Early Decision (28 page)

The debate had been held at Cobb Lecture Hall. Now clusters of high school kids stood shivering in the frosty air all around the quad, where occasionally an unshaven philosophy or classics scholar would stumble down the stairs of an entry onto the walkway, study the groups of young minds, and look up at the fading sky before zipping up and hunching away. Alexis was radiant, standing there, bundled in a pink parka with her hair in a high ponytail. Behind her the long expanse of Gates-Blake Hall was like a quiet ship at mooring. The English department was there, and inside, Anne's old mailbox, with a new doctoral candidate's name assigned it.

“Sorry,” Alexis was saying, giggling. “I should have explained! Okay, so it was, ‘Resolved: Life begins at conception, so reproductive technology constitutes murder
.
' I was Negative. First speaker. And you can't talk about God, of course, though there was this one Catholic kid on the Affirmative who shouldn't have been there, I can't believe his coach didn't switch him, it's just stupid to be all passionate like that. You can't think. So it came down to policy which is already in place, all these practices and procedures, did you know about IVF, what they're really doing? Did you know that there are pregnancies that, if they are left to continue, will absolutely kill the mother, no matter what? And the baby?”

She was speaking faster than Anne could track. And doing so with a small wad of pink gum in her mouth, which Anne spotted periodically behind her teeth, and which made a kind of syncopated cracking sound as Alexis spoke, as though her tongue were wearing tap shoes. A faint strawberry cloud hung in the air between them. Alexis reached up, undid her ponytail, rebound it, and kept talking.

“So anyway we won, it was fine, but it was, like, I've never seen a team less prepared on pure policy. No takeouts, just this, like, they took
offense
. I think one girl cried. She was Chinese.”

“Congratulations,” Anne said. “You must be tired. And thirsty.”

“Thanks. But I'm totally revved. Do we have time to walk around? When do we have to leave? You're so totally nice to do this!”

They had half an hour or so. The weather was clear, but they'd hit traffic heading west toward the airport. “How about some tea?” Anne offered.

They turned past the chapel toward a little café Anne remembered tucked up on the second floor, in a corner where two long corridors met. The holiday was descending, but maybe some straggler work-study kid was still closing up. “Why do they schedule debates the day before Thanksgiving?” she asked.

“Oh, 'cause it's the only time everyone's not in school! And it's not a religious holiday, so it's okay to cut into it a little.”

“Ah. Of course.”

“Oh my God,” said Alexis, looking around. “I think I want to go here.”

“To Chicago?”

“Yes! Look up.” She was pointing along the cornices. “See those? Gargoyles, beside every other window! It's like a cathedral!”

Anne had loved the little guys when she was on campus, and this made her wish for a moment to put her arm around Alexis, as though she were her daughter.

“They fascinate me,” Alexis continued. “They were an expression of Gothic fear. A way of manifesting all the nasty things the people couldn't control. They didn't have the science to understand famine, plague, you know, dying. So they envisioned these monsters. Expressions of their insecurity, but lovable, too. I like to wonder what we do now. Like, what gargoyles do we have?”

“I don't know,” Anne said. “Weird little lapdogs?”

“You know what I think? I do this thing where, at night, I write down something I'm really worried about as though it has happened. Write it like a headline or something. Sometimes with a date and a place, like they do in the papers. And then I just look at it, and think, ‘Okay, so that happened.' When of course it didn't. Then I just tear it up into, like, a zillion pieces. That's like my gargoyles. Only not as cute.”

“Have you reported on not getting into Harvard?”

Alexis stopped. They were at the café's entryway. The other students had begun to clear out, and the last activity in the courtyard belonged to the frantically rummaging squirrels. Anne wondered if it was due to snow.

“No,” she said. “Why? Should I?”

“I wouldn't think so. But I'm wondering why you're interested in coming here, all of the sudden.”

