to discuss applicants in the upstairs corridors.) But much mischief could be accomplished here, if one were so inclined, and when you thought about it-as Portia did now-wasn't it sort of surprising that mischief didn't get done all the time? This office, after all, employed a number of undergraduates at the height of the season, who sat for hours at a time in this room, slitting open the incoming envelopes and filing, filing, filing each filament of information into the thousands and thousands of separate folders. Part-time application readers from the town and university community were similarly hired during the most intense months to carefully read applications and write a first reader report. People wandered in and out, delivering food or picking up the shredded doc.u.ments for recycling. Sometimes, when the receptionist was on break or in the bathroom, prospective students and their families had even stumbled inside, stopping in shock when they realized where they were and what they were seeing. Automated though it was, the system seemed rife with the potential for human influence-accidental or outright sabotage-yet you never heard of it happening. Did it happen? she wondered, closing the office door behind her and hearing the lock click. Was there some secret tradition of midnight fixing, unexplored by the ax-grinding journalists who seemed so fixated on the notion of admission for sale to big donors? Had there ever been an administrative a.s.sistant intent on sneaking in his or her cousin's child with a few covert taps of the keyboard? Or a Princeton undergraduate secretly fixing things for a friend from home? How about an idealistic admissions officer who couldn't bear to let some favorite applicant go? It was odd, Portia thought, that these questions had never occurred to her, that she had for years placed a mindless trust in the system and its pract.i.tioners, from Clarence on down to the student interns and outside readers, when any of them, probably, could find some way to tamper with the works. If they wanted. And who among them had never wanted?

She felt, when she unlocked her own office door on the second floor, an unmistakable and terribly welcome sense of tranquillity. Here, all was unaltered from the morning of her departure for Vermont, when she had stopped in briefly before meeting Rachel for their walk: her Word-a-Day calendar set to December 24 (when its word was, inauspiciously, "Inauspicious"), a scrawled note on her desk to chase down an application from a Groton student she'd read about in a Boston Globe piece on young environmentalists, and three bundled stacks of applications, fifty in each, which Corinne had dropped off. These folders, for which Portia was to act as second reader, hailed from her old district and were doubtless weighted with future doctors, scientists, mathematicians, and engineers from the heavily Pacific Rim immigrant applicant pool, an overendowment of abundantly overqualified kids. She sort of missed them, it occurred to her. She missed the Bay Area kids who hauled their cellos into San Francisco on the weekends, redesigned the computer systems for their schools, and interned with research scientists at Berkeley, and the Silicon Valley kids, shuttling from the tennis team to their community service duties at the tutoring center, and the Hawaiian kids with their fantastic names and intensive luau dance training. They were all in there, of course, and who else? Plus, she was anxious to see what this least favorite colleague, forced from her Mid-Atlantic comfort zone, had made of her new charges.

She stood for a long moment, merely looking.

Outside was starless night and very cold. Inside, it was also dark, and she was entirely alone, except for the kids in their thick and suppliant folders. She felt a kind of duty to them, but not only a duty. She truly preferred to be with them, these fleshless people, their best selves neatly in black-and-white on the two-dimensional paper and primly contained within each orange file. And she felt necessary to them, and she felt accountable to them, and were those really such terrible things to feel? She took off her coat and reached for the topmost folder.

My favorite saying is "no guts, no glory." I can't recall who said it first, but whenever I am in trouble or facing a big challenge, I think about this saying. What it means to me is that anything worth doing is worth doing well, not only in sports but in life. There have been times when our team is in the dumps because things are not going well, but I always draw inspiration from this saying. It has helped me to be a stronger individual everyday.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

AREN'T THERE THINGS TO TALK ABOUT?

The kid who had written about zombies, it turned out, was the real thing. His impenetrable essay, which she had dispatched to David through the university mail, came winging back the first week in January with a cover note that read: "Definitely. Absolutely. Yes, please."

Portia found the file on the overhead shelf she used as a parking lot for applications awaiting something or other. She slipped this memo in the back and made a note in the "Department Rating" area of the reader's card, a seldom used but highly influential section on the front. Then, before she let it go, and armed with David's endors.e.m.e.nt, she made another attempt to glean some sense from the essay: Certain things are conscious. We may not know what it's like to be a dog, or a bat: but we know (or at least we think we know) that animals have feelings and experiences. We also know that a creature's conscious life is somehow determined by what's going on in its brain. So here's a question: What exactly is the relation between conscious experience and the brain activity that underlies it? Many philosophers-materialists-have thought that conscious experience just is brain activity, in the same sense in which heat just is the motion of molecules. The Zombie thought experiment puts pressure on this sort of view. We seem to be able to imagine or conceive a creature that is just like you in every physical respect, down to the last detail, but which is altogether unconscious. A Zombie will move and talk as if it were awake and genuinely aware of its surroundings; but its inner light is OFF. It has no subjective experience. Now the fact that we can imagine such creatures gives us some reason to believe that they are logically possible. But if it's logically possible for a creature to have a brain just like yours and no conscious experience, then consciousness is not literally identical to brain activity. Instead we should say that brain activity normally causes consciousness, in the sense in which heating up the filament in a lightbulb normally causes it to glow. On this view, the physical aspects of an organism are distinct from its subjective, mental aspects: at best there are various causal laws connecting the two domains.

