In February, she came face-to-face with Jeremiah Balakian, twice in the same grim week.

First in the pile at ten on a Monday morning, three hours into her day. Her door was shut, her jeans stiff with wear, last night's snow from her trudge through town drying into white rings on her boots. The folder began, as always, with the test sheet. It showed that the applicant had taken the SATs the previous spring. Verbal was an 800-common enough in this applicant pool. The math was lower-680-but respectable. There were no SATII test results, but there were plenty of APs. Eight in all, likewise taken the previous spring. They made an unbroken line of 5's.

She turned to the second page of the application, where extracurricular, personal, and volunteer activities were listed and defined. More often than not, Princeton applicants overflowed the available seven lines with their debate teams and varsity sports, volunteer work and church activities. This applicant's was entirely blank except for a two-word notation on the top line: "Independent study." She wondered if she might be missing something.

Portia went back to the reader's card, where Martha's downstairs staff had pulled the relevant grades from the high school transcript, inserting them into a grid for each year: A's, B's, C's, D's, and F's. It was a shocker. Mostly C's and several D's; nothing higher than a B. And no AP courses at all. But how, she wondered, given his scores on the AP exams, could that make sense? She had sometimes seen this kind of syncopation on the exams of homeschool applicants, but the applicant had clearly attended high school. She paged forward, past essays and signed forms, to the guidance counselor's portion of the paperwork and found, as she'd expected to find, an official transcript and forms. They were from Keene Central High School and were accompanied by the customary brochure about the school and its demographics, lists of clubs and teams ("Go Lions!"), and roster of colleges attended by the last five years' worth of graduates. Then, tucked behind these, she found letters related to the applicant's senior year at the Quest School. A page of densely written course evaluations from various teachers. And letters. The first letter was from John R. Halsey, humanities teacher and student adviser.

So. Yes, she nodded, shivering in her layers of dirty clothing. Here was Jeremiah.

She returned again to the front of the reader's card and looked at the Academic and Non-Academic rankings, finding herself entirely unprepared to choose one. Academic 1's were kids who had 800 SATs and job lots of AP 5's. Academic 5's were kids who had barely sc.r.a.ped themselves through high school. Jeremiah, apparently, was both of these. She resisted the momentary impulse to average everything out and give him a 3. Clearly, whatever he was, he was not a 3. Not that these ratings were in any way binding. They were a signpost, not an evaluation, a little shorthand to the reader as he or she embarked on a thorough consideration of everything in the folder; but setting Jeremiah up with a rating of Ac 3/NonAc 5 would only make everything an uphill battle, at least for the readers who followed her. She decided to leave the ratings aside for the moment. Instead, she began to read the application itself, slowly and with judgment suspended to the best of her ability.

Balakian, Jeremiah Vartan. She hadn't realized, when she'd met him, that he was Armenian. She didn't recall having heard his last name at all.

Home address: Keene, New Hampshire.

Possible area of academic concentration: "Humanities: art, history, languages, literature."

Possible career or professional plans. This he had left blank.

Place of birth: Lawrence, Ma.s.sachusetts.

Ethnicity: Caucasian.

The address of the school she remembered all too well: One Inspiration Way, North Plain, New Hampshire.

His father was Aram Balakian, occupation retail sales, employer Stop & Shop, Keene, N.H. He had an a.s.sociate's degree, Keene Community College.

His mother was Nan Balakian. The s.p.a.ce for education was left blank. Retail sales. Stop & Shop, Keene, N.H.

No siblings.

Portia turned over the reader's card and wrote, "Mom and dad: grocery clerks. No sibs," in the "Background Information" section. Then she wrote and circled the letters NC, meaning that the parents had not attended college. Jeremiah, if he managed it, would be the first. She left the s.p.a.ces for "Academic" and "Non-Academic" activities blank.

Under "Summers" he had written: For the past two summers I have been employed full time at a supermarket in Keene, rotating among various positions, from stocker to warehouse to checkout, none of them particularly taxing. I wasn't very optimistic about the job at the outset, but I came to discover that examining someone's groceries is a strangely intimate and fascinating activity. When you know what people are putting in their mouths and on their bodies, you know a great deal about them: physically, emotionally, even politically. Sometimes I'd want to confront them about their choices: Don't you know what this food is going to do to your blood pressure? Don't you know this manufacturer has one of the worst environmental records in the world? Did you know that for the same price as this fake cheese you could get real cheese? But of course, a humble checker can't say such things. We scan and pack and take their checks or food stamps or credit cards. I learned a great deal, and I hope I'll never have to work there another day in my life.

She smiled. She flipped back in the application to check the "Work Experience" section for the name of the employer: Stop & Shop. He had worked for his parents' employer. Under "Summer" she wrote, "Grocery Clerk, FT X 2," meaning that he'd been employed for both of the past two summers, the ones Princeton cared most about. Then she turned back to the application and frowned at the "Few Details" section.

