Small Admissions Read online

  “No one said life is fair.”

  “Does it really cost $44,000 a year to go here, or is that a typo on the website?”

  Maureen smiled at Kate, standing there with her little notebook of questions, and said, “So just to be clear, you don’t know anything at all about admissions, is that right?”

  “I don’t know anything about anything.”

  Maureen shook her head.

  “But I’ll learn fast,” Kate said. “I’m usually a fast learner.”

  “Have you ever interviewed anyone before?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a good judge of character?”

  “Not particularly. I don’t tend to like people.”

  “Well, at least we have that in common. Are you a fast reader?”

  “I think so.”

  “And you’re what, like, seventeen?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Look, Nellie, let me fill you in on a few things.”

  “It’s Kate, actually.”

  “One, in January we don’t sleep, and two, it’s the parents you have to wise up to, not the kids. New York parents, most of them, anyway, are crazy.”

  “I don’t need to sleep,” Kate said. She was trying to write things down, but the information was coming in a way that seemed to lack order, in spite of the numbered points.

  “Three, don’t fall in love.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t fall in love with applicants. Just because you love them doesn’t mean we can take them and just because we take them doesn’t mean they’ll come.”

  “I don’t think I’m likely to care all that much.”

  “That would be an asset if it’s true, but we’ll have to wait and see.”

  Kate stopped scribbling and looked up at her. “I’m going to get fired.”

  “He doesn’t have time to fire you now,” Maureen said. “There’s too much to do. If you’re going to get fired, it won’t be until spring. I’m guessing late April.”

  “Maybe I’ll know what I’m doing by then.”

  “Hmph. Maybe, maybe not. Just don’t end up like the last guy.”

  “The one with the goatee? Why? What happened to him?”

  “Want my advice? Do your work, but don’t get caught up in it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “And stop being so damn nervous all the time. You make me uncomfortable.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Make to-do lists every day. And don’t get sick. You don’t have time to take a day off, even for the flu. And if you get the flu, don’t breathe anywhere near me.”

  Kate started making lists and taking vitamins. She found typos on the website and one ungrammatical construction in the school facts brochure. She took a family from Hong Kong on a slightly awkward tour of the building and got lost only once. They were smiling the whole time, so Kate was pretty confident that they liked what she showed them. She sent polite, well-written emails, and people responded in turn.

  At the end of her second week, she was sitting in her office when Mr. Bigley came in and placed some marked-up papers on her desk. “Excellent work,” he said, putting his hands in the pockets of his high-waisted khakis.

  “It was only a comma or two.”

  “Attention to detail. Very well done.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bigley.”

  “Call me Henry,” he said. “Nice flowers.”

  “Aren’t they pretty? My friend sent them.”

  “Maureen thought maybe a boyfriend . . .?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t have one, long story.” She was tempted to tell it but decided it was best not to. Instead she handed him the card that read Best of luck on your new job! Love you, Chloe.

  “I don’t think you need luck. You’re doing great.”

  “Thank you. I’m a little nervous, to be honest.”

  “No need. You’re doing a terrific job. How do you feel about interviewing?”

  “I’m not good at answering questions, you might have figured that out.”

  “Ha! No, I mean giving interviews. I assume we should talk about that before things start up.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You’ll meet with the child and then with the parents,” he said, sitting down. “Mostly students applying to sixth.”

  “So they would be . . . fourteen or something?”

  From Maureen’s office they heard a loud “Ha.”

  “You’re funny, Kate,” Henry said. “Think of the interview as a conversation. Keep it relaxed. Get to know them by making them comfortable.”

  “So just talk to them?”

  “Find out if they have good work habits. Do they take notes and do their homework? Are they avid readers? Are they intellectually curious and self-directed? There’s no need to question them about their grades; it puts them on the spot, and we see all of their school reports anyway. And never ask them where else they’re applying to school. ISC rules.”

  Kate grabbed her notebook, opened to a blank page, and scribbled WTF is ISC?

  “But you do need to know if they’re passionate about anything,” he continued. “In what ways would they participate in student life?”

  Figure out—Are they good students? What are they into?

  “The parents are a different story. They’ll have a lot of questions. Answer them and otherwise let them do the talking. You’re not actually interviewing them. You’re trying to determine if Hudson is the right fit for the student.”

  Fit, Let them talk. “Got it.”

  “And here’s a really important thing: never, ever make promises. Don’t give the parents or students the idea that anything’s decided, one way or the other.”

  No promises. “Right, that makes sense.”

  “We make decisions as a committee, and we consider all the parts of the application.”

  A committee of three?

  “This is stressful for the parents, so they’d love to get assurances while they’re here—but we can’t give them that until we send out official notifications.”

  “When is that again?”

  “February. And those decisions are final. We never discuss the reasons for our decisions, that’s a rule.”

  Decisions final. No explanations.

  “It’s not always easy saying no, especially once you get to know the kids, and some of the parents take rejection really hard. But try not to let it get to you.”