“Oh.” They climbed the stairs and came out onto a long, low hallway. Alexis lowered her voice, but they were alone. “Because in truth, maybe not getting in, it's not the worst thing. I mean, maybe I don't want to go to Harvard. Maybe it's not the best place for me! And if I get in, like, how can I
not
go? But then I won't be seeing all these other places. Like, really
seeing
them. You can't see them when Harvard's in your head. If you got in, I mean.”

Anne was quiet.

“I guess I'm foreclosing on my options, is what I'm saying,” Alexis finished. They came to the café, a paper-strewn set of laminated tables on uneven legs and a smattering of mismatched chairs. Behind the counter, a tired girl with magenta hair in a headband was shoveling sugar packets into a basket. “Oh my gosh, this is so cute and cozy!” said Alexis. “I can't believe you knew this was here!”

She seemed not to know, or to have forgotten, that Anne had been a student there, and Anne didn't want to remind her; it would have meant explaining why she'd left, and she couldn't yet talk about that decision and keep her confidence about her.

“Can I have a coffee?” Alexis asked.

Anne wasn't sure what the prohibition was—caffeine? Spending cash? She raised her brow.

“Oh, just because, you know, just asking,” Alexis said.

Anne ordered two coffees. They sat.

Anne had never formally withdrawn, actually, from the university. She was technically still on leave. She could, theoretically, still march downstairs to the dean's office and reclaim her spot.

She poured milk in her coffee and watched Alexis do the same. Then followed with sugar. It occurred to her that Alexis had never had a cup of coffee before.

“Like it?” she asked.

Alexis removed her gum from her mouth and strapped it delicately to the side of her cup. She took a sip. “Delicious,” she lied.

Anne waited.

“But what if, like, I could get into Yale? Or Princeton?”

“I think you probably can.” Anne had never told a student this before. She studied Alexis's face, the pure enthusiasm sitting smooth across her cheeks, and waited for the shadow. Surely there must be something else the girl wished to talk about. What was it that drove her so hard? What specter stalked this cheerful achiever?

“Oh my God,” moaned Alexis. “So what do I do? Like, in the debate, there are, like, a million ways to think about a thing. You know?”

“All too well.”

“Like, for example, if you consider the resolution—that life begins at conception—then a person exists before the mother's body even knows it's there. There are invisible people—we can't see them, can't detect them, but we are obligated to protect them. Or so this is what you'd have to argue, to be in the affirmative. And here we have all these in vitro clinics—you know about those?”

“I do.”

“So they create these people, literally
make
them, in the lab. Pipettes, plates, the whole thing. And then, if the mom and dad aren't ready or something, they
freeze
them. Think about that. About half the time, they survive and can be put back into the mom and become a baby. It's impossible. It's like Frankenstein. If you're in the affirmative, you have to believe all of this is wrong.”

“Because you can't freeze a person.”

“Exactly! I mean, I couldn't just take you and freeze you. At least, not without your consent. And they pointed out that the biology isn't the same for adults, but that's irrelevant to the ethics. A person's rights, as we understand them, are sacrosanct, at least in this country. It's not different with respect to age, not when it comes to having a fifty percent chance of surviving. And there's no law against enforced freezing, but we may imagine there should be, or ought to be. I mean, you couldn't freeze a baby that was, say, six months old. Or six weeks old. So why six days? Why is that okay? It's okay because it's not a person.”

“Right . . .” Anne said carefully. For an instant she wondered if Alexis might be pregnant, but knew immediately that this was not so. Not even close.

“So my question is, how late is too late to freeze a person? Just 'cause you're not ready for them? 'Cause you have others to choose first? And it's not directly relevant for the purposes of the debate, but it totally wrong-footed the pro-lifers, who as I said shouldn't have had that side anyway, 'cause they were really upset. But here's the thing.”