She read this twice but could not follow the logic past the point about the inner light being OFF. (Did this, in fact, indicate that her own inner light was OFF?) Nonetheless, she wrote her summary and checked "High Priority-Admit" at the bottom of the card, then put the file in the pile of folders to go to Corinne for second reading.

Her colleagues were all in the early stages of their shared annual affliction. The traveling was done for the year, and what remained was this confluence of the cold and winter, and the all-in-our-hands sense of bleak responsibility: to the trustees and faculty, of course, and to the guidance counselors (who were, for better or worse, their partners in the work of getting the right students into the freshman cla.s.s), and, yes, to the alumni, because Princeton honored its graduates and wished to retain their high opinion. But mainly to the applicants themselves, who collectively seemed to hover everywhere in Portia's imagination, like spectral Jude the Obscures, waiting for the verdict on their futures and-Portia very much feared-their sense of self-worth. Sometimes she imagined them, waiflike across Cannon Green and behind West College and along Na.s.sau Street, winding their white, supplicating hands through the great iron gates. (This was not, needless to say, an image she shared with her colleagues.) No one was complaining aloud, but then again, no one had to; the weight of the burden was intense and everywhere, and the entire crew (fighting the same cold) shuffled through the corridors with the same set of dour thoughts.

Portia, too, was well into her winter sinus misery, a malady that typically began after New Year's, did battle with a tag team of antibiotics over the winter months, and finally surrendered to modern medicine just in time for the pollen surge in April. It had begun right on schedule the week she returned from Vermont, flickering behind her cheekbones as the year turned, sneaking tendrils of pain along the facial nerves, coiling around her ears and scalp. At her appointment with the internist she got a prescription for Ceftin, the best of a bad lot, and asked for Ambien, which she'd been given but was not yet brave enough to use. Instead, she lay in bed timing the pounding in her head against the dull clicking of the bedside clock, feeling the pain across her entire face, as if the bones of her skull were contracting steadily, the flesh struggling against containment. This was not an effective sleep aid. The house would not seem to warm up, and she wondered if there was something she was supposed to have done to the boiler after her return; but the boiler was Mark's domain, and she did not want to ask him about it. She did not want to ask him about anything. She did not want her reverie that he did not exist, and that therefore nothing had happened between them, to be broken. Besides, she was hardly at home, so it hardly mattered that she was cold.

Once again, this year, the applications had jumped-up eight hundred this time-more evidence of the still swelling population bubble of teenagers and, too, perhaps, that their efforts to reach beyond the traditional applicant pool, to students who might not have thought to apply ten or even five years earlier, were proving successful. It all seemed utterly overwhelming just now, with every surface in her office piled with files and boxes more waiting downstairs in the office, but no one was panicking because they always felt this way at this particular moment in the cycle. There had never, in Portia's recollection, been any real worry that they wouldn't finish in time, though the task did have a way of expanding to fill every worker's every available hour.

This was the point in the admissions cycle when Portia became reacquainted with many of the students she'd spent the previous spring encouraging to apply to Princeton. Selling the university, of course, was not difficult, but overselling it to potential applicants sat near the top of every critic's list of complaints (the gist of this being that top-tier colleges went out of their way to get vast numbers to apply, only to admit an ever smaller percentage and earn, as a result, a higher U.S. News & World Report ranking). But while Portia did sometimes wish there were a way to selectively discourage the students she met while visiting high schools, she would never-and could never-do it. Not only was it the office's philosophy that every student should feel welcome to submit an application, and that equal and thorough consideration awaited everyone who did so, the fact was that you just couldn't tell, when you looked into their serious, tremulous faces at the information sessions, who was the kid who'd cheated his way through Calculus BC and who was the kid whose English teacher was going to call him "the most exciting student I've had in my thirty-year career." What if she discouraged some student who couldn't break 1200 on his SATs from applying, when he would turn out to be idiosyncratically cerebral, a true original kid whose unqualifiable abilities would lift the discourse in every cla.s.s he enrolled in? How could you know that the thoroughly dull high school junior struggling to make conversation over cider and cookies would emerge as the writing program's most gifted novelist in a decade? Still, when their faces came back to her now, swimming up from the accounts of debating triumphs and stage fright at the piano recital, she sometimes wished she'd been able to say to them: Don't. Don't try for this. Don't want this or, worse, make some terrible connection between who you are as a human being and whether or not you get in.

