First & Then by Emma Mills
1
My college essay was titled “School Lunches, TS High, and Me,” and it was every bit as terrible as you’d expect.
I stared at a poster on the wall behind Mrs. Wentworth’s desk while she read. It was this National Geographic–looking photo of a pride of lions on a veldt. One was out front, looking particularly majestic. Golden sun dappled its mane, and whereas the background lions were looking here and there, this one’s dark eyes gazed right at me. Underneath the picture, the word ACHIEVEMENT was printed in big serif letters.
Clearly, this was supposed to inspire something in me. I wasn’t quite sure what. Run faster. Kill more gazelles. Be better than those riffraff lions hanging at the periphery.
Mrs. Wentworth cleared her throat eventually, and all she said was, “School lunches.” It posed the question “why?” without formally asking it.
“The prompt said to write a page from the story of my life. You eat an awful lot of school lunches in your lifetime, don’t you?”
“And this cafeteria food was somehow … meaningful to you?”
“There were some deeply moving mashed potatoes—I’m not going to lie.”
There was something strange happening around her lips, a weird sort of twitching motion. I think a frown and a smile were locked in mortal combat. “Devon, I really need you to take this seriously.”
She meant take it seriously like go home and write an essay about a dead relative, or a sick bird I had nursed back to health when I was little, or a mission trip to build houses in Guadalajara. I just couldn’t find it in my heart to do that. I’d never been to Mexico.
But then she surprised me. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “It’s not the topic. It’s the execution. You could’ve run with this. It could’ve been witty and inventive and really captivating. But it reads like you wrote it during a commercial break.”
I took offense to that. I wrote it during at least four commercial breaks.
“How much thought did you really give this?”
It wasn’t like I hadn’t given any thought to it. I had even gone as far as composing an essay in my head, written in the style of Jane Austen. Jane was my favorite author, hands down, and I knew that my true life’s story would be told in her style.
Jane didn’t shy away from the truth about people. I felt like I knew her from reading her books, like I knew the kind of person she had been, and it was someone who I liked a great deal. Someone who saw people for who they really were, someone who was capable of calling bullshit in the most elegant way imaginable. Jane would tell it like it was.
Unfortunately, how it was for me wouldn’t make the best sort of college essay. Miss Devon Tennyson requests admission to your university, despite the fact that she is stunningly average.
I couldn’t say any of this to Mrs. Wentworth. I didn’t expect her to understand it, how I took comfort in seeing things through Jane’s lens sometimes. She couldn’t possibly comprehend the satisfaction I drew from imagining myself as Miss Devon Tennyson and unextraordinary, as opposed to regular Devon Tennyson and just plain boring.
When I didn’t speak, Mrs. Wentworth set my essay aside. “Devon, this is crunch time. You’ve got a lot of work to do this semester if you want to get your applications competitive. Your GPA isn’t bad, but your extracurriculars are definitely lacking. Are you at least aware of this?”
One brief tryst as girls cross-country team manager. One failed run for Homecoming Court. One nonspeaking role in the drama department’s annual desecration of Beauty and the Beast. I was definitely aware of it.