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In One Person

In One Person

Titel: In One Person Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: J Irving
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over.
    Favorite River was not in the top tier of New England preparatory schools; understandably, the academy kids didn’t apply to the top tier of colleges or universities. Most of us went to small liberal-arts colleges, but Tom Atkins saw himself as a state-university type; he’d seen what
small
was like, and what he wanted was
bigger
—”a place you could get lost in,” Atkins wistfully said to me.
    I cared less about the getting-lost factor than Tom Atkins did. I cared about the English Department—whether or not I could continue to read those writers Miss Frost had introduced me to. I cared about being in or near New York City.
    “Where’d you go to college?” I had asked Miss Frost.
    “Someplace in Pennsylvania,” she’d told me. “It’s no place you’ve ever heard of.” (I liked the “no place you’ve ever heard of” part, but it was the New York City factor that mattered most to me.)
    I applied to every college and university I could think of in the New York City area—ones you’ve heard of, ones you’ve never heard of. I made a point of speaking to someone in the German Department, too. In every case, I was assured that they would help me find a way to study abroad in a German-speaking country.
    I already had the feeling that a summer in Europe with Tom Atkins would only serve to stimulate my desire to be far, far away from First Sister, Vermont. It seemed to me to be what a would-be writer should do—that is, live in a foreign country, where they spoke a foreign language, while (at the same time) I would be making my earliest serious attempts to write in my own language, as if I were the first and only person to ever do it.
    Tom Atkins ended up at the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst; it was a big school, and Atkins would manage to get lost there—maybe more lost than he’d meant, or had wanted.
    No doubt, my application to the University of New Hampshire provoked some suspicion at home. There’d been a rumor that Miss Frost was moving to New Hampshire. This had prompted Aunt Muriel to remark that she wished Miss Frost were moving farther away from Vermont than
that
—to which I responded by saying I hoped to move farther away from Vermont than
that
, too. (This must have mystified Muriel, who knew I’d applied to the University of New Hampshire.)
    But that spring, there was no confirmation that Miss Frost’s rumored move to New Hampshire was true—nor did anyone say
where
in New Hampshire she might be moving to. Truly, my reasons for applying to the University of New Hampshire had nothing to do with Miss Frost’s future whereabouts. (I’d only applied there to worry my family—I had no intention of going there.)
    It was frankly more of a mystery—chiefly, to Tom Atkins and me—that Kittredge was going to Yale. Granted, Atkins and I had the kind of SAT scores that made Yale—or any of the Ivy League schools—unattainable. My grades had been better than Kittredge’s, however, and how could Yale have overlooked the fact that Kittredge had been forced to repeat his senior year? (Tom Atkins had erratic grades, but he had graduated on schedule.) Atkins and I knew that Kittredge had great SAT scores, but Yale must have been motivated to take him for other reasons; Atkins and I knew that, too.
    Atkins mentioned Kittredge’s wrestling, but I think I know what Miss Frost would have said about that: It wasn’t the wrestling that got Kittredge into Yale. (As it turned out, he wouldn’t wrestle in college, anyway.) His SAT scores probably helped, but Kittredge’s father, from whom he was estranged, had gone to Yale.
    “Trust me,” I told Tom. “Kittredge didn’t get into Yale for his
German
—that’s all I can tell you.”
    “Why does it matter to you, Billy—where Kittredge is going to