This had been a fairly recent innovation, part wink to the applicants (See? We have a sense of humor!), part palate cleanser between the nuts and bolts of the front-loaded information at the beginning of the application and the essays to come. The questions changed a little every year, but they generally asked the kids to name their favorite books, music, sources of inspiration, films, mementos, and words. (The words tended to be fairly grotesque. In the past month alone, she had come across "defenestrate" more times than she cared to remember.) This year's tweak was "Your favorite line from a movie," which had reaped hundreds of sentences Portia had never heard before and many, many citations of the cla.s.sic G.o.dfather line "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli."

Jeremiah's choices, to say the least, were unusual. His favorite book was Wiesenthal's The Murderers Among Us. His favorite source of inspiration: "Whatever book I'm reading at the time." Under favorite Web site he wrote, "I'm sorry, I don't have a computer." His favorite line from a movie? "Now tell me, do you feel anything at all?" from Sunday b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday. She hadn't seen the film in a decade, at least, and yet, reading the line here, so out of context, she was amazed at how quickly and fully this opening line came back, spoken over a black screen: just that male voice-Peter Finch's voice-and then the image of a hand-Peter Finch's hand-palpating the bloated abdomen of a middle-aged man. It was a ringing, terribly bleak line, sharply foreshadowing the ninety-odd minutes of interpersonal desolation to come. The adjectives he'd chosen to describe himself were "loner (but not the scary kind)" and "fervent." Being a loner was not, she thought, something the modern teenager was often eager to admit to. "Fervent" she had never come across before.

Usually, there wasn't much to take from the "Few Details" section. Occasionally, something unusual was worth writing down. In the section of the reader's card marked "FD," she wrote: "Sunday b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday," but mostly because she enjoyed thinking that Corinne would not know what it meant.

Now, and only now, it was time to read the essays.

For his longer essay, Jeremiah had chosen one of the most popular prompts, an Einstein quote: "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries to comprehend only a little of this mystery every day." (Albert Einstein, Princeton resident 19331955) She leaned over the page, awkwardly aware of how good she wanted it to be.

I became an autodidact at eight years old, when I realized that my teachers were not going to be able to teach me. It wasn't that they were unequal to the task of teaching me-they weren't. And it wasn't that they didn't wish to teach me. I think they wished to very much. But they were busy. They needed to keep order, muster the slower ones, persuade various second graders to stop biting, pulling hair, and doing disgusting things with their body fluids. I think I spent most of that year waiting to learn, but I finally figured out that I could be putting that time to better use. So I set off, without much direction. I read biographies, mainly, because I had no idea how other people had lived their lives. When biographies led me into different disciplines, I followed them until my interests shifted, but I always picked up the thread with a new life story. I never bothered to devise a master plan. I had no concept of a master plan. What I was doing was almost hedonistic. It certainly was not disciplined. It has continued now for ten years.

All this time, of course, I was in school, but just barely. I'm sure it does not reflect well on me when I say that my high school cla.s.ses, in the main, did not interest me, so I mostly ignored them, sometimes sc.r.a.ping by with pa.s.sing grades, sometimes not. My high school, Keene Central, tried various methods to bring me into the fold. I was threatened with detention, which was fine with me because it was a quiet place to read, and suspension, which was even better since my parents both worked during the day, which meant that I could read in comfort, at home. I was told that I would be held back to repeat tenth grade, then eleventh grade, but to me, additional years of school meant additional years when I would not have to support myself, when I could simply continue on as I had been. Still, I believed that my guidance counselor meant well, and I regularly promised to mend my ways, but it always had to be after I finished the next book, and then the book after that.

Then, last spring I had a chance meeting with a teacher from a new private school, not far from Keene. On his advice, I registered to take AP tests in some subjects that were interesting to me. I also took the SAT a few weeks later and did all right on the verbal part, but I should have reviewed the math before I took it. Most important, though, was that I persuaded my parents to let me leave Keene Central. (It was difficult to persuade them, but not at all difficult to persuade Keene Central!) In the past few months I have spent at Quest, I have at long last learned to bend my pursuits into some thematic shape, to make links between ideas, to consider opposing ideas in a critical way. I have also developed the long overdue discipline to complete a.s.signments, prepare for tests, and meet deadlines. For the first time, I feel an immense exhilaration about where all of this may be going, and what it has been for. Of course, it is frustrating to think about how things might have been different if I had been exposed much earlier to this kind of guidance, but it should also be said that I never thought of going to college until I began studying at Quest, so now, perhaps, my education may be extended and deepened in this new direction.