She stopped to sip at her coffee, which she didn't seem to care for much at all, then continued: “The thing is, I think of myself, now, as, like, having a thousand versions. There's the me who could go to Harvard—I mean, if I get in. And the me who could go to Yale. And the me who goes to, I don't know, Stanford. And the me who takes a year off and does something totally different. And the me who, like, decides college is an inappropriate use of my parents' money and that I should work instead. Or—” She broke off, frustrated, and rustled through the discarded flyers on a table beside them. Flipping over one pink sheet, she read, “ ‘Graduate fellow opportunity in London, England! International comparative education study, tenure one year!' ” She slid the page across to Anne. “Or I could do that! Why not that? You see?”

“I do. I really do.”

“All I have to do is just freeze all of the me's except one. But then, I can't ever go back. I don't remember ever feeling this way before. High school was just, like, what they called the years after eighth grade. But now it's like, I have to choose that one
me,
and that's the only one I can have for the rest of my life. And the rest will die. And I just can't face that.”

Alexis blinked her clear blue eyes. She wore no makeup. Her cheeks were pink. A soft, pale mustache on her upper lip was almost shockingly candid, as though the girl had never looked in a mirror before. Anne raised her coffee and squinted a bit, to signify thought.

There were, at that time, some four thousand two- and four-year institutions of higher learning in the United States. Anne had often thought of the graduating hordes every spring, jostling to find their places, pouring into the cities and onto the trains, writing reading calling knocking. It made her crazy to think of it. But Alexis was not speaking of competition. This was something different.

“Your other students,” she added now, “what do they do?”

In all of Anne's years working with kids, not one of them had asked a question about the others. They seemed not to want anyone else to exist.

Anne set down her cup. “Alexis, where you go to college is not the same as who you are.”

“No, but it shapes me. It, like, shapes everything.”

“Unless you consider that there's a trajectory to all of this passion. That you have a destiny, an intellectual and an emotional destiny, and that this force you feel is driving you toward that. Regardless of whether you turn left or right, you'll get there. You can't
not
get there.”

“Oh!” Alexis exhaled, sending a little squall over the surface of her coffee. She set it down and put her palms to her cheeks. “Oh my gosh, that makes me cry.”

“Why?”

She looked, quickly and shyly, at the magenta-haired counter girl, who was prone over a magazine. She turned back to Anne. Her eyes shone.

“Just that it's inside me.”

“Yes. Where did you think it was?”

“I don't know. Out there. In everything out there.” She pursed her lips. “Hang on.” She bent below the table to dig through her book bag, resurfacing with a small wooden gavel with a fake metal plaque on one side. First speaker's award. She set it between them.

Alexis continued: “I guess it sounds silly now. Freezing the Yale me. Sorry. That's really embarrassing.” She peeled her gum from the side of her Styrofoam cup and popped it back in her mouth.

“No, no,” Anne told her. “It's true. Sometimes, growing up—it does feel like playing God. Like being in the lab and having to just, make things happen. Make a person. It's kind of amazing that no one's there over your shoulder, telling you how to do it.”

Alexis rolled her gavel back and forth, over the pink flyer. “I guess that's why we love teachers,” she said. “And parents.”

Anne knew from the Grants' e-mails that Alexis had long ago passed her parents in aptitude and ambition. She wasn't riding their fantasies.

“Are yours helping you with this one?” Anne asked.

“Well, you heard them. Grammar and stuff. That's their way of helping.”

“Mine, too,” Anne admitted.

“So what do I do?” Alexis asked.

“Well, you come with me to Midway. And you get on an airplane and you fly to Kansas City and you have turkey with your grandma. And in May, or January or March or whenever, you write to some lucky college and tell them
yes
. And then you go.”

Alexis nodded. She was chewing softly. She picked up her trophy and began to whack her half-spent sugar packet. “I'll never have this much choice again, though,” she said sadly.

“Actually, it's going to happen over and over,” Anne corrected her, sounding sad enough herself.

Her tone startled Alexis, who stopped her gavel and looked up.

“And that's bad?” she asked.

“I guess it just depends on how you feel about not knowing things,” Anne answered.

“I
hate
not knowing things,” Alexis declared.