Shadows Still Remain by Peter de Jonge Page B

her right is a shelf lined with parliamentary papers documenting the British slave trade from 1866 to 1877 and by the entrance a cast-iron bust honoring an old dead rich guy named Charles Winthrop, whose estate must have picked up the tab for the room. O’Hara’s high school years were a waste of taxpayers’ money, and since then she has spent more time in dive bars than libraries. That ratio, however, might be subject to change, because the tranquillity, quiet and good lighting are all deeply appealing, and not just because she’s hungover. While her young, well-heeled neighbors text and IM each other, steal music off the Internet and check the value of their trust fund portfolios, O’Hara puts her phone on “silent,” takesa long sip of coffee and cracks the first folder. Soon, she is the only person in the room who is learning something.
    Pena’s application lays out the essentials of a two-part life that are as starkly different as the upper and lower halves of her own body. Her first twelve years were spent in Chicago, the next six in a small New England town, and her essay explains how she got from one to the other. In blue script, raw and ill-formed for a high school senior, she recounts how her father, Edwin Pena, a longtime junkie, tested positive only after finally beating his heroin habit, and died three years later on a cloudless spring morning. And just as O’Hara spiraled out of control when her father died young, so did the twelve-year-old Pena. Six months later, she was sent to a boot camp for troubled teens. Every morning started with a two-mile run, and Pena discovered her gift for endurance. Pena’s mother knew a woman, more acquaintance than friend, who had moved to Westfield, Massachusetts, and that fall, determined to escape the old neighborhood, mother and daughter abruptly pulled up stakes. The only link between Pena’s two lives was her new sport. In her first three races at her new high school, Pena finished eleventh, fifth and third, and the self-confidence earned on the track spilled over to the classroom. Two years later, the barrio girl reinvented as a student-athlete won a scholarship to a tony prep school for girls called Miss Porter’s. At the end of the essay, Pena describes how events in her life sparked an interest in early adolescence, particularly that small window of opportunity, when a still impressionable young person can go up as easily as down. O’Hara knows highschool seniors will say or write anything if they think it will get them into college. They’re worse than drunk guys trying to get laid, but apparently, Pena actually meant it. Although her grades weren’t as high as O’Hara thought would have been necessary to be considered for a Rhodes scholarship—one A-minus, four Bs and even a C—six of the twelve courses she took or was taking at NYU were in the psych department. Attached to her transcript is a proposal for independent study, already approved, based on her volunteer work as a mentor to two at-risk Dominican sisters, thirteen and eleven, who, like her, are the daughters of a recovered junkie. Pena, it appears, was a girl on a mission, the rare student who arrives on campus knowing exactly what she intends to do, and then follows through. But O’Hara knows that things are rarely as clear as they seem to a headstrong teenager. Not everyone can be saved, or even wants to be. Missionaries find that out all the time, sometimes by getting killed.
    As O’Hara weighs the significance, if any, of Pena’s sharply focused application and transcripts, a particularly annoying hip-hop ring tone shatters the silence. After much too long, a male student at the table beside her casually flips opens his cell “What up, dawg?” he says. O’Hara, who to her own surprise is already feeling proprietary about the thought-conducive quiet in old Winthrop’s room, leans forward in her chair and