“Libby. Stop putting peas in your milk,” my mom says.
Libby looks up at my mom, a handful of peas poised over her cup. She puts the peas back onto her plate and then sticks her hand into her milk, trying to fish out the few floaters she dropped in before she got caught. To no one’s surprise she knocks the whole thing over and starts to cry. I grab my rag.
My dad doesn’t miss a beat. “He paints vans?”
“Yeah. Well, other stuff, too, I guess. But he said he could help … update the church van.”
I try to be gentle about the van around my dad. Although he has never admitted to it, I wonder if he might have been the artist of the headless sheep.
“Ethan, eat your chicken.” My mom is inching toward madness tonight. I hear it in her voice.
“But I don’t like chicken!”
“You like chicken nuggets,” my mom points out, her teeth clenched.
“These not chicken nuggets.”
My mom shoots my dad a look of exasperation, but he’s looking at me.
“How much would this updating cost?” My dad has an amazing ability to tune out chaos. I’m guessing that comes from enduring a decade of church council meetings.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But I could ask him?”
Eli dips a piece of chicken into his bowl of applesauce, probably trying to moisten it up, and accidentally bumps his cup, sending it over.
“Oh, for the love of God!” my mom yells, which makes Essie start to cry now. “We’re going back to the flipping sippy cups. I swear!”
I don’t know who my mom thinks she is threatening. We’d all be thrilled to go back to the sippy cups.
Probably sensing that his gift for tuning out chaos is contributing to my mom’s drift toward madness, my dad grabs the rag and starts mopping up the second cup of milk. My mom is tossing dishes into the kitchen sink. I probably should just let it go … but …
“So … the van?”
“Fine, Eva,” my dad says, more curtly than usual. “Ask him.”
Before he can overthink his sentimental feelings about the Loser Cruiser, I hop up and start making myself useful.
After another round of bath time and bedtime times four, I finish my homework and commandeer the one computer in our house. My mom and dad are watching Revenge, their television guilty pleasure.
I stare at the online application to MIT, although I know it nearly by heart. I know them all by heart: Northwestern, University of Chicago, Stanford. But I never get much farther than staring. It’s not the essays that overwhelm me; my strengths are math and science, but I can write a mean essay if I have to. My ACT and SAT scores are more than respectable and if I do an interview, I should be fine once I get past the initial handshake. What makes me stumble is the biographical information, where I have to talk about my family. I mean, it took me years to even tell Charlotte that my mom and dad are not actually my mom and dad, so I don’t know how I’m going to spill it all out to strangers in a succinct paragraph.
I don’t have to put it on my application. I could just pretend that my family is traditional and leave it at that. But I also know that my situation is unique, and it might be the thing that makes me stand out in a sea of overachieving eighteen-year-olds. I’d feel guilty using my family’s tragedy to give me a boost, but my real parents are dead. I never got to know them. If getting into college is one tiny good thing that comes out of their death … so be it. Right?
I just don’t know how to present myself as the appropriate mix of orphan and overachiever to an admissions board. And even if my grades and test scores and dead parents were enough to get me in, there’s the cost. Holy good God, the cost.
It costs $62,946 for one year at MIT. Pretty similar costs for any place I want to go. (Gotta wonder where they get that extra $46.) Four years would cost $251,784. Our house isn’t even worth that much.
The university websites are wonderful, all the text written in an informal, laid-back voice that makes you fall in love with them. They say things like, If you are admitted to insert school name here, we will make sure that you can afford to come to school name and We will help meet every single cent of your family’s demonstrated need. Um, yeah. Right. Maybe if I sell my soul. How can they possibly promise that?
The websites say that, after all that free money they can’t wait to throw at you is doled out, the average cost for a student is closer to twenty-five thousand dollars. As if that lessens the sting. It’s still a hundred grand for four years. My dad only makes about seventy-five thousand per year, and he supports a family of seven!
If I apply to all these schools — and I really, really want to apply — and I get in … how can I put that pressure on my parents? How would I ever pay them back? First they rescue me from orphanhood and then finance a completely overpriced education when they still have four more kids to raise?
In my fantasies, I go off to one of these prestigious universities, solve a medical mystery, cure myself, and make my first million before I’m thirty. Then I pay for the quads to go wherever they want for college so they don’t have to deal with this kind of stress. Reality is that I’ve been researching scholarships, which is depressing because they come mostly in chunks of less than a thousand dollars. And the amount of work you have to do just to apply for the scholarships would be overwhelming if that’s all you did. But when you go to school and tutor and do things like student council so you have something “leadershippy” on your college applications and help take care of four three-year-olds, it’s enough to make you weep into your spilled milk.
I have found one scholarship through a big corporation in Madison that gives out twenty-five thousand dollars per year for four years. That’s most of what I might realistically expect to pay at MIT or a school like that, given the “needs-based” aid they hand out to families like mine. The scholarship is extremely competitive, probably more competitive than even getting into MIT in the first place. But as far as I can figure, it might be the only way for me to bankroll my education.
The key to that scholarship — the Ingenuity Scholarship — is having something that sets you apart. Some unique talent or skill that makes you one in a million. They are vague in their description and I’m not sure if my math talent, or my visions for that matter, would qualify me. I know it’s worth a shot, but I just haven’t been able to get up the nerve.
Tonight I stare at the application again.
Please tell us about the skill, talent or aptitude that makes you unique.