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culinary experience. (Portia could only imagine the potluck they must have thrown
     five years later, when the student she’d recruited on that trip had won her Rhodes scholarship.) Those two counselors had
     both moved on to other jobs, but Portia still thought of them. There had been time for human contact in their conversations,
     in their inelegant cinder-block offices, on rickety folding chairs, across laden Formica desks. She still remembered their
     names and didn’t doubt those women could produce her own. But William Roden would retain only one fact about her from this
     meeting: that she represented Princeton. She might have been lacquered in ivy and leading a tiger, Portia thought, driving
     west from Deerfield and winding north into the woods. He would not remember her face, or the fact that she had grown up nearby,
     or indeed anything personal about her. It was a good thing she had given him her business card. When it came time to get in
     touch on behalf of those “one or two” students he’d mentioned, he would undoubtedly need to reacquaint himself with her name.

I would have to say that I have been inspired the most by my older brother, Tim. Tim was diagnosed with a tumor in his lower
     leg when he was 14 years old. I remember when our parents explained to him that doctors would have to remove his leg. He was
     incredibly brave. He just said, “It’s all right. I know it has to be done.” After the amputation, Tim worked tirelessly to
     rebuild his strength and learn to use his new prosthesis. He eventually joined his high school lacrosse team and now plays
     lacrosse at UNH. His fortitude and perseverance have been the greatest inspiration to me, and I hope to follow in his footsteps
     at college and beyond.
CHAPTER TWO

I NSPIRATION W AY
    A s borders went, Massachusetts/New Hampshire was not particularly dramatic. There were no long bridges to cross or welcome
     centers waiting just past the line, with placards declaring the name of the governor. There weren’t even any highways in this
     part of the state, only the lacy network of smaller roads bound from wood to wood, some of them the descendants of far more
     primitive roads from a time before the borders themselves. Even so, this reddest of red states had always felt like a very
     foreign land to Portia, or so she had been taught to feel in the bluest of blue states she was about to leave. Vermont was
     Massachusetts’s natural sibling, its cousin up north. One drove up to Vermont to visit friends, and friends of friends, and
     to attend music festivals and solar energy festivals and peace festivals. But nobody you knew lived in New Hampshire, land
     of Live Free or Die. Over there they were too busy incubating right-wing politicians and shooting their guns to take much
     of a look at solar energy or—God forbid—peace.
    Many years before, it had come as something of a shock to Portia when she’d realized, crossing the Connecticut River en route
     to her Dartmouth interview, that she had never actually been to New Hampshire. So close and yet, to a girl raised in counterculture
     splendor by a mother who was gynocentric in all but her sexuality, an utterly foreign country. As in:
Why would anyone want to go there?
    “Why would you want to go there?” her mother would indeed demand six months later. (She was referring to Dartmouth in particular.)
     Cornell was pretty. It had gorges. Portia had also gotten into Barnard. Wellesley. There was always UMass just up the road.
     But Dartmouth was a school of louts and bullies in a state of louts and bullies. Who needed it?
    I need it, Portia had thought. “It will be good for me,” she had said.
If we’re always surrounded by people like ourselves, how can we grow? How can we effect change?
She might not have actually said this part, but she was thinking it, or trying to be brave enough to think it. Because what
     she had really been thinking was unspeakable in the presence of her mother. She