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like, accounting or something.”
    “Well, I’m actually one of those people who thinks it’s better not to have too clear an idea when you go to college. Lightning
     strikes, you know.”
    “Yeah,” Joanne said uncertainly, but her classmates were crowding her aside. The orange blanket baby wanted her to know that
     his lacrosse team made the regionals last year. Hunter from the couch wanted to give her a manila envelope containing, he
     said, his recent op-ed piece in the Deerfield student paper on the anti-intellectualism endemic at the school. Portia looked
     at her watch and noted gratefully that she was nearly out of time.
    “Mr. Roden?” She looked around for him. He was standing with two ponytailed girls in front of the fireplace. She tapped her
     watch and he nodded, moving off instantly, probably leaving the girls in the middle of their angst-ridden declaration.
    “Time to go?” he said, reaching her. “Listen, this was great.”
    “Oh, I love coming here,” she said heartily. “The kids are so articulate.”
    “Yes, they certainly are. They’re happy kids. It’s a happy campus.”
    “Yes,” she agreed, because it seemed like the appropriate response. She made eye contact with her orange blanket applicant,
     and Joanne, and told the director’s daughter that she was looking forward to her application. Then they were outside in the
     bright midday sun.
    “I remember this smell of burning leaves,” she said as he walked her to the parking lot. “I think all of New England burns
     leaves the same week.”
    “It’s a decree!” Roden said. Like her, he was killing time. “So where are you off to now?”
    “Oh, Keene. I’m crossing the border.”
    “Public school?” he asked. There was an edge of hopefulness. It was bad enough that she should bestow her favors on any other
     school but Deerfield. He did not, in particular, wish to share her with his students’ most direct competitors: applicants
     from Northfield Mount Hermon, Groton, St. Paul’s.
    “No. It’s a new school, actually. I think they’ve only been going a couple of years. Outside of Keene. Wait a minute.”
    They were beside her rental car now. She opened up the passenger door and put her satchel on the seat. Then she leaned down
     and hunted out the downloaded directions. “Quest School. Do you know it?”
    “Never heard of it,” he said with notable relief. “Experimental? Sounds experimental.”
    “I actually don’t know anything about it. It’s a first visit for us. And we haven’t had any applications so far.”
    “Ah.” He seemed even more relieved to hear this. “Well, good to know what’s out there.”
    “Absolutely.” She put out her hand. “Thank you again, I think it was a very successful visit, and I can’t wait to start reading
     the applications.”
    “Yes. And one or two I’ll be writing to you about.”
    “I’ll look forward to it.”
    He waited to wave as she drove away, a piece of arcane protocol about how the departing representative of the desirable college
     must be the one to break contact. Portia knew it had nothing at all to do with her. Their interaction had been thoroughly
     predictable, professional, impersonal. Only a couple of times, in fact, over sixteen years had Portia felt any real connection
     with the college advisers she’d dealt with, and both times the locale had been thoroughly remote, both in the geographic sense
     and in terms of Princeton’s reach. The first was in the Central Valley of California, where the overwhelmed guidance counselor
     was herself newly graduated from community college and responsible for nearly six hundred seniors, many of them the kids of
     laborers or Hmong immigrants; the second took place in Sitka, Alaska, where she was the first Ivy League admissions officer
     ever to materialize, and the effusive guidance counselor had roused the entire PTA to throw a potluck in her honor, complete
     with dried bearded seal meat—an indelible