The sum total of all I've learned is that I don't know anything, really, only little pieces of things. I haven't been anywhere except for a few trips to family in Watertown, mainly because my parents aren't wealthy but also because they are settled people who don't like to travel. I haven't had any interesting jobs, but I do work during the summer at the supermarket where my parents are employed. Mostly, what I do is read. Right now, my interests are the architecture of early cities, the Ottoman Empire, George Sand, Sojourner Truth, and contemporary j.a.panese fiction (in translation, unfortunately; another shortcoming I would like to rectify). Earlier this fall I immersed myself in American Pop Art, with particular reference to Warhol and Lichtenstein. If I am accepted to college, I would like to delve deeper into art and architecture, European literature, Eastern religions, and the history of medicine. I would also like to continue with Latin, which was not offered at Keene Central, and which I was only able to begin this fall, and especially philosophy. I have left the question of possible future plans unanswered, because there are too many things I would need to find out first. Thank you very much for your time.

All right, she thought, relieved. So it was good. But the problems were glaring. By his own admission, he had ignored his cla.s.ses, declined to follow the curriculum, and resisted guidance from teachers and administrators. Clearly, failure did not perturb him. What did? She considered for a long moment before writing, in the s.p.a.ce allotted for Essay #1: "Autodidact since age 8. Has not done well in school but has read incessantly, esp. biographies. Clearly values education over academic 'success.' Complex picture here. Fine writer."

His second essay: I discovered early on that I was not at all interested in the practical side of mathematics (for example, in the problem solving that anyone who wants to use math for science or engineering needs to know). What I did care about were questions like: How we can know that 2+2=4? And that's not so much a mathematical question as a philosophical question. Actually, it's no different from other questions about the basic sources of our knowledge: How do we know that it's wrong to cause pain? How do I know that something I'm observing is actually happening? In all of these cases, we have knowledge of a fact that doesn't derive from ordinary sense perception. So how is that possible?

For a while, I did make an effort to follow the math curriculum in school, but I knew that I was always gravitating toward things that weren't really central to the cla.s.s material. When we studied geometry, for instance, we were taught Euclid's axioms and postulates. The textbook mentioned that one of the postulates was controversial-given a line, exactly one line parallel to the original can be drawn through any given point-and that it might even be false "for our world." This was baffling to me: mathematics is supposed to be certain! If this axiom is wrong, how do we know that others aren't wrong? And if the others might be wrong, how can we claim to know anything in geometry, or in any other part of mathematics? I actually departed the curriculum completely at this point, and started reading philosophy on my own, which is exactly what I was doing when I was busy getting that D in eleventh grade math.

Since then, I've noticed that, in other cla.s.ses, I tend to get stuck on questions that are raised in the very first chapter of the textbook: What is life? (in biology). What is a poem? (in English). What is the past? (in history). To be honest, I've never understood how people get beyond those questions to what comes later. It's not that I'm not interested in what comes later: I'm very interested! But I just haven't been able to get there on my own. Of course, I realize now that my unwillingness to play by the rules in my cla.s.ses is going to end up hurting me, probably in ways I never considered when I was blowing off my homework. I wish I could go back and make a different decision, but if I could do that, I'd probably know so much math and physics that college would be a little redundant. So instead, I'm just going to hope it all works out for the best.

If she were in a different frame of mind, Portia thought, she might note the fact that the two essays were not very dissimilar. She liked, in general, for an applicant to take these two opportunities to show distinct facets of themselves: scholarly and personal, scholarly and musical, scholarly and socially conscious. But Jeremiah, she was getting the impression, was not particularly multifaceted. This-this avid, self-directed scholarship-was what he was, and all he was. There had been little development of a self, which was of course not all that unusual for the age group. But Jeremiah was a consumer of information and ideas. It was the most real, possibly the only real, focus in his life. This would hardly make him a hit in the eating clubs, but on the other hand, Princeton was one of the few universities where the Jeremiahs of the world could fruitfully congregate. He should be here, probably, where he could meet his peers and be properly nurtured.

In the comment s.p.a.ce for the second essay, she wrote: "Following his own curriculum in math/philosophy. Not interested in applied math but 'gets stuck' on big questions. Reading far ahead even as he acknowledges underperforming in cla.s.s. Again, strong writer."

She read what she had written and frowned. Lemonade from lemons, certainly. But lemons in abundance.

