“So, anyway, I’m sure I flunk the damn test, because I’m an Indian from the reservation, and I can’t be that smart, right? I mean, I’m the first person in my family to ever graduate from high school, so who the hell do I think I am, trying to go to college, right? So, I take the test and I did kill it. I killed it, I killed it, I killed it.
“And now, you want to take it away from me, a poor, disadvantaged, orphan minority who only wants to go to the best college possible and receive an excellent Catholic, liberal arts education, improve his life, and provide for his elderly, diabetic grandmother who has heroically taken care of him in Third World conditions.
“And, now, after all that, you want to take my score away from me? You want to change the rules after I learned them and beat them? Is that what you really want to do?”
Mr. Williams smiled, but none of his teeth showed.
“I didn’t think so,” said Roman as he turned away from the desk. He stepped through one door, walked past a woman who’d decided to hate him, and then ran.
As a high school senior, Grace Atwater had also been accepted into St. Jerome the Second University, not because of her grades, which were only average, but because she’d obtained those average grades at the Pierpoint School, one of the most exclusive private high schools in the country. Grace was the only Native American to ever attend Pierpoint, but she’d always known her Indian blood had nothing to do with her admittance. Her mother, Ge Kuo, the Chinese-American daughter of parents who’d never left China, had been the music teacher for twenty-three years. Still, to her credit, Grace had worked hard, fought her way past an undiagnosed case of dyslexia, and surprised everybody with a perfect score on the CAT — the highest score ever for a Native American. She’d also submitted a personal essay that had surprised the St. Jerome admissions board.
To Whom It May Concern, began Grace’s essay. This is the invocation I want to hear if I am accepted into your wonderful institution:
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to St. Jerome the Second University, or as we affectionately call it, Saint Junior.
You are a very special group of students. In fact, the very best this great country has to offer. This year’s incoming freshman class has an average high school grade point average of 3.81.
You have an average CAT score of 1280. Among you are forty-two American Merit Scholars.
One hundred and ten of you were president of your senior class. Seventy-five of you were president of your student body.
One hundred and sixty-two of you won varsity letters in various athletic endeavors. Sixty-three of you have received full athletic scholarships and will compete for St. Junior’s in basketball, soccer, volleyball, tennis, and track.
You have excelled. You have triumphed. You have worked hard and been rewarded for your exemplary efforts. You have been admitted to one of the finest institutions of higher education in the world. Please, give yourself a hand.
Good, good. Now I want you to hold out your right hand, palm up.
Now, I want you to think hard about all that you have accomplished so far in your young lives. I want you to think about all the trophies on your mantels and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. I want you to think about all the news clippings in your scrapbooks and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. I want you to think about all the letters on your jackets and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. I want you to think about all of your accolades and rewards and imagine you’re holding them in your right hand. Can you see them? Can you imagine them? Can you feel them?
Good, good. Now, I want you to crush all of that in your fist. I want you to grind it into dust and throw all of it away.
Because none of it means anything now. Today is your new birthday. Your new beginning. And I am here to tell you that twenty-five percent of you will not make it through your freshman year. I am here to tell you that more than forty percent of you will not graduate from this university. I am here to tell you that all of you will engage in some form of illicit activity or another. In premarital sex, in drug and alcohol abuse, in academic dishonesty and plagiarism. And you will tell lies. To yourselves, to each other, to your professors, to your confessors, to me. Most of you will fall in love and all of you will not be loved enough. And through all the pain and loneliness, through all the late hours and early mornings, you will learn.
Yes, you will grow from the frightened and confused teenagers you are now into the slightly less frightened and slightly less confused adults you will become.
I am Father Arnold, President of St. Jerome the Second University. May God bless you in all of your various journeys.
Three weeks before Grace left for St. Jerome, her mother died of breast cancer. Grace had never known her father — he’d fallen off a building and was buried in the foundation of the Rockefeller National Bank Building. When she was sixteen, Grace had opened up a savings account there and, without fail, had deposited one hundred dollars a month.
After they’d graduated together from St. Junior, Grace and Roman were married in a quick Reno, Nevada, ceremony and then flew to Greenland where Roman played shooting guard for a horrible team called the Whales. They won two and lost thirty-five that first season, despite Roman’s twenty points and ten assists a game. The next year, the Whales won their first five games before the entire league went bankrupt. Grace and Roman then moved on to twelve other countries and nineteen other basketball teams in ten years before she’d woken up one bright morning in a Hilton Hotel in Madrid, Spain, with the sure knowledge that she wanted to return to the United States.
“Roman, are you awake?”
“I think it’s time for us to go home.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve done all you can do over here.”
She’d supported him, emotionally and spiritually, had traveled with him to more places than she cared to remember. She’d eaten great food and had been food-poisoned six different times — she couldn’t look at a mushroom without retching — and she was reasonably fluent in five different languages. How many Indians could say that? She’d watched every minute of every one of his games — only God knows how many — and had held him equally tight after good and bad performances.
She had never loved him because he was a basketball player. In fact, she’d loved him despite the fact that he was a basketball player. She’d always understood that his need to prove and test his masculinity was some genetic throwback. Given the choice, he’d rather have been a buffalo hunter and soldier killer than the point guard for the Lakers, but there was no such choice, of course. He couldn’t be an indigenous warrior or a Los Angeles Laker. He was an Indian man who’d invented a new tradition for himself, a manhood ceremony that had usually provided him with equal amounts of joy and pain, but his ceremony had slowly and surely become archaic. Though she’d never tell him such a thing, she’d suspected his ceremony might have been archaic from the beginning. After all, the root word for warrior was war, and he’d always been a peaceful and kind man, a man who’d refused to join anybody’s army, most especially if they were fighting and killing for something he believed in.