Early Decision Read Online Free

way.”
    â€œThanks. So do you. Really good to see you, too.”
    He disappeared down the fluorescent corridor. What if, Anne thought, what if I were sitting here waiting to interview Gideon Blanchard, instead of being interviewed by him? She turned the bright candy pages of Vanity Fair. It was an impossibly pleasant fantasy, and an impossible one. There was no way to get there from here. Maybe I should be meeting with Mrs. Blanchard, Anne thought wryly, for a little coaching myself. Call down my dream. And just then the big door opened, and Mr. Blanchard stepped out, his hand extended. He was big indeed, tall and slim in a beautiful suit and French cuffs; Anne caught a flash of enamel at his wrist when he held the door for her. She recognized him immediately. Slightly long in the jowl, but with a wide smile and quick, intelligent eyes. “So, you’re the independent college counselor, ” he sang, as though hanging a bit of bait. “Coffee?”
    â€œYes, I am, and no, thanks.” She sat where he gestured. There was a college crest on the carved chair, but she hadn’t had time to make out which one.
    He settled himself behind his enormous desk. His smile remained huge but his teeth made her think of arctic ice—gleaming cold and perfectly opaque. “And just how does one get into that sort of work? I’d never heard of such a thing before my wife brought it up. Sounds a little belabored, to be honest.”
    It was not uncommon that something competitive cropped up with the husbands. You’d have thought it would be with the wives: here was Anne, single, in her twenties, skinny, free, able to shape-shift between the grown-ups and the incorrigible teenagers. But the mothers clung to her. They met her at the door in their bathrobes. They called her from their cars in the grocery-store parking lot and told her the horror story about the valedictorian who got in nowhere. When, as happened on occasion, students got busted drinking or smoking weed, Anne was the first call the mothers made. “How will we handle this on applications?” they asked, choking on their tears. “Can you come over tonight?” No, it was the fathers who wanted to lock horns with her. Her theory was that they believed that the story of their success had begun in college—Harvard Yale Amherst Williams—and that college was, therefore, part of the real world, which was their domain: the world of business and banking, of 6 A.M. wheels-up flights to conference rooms in Cleveland and Bonn, of expense reports and younger associates grinding out the midnight hours; the world, in other words, of adults. Finally their children were emerging from the localized haze of elementary education and the harrowing irrelevance of high school to a track they recalled and could, they imagined, predict. What did this girl think she knew about all of that? Had she ever even had a job, anyway?
    â€œFor two years I taught at a very selective prep school, English composition and Shakespeare,” Anne told Mr. Blanchard. He nodded gamely. “My seniors were always asking for nights off from their homework so they could work on college applications. So I assigned those essays as homework, and made them bring them into class, and they were terrible. We worked on them for weeks. I created a course on the personal essay, and both years, for whatever reason, all my kids got into their top choices. Then their mothers started calling about siblings, and word got out, and now here I am.”
    Anne had come to her work at a fortuitous time. A combination of social and economic factors had sent application rates soaring. The sixties had opened the college gates to nonwhites and women, and all of those kids—the baby boomers—had grown up and created more college-bound seventeen-year-olds than the country had ever seen. Growing wage disparity between blue- and white-collar jobs made a degree necessary for a