"I know who Bob Moses was," said the boy.

This was a moment of cognitive whiplash. It took her a moment herself to remember who Bob Moses was. "Oh?"

"He lives in Cambridge now. He's trying to teach math in a new way. About a year ago, I had this phase where I was reading books about mathematicians. He was in one of the books I read."

Portia could only nod.

"You know what's strange, though? Really good mathematicians talk like poets. They run out of language, so they twist words together to explain their ideas. Like poets do. But anyway, the book about Moses made some reference to his civil rights work. So then I read something else about what he did in Mississippi."

"What's your name?" she asked him.

"Portia," said John, materializing beside her, "thank you for doing that. And I apologize-you must have thought the initial reaction very odd. I ought to have prepared you-we tend to encourage that kind of partic.i.p.ation. Spirited partic.i.p.ation."

Rude partic.i.p.ation, she thought. "I sort of got that. The culture of the school, yes?"

"Yes. And that particular student is Deborah's daughter."

"The elusive Deborah Rosengarten?"

"Yes. Simone's her only child. She's been raised to make her opinions known."

Portia smiled. Simone Rosengarten. As in de Beauvoir, no doubt. She would write it down tonight.

"Not your typical information session, I suppose," he said, watching her.

"No." She smiled. "I do feel as if I earned my salary today."

"I would have stepped in if I were ever in doubt. You were really remarkable."

"Oh, I enjoyed it," she said, not entirely truthfully. And-" She turned to the boy, the Warhol boy, but he was already halfway to the door. "Hey," she said after him. "Wait a minute."

John turned to look after him. "Hey, Jeremiah?"

The kid stopped, but halfheartedly. "Yes?"

"I-" But she wasn't entirely sure. Wanted to ask him something, but what? His last name? Or whether he would really apply? Or maybe what it was that kept her here a long moment past the point where it made sense to be looking after him.

"Jeremiah," said John, "are you thinking of applying to Princeton?"

"Yeah, maybe." He looked utterly nonplussed.

"Well, I hope you do," Portia told him. "And if you do, please let me know. Here's my card," she said, taking one from her wallet. "Let me know if you have any questions. If you want to come visit the campus, we can match you up with an undergraduate and you can stay with him in his room."

"Okay," he said, looking at the card. "Portia," he read as if she weren't there. "Like The Merchant of Venice."

"Yes. My mother had the idea that if she named me that, I would grow up to be very wise. I'm lucky she didn't name me Athena."

"Or Minerva," Jeremiah said. "Or Sophie. But a lot of people are named Sophie. They probably have no idea that's what their name means."

Portia frowned.

"Or Metis. That would be really strange. Or Saraswati. Yeah, I think you probably got lucky. If you've got to be called something that stands for wisdom, you probably couldn't have done any better."

She just looked at him. He stood by the door, his book resting against his thigh. He had delivered this disjointed speech in profile, his rather aquiline nose directed at the great picture windows at the end of the room. Now he lingered for a final minute, utterly without self-consciousness, and finally turned and left.

"Interesting kid," Portia said, removing the DVD from her laptop and placing both into her brown leather satchel.

"I guess. We're so used to him. We let him alone, mainly, but we do make him produce scholarship, otherwise he'd keep going the way he was before. He told you about his old school?"

She nodded. "So... he doesn't take cla.s.ses here?"

"Oh sure. Well, he attends, but his mind is usually otherwise engaged. We decided not to fight it. That's what they did at Keene Central, to ill effect."

"They threw him out?" she asked, shouldering her bag.

"Well, they were headed in that direction. I met him at a yard sale last spring. He was sitting on the ground reading a 1952 Encyclopedia Britannica. Letter S." John grinned. "He said he was looking into the source material for King Lear. He told me he was on academic probation. We started getting together at Brewbakers on Sunday afternoons."

"Brewbakers?"

