By now, Portia had dwelt in... «Admission»
LittleGhost22 мая 2016By now, Portia had dwelt in the world of the college-aged, and the nearly college-aged, for a very long time. She knew these kids intimately, more intimately perhaps than when she’d been one of them. She knew that they were soft-centered, emotional beings wrapped in a terrified carapace, that even though they might appear rational and collected on paper, so focused that you wanted to marvel at their promise and maturity, they were lurching, turbulent muddles of conflict in their three-dimensional lives. She knew that they were dying to leave home and petrified to go, that they clung to their friends but knew absolutely that no one truly understood them. When she went out into their world, departing her ivory, literally ivy-clad tower to visit their schools — and it was oddly immaterial if their schools were sticky with wealth or held together by municipal duct tape and valiant teachers — she knew precisely who they were and what they were going through. She knew that their arrogance was laced with self-laceration (sometimes, in the case of the girls, literal self-laceration) and that their stated passions were, more often than not, arid things assembled in their guidance counselors’ offices or at the family dinner table. She knew that the creative ones were desperately afraid they were talentless, and the intellectuals deeply suspected they weren’t brilliant, and that every single one of them felt ugly and stupid and utterly fake.
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