“Why don’t you join us for tea, and determine the essence of a person afterward?”
“Yes. I know for sure I’m hungry.” They walked toward the kitchen. “Felicity? Are you happy?”
“I am very happy.”
“But what things would make you happier?”
Felicity bit her lip, thinking. “I don’t need anything else. All I really want are long and happy lives for all of us.”
Through the huge windows, Erin spied Pippa and her pals jumping on the trampoline. She said, “Life is slower here. Smaller. Your houses. Your cars. Your boats. The things that make kiwis happy are different.”
“Happiness is happiness,” Felicity said.
“Yeah, but, so Hank has his boat, right? My parents’ partners’ boats are much bigger and pristine. They can live on them for a week if they want.”
“And how often do they live on those boats for a week?”
“Never, I guess. But they could.”
Felicity said, “There’s a difference between what you need in a boat and what people want in a boat. Same with houses. Same with everything. The closer together your wants and needs are, the happier you’ll be.”
“How do I know you’re not saying I should own less stuff simply because you own less stuff.”
“I’m asking which stuff you actually need to be completely yourself.”
That was food for thought.
“And something else,” Felicity said. “You’re talking about things here. Things will never make you happy. There’s always something bigger or better or newer. Life isn’t about that. Look at our neighbors who lost their homes during the quake. It was devastating, but they’re living on. Life is about what you enjoy doing and who you enjoy doing it with.”
They stared at each other, Felicity smiling warmly.
“Does that make sense?” Felicity asked.
“Yes, Mum.” Erin caught herself, panicked, then smiled. “Felicity, sorry. Yes, it makes sense.”
SEVENTY-ONE
Hours later—after tea and a bit of homework—Pippa snored lightly while Erin’s mind raced.
Always ask for what you want, and always do what makes you happy.
In Ilam’s front office on her first day, there’d been a poster: INTEREST + APTITUDE + CAREER. Four months ago, Erin’s “interest” list would’ve been completely different. It would’ve been a list of expectations forced upon her. What did she want?
She whispered, “I do not want to be a doctor.”
But what do I want?
Wide awake, Erin crept into the dining room with her backpack. She wrapped herself in blankets and opened her steno pad. In all caps, she wrote THINGS I WANT.
What was so exciting she would want to do it every day for the rest of her life?
She had fun with guitar, but that wasn’t a career for her. She loved rock climbing and swimming, but they didn’t make a life. She loved, loved physics and astronomy, but where would they lead her? Life as an astronomer? Working for NASA? An astrophysics professor?
Claire always said those who can, do—and those who can’t, teach.
Erin wanted to excise her mother’s voice from her brain.
She did want astrophysics, but Google said astronomy and astrophysics were almost exclusively graduate programs. She could start with physics.
That narrowed the field.
It would be nice to swim, but … there was no but. She wanted to swim competitively. Big schools were out, because she was good but not that good.
That narrowed it down.
And where?
Claire and Mitchell loved Columbia because they loved New York, but Erin didn’t need to be in a city. In fact, she would love to live near mountains. She would never be a mountain biker, but climbing was awesome.
A quick search yielded dozens of colleges with great climbing walls, and many with climbing clubs. She definitely wanted to stick with climbing in addition to swimming.
She wanted starry nights. Beautiful scenery she could breathe in. Easygoing people. But with interest in and access to good clothes.
She wanted a town similar to Christchurch, but with better fashion and warmer winters.
She made a second list, DO NOT WANT: religious schools, all-girls schools, schools close to Wheaton.
Her list nearly complete, she converted it to a spreadsheet.
The thing is, what she liked about Ilam—what she loved about Ilam, aside from free time at lunch and the fact that she could wake up five minutes before it was time to leave the house—was the lack of constant competition. No one really cared who was studying what, and no one had uttered the word valedictorian. Everyone acknowledged people with talent in sports and in art, but they collaborated. Erin liked competing—she really, really liked winning—but in class, competing didn’t feel productive.
Columbia had competitive admissions and a reputation for a cutthroat premed undergraduate program. Four years of cutthroat academics would be a nightmare.
DO NOT WANT: a cutthroat undergraduate experience.
She cross-referenced and Googled, removing schools consistently included in cutthroat lists. University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia fit every other bill, but no.
No school had an undergraduate astrophysics program, decent swim team, rock climbing, low light pollution, and a collaborative environment. Cross-referencing the physics program with at least two of the others whittled her list to twelve.
She pored over websites, took virtual tours, and narrowed again to seven. For Cornell, Colorado at Boulder, Wisconsin at Madison, Washington at Seattle, Stanford, Illinois Champaign-Urbana, and University of Arizona—Erin outlined a sincere essay about how study abroad had changed her.
SEVENTY-TWO
Hours later, Erin edited her passionate essay about her life in New Zealand.
All her schools took the Common Application, and Claire’s approved essay was uploaded already for all the Ivies.
Since Claire insisted on having Erin’s passwords, this would be tricky. Once applications were saved in “ready” mode, only the first hundred or so words were visible.
After the first full paragraph of her Columbia essay, Erin inserted a new one:
To Whom It May Concern:
I respect Columbia, but while you’re on my parents’ list of ideal colleges, you’re not on mine. You’ve read about helicopter parents? Mine are the worst kind: they don’t even have my best interests at heart. As you can read in the surrounding essay—which a professional essay writer edited heavily—I’ve learned a lot Down Under.