The pool, once again, was absurdly strong, the applicants more driven, more packaged, more worried, even than the year before. They were decent kids who had never considered that their life experience was at all unusual, since they were like everyone else they knew, so when they set foot outside the United States, on a church home-building trip to Mexico or a visit to relatives in Bombay, they were stunned by the poverty, dumbstruck to discover how wealthy and privileged they were. They wanted to fix things, cure diseases, make it better. They wanted to turn into the amazing people their teachers swore they were and their parents had always planned for them to be. They wanted not to fall short at this finish line of their entire lives (so far) and be that kid who'd thought he was so great, who'd aimed so far above himself. Portia felt for them, of course. She wished, as she checked, again and again, the box reading "Only if room" (a euphemism for no, as there was never room), that she could reach through the folder to the kid beyond and say, Anyone would be ecstatic to have their child turn out as great as you, and, Please, go and do all the things you say you intend to do.

Few of them were eliminated easily. The campaigners, who fashioned elaborate dossiers with glossy eight-by-tens of their grinning faces and sent in reams of thick stock pages enumerating each spelling test and charity walk as far back as middle school, could not be dismissed out of hand, because you couldn't hold someone's personality against them, and besides, some idiot might have told them to do it. The student who provided an eighteenth-century family tree with the name of a distant ancestor circled in red could not be eliminated instantly, though his cover letter said he wanted to go to Princeton because his antecedent had "helped set up the place." The girl who had entered her e-mail address as could not be declined on the spot, because even Princeton applicants were allowed to be idiotic teenagers. The ones with low SAT scores couldn't be dispatched quickly, because some of them were superb and thoughtful writers, with recs that begged her to see past the numbers to this singular awakening mind. So when she came to an applicant who, given the benefit of every doubt, fell decisively short, she was relieved: Here was one she did not have to bring to committee, sell to her colleagues, sell to Clarence. The math geeks who hadn't done any math outside of school-"Only if room." The literary types who were poor writers-"Only if room." The faux philosophers, high on Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, who only hoped to find professors worthy of having them as a student. She had no need to trouble David with their essays: As Sartre wrote in his play No Exit, h.e.l.l is other people. This play ill.u.s.trates the theory of existentialism, which is the philosophy that since G.o.d is dead, we are all ultimately responsible for everything that happens to us. This philosophy is valid in my opinion. When I first read Sartre's play, I realized that other people are cowards who hide behind religion and rules and laws. They think that their lives are not really up to them, and this makes them lazy and complacent. Since then, I have been reading the great works of philosophy on my own, starting with the Apology of Socrates which shows that it is important to stand up for what you believe in even if everyone else thinks you're wrong. After one year of intense study, I began to think of my own philosophy. I call it metaexistentialism, and it builds on the profound insights of Socrates and Sartre. My first book, Dionysus Novus: A Treatise on Agony and Ecstasy, is almost complete and I hope to publish it soon. It argues that we are most real when we experience intense emotions, and that those who are not capable of intense emotion live lives that are mediocre and sad. In college I hope to develop these ideas, and possibly teach courses in philosophy and literature to impart my philosophy to others. I have found that other people often find it hard to understand my theories. But they are not professional philosophers, and so that is to be expected. I look forward to studying with important professors who will definitely understand what I am saying.

"Only if room."

The Fannie Lou Hamer essay had not turned up in the database, but Portia, reading through it again, could not let go of her suspicions. Misspelling both the t.i.tle and author of your favorite book, as this Rhode Island girl had done, was pretty close to unforgivable on a college application, but it was the disparity between this carelessness and the superbly fluid, well-constructed-and correctly spelled-essay that bothered her. There was little else noteworthy in the application. The girl was a strong student who'd taken summer cla.s.ses at Brown and played squash. She did like the fact that the girl had written about Hamer, not a more obvious civil rights figure-that counted for something-but in the end she could not disentangle herself from that Pride and Priviledge. "Only if room." And there would not be room.

The "national judo champion" did not appear anywhere on the Web site of the United States Judo Federation. Portia looked through the application again and found nothing to outweigh this information. She marked the "Unlikely" box, effectively concluding the matter.

Which left... the application with the unchecked disciplinary waiver. It was three-thirty in the afternoon when she picked up the phone, summoning what she could recall of the counselor from their meeting last May. No, April, on a swing through Boston: n.o.ble and Greenough, Milton Academy, a charter school in Roxbury run by a heroic woman in her sixties, and Porter Country Day School, Portia's final stop. The college counselor was in her late thirties, small with blond hair blown straight and an accent, Portia remembered thinking, more New York than Boston. Her name, right on the secondary school report, was Elisa Rosen. She picked up quickly, as if she'd been waiting by the phone, and if she sounded initially distracted, the utterance of the word Princeton made her snap to attention.

"Of course I remember," she said with great warmth. "You had a name from Shakespeare. Juliet? Helena?"

"Portia."

"Yes! The quality of mercy. Very appropriate for an admissions officer."

Portia nodded. It was not the first time she had heard this.

"How can I help?" said Elisa Rosen.

"Oh, I just had a quick question about one of your seniors."

"You've got about twenty from us this year."

"Yes. His name is Sean Aronson? I wanted-"

"Ah." The warmth in her voice had fled, quite suddenly. "And what about?"

"This may have been nothing," she said carefully. "I noticed that the disciplinary action question wasn't checked. It's not a huge deal." She listened into the silence. Which grew. "Unless," Portia said, frowning, "it is."

More silence.

"Ms. Rosen?"