Early Decision (2 page)

C. H
UNTER
P
FAFF

I first went to Montana on a class trip last summer. In addition to community service work, my group went camping in the Bitterroot Mountain Range. For twelve nights we slept outdoors. The experience sparked my passion for the outdoors and The West. By day, we worked clearing debris from hiking trails and around a reservoir with Rangers guiding us. (The reservoir provided all the drinking water for the towns in the valley so it had to be kept clean, and also water for fighting forest fires.) It was amazing how much trash you can find on trails that are so far from towns. Coke cans, ziplock bags and candy wrappers are just some of the things we collected. We of course learned to “Pack In, Pack Out”; so we were careful to “Leave no Trace.” I never understood the value of these words until I saw the garbage in the trails in those beautiful, pristine mountains. Growing up in Winnetka, Illinois, litter is something I'm just used to.

At night, we made campfires and had lectures by Rangers on the animals of the mountains and ecosystem. Later we drove a long distance to our last stop and past an open field where Mustangs were grazing. Mustangs are wild horses that are not tamed. No one rides them. They have never been bridled. The Ranger told us that when there are storms, the mustangs run and run because running is their way of handling their fear. He gave us some grain to hold out over a fence by the road to see if they would come. The Ranger explained that local people come throw hay over the wire to help them because there's drought due to Global Warming and the grass is too dry to sustain their enormous appetites during the foaling season.

That was last summer and still to this day I feel my experience in Montana helped shape the way I handle thinking about my future at school and beyond. I realize the importance of community service not just at school, but during the summer and everywhere we go. I also realize that there are fragile ecosystems, even in the West, which need our protection. My AP biology class is giving me the tools to learn how to protect those beautiful places. I hope to major in Environmental Science at ____ so I can return to Montana and work with the Rangers in their missions to save our planet's wild spaces.

Shit, thought Anne. It was dead. He was dead. Here was a solid B-plus boy with solid everything else: SATs in the mid-eightieth percentile, a few 3s and 4s on the APs, tennis, photography, guitar, some student leadership—but whose essay revealed a boy without passion. And there were technical problems too: he'd get nowhere mentioning environmental science because he'd shown no real scientific aptitude. As in the professional world, on college applications affinity and interest had to be aligned. Welcome to the end of childhood. Anne stifled a sigh. This was the kid who gets turned down everywhere, a tanked guppy with some nice streaks of color but nothing different from the zillions swimming alongside him. She held her head low, as though she were still reading, trying to plot a set of optimistic responses. Beside her, she felt Hunter shifting awkwardly in his chair. Had she not had his essay in her hands, she'd have wondered if he was in some sort of pain. A faint body smell, accompanied by gentle heat, rose off of him, as off a roast. He kept pulling off his baseball cap to shape its sueded brim in his fingers. The curls that sprang out beneath it shone. The boy was bursting with life; he could barely stay in his own skin. Why the hell were his sentences so flat? And his voice was nowhere to be found. Not an idea in the draft, save one—but Anne knew it had to be approached tenderly.

“So, Hunter,” she said finally. “Do you
want
to go to college?”

He glanced at her and said nothing, then aimed a disbelieving smile into his lap.

She continued, “Or would you prefer to do something else next year?”

“Is that a joke?” He winced, appearing embarrassed for her and how little she understood. “Of course I'm going to college. Do I want to go to college? Ha! That's funny.”

“No, I mean it,” Anne said. “Do you want to go? A lot of people never do, you know. Some of them go to technical schools, or they spend a few years at a community college, or they just get a job. You could just start your life. You're almost eighteen. You could head right out that door and rent a little apartment in the city, get a job, meet someone special, the whole nine yards.”

Hunter slumped back in his chair and folded the brim of his cap low over his temples.

“Yeah, okay, right,” he said. He was worried he was being set up. And he was, of course; as flaky and hormonal as they were, teenagers always caught the trick. Hunter shot back: “I'll take the meet-a-woman part.”

Anne said nothing.

“I mean, yeah, of course I want to go to college.”

“Why?”

“Why?” He was incredulous. “
Why?
Everyone goes. I mean, my parents . . . my friends, like, everyone at my school goes to college. It's how you get a job? Plus there are keg parties.”

Anne was quiet. The traps—sex, booze—she let pass. She was still too close to the kids' age to speak to them of such things.

“My parents would
kill
me if I didn't go to college,” he added.

“Actually,” Anne said, “at this point, they'd kill
me
if you didn't go to college.”

Hunter looked her square in the face for the first time, and permitted her to look back. His eyes, she saw, were green. Then he laughed.

“Okay, yeah, you're right about that! Cool.”

“So, listen, work with me here. Let's say you could do anything in college. I mean, anything. Go anywhere, study anything, not study anything. What would it be?”

“Does my essay suck or something?”

“No, it doesn't suck. But it is kinda boring. And I think that's because it bores you to think about college, because it's like all the other things you have to think about: SATs, summer reading, preseason, all stuff you have to do. Not stuff you want to do.”

“Maybe.”

“Because I know you're not boring. You're sitting there next to me and I know you've got things you're thinking about, and I'm guessing maybe someone special on this trip to Montana, or—”

“She couldn't go,” he said quickly. “She's a freshman. Well, sophomore now.”