  “Get to me how?”

  “Don’t get too emotionally involved. Take Maureen, for example. She makes fun of the applicants.”

  “She what?”

  “Even I do from time to time. Not to their faces, of course,” he said.

  “Isn’t that, I don’t know, wrong?”

  “Maureen takes her job very seriously, even though it might not always look that way.”

  “I heard that,” Maureen yelled from her office.

  “We should have dinner some evening,” he said. “We’ll be working together every day. It would be good to have a chance to discuss our strategies for this season, and I’d be interested to hear ideas you have for making things run smoothly.”

  Strategies???? Think up something not stupid. “I’d love to,” she told him.

  “Keep it up, trouper,” he said and walked out whistling.

  October

  Soon after Kate got dumped, I met George. I swear I didn’t mean to. It just happened. And it wasn’t right, given the shit show that was Kate’s life at the time. Given what I did, or didn’t do. It was totally unacceptable that she was alone and I was in love. Guilt was my normal state of being, and one way I handled it was by keeping George a secret. It made sense to me: I wanted to see Kate in a happier state before I told my friends about him.

  I got seven possible guys for her with my phony online profile. I narrowed them down to three and read their messages out loud.

  “What are you after?” George asked. He was packing for a work trip, folding his shorts and counting his sock
s. He would be gone for a month, organizing food relief in Haiti. It was the first time we’d been apart since we’d met.

  “Someone steady, and above all kind and smart. And interesting. Someone we would want to have a beer with.” I read the messages again. “They don’t sound like dicks to me,” I said. “Should I see them?”

  “Would it help to see them?”

  “Do you mind if I see them?”

  “Why would I mind if you see them?” he asked.

  “What will I say?”

  “I don’t know. ‘I’m here to interview you for my friend’?”

  “Can I say that?”

  “It’s weird.”

  “Or I pretend to be her.”

  “Frankly I think you should stop worrying about all this. It’s not your problem.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “You spend all day worrying about other people, and then you come home and you keep at it with your friends. You have no reason to feel guilty.”

  “Angela thinks . . .”

  “Why do you care what Angela thinks? Go do something nice this afternoon, something for yourself for once. Go to a movie.”

  “Without you?”

  “Why not?”

  “It won’t be fun.”

  When George wasn’t looking, I hid a jar of Nutella and a note in his suitcase. He flew to Haiti, and I went alone to see a deeply depressing film about life in Germany after World War II. It felt punitive in a way I figured I deserved.

  After the movie I met Vicki for a drink at a trendy bar she suggested. It was crowded, loud, and full of guys who were hitting on her. I went to the bathroom as soon as I arrived and came back to find her surrounded. She shooed the men away to clear my barstool.

  “You went to a movie alone?” she asked.

  “I had no idea so many women got raped in the aftermath of the war,” I said, having delivered a lengthy summary of the film. “Such brutality, not to mention the starvation, homelessness, and disease.” Katy Perry was blaring over our heads. “The inhumanity of war is appalling.”

  “You’re seriously killing my buzz, sweetie. I’ll take you out to a real movie sometime, something a little less enlightening and a little more Hollywood, preferably with Channing Tatum.”

  “Who?”

  Vicki shook her head. “Where have you been?”

  “Not at the movies, I guess.”

  “So what are you doing these days? I don’t see you enough.”

  She was right, of course. We hadn’t seen much of each other now that I was spending all my free time with George. “I started running,” I lied. “I try not to miss a day.”

  “Treadmill?”

  “No, just out.”

  “That’s great. You know what you should do?” she said. “You should run a half marathon.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Not at all,” she told me. “If you set up a training schedule for yourself, you could absolutely work your way up to it. All you need is a one-mile-at-a-time kind of mind-set. You could totally make that goal, if it’s something you want to do.”

  She had said the same thing to me before in a million different ways, and it was one of the things I liked most about her. Freshman year, I considered taking Russian for a brief spell, and she was my biggest supporter. While everyone else was saying, “Oooh, Russian? Sounds really hard,” Vicki was telling me, “Of course you can learn Russian, Chloe! Just get into a one-word-at-a-time mentality.” Or last year when I casually mentioned that someday I hoped to write a book, she said, “You should totally do that. Why not now? You just have to get into a one-page-at-a-time frame of mind, you know? Go for it.” As someone who leaned toward self-doubt and cynicism, I relished her can-do attitude and hoped it would rub off on me. She loved a challenge and believed in all that American Dream perseverance crap, which unfortunately meant she also had the accompanying lack of sympathy for anyone who stumbled and flailed.

  “Have you talked to Kate?” I asked.

  “Not since she started working.”

  “We should do something nice for her, don’t you think? Like cook her dinner maybe. I hope she’s not feeling neglected.”

  “Oh, please,” Vicki said. “Seriously? I think she’s gotten enough attention to last her a lifetime.”

  The next day, I bought Kate a plastic pumpkin filled with Halloween candy. I thought maybe kids would be nice to a lady with candy in her office.