"Only cappuccino in town." He shrugged. "Anyway, he started here this fall, and it's working, as far as I can tell. He's preparing a lecture for the entire school about pop art right now." He shook his head. "On the day we a.s.signed it, it happened to be pop art. If we had a.s.signed the lecture a few days earlier, it might have been the Beats. A few days later, it could have been the Armenian genocide. He's like that game show where they let you loose in the supermarket for five minutes and you have to grab everything you can, except we can't seem to convince him he has more than five minutes. He can take his time."

"He mentioned that his parents hadn't gone to college."

"No. They seem like nice people, but they don't connect with him very well. You know, he was supposed to be playing football at Keene Central by now and racing motocross on the weekends. Jeremiah was never going to be like that."

She nodded. There had often been Jeremiahs in the applicant pool. They were attractive to the faculty, who some years earlier had flatly asked for more of them: fewer golden kids who did everything well, please, and more awkward kids who were brilliant but couldn't tie their shoes. The faculty themselves, she suspected, had once been awkward, brilliant kids who couldn't tie their shoes.

"Are you going back now?"

"Oh no. I'm staying over in Keene tonight. I'm going to Northfield Mount Hermon in the morning, then I'll fly back from Hartford."

"Northfield's a great school."

"Yes. We've had wonderful applicants from Northfield."

She stopped. She was aware, for the first time, of something awkward between them, something she had to call upon herself to ignore, or resist. She didn't particularly want to look at it directly.

"Let me walk you out," said John.

Outside the sunlight was in its last, brilliant blare of the day. The hay in the fields was richly yellow and came glowing, vibrating, out of the dirt in unkempt piles of bales. She could see kids in the cow pasture, walking the herd back after milking, with three or four dogs running around them. Closer, where the volleyball game had been played, the stout woman she had seen in the commons seemed to be setting up for some kind of game, with goals and boundaries. This enterprise, it seemed to her, was not entirely logical, but it was, in some baffling way, cohesive. Even beautiful. This was, Portia felt suddenly, a beautiful place-an astoundingly beautiful place to spend a life, or a work life, at any rate. Whatever their oddities, the project here seemed tangible. Take kids, make them partic.i.p.ate in the community, and make them think. It was Princeton's own mission, more or less. Minus the ivy. And the money.

She opened the pa.s.senger door, and the car emitted hot air. She closed her eyes, momentarily dizzy. John stood behind her, and there was again that awkwardness between them. She was wondering how to leave, precisely, but in the next moment a boy of about fourteen came rushing up to them and stopped abruptly at John's elbow.

"Dad," he said.

The boy was young but tall-gangly, teetering on long legs. He was a handsome boy with coiling black hair and deeply black skin and a long, sinewy neck too elongated for his wheat-colored turtleneck sweater, which hit rather lower than it was meant to. He glanced at Portia without expression, then focused again on John.

"Portia," he said, "this is my son. Nelson, can you say h.e.l.lo to Portia?"

Obediently, he turned and held out his hand. It was warm and dry and rough, and she shook it.

"Dad," the boy said, his task dispatched, "okay if I go home with Karl? We want to do math."

"Math?" John said wryly. "Or computer games?"

"First math. Then, and only if there's time, educational computer games."

"All right," he said. "Be responsible. I'll come and get you on the way home."

"Thanks," said Nelson. "Bye," he said to Portia, and took off.

John looked after him. "Of course he makes friends with the only kid at our school who has a full library of computer games. I'm only hoping they're not of the blood-spattered genre, but the truth is, I'm afraid to ask."

"Denial is a parent's best friend." Portia smiled.

"Yes. Do you have kids?"

She shook her head quickly. "No. No kids."

"Well, it's an adventure."

She nodded, watching his long boy climb into the backseat of a battered Volvo. "He seems like a great kid."

"Oh, he is. He's happy and smart. A little lazy, but why not be lazy when you're young? When else are you going to do it?"

"Good point. Well, listen, thanks for having me. It was very interesting. You've got some very strong personalities here. I hope we'll get some of them to apply."

"I think you might." He smiled. "I'll work on Jeremiah. And I wouldn't be surprised if you got Simone, eventually. I think she'd do fantastically well at a place like Princeton. Despite her bl.u.s.ter."