The secondary school report from Keene Central, which came next in the file, was a definite cold shower. She'd known what was coming because of the tally on the reader's card, but the transcript itself was still a blow, the very picture of a checked-out student. His highest grades, B's, had been earned in history and English; his lowest, mainly D's, in math and science. The c.u.mulative picture of these two extremely important years of high school implied that Jeremiah didn't even belong in the pool, let alone in the cla.s.s. With a sinking feeling, she turned to the brief letter by his former guidance counselor, a Burton McNulty: I was surprised to learn that Jeremiah had decided to go to college, because even though I tried to motivate him to do just that while he was at Keene Central, the fact is he never seemed to care about what he was going to do after high school. Jeremiah's main goal in life, in my view, was to be left alone. He hated to be reminded that he wouldn't pa.s.s English if he didn't turn in his paper, or he wouldn't pa.s.s math if he didn't sit for the final. Of course, we have had many, many students over the years who fit that description, but what was so frustrating about Jeremiah was how smart he clearly was. If only he'd applied himself, he could have been at the very top of our cla.s.s, not languishing in the bottom with kids who weren't going anywhere in life. Time and again I sat him down and told him he needed to get himself together, that it would be an awful shame to waste what he had, and I thought I'd gotten through to him more than once, but then I'd get the final reports from his teachers and see he'd failed to complete a.s.signments and skipped tests. Sometimes they really didn't want to fail him because they recognized his potential, but they were obligated to because of the missing papers and test scores. I can tell you that a couple of those D's and low C's actually should have been failing grades, but the teachers just couldn't bring themselves to do it.

Jeremiah is a very nice young man, and I can't help but believe that we failed him here. I wish I had known what to say to him or how to help him, but I just came up short again and again. If the teachers at his new school were able to do something with him, then I'm very pleased. As for college, I'm a bit at a loss about what to tell you. Perhaps college will bring something out of him that high school could not. Can he do the work at a place like Princeton? Well, he's smart enough, obviously. But WILL he do the work? I just don't know. I wish only the best for him and I would love to see him succeed.

Portia, tapping her pen, read the recommendation through again, trying to spin it. This was, to say the least, an unusual letter for a Princeton applicant. Princeton applicants were typically the pride of their schools, the one in a decade for grievously overburdened counselors at ma.s.sive public schools, or just the fine young men and women that private schools with long Princeton connections existed to produce. Every now and then, of course, as in the case of the morally deficient Sean Aronson, there might be a whiff of ambivalence rising from a letter of reference, a sotto voce implication that, while this was certainly a swell kid, the admissions officer reading this letter might be encouraged to look elsewhere on the list of applicants from this particular school. And though she had many times encountered students whose guidance counselors believed them to be underachievers, she could never recall a gap as big as this one. "Johnny could have been valedictorian if he had not devoted so much training time to track." "Lori might have ranked much higher if she were not so fully committed to her church activities." But Jeremiah had not thrived in high school at all, and without the excuse of extracurricular pa.s.sions. He had been too busy reading. He had not cared to succeed.

She was a little surprised to find herself as engaged as she was. On the face of it, this application was not a difficult call. Was it fair, after all, to take a place from a kid who had worked his heart out-more accurately, to take it from roughly nine kids who had worked their hearts out-and give it to a kid who hadn't even tried to toe the line? Jeremiah, for all his potential, had not looked up from his books long enough to seek guidance that was his for the asking. There were abundant opportunities for smart kids, after all, even smart kids who happened to be poor and had parents who did not like to travel. A little research, a little initiative, and he might have found his way to CTY or one of the other academic programs with scholarships at the ready. He might have corresponded with the authors of some of the books he'd read, at least one of whom might have extended himself or herself to such a brilliant young person. Jeremiah had not availed himself of community college courses, as so many Princeton applicants did, nor had he made any effort to move himself out of a learning environment that had so obviously been inadequate to his needs. The picture he presented was immensely frustrating. But she couldn't, somehow, quell her own intrigued attention to him.

That wasn't about John Halsey, she hoped. John Halsey, whom she had almost successfully barricaded behind a wall of other thoughts. He had forgotten her, of course. Though they had not exchanged addresses, phone numbers, he obviously knew where to reach her, and he had not reached her. Perhaps she had told him not to. Perhaps she had implied, somehow, that she was in a loving, committed relationship, that the night they had pa.s.sed together, asleep and awake, was something aberrant and solely carnal, and she did not wish to be reminded of it. Had she actually said that? Had she felt it? There had been times, since Christmas, when she had wiggled loose one tiny stone in the barricade and let herself peer through: Pleasure and affection were on the other side. She was always surprised to find them there. That thing had actually happened, but it wasn't happening still. It wasn't happening now. Now she had to propel herself out of bed in the morning and into her own frigid room and into clothing that was not so obviously the clothing she had worn the day before and slept in, and then she had to make her way here, to the office, where she needed to be normal in action, normal in tone, friendly to colleagues, receptive to Clarence, graciously obscure to callers ("I know I shouldn't be calling, but I just wanted you to know that my daughter just got the lead in her school play!"), and above all fast and efficient through the application in front of her, and the next one, and the one after that, and the hundreds to come, all around her in the office and more waiting downstairs. All of this took everything.

Behind Jeremiah's incriminating Keene Central doc.u.mentation, his Quest material offered an oasis of text. No grades from Quest, of course, but paragraphs and paragraphs from the teachers who had begun with him only in September, praising his brilliance, his breathtaking leaps of inference and a.s.sociation. He was a scholar, an aesthete, a sublime intellectual. Also deeply compa.s.sionate, profoundly creative, a still forming mind that could take off in a number of directions at any time, finding ultimate expression in philosophy, history, literature, linguistics. He also painted beautifully, apparently. Portia sighed. She was steadying herself.

