10. Likelies/Targets/Reaches #3
Andrew Eastman’s father must sit on the board.
Audre gave Mav a folder thick with paperwork, which would have included the names of Tiffin’s board of directors.
But Mav has been so focused on his new job (and on scouring Colbert’s Instagram account for signs of Amanda and the boys) that he hasn’t given the Tiffin board a proper vetting.
Mav runs down the list of sixth-formers before him. There’s no Andrew Eastman listed. How is that possible?
Mav makes a note to check on this and turns his attention back to Liam. “Tell me about your dream college.”
“I’ve never seen any place but Queens College,” Liam says. “I always thought I’d go there part-time while I worked.”
“But that’s not exactly your dream, is it?”
“No sir. My dream is a campus like this, with grass and trees and fancy buildings, and good food like they have here.”
Mav laughs. “There isn’t a college in America with food as good as Tiffin’s.”
“I guess I want as close to this as I can get,” Liam says.
“Small,” Mav says. “Someplace with a real campus feel.” As he starts making a list for Liam—Bowdoin, Williams, Davidson—he remembers why he loves his job. He’s in the business of making big dreams come true.
Mav writes: Salt of the earth, working-class background, brother OD’d, good character / strong work ethic (missed SAT to cover a shift for a sick coworker), needs full scholarship, rooting for him.
Beneath this, Mav writes: Who is Andrew Eastman???
Charlotte “Charley” Hicks—Harvard, Columbia, Colgate, Bucknell, Skidmore, George Mason
GPA 4.0 (transfer last year from Loch Raven High School, Towson, Maryland); SAT 1550; ’Bred Bulletin (editor in chief). Work experience: Towson Hot Bagels, Enoch Pratt Public Library. Hobbies: reading, plants.
Finally, Mav thinks, someone who understood the assignment.
Charley Hicks has not only given him a wide range of schools, she’s the only person who listed hobbies.
Mav isn’t surprised she listed reading. When Mav met Charley at the Move-In Day cookout, she asked if he’d read any good books over the summer.
“Yes,” he said. “I took it upon myself to read all of Elizabeth Strout.”
Charley cried out as though Mav had set her on fire (in a good way).
The two of them talked Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton—and all the other sixth-formers who had come to welcome Mav to Tiffin (in other words, kiss up) had drifted away, pulling out their phones (probably to google “the Amgash series”).
“Please take a seat, Charlotte,” he says.
“You can just call me Charley,” she says—and Mav thinks, Right, she told me this at the cookout, why am I being so formal? He feels weirdly nervous. Charley is an exceptional kid, and he finds himself wanting to impress her.
She gazes at the framed posters hanging behind his desk and points to the one over Mav’s left shoulder. “That’s Degas, right? He did the ballet dancers?”
“Yes,” Mav says.
“Is that Degas as well?” she asks, pointing to the poster over Mav’s right shoulder.
Mav turns. “No, that’s Renoir. Girl with a Fan. Both paintings are from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. It’s an hour or so west of here.”
“I’ve never been,” Charley says. “I’ll have to go.”
She’s just being polite… but Mav will take it.
“Thank you for writing down a range of colleges,” Mav says.
“You were the only person who did so.” The instant the words are out of his mouth, he imagines his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Amanda, frowning: Already picking favorites.
But Amanda isn’t in his office. She’s seventy-three miles away at Colbert, probably sexting her principal friend.
“I have to admit, I was pleased to see Colgate on your list. That was my alma mater.”
Charley’s eyebrows jump. “My father went to Colgate. He graduated in 1996. He was a Theta Chi.”
“I was a Theta Chi!” Mav says. “I graduated in ninety-eight.” He checks Charley’s last name again. “Is Thad Hicks your father?”
Charley pushes up her glasses. “He is? Was? He died two years ago.”
Mav flinches. “Oh, Charley,” he says. “Oh god, I am so sorry to hear that.” Mav hasn’t thought about Thad Hicks in years—decades—but hearing that Thad is dead still feels like a loss.
“I knew him in college. He was our fraternity president, we all looked up to him. If I remember correctly, he was headed to law school. Georgetown, right?”
Charley nods.
“I can’t believe I have Thad Hicks’s daughter in my office right now. He was a great guy, which you already know because he was your dad.” Mav chuckles. “He’d study at Case until eleven, then show up at the Jug ready to rip it up. Your dad bled maroon, I can tell you that.”
Charley heard that Tilly Benbow left Mr. Maverick’s office in tears, but Charley never imagined she’d be crying as well. She can’t believe Mr. Maverick went to Colgate and knew her father—knew him before Charley knew him, before her mom knew him.
Thad used to tell Charley stories about Colgate when her mom wasn’t around, because Thad had a serious girlfriend in college named Carol Passmore who sang with the Swinging Gates, the female a cappella group.
Thad told Charley that everyone thought he and Carol would end up married, but they broke up after graduation.
Charley says, “Did you know my dad’s college girlfriend, Carol Passmore?”
“Yes!” Mav realizes he should probably tamp down his enthusiasm, but just hearing these names—Thad Hicks, Carol Passmore—makes Mav feel like he’s nineteen again, walking from Stillman to the Coop.
Carol was best friends with Bonnie Yeo, the girl Mav had a crush on.
He used to try to buy Bonnie drinks at the Jug.
(Mav will never love another bar the way he loved the Old Stone Jug.) “I’m friends with Carol on Facebook. I’ll have to tell her I met you.”
This is followed by an awkward silence, which Charley breaks by saying, “I have a question.”
“Right!” Mav says. “We’re here to talk about college admissions…”
Charley laughs. “It’s not about college admissions, actually.”
“Good!” Mav says. “You’re my tenth appointment of the day, and I’m tired of talking about colleges!”
“I’m the editor of the ’Bred Bulletin this year—”
“Yes, I saw that mentioned on your…” Whoops! Mav has interrupted. Amanda used to accuse him of never letting her finish a sentence, and he told her she was too sensitive. “I’m sorry, go ahead.”
“I’d like to interview you for the paper.”
“Wonderful, of course, yes,” Mav says. He checks his desk calendar.
Back at Colbert, because he was married to Amanda and had two boys at the school, Mav didn’t have a free minute.
There were always donor dinners, sporting events, awards banquets.
But now his days are baggy with time. His apartment in Haydensboro is only three doors away from a bar called the Alibi, and already the bartender, Jefferson, knows Mav by name.
“I could meet you at the Grille on Sunday afternoon around three?”
“That works,” Charley says, typing into her phone.
“I have a question for you,” Mav says. “Also not about college admissions.” His voice is still too animated; he hears Amanda’s vicious whisper: You’re at an 11 and I need you at a 3.
“Would you be interested in an art appreciation class? It wouldn’t be for credit, but I’ve been thinking that, since the school doesn’t offer any kind of art history, I could teach a course about the great painters, maybe one evening a week?
” He pauses. “I was an art history major at Colgate.”
Charley shrugs. “Sure, I’d come. I’d like to learn the difference between Degas and Renoir.”
And Seurat and Monet and Manet—and Vermeer and Modigliani and Rembrandt.
And Rubens! Matisse! Botticelli! (Mav did his senior thesis on Birth of Venus.) Now it feels like someone has set Mav on fire (in a good way).
He won’t get paid for this extra bit of enrichment, but he doesn’t care.
He feels driven by a sense of purpose. Tiffin kids should know about art.
After Charley leaves his office, Mav stares at his computer, wondering what he can say about such an exceptional student, one open to learning for learning’s sake.
He writes: Let this girl into all the colleges.