  She took the call, expecting to hear from a prospective client, and was quite pleased with the tone of her own voice. She’d been working on sounding more throaty and less nasal in an effort to come across as professional but amiable. Mature but young. Smart but sexy.

  “Victoria Taylor, good afternoon.” Nice. Better than Vicki. More sophisticated. Classy.

  “Hello, Vicki. Eeet’s me,” was all the caller said. Vicki was stunned. She recognized Robert’s voice immediately, the cartoonish accent, but she didn’t appreciate his presumption.

  “I’m sorry, who is this?” she asked.

  “Eeet’s Robert. You know.” Why was his phone voice so sexy without even trying? “Can you meet me for dinner?” he asked. “Don’t say no.”

  “You’re in New York?” she asked, trying to stay cool.

  “Not yet, but I’m coming. There’s a new hotel that has caught my mother’s attention. Five stars in a renovated turn-of-ze-century building. I agreed to evaluate eeet.”

  “And you call that a job?”

  “Why should work be a torture?”

  “It shouldn’t,” Vicki agreed. “But your jobs always sound more like vacations.”

  “I need to see you.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

  “Please, Vicki. Eeet’s important.”

  “It’s Victoria.” She drummed her pencil on her knee and swiveled in her chair. What would be the harm really? Maybe he could explain himself, make amends. Besides, she could always cancel.

  “I don’t see the point,” she said, “but I’ll think about it.”

  He sighed long and sad. “Come on. A nice dinner with me at any restaurant you like. What do you say?”

  “Have you talked to Chloe?” she asked.

  “She won’t speak to me, my own cousin. I simply can’t understand eeet.”

  “Seriously? You can’t?”

  “I’m not so bad, Vicki.”

  “Victoria,” she corrected him again. “Let me know when you arrive. Maybe a quick drink if I can find the time.”

  “And are you well?”

  “I’m fabulous, actually. Better than ever. I’ve been promoted.”

  “How eeez Kate?”

  Kate, Kate, Kate. God, it was tedious. “None of your business,” Vicki answered. “And what do you care?”

  Kate escorted a young boy to the doorway of her office and pointed to the two empty chairs sitting across from her desk. He stopped, blocking her from entering. “Sit anywhere you like,” she said. The boy looked at the two chairs, turned, and decided to sit in the swivel chair at her desk instead. That seemed presumptuous. She thought about saying something, like “Not that chair” in a polite way, but it might hurt his feelings to ask him to move, so she took her clipboard and sat in the chair intended for him.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “Doing okay?”

  “I guess.”

  “Dillon, right? What kind of a name is Dillon?”

  “It’s a boy’s name.”

  “It could be a girl’s name, too.”

  “No it couldn’t.”

  “Why couldn’t it?”

  “Because I’m a boy.”

  What kind of logic was that? Kate looked at her clipboard where she had placed a copy of Henry’s Interview Guide Sheet. She noted the first heading, “Academic Preparedness,” and next to it she scribbled, Sucks at reasoning. “So how’s it going?” she asked.

  “You said that already. Does this chair spin
all the way around?”

  “Yes. I think so. I don’t know.”

  He started turning in circles. “My dad’s chair spins all the way around. My dad’s desk has a drawer that locks.”

  “That’s useful. I wish I had one of those.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. That way you can keep things safe. Or secret.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Like money, I suppose.”

  The boy frowned at her. “I’m not supposed to talk about money,” he said.

  “No, of course not. Well, papers maybe. Like a letter. Like a secret love letter,” she said, trying to be cute, trying to get him to warm up.

  “Who wrote you a love letter?”

  “No one. I only meant if someone did, I could lock it in a drawer.”

  “That’s not what my dad has locked in his drawer.”

  “How do you know what he has locked in his drawer?” Kate asked.

  “I don’t,” he answered.

  “Well, then.”

  “You don’t know, either.”

  “Obviously.” Kate looked down at the list of suggested questions and started with the first one: “So,” she cleared her throat and read, “ ‘What do you like about your current school? And what would you most like to change?’ ”

  “Ummmm,” he said and swiveled a little to the left, a little to the right, and once all the way around. “I like my friends and my PE teacher,” he said, “and I like PE and lunch and recess on the days we have recess but sometimes we don’t get to have recess when the class is too noisy and we have to stay lined up until everyone’s quiet and then no one is, and then we don’t get to go outside at all. I hate math, but I’m not supposed to tell you that.”

  “That’s okay. I hate math, too. But in general you would say . . . you like school,” she said, summing up by putting words in his mouth. She looked at her blank form and wondered what to write down and what to ignore. Has friends, likes P.E. & lunch, hates math. No recess = bad.

  She skipped over the next question—“What academic challenges do you face and how do you overcome them?”—because he’d already fessed up to the math thing. Why beat a dead horse?

  Moving on: “What extracurricular activities do you engage in outside of school and how much time to do you commit to these activities?”