John Halsey's letter finished the folder: To the Admissions Committee, I have been a teacher for sixteen years, working in such disparate settings as a highly compet.i.tive New England prep school, a mission school in Africa, an inner city school in Boston and, now, at this new and progressive school in New Hampshire which is only just graduating its first cla.s.s. I can safely say that I have never had a student who poses the challenges that Jeremiah does, nor a student so enthralling to teach, so promising, and so in need of what a great university can offer him.

I literally stumbled across Jeremiah less than a year ago, at a yard sale where he was reading his way through an encyclopedia. Even with my broad experience of teenagers, I had never seen one like him before. Our first conversation lasted about twelve hours, during which we touched upon subjects as diverse as math, poetry, aesthetics, philosophy, biology, building styles, soil content, early medical discoveries, Flemish painters and New Hampshire state politics. I will never forget it. I also discovered that he was failing eleventh grade, and had very nearly failed tenth grade. I was, to say the least, stunned.

I don't fault Jeremiah's high school. It's a big and unwieldy inst.i.tution, and they do what they can to keep marginal students in school. I don't think they were unreasonable in hoping that a student of Jeremiah's abilities would make some effort of his own to excel within the framework of the school, but for reasons that are probably too complex to find their way into a letter of this type (I'm thinking about a difficult family situation and its part in forming Jeremiah's character) he just wasn't able to do so. He wanted to learn, but he resisted the structure and requirements he met with in high school.

There is good news, however. In just the few months he has spent with us at Quest, we have begun to see a real flowering in Jeremiah's scholarship. Without question, he is capable of performing academically at the highest levels. With faculty to engage with him and fellow students who can challenge and influence his ideas, his work has begun to show focus and immense depth. When I think of Jeremiah at a place like Princeton, I am elated, not just at the notion of what the university can do for him but for what he can bring to the right cla.s.sroom environment. This is a remarkable, special, brilliant young man who is just coming into his own.

I am aware of the difficulties this application must pose-the transcript from Keene Central in particular. I know that Princeton applicants do not usually present transcripts full of D's and C's. I know that Princeton applicants are busy young people, with full schedules of sports and volunteer work and musical performances, whereas Jeremiah has not undertaken any extracurricular activities at all. I can certainly understand why you might be skeptical about someone with his credentials, from a brand-new school that has never sent an applicant to Princeton, let alone a matriculated student. But if my experience as a teacher means anything, and I hope it will, please understand that this is the single most extraordinary student I have ever encountered. There is such potential here.

Yours sincerely, John R. Halsey, Humanities Teacher and Student Adviser Ordinarily, she knew, she would have been skimming by this point in the application. After the blank extracurricular record, after the miserable transcript, she would have been turning the last pages quickly, making the briefest note on the guidance counselor's letter ("GC notes very smart kid not motivated to achieve in HS, v. frustrating student") and the references from Quest ("Sr yr tr says brilliant, self-directed, wide interests"). It was strange, she thought, how she could hear his voice in that letter-clear and sharp, striking just the right mix of reasoning and dignified supplication, gamely dodging the obstacles he knew were there. There was pa.s.sion here, but held in firm check by the rules, which he clearly understood. Was he speaking to her? Did he understand the system well enough to know that she would be the one reading his letter? He had been very correct, she saw. There was no note of familiarity, certainly no outright imposition on what had pa.s.sed between them, not even a reference to the fact that the applicant had met a Princeton admissions officer a few months earlier. What he'd written was thoroughly aboveboard and beyond reproach. She wanted to call him.

Surely there was some reason to call him. Surely. Some verifiable question or fact to check. The phone number was temptingly at the bottom of the sheet, so innocently there in its black on white. She might lie and say that his scores had not arrived? No, that might cause unpardonable distress. Or ask how his senior year was going? A thoroughly reasonable query for a student with a problematic record. But he would know why she was really calling.

She looked through the application one more time, more at a loss than before. The applicant was detached, unmotivated, uncooperative. The applicant was brilliant, a pa.s.sionate learner. The applicant cared about nothing. The applicant cared about everything. The applicant had been thoroughly uninvolved in his school. The applicant had been thoroughly involved with his own education. He was a strange boy. He was a strange but fascinating boy who would both benefit and benefit from Princeton.

If the application had come first to anyone else, she knew, it would probably run aground at this point. Corinne would take one look at those grades and the SSR, make a brief summary note, and check "Unlikely," the 800 verbal and AP scores aside. She would discount the raves from a brand-new school with no track record, distrusting the opinions of teachers who declined to grade and test their students. She might not even be impressed by Jeremiah's obvious appet.i.te for learning, considering it too undisciplined to translate to a challenging university curriculum that did require that deadlines be met and exams be taken.

