Wrong About the Guy(34)

Our personalities were similar, too. We were both outgoing and quick and impatient and greedy. We got each other.

So in a lot of ways you could say we were soul mates. Which maybe meant we were destined to be a couple.

But I wasn’t feeling it. Friends, yes. But nothing more. Yet.





seventeen


I flung open the front door. “Heather’s coming,” I told George, who had appeared, at my mother’s request, to help me with my college essay. “Only not for another hour, so you can focus on me first. But then you have to focus on her.”

“Okay. Where do you want to work?”

“Where do we always work?” I led him to the kitchen and he sat down and took his laptop out of his bag.

“Your mother said you’d send me your essay ahead of time but I never got it.”

“I forgot.” Which wasn’t entirely true—I had remembered a couple of times (mostly because Mom kept reminding me) but never when I felt like running to the computer and actually doing anything about it. “Hold on.” I located the document: a rough draft that I had written during a summer essay workshop at school. It was about a trip I took to Haiti a year or so ago—the show had arranged for Luke and Michael to do a PSA calling attention to the need for adequate housing there and I’d gone with them because Luke and Mom had felt it would be educational for me.

My college counselor had said the essay was “good but needed work.” I hadn’t looked at it since then.

“It’s possible it sucks,” I said as I opened the document on my laptop and swiveled it around for George to see.

“I’ll leave myself open to the possibility,” he said, and then read silently. I watched his face for signs of approval or disapproval, but he kept it studiously blank.

“Well?” I said when he finally looked up.

“It’s a little too long. You need to cut it by about thirty percent.”

“I know. But is it good?”

He leaned back and regarded me. “Here’s the thing. It’s fine. It’s well-written and takes you on the right sort of journey. There’s nothing wrong with it exactly—”

“Wow,” I said. “Stop all the gushing. It’s going right to my head.”

He ignored that. “If you want to use this, you certainly can.”

“But—?”

“It’s just . . . It feels a little generic. Tons of students write essays about being exposed to poverty and having some kind of an epiphany because of it—as if third world countries only exist to expand our rich American minds.”

I flushed, embarrassed because he was right and annoyed at him for the same reason.

“Also,” he said, “how much did that experience really change your life?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you actually volunteer more now? Watch the news and stay on top of global events? Donate to groups like Doctors Without Borders? What did you take home with you other than a, um . . .” He glanced down at the screen and read, “‘A sense that we draw boundaries and turn our backs to keep ourselves from feeling the pain of people whose only separation from us is geographic’?”

I squirmed at hearing my own stupid words. “Okay, that may have been over-the-top.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I would definitely rewrite it. But that’s not my point. My point is, how did that trip really affect you?”

“I think about it a lot.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

I glared at him. “Okay, fine, so what do you want me to do? Add in something about how now I give all my allowance money to good causes or something like that? You don’t think that will sound smug?”


“I think it will sound smug,” he said. “Not to mention that it would be totally dishonest, since I’m guessing you don’t actually do that.”

“So what then?”

“You have a couple of choices. You can sharpen and edit this, and it will be fine. Totally acceptable. Or you could do something completely different.”

“Write a whole new essay, you mean?” I made a face. “Ugh.”

“You don’t have to. It’s your call. But—” He leaned forward. “Ellie, you’re one of the funniest, smartest, most interesting people I know. You don’t think like everyone else and that’s mostly a good thing—”

“Mostly?” I repeated. But I felt a little bit better; George never complimented me if he could help it, and he’d just complimented me a lot.

“Sometimes a good thing,” he said. “And I’m trying to make a point here, so don’t get all full of yourself. This essay could have been written by anyone—well, by anyone rich and privileged enough to travel safely to a third world country with her parents, which is a large percentage of the people applying to liberal arts colleges.”

“So what should I write about?”

“Something only you could write about.”

“Which would be . . . ?”

“I don’t know,” he said a little impatiently. “If I knew, it wouldn’t be something only you could write about, would it? Think for a second: What makes you unusual? What do you think about that most people don’t?”