But Jeffrey seemed to cling to the idea. “How much should we offer?”
“Two hundred and forty-six dollars,” Nolan said. “How the hell should I know? You think I’ve done this before?” He sighed. “Let’s say a thousand.”
“You think that’s enough?” Jeffrey asked. “That probably isn’t enough. You should ask her what she wants.”
“She works at a Milk-n-Bread.”
“Still …”
“Jeffrey, I’m not particularly interested in your judgment right now. A thousand dollars is plenty. Agreed, Will?”
“Might as well give it a try,” I said. Actually, the plan seemed terrible, but it was all we had. And a bribe seemed like small potatoes compared to robbery and kidnapping. “But who do you think ought to—”
“I’ll talk to her,” Nolan said.
Good. I didn’t want that job. “She told me her name’s Marie.”
“And you believed her?” He shook his head. “Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe I should be the one,” Jeffrey said, “since it was me who, you know …”
“You?” Nolan said. “You go in there, you’ll end up accidentally raping her.”
“Fuck you,” Jeffrey said.
When Nolan stood and left the control room, Marie’s eyes widened. She hugged herself tighter.
5
People assume that to get accepted into a school like Princeton, one needs to be an exceptionally well-rounded student. This is false.
In high school, near the end of my junior year, my guidance counselor called me into her office one afternoon and told me that my grades and test scores gave me a shot at a top college, but that I ought to sign up for more extracurricular activities. Maybe run for class office. Volunteer at a hospital. I decided to do none of those things, because I was more interested in my rock band. We called ourselves Burn, and our logo had flames, and we practiced at high decibels every afternoon in Ronnie Martinez’s unfinished basement. The way I saw it, Burn was the only extracurricular activity I ever needed.
When I arrived at Princeton, I quickly learned that my guidance counselor was wrong. Top schools don’t want well-rounded individuals. They want a well-rounded class. For that, they need kids who are especially unrounded—ones who are exceptional at physics or the cello or the writing of poems, kids who solve complicated math proofs or pilot airplanes or start up foundations to promote literacy or fight diseases in remote parts of the globe. Put them all together, there’s your class of Ivy Leaguers.
I hadn’t done anything remotely exceptional even though others thought I had. During my senior year, for the annual science fair I designed a lens for our high school’s old telescope that filtered out most of the spectral frequencies of light pollution. Later, I’d learn that this type of lens already existed. Still, it was new to me, and apparently to everyone at my school. The superintendent got me in touch with a local camera manufacturer, which followed my design and made a prototype. There was an article in the paper with a photo of me on the school’s roof, looking through the telescope at the night sky. The local network news covered the story. We made popcorn, and when my face came on the television screen, my mother cried. My father mussed my hair and kept repeating, “Look at that. Just look at that.”
The following spring, I got accepted into Princeton and Harvard and every school I applied to. Don’t get me wrong: I was a good student. Plenty of As. High SATs. But thousands of kids with As and high test scores get rejected from the top schools.
No, it was the telescope lens.
Was it a clever school project? Sure. Was it worthy of all the attention? Not really. But teachers wait years and years for a student to take the initiative in a scholarly pursuit, and when they see it, it’s as if all of their years in the profession—the meager pay, the administrative headaches, all those parents to deal with—finally amount to something. My letters of recommendation must have made me out to be the next Stephen Hawking. Colleges evidently saw me as their budding cosmologist to round out their well-rounded class, when the truth was, all I’d done was invent something that’d already been invented. I wasn’t even especially interested in science. But growing up in a city where the night sky is a constant dull orange, I just thought it would be nice to see some stars for a change.
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