Free Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz Page A

visit the campus, we can match you up with an undergraduate
     and you can stay with him in his room.”
    “Okay,” he said, looking at the card. “Portia,” he read as if she weren’t there. “Like
The Merchant of Venice
.”
    “Yes. My mother had the idea that if she named me that, I would grow up to be very wise. I’m lucky she didn’t name me Athena.”
    “Or Minerva,” Jeremiah said. “Or Sophie. But a lot of people are named Sophie. They probably have no idea that’s what their
     name means.”
    Portia frowned.
    “Or Metis. That would be really strange. Or Saraswati. Yeah, I think you probably got lucky. If you’ve got to be called something
     that stands for wisdom, you probably couldn’t have done any better.”
    She just looked at him. He stood by the door, his book resting against his thigh. He had delivered this disjointed speech
     in profile, his rather aquiline nose directed at the great picture windows at the end of the room. Now he lingered for a final
     minute, utterly without self-consciousness, and finally turned and left.
    “Interesting kid,” Portia said, removing the DVD from her laptop and placing both into her brown leather satchel.
    “I guess. We’re so used to him. We let him alone, mainly, but we do make him produce scholarship, otherwise he’d keep going
     the way he was before. He told you about his old school?”
    She nodded. “So… he doesn’t take classes here?”
    “Oh sure. Well, he attends, but his mind is usually otherwise engaged. We decided not to fight it. That’s what they did at
     Keene Central, to ill effect.”
    “They threw him out?” she asked, shouldering her bag.
    “Well, they were headed in that direction. I met him at a yard sale last spring. He was sitting on the ground reading a 1952
Encyclopedia Britannica
. Letter
S
.” John grinned. “He said he was looking into the source material for
King Lear
. He told me he was on academic probation. We started getting together at Brewbakers on Sunday afternoons.”
    “Brewbakers?”
    “Only cappuccino in town.” He shrugged. “Anyway, he started here this fall, and it’s working, as far as I can tell. He’s preparing
     a lecture for the entire school about pop art right now.” He shook his head. “On the day we assigned it, it happened to be
     pop art. If we had assigned the lecture a few days earlier, it might have been the Beats. A few days later, it could have
     been the Armenian genocide. He’s like that game show where they let you loose in the supermarket for five minutes and you
     have to grab everything you can, except we can’t seem to convince him he has more than five minutes. He can take his time.”
    “He mentioned that his parents hadn’t gone to college.”
    “No. They seem like nice people, but they don’t connect with him very well. You know, he was supposed to be playing football
     at Keene Central by now and racing motocross on the weekends. Jeremiah was never going to be like that.”
    She nodded. There had often been Jeremiahs in the applicant pool. They were attractive to the faculty, who some years earlier
     had flatly asked for more of them: fewer golden kids who did everything well, please, and more awkward kids who were brilliant
     but couldn’t tie their shoes. The faculty themselves, she suspected, had once been awkward, brilliant kids who couldn’t tie
     their shoes.
    “Are you going back now?”
    “Oh no. I’m staying over in Keene tonight. I’m going to Northfield Mount Hermon in the morning, then I’ll fly back from Hartford.”
    “Northfield’s a great school.”
    “Yes. We’ve had wonderful applicants from Northfield.”
    She stopped. She was aware, for the first time, of something awkward between them, something she had to call upon herself
     to ignore, or resist. She didn’t particularly want to look at it directly.
    “Let me walk you out,” said John.
    Outside the sunlight was in its last, brilliant blare of the day. The hay in the fields was