“Oh, darling, this will be fun.” She stood from behind her oak desk and reached up to the highest shelf in the office, pulling down a slim pale yellow pamphlet. “They have a Women in Science and Engineering program. It’s just perfect for you,” she said, her dark brown eyes wide and bright. “They offer full rides to the top two students. First you get in, of course, but then you take a test in the spring to determine the money.”
I flushed, embarrassed that she knew I was a scholarship kid, though of course she did. It was her job to know.
“You have a shot,” she said. “A good one.” She thumbed through my transcript and then leaned in close to her laptop, scrolling through my resume. “Science Bowl captain for two years. Math Olympiad Scholar all four years.” She kept scrolling. “Ah, look, you’ve even tutored middle school students in physics! Do you ever sleep?” Dr. Boardman joked and threw her head back with a chuckle, her graying bun bouncing up and down.
Butterflies hummed inside my stomach. This was what I hadhoped for, for all those late nights racking up extracurricular activities, all that risk to get to the top, to be worth it. To make me, as Dr. Boardman liked to say, “marketable” to the admissions boards.
Dr. Boardman slid the shiny brochure over to me, and on the front, I saw beautiful young women laughing and sitting together on benches and in classrooms, textbooks splayed open in front of them.
Brown invests in our female scientists and technologists, said one caption.Join twenty-five incoming freshmen on the journey of a lifetime. The words sat under a photo of a group of women staring up at the aurora borealis on what looked like a class trip to Norway. I brought the pamphlet close to my face and peered at the girls. This could be me.
Everything solidified when I visited Adam last year. Mom and I had driven up early one Friday morning so I could sit in on an Intro to Astronomy class with Mallika, a tall, dark-skinned, impossibly confident sophomore from Wisconsin whoadoredthe Women in Science and Engineering program.
“I’m so glad you’re here!” she squealed when we met in front of the lab. “Showing prospectives around is my all-time favorite thing. I’m basically the ambassador to the program. Plus, I hear you’re super into astronomy, too, so it’s perfect. I just did a summer at NASA.” Mallika raced ahead and threw open the doors to a small auditorium where students were already beginning to gather for class. We grabbed a pair of seats just as the lights dimmed, signaling the professor was about to begin.
“She just got back from doing research at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii!” Mallika whispered in my ear.
As the hour raced by, my heart swelled. I wanted so badlyto be there, to be among these brainy kids, learning and growing and becoming a fuller me, one who knew everything there was to know about the stars, the sky, and the magic up above. I wanted to be friends with people like Mallika, who were obsessed with what I was obsessed with.
After the class ended, I followed Mallika into the hallway as she smiled and joked with just about everyone who passed. “Keep in touch!” she said, squeezing my arm.
I met Adam outside on the quad so he could show me, as he put it, “all the fun stuff they leave off the tour.”
“Hey, Newman,” he said as he appeared and wrapped me in one of his amazing bear hugs. “Let’s go.” Adam grabbed my hand and we started walking. I tried to stay in the moment with him; I’d wanted to be alone with him here for so long, but my brain was still spinning with diagrams and theories and constellations.
“Ta-da,” he said, after a short walk through campus. We stood in front of a dilapidated townhouse. Shingles were falling off the side and the front porch looked like it was about to cave in. “College life.”
“It’s perfect,” I said. And it was. It was exactly the kind of place that I pictured for Adam. We spent the rest of the evening playing beer pong with his roommates—three other guys in the English department who took turns ripping hits from a two-foot bong. It was so much like everything back in Gold Coast. So... normal.
My head started to spin and when I looked at my phone, I saw a text from Mom. It’s about that time...she wrote.
“Shit,” I said. “I think I have to go back to the hotel.”
Adam nodded and set the bong back down on the cracked coffee table. “I’ll walk you.”
“You don’t have to,” I said, embarrassed.
He laughed. “Come on.”
We walked together in silence until we reached the sleepy bed and breakfast Cindy Miller had recommended. This time, I was totally aware of every centimeter between us. I wished this were our default. That this was my life, permanently.
Adam stopped and turned to me. “So,” he started, his clear glasses slightly askew, making his blue eyes shine brighter than I ever remembered. “What do you think?”
“I love it,” I said.
“I knew you would.”
I braced myself for something magical. For a cosmic moment that would ripple through my veins. For our mouths to find one another. For everything to collide and make total sense. I closed my eyes and waited. But nothing happened. Instead, Adam hugged me with such a gentle grace I wanted to cry. He rested his head on top of mine and breathed in deeply. “See you soon, kid.” Then he was gone.
That night I resolved not to be the girl who followed a boy to college. This wasn’t about him, I told myself. Brown was the best. It was the right fit. Everyone said so.
It had the program of my dreams but it was also the perfect place to burst the Gold Coast bubble, to challenge everything I thought I knew, to meet people who grew up in areas that were diverse and interesting and not painted with the same brush. Where people acknowledged how insane it is to have multiple houses and cars, where the administration actually wanted students to have an array of perspectives and backgrounds, didn’t just pretend to.
So I put everything I had into that application. I spoke to Mallika and a handful of professors in the astrophysicsdepartment, gathering as much information as I could for my essay. I tried my best to explain why studying space was the only thing I could picture myself doing, and why I would be a worthy investment. I could have combed through the Files, looking for Brown contacts or help from the uber-exclusive college counselor who saw Players for free (his daughter was one five years ago). But I didn’t. Every time I went to open the app, something stopped me. I wanted to do this on my own. I wanted to see if I could. So instead, I submitted my application and prayed.
At Dr. Boardman’s insistence, I also sent in an app to State’s honors program, which, if accepted, would guarantee me free tuition.
“Plus, doesn’t their physics department have an exchange program at that observatory you love in Hawaii?” Mom asked when I told her.