But it had not come to Corinne. It had come to her.

She went back to the academic rating at the top of the reader's card, which she had left blank before. She was even more at a loss now. By any rational standard, Jeremiah was the very picture of a NonAc 5, but saying as much would seriously handicap him going forward. She decided once again not to choose a number. Instead, she wrote: "Complex picture-see summary." Then she turned the page over.

The summary was the most important entry on the reader's card. It was the closing argument, in which the weightiest evidence was reprised and the recommendation given. It was the place she could be openly thrilled at having found such an amazing young person to bring to Princeton, this scholar who was going to make his or her professors delighted to be teaching here, this kid whose roommates were destined to feel as if they'd won the lottery. In the applications that wowed her, the summary was the place she couldn't wait to arrive, after filling the card with the disciplined, impersonal reporting of activities and references, after the sober evaluation of the essays. This, finally, was the place where she could drop her veneer of professionalism and write, "I love this kid." But for most of the applications she read, it was also the place she had to write, again and again and again, that this wonderful applicant, this hardworking student, gifted musician, committed humanitarian, and talented athlete, fit comfortably in the applicant pool but, alas, did not stand out, or where she wondered aloud if the girl or boy in question had truly challenged themselves or was a strong enough writer to succeed at Princeton.

Usually she tried not to overthink her entries, but now she paused, wanting to be clear in the limited s.p.a.ce, and persuasive, which required precise language. That language did not come quickly, but it did come at last.

"Jeremiah," wrote Portia, "is a highly unusual applicant, and requires very careful consideration. A self-proclaimed autodidact, he has essentially been a homeschooled student in a school setting, and minus an instructor. His grades are terrible-by his own admission, he has not applied himself to the school curriculum, but then again, the school he attended 911 did not recognize or accommodate his needs. The school he has attended since Sept. is making better progress with him. This is a brilliant student who scored 8 AP 5's without taking any AP cla.s.ses. Wide range of interests, persuasive writer, no ECAs at all. I believe that this student would thrive at Princeton and adapt to its demands, and I strongly recommend admission."

At the bottom of the second page, she had to check a recommendation for the second reader, and again this most influential action posed a quandary. Checking "Unlikely" usually meant the end of any possibility of admission. Checking "Only if room" essentially accomplished the same thing, but with more regret. Neither of these was an option, as far as she was concerned. What remained were "High Priority-Admit" and "Strong Interest," the categories from which virtually all successful candidates would emerge.

"Strong Interest" was a very common recommendation in this incredible applicant pool, the likely designation for thousands and thousands of files currently undergoing first readings. "Strong Interest" applicants were phenomenal students committed to extracurricular pa.s.sions, great writers, superior mathematicians, budding scientists whose names were already on published papers. But "Strong Interest" wasn't going to do it for Jeremiah. In this vast category, he would be swimming alongside students who had chewed up their high school curricula and come out begging for more, whose teachers swore they were the most gifted to emerge from their schools in years. That wasn't Jeremiah.

"High Priority-Admit," oddly enough, was slightly more idiosyncratic and hence possibly more forgiving. A Non-Academic 1, for example-a nationally placed debater with middling SATs, a working actor who wasn't perhaps such a superior student-could be a "High Priority-Admit." But Jeremiah was not a NonAc 1. Far from it. "High Priority" would require a great outlay of effort on her part in committee. She would have to argue for Jeremiah, perhaps plead for him. Undoubtedly, she would have to win over colleagues who balked at awarding a place to a kid who'd performed so poorly in high school.

She couldn't remember ever being so flummoxed by this usually straightforward act. Sometimes, by the end of a folder, she might be divided, unsure, but almost always the very act of summing things up made the appropriate designation clear. Great kid, not compet.i.tive: "Only if room." Driven kid, high achiever, great fit for Princeton: "Strong Interest." Amazing kid-one of those few applicants she would remember when this was all over, thousands of folders from now, whom she truly cared about and wanted to support: "High Priority-Admit." And that was going to be Jeremiah, she was sure.

It was a decision she would have to defend, obviously, but she would do that for him. It was right to do that for him, she thought, checking the box and closing the file.

Though just how right, she still did not understand.

That was Monday morning.

The week pa.s.sed in folders, late night stops at Hoagie Haven on the frigid walk home to Maple Street, layers of clothing it was too cold to sweat in and therefore, surely, permissible to keep wearing. She had stopped cooking in her own kitchen. She had stopped looking at the mail, which she tossed into an empty box just inside the hallway. The digital number on the answering machine had climbed and climbed: 2, 11, 19, 22, little red lines rearranging themselves, until one day she came home and saw the word Full, which at least, and to her relief, did not change. And the house was unrelentingly cold, though she did not think of this as odd, only part of the new normal her life had become.