"Maybe because of her bl.u.s.ter," Portia said. "Look, if you have questions about the process, please call me. College guidance is such a well-oiled machine at most private schools. I don't want your kids to miss out because this is the first year for you."

"That's really kind of you," he said. He looked as if he meant it. "We should have had you sooner," he said. "And I'm so sorry about Deborah. I will scold her when I see her."

"Oh, not on my account," Portia said, thinking that a scolding was certainly in order. "Hey, can you tell me how to get to the lovely Keene Best Western?"

He could, and did. She wrote down what he said and tossed the piece of paper onto her pa.s.senger seat. Then she closed the car door. "Well, good-bye," she told him, forcibly ignoring, once again, that clear discomfort.

"Portia," said John, who wasn't taking her outstretched hand, "before, when I said I remembered you, I didn't mean that I remembered the appointment. I meant that I remembered you. I remember you," he said. "I went to college with you."

Still, ridiculously, she held out her hand. Only the ground wasn't quite there anymore, just a slightly tilted thing underfoot. She frowned at him. "You were at Dartmouth?"

"Yes. We didn't know each other. But I knew you. I knew who you were."

Who she was? It was nearly unbearable to think about who she was.

"Yes?" Portia managed.

"I knew Tom. I was in his fraternity."

She nodded glumly. She looked at him again, trying to imagine him younger, but he already looked young, and with more hair, but that brought nothing back. It had been one of the bigger fraternities, with, thanks to Dartmouth's quarterly sessions, an eternally shifting population in the house, not that she'd ever noticed anything when she was around Tom, on her way to Tom, in retreat from Tom. She hadn't thought about Tom in a long time.

"I'm sorry, I took you off guard."

"No, it's okay. I don't remember you."

"Oh, I was a year behind you. And everybody was always coming and going, right? That crazy Dartmouth Plan. I went to France for almost a year. And you left for a while, too, I think."

"Yes..." Her mind raced. "I was in Europe."

"Ah. When I came back from France, your cla.s.s had graduated, but then I started seeing you around campus again."

She nodded dully. "I was working for the admissions office."

"You know," he said, "this is sounding a little stalkerish. I apologize. It wasn't like that. But I always thought you were..."

She looked at him sharply, and he seemed to take control of himself.

"Anyway, it's nice to see you again."

"Nice to see you," she said heartily. "Nice to meet you."

"Yes."

They stood for too long a moment. Portia was nursing a sick feeling that began to rattle through her abdomen, dissipating as it radiated. She was forgetting where she was, not physically so much, but in the span of her life, as the curtain she had strung across her wake began to flicker and then ripple, showing little views of herself as she'd been in that fragile, dangerous time. She was no longer in contact with anyone who'd known her then, and for good reason. Now, ambushed, she was surprised by her anger.

"Maybe I should have mentioned it sooner," he said quietly.

"Yes, maybe you should have."

She reached for his hand and gave it a brisk, cold shake. Then she turned her back on him and went to the driver's-side door and got in. She made a point of not looking back, but she couldn't get out of there fast enough. Once she was clear of the driveway, with the crude, homemade sign in her rearview mirror, she drove without direction through the woods, turning and turning as the roads forked and met. She was greedy for the darkness, which grew as she drove, and the cold, which she would not alleviate. It took nearly fifteen minutes to feel safe, but when she did, she pulled off into a stand of white pines, and stopped the car, and covered her face with her hands.

In the middle of my soph.o.m.ore year, my father was hospitalized with depression. This event affected every aspect of my family. For one thing, I found that I was required to be in charge of my younger siblings after school, which meant that it was impossible for me to continue to play on the softball team. I also had to give up my volunteer services at the hospital, a great disappointment to me. My father is back at work now, and I have tried to make up for the time I missed in my extracurricular activities. I wanted to explain this lapse in my partic.i.p.ation, in light of the situation in my family.

CHAPTER THREE.

THE WORST KIND OF FAILURE.