Aha. Thank heavens for girlfriends. “Did you tell her about it?”

“Totally.”

“About the litter and stuff? The Ziploc bags? The fragile ecosystem?”

He jerked his head back. “No. Dude. Why would I talk about that stuff?”

“Then why write about it?”

He blinked at her.

“Has she ever been to Montana?” Anne asked quickly. She couldn't risk losing their thin détente.

“Nicole? No. Idaho, once, I think. Sun Valley.”

“Man. Too bad. It's gorgeous.”

“Oh my God! Montana was so insane. They have these rivers—braided rivers. Have you ever seen those? So, it's a river made by glacier melt, the runoff. When it heats up the water just runs down from under the ice, but it's not always this steady stream, so as the current gets stronger it moves around, like a snake, sort of, over time. So you'll be standing in this huge riverbed, it'll be, like, gravel from here all the way to where you can see, and there are, like, these seven little rivers running through it. And they switch and cross and go back and all, like a braid, is the name. It's like the best watering spot imaginable for elk and moose, tracks everywhere, and just—these rivers that move around! It's so amazing. You never see them changing. They just do. Constantly.”

“And the mustangs?”

Here he paused. “What about them?”

Anne backed off a bit. “I've never seen them, is all. Are they big?”

“Oh. Like normal horses. But just—they've never been ridden. You can't ride them. They're totally wild, like horses used to be, you know? No saddle, no ropes. They were just hanging out there in the middle of this crazy field. I shouldn't even say ‘field' because it, like, never stopped. There was just this wire along the side of the road and then, like, grass forever. And they were hanging out out there, just chilling in this big circle. Like I wrote—and we tried to feed them, but they weren't having it. Which is cooler, I think.”

“Are they protected?” Anne asked.

“The ranger said these ones are.”

“But in some places they're not?”

“I don't know. Do you think? Where else do they have them?”

“I don't know.”

“I hope not. That would suck,” he said.

“It would.”

“But what's the deal with the essay?” Hunter asked.

“Well, forget about the essay for a moment,” Anne told him. This was the best way with boys—try to make them forget they were writing at all. Girls preferred to drill down; boys needed to be distracted. It made using their voices safer. “Can we just think of writing a—I don't know, let's say an e-mail, from Montana? To . . . Nicole. Is that right?”

“Yeah.” He dropped his head so fast it was as though he'd sustained a blow. He really liked this girl.

“So you're writing to her, to tell her about the stuff you're seeing in Montana. And why it's cool. And why you don't want to come back to Winnetka, and why you wish you could just send for your stuff and mail farewell postcards to all your teachers. Right?”

“Totally.”

“So just write that e-mail. But send it to me. Okay?”

“What?” he asked.

“Just an e-mail. To me. And I'll see you next week.” Anne began packing up her bag.

“Um, oh-kay. Whatever,” he sang at her.

But it was a false challenge. Hunter had taken off his hat and was working the brim again; he was already thinking. This was keen distraction in the guise of apathy. A classic teenage feint. He didn't look up to say good-bye, and Anne let herself out the wide front door. Through the window she saw him lower his head to the shiny dining table and rest it there, as though exhausted. Hunter Pfaff was in agony. It was a very good sign.

 

T
HE OFFICES OF
Blanchard, McHenry, Winsett & Blair formed the anchor tenant of a landmark building on Grant Park, overlooking the long, low roof of the Art Institute and, to the east, the bright crescent of Lake Michigan. August heat silvered the city. Anne wore a dress. Three secretaries passed her back into the labyrinth, through doors they unlocked with sliding cards. She settled outside the big door with a fresh
Vanity Fair
and lemon water from a glass pitcher.

“Anne?” asked a voice.

She looked up. It was a very young man. For a moment she was so puzzled her mind went blank, and she felt her arms begin to prickle with nerves. But then the picture snapped back into focus: this was not Gideon Blanchard but a colleague, must be a very junior assistant, whom Anne had known—where? In high school. Must have been. She scrambled for his name.

“Oh, hi!” she replied.

“Don't get up,” he said. “I'm just running somewhere. But I thought that was you and I wanted to say hi. Listen, what are you doing here?”

Anne thought that an impertinent question to ask in a high-powered law firm, but she must not have looked terribly distressed—or high-powered. “I have a meeting with Gideon Blanchard,” she told him. Her mind was flipping through files, trying to pull up anything at all. He was tall and very lean, with a sharp chin and oddly angled cheekbones that she remembered from the long afternoon class they'd shared. Some elective, senior year. He'd been younger by a year.
Ian? Liam?

“Oh, the big man!” he replied, openly impressed. “Well, have fun with that. He's a great guy. I really admire him. You a lawyer?”

“Nope, no. Are you?”

“Yeah, second year. It's a grind, what can I say? But this is as good a place as any, so it's cool. You a journalist, then?”

The question smarted. She had no interest in law, but journalism was a sometime dream. “Ah, nope. Just working with Mr. Blanchard on a private project.” She always protected her clients' confidentiality, though Gideon Blanchard's feelings weren't the ones at stake here.

“Got it. Okay, well, cool. Good to see you! You look great, by the way.”

“Thanks. 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?”

“Yes, 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?