Still, there were irritations. The muscles of her legs, for some strange reason, had become tight and sore, as if she spent her brief periods of sleep in some strenuous, somnambulant activity. She woke to the throbbing of her calves and shrill pain in her tendons. The first few blocks of her walk to work made her wince, but then, magically, every single day, she forgot about it until the next morning. And the sinus, of course, which still tormented her and wasn't getting better but was by now so ordinary that it hardly counted as a malady. And most troubling of all, she had begun to forget things, like the name of the lawyer who had done their house sale and purchase-Mark's and hers-whom she probably ought to call, for advice if not for the inevitable legal dissolution to come, unless Mark had already called him, which was very disagreeable to think about.

But she couldn't call him if she couldn't remember his name.

And she wouldn't have to think about it if she couldn't remember his name.

Also her growing sense that she needed to be in touch with Susannah about something, and Caitlin, who had indeed made the extraordinary decision to apply to Dartmouth, as well as UVM, rea.s.suring Portia (to some extent) that she was giving real thought to sticking around.

But she didn't call Susannah.

And she didn't call Caitlin.

She woke before dawn every morning, sore with the cold, and then waited pointlessly to fall back to sleep. When that failed, she turned on the light and sat hunched under the coverlet to read the day's first folders against her bent knees, breathing visible breath onto the printed pages: the Vietnamese girl from Methuen who wrote about the crack house across the street; the rock climber from Choate who described hanging by his fingertips from the wall of El Capitan so vividly, she felt her own fingers throb. When the sun came up Portia put on clothes, avoiding herself in the mirror, trying to look as if she were putting some thought into it. She went downstairs to make coffee, rinsing yesterday's coffee cup, pushing aside yesterday's unread paper to make room on the table for them: the children of professors at Brown and Harvard, a corrections officer from Somers, Connecticut, a Yale microbiologist, a fast-food worker from New Bedford, and hedge fund managers from Greenwich and Darien. She knew she needed to eat breakfast, but every morning she remembered that she had forgotten to get food again, which was something she never used to forget. So she loaded up the read files in one bag and the unread files in another, zipped the bags closed, and began the walk downtown, arms and legs and back screaming in pain, and unlocked the outer door to West College, and carried them up the stairs and down the corridor, where she read and read (as the watery light filled the room and the sounds of her colleagues came into the building and up the stairs and down the corridor to their own offices): the Fairfield County kids with summer jobs in Edgartown, the strivers from Woonsocket and Bridgeport. More and more of them ran before her eyes, new immigrants and old families, brawny, brilliant kids from the great prep schools, polished and shining, kids who struggled to express themselves in the new and th.o.r.n.y medium of English. She had asked Clarence for them, and now she had them. She couldn't fail to see the right things, make the right decisions.

That particular week, the week that began with Jeremiah's baffling, difficult application, was the darkest, the coldest yet. She had a pair of those ugly boots everyone had worn the previous year, the soft ones that looked like overgrown bedroom slippers. Every morning they became saturated with water on her way downtown, so she took them off, and her drenched socks, and set them in the corner of the office beside the heater, where all day they dried with white lines of evaporated moisture, like tidewater marks, and the smell of damp wool filled the room. In direct contrast with her house, the office was nearly too warm, and as the day went on she would remove layers, dropping them into a pile beside her chair. Only when she got down to the clothing closest to her skin did she understand that she was not very clean and should really address that, though by the time she got home at night, it was too cold to think about being undressed, even briefly.

On Tuesday, Rachel stopped by again and tried to get Portia to go have lunch, but she had too many files to read and sent her away. On Thursday, a message appeared on her office phone from a sober-sounding male attorney whose name she didn't recognize, complaining that he had left several messages at her home and would she please call him back? She listened twice to this, if only to ascertain that he was not the lawyer who had handled their house. Had Mark, then, "given" her their lawyer? Was this a concession? Or perhaps Mark had not considered him a good enough attorney. Why were they bothering her now, at the height of reading season? Had Mark learned nothing from the sixteen years of admissions work he had at least been a close witness to? Did he not know how hard this was, how much care they needed, every single individual young person who had exactly one chance to apply to Princeton, who required her clarity, her compa.s.sion, her judgment? Why couldn't they all just leave her alone?

On Friday afternoon, she found herself, quite suddenly, without files to read. She stood for a strange, awkward moment amid the tumult of the downstairs office, looking first at the stack of files she had hoisted into Corinne's holding area and then staring blankly at her own, which was empty. It was a weightless moment, not at all pleasant. The idleness, even momentary, felt so out of synch with the tension and focus all around her, as so many thousands of pieces of paper were tracked in their journey around the maze of admissions personnel. She was not sure what to do with herself. Should she go home and try to sleep? She was tired enough, she knew, but she also knew it would be a pointless endeavor. If she could barely sleep in the deep night, how would she be able to do it in daylight? Besides, how long was this odd lacuna of inactivity going to last? The second wave of reading-in which she'd review Corinne's first pa.s.s on the applications from her former territory-had already begun, and there were still stragglers coming down the pipe, sometimes short a teacher recommendation or missing some test score.

She heard herself tapping an impatient fingertip on the countertop. In the busy room, her stillness felt unavoidably comical. Embarra.s.sing.

"Need something?" said Martha, pa.s.sing with a stack for Dylan's shelf. Portia looked at them almost enviously.

"Folders," she said.

"Are you missing some?" Martha said with alarm. Lost applications were her nightmare scenario, and rightly so.

"Oh! No. All present and accounted for. Except I have nothing to read at the moment. I don't think Corinne's ready for me yet."

"Corinne? Wouldn't think so. California had a big jump this year. You should go home!" Martha said. "I have to tell you, you're not looking very hale at the moment."

"It's the sinus," said Portia. "I get it every year."

Martha did not respond, but Portia could see that she wasn't jumping to agree with this.

"I'm going out for coffee," Portia said brightly. "I haven't been to Small World in weeks. I can't go in there with folders, and I always have folders. But look! No folders. I'm going to Small World."

"Well," Martha said dryly, "I suppose it's closer than Disney World."

"And when I come back"-she nodded at her empty shelf-"there will be folders here, waiting for me."

"It's entirely possible," Martha said merrily.

Portia looked around one last time, in case someone might be approaching with reading material bound for her holding area; but when this proved not to be the case, she returned to her office and put on her outer sweater and her coat. It felt so peculiar not to be walking with great weighty bags at the end of each arm. It felt light and unsteady, as if she had become unrooted somehow. She went outside, grateful for once for the hit of cold, which at least helped to cut through her haze. Coffee was good, she thought. It was a giver of energy without requiring digestion or even the effort of chewing. She had not done much chewing lately. She wanted to feel the heat run down her throat and settle into that hole at the core of her and take up s.p.a.ce for a time. And she missed Small World, which was a buoyant place, full of conversation and greetings among friends, but also a place Mark frequented, which was another reason she had been avoiding it.

She was rounding the corner of Na.s.sau Hall when she found herself shuffling past a tour group making its frigid way back to Clio and the Office of Admission welcome center. Her arms were crossed over her chest and her head was down, which was why she hadn't seen them coming, but the backward-stepping undergraduate at the head of the group caught her eye as he pa.s.sed, for the unusual rhythm of his gait and the bright white of his Princeton Marching Band boater. He was telling the storied history of Na.s.sau Hall. He was good at walking backward, she thought, shuffling forward. Was that a marching band skill? Did he really love Princeton as much as he seemed, when his mittened hand pointed out the missing blocks of sandstone, replaced by cla.s.s plaques since the nineteenth century? She followed his gaze, slowing as the group stopped around her, and found herself beside a boy in an old black coat, who looked so oddly familiar that she wondered first if he might be an actor, someone whose face had flitted past on a cereal commercial or an ad for a wireless provider. His black curly hair was whipping in the wind, but he did not seem very bothered even so. Possibly he was used to the cold.

"Portia?" the boy suddenly said.

Portia thought: How strange, that there is another Portia. And apparently standing just where I am standing.

"Isn't it?"

"Portia."

This other voice was behind her. She had been swallowed up by the little crowd, nearly all of whom were paying her not the slightest attention. But this particular voice was creating a real disturbance in the field. It had spoken only one word, and she wanted it to go away.

"Hey," said the boy, "do you remember us? You came to our school. You're an admissions officer, right?"

She stared at him. The effect in the little group was seismic. Even the backward-walking guide stopped talking. The mothers and fathers were instantly alert, but no one said a word. Perhaps they couldn't believe it was true, Portia thought sourly. The way she looked, with her wet slouchy boots and multiple sweaters, the same thick braid she'd been wearing for four days or five, she couldn't remember. "It's Jeremiah," she told him, as if he had asked for clarification.

"Yes! And you're Portia. The symbol of wisdom."

"Only on my good days," she said weakly. She looked around at them all. She was tempted to rea.s.sure them: You are not to infer, from my slovenly appearance, that your child will not be given thorough, professional evaluation by myself and my co-workers. Bye now!

"I decided to apply to Princeton!" he said delightedly.

"That's good news," she said, careful, very careful. She could not, of course, confirm that she knew this, let alone that she had very recently read his application.

"Portia," said that voice again, and this time she really had to turn. With so many watching, and they were absolutely watching, there was really no dignified-no, sane-way not to. And there he was, right behind her with his dark and lanky son at his side, and a tall woman, taller than him, with long ringlets of red and gray hair. The infamous Deborah Rosengarten, no doubt.

"h.e.l.lo, John," she said, her voice sounding bizarrely perky. "What a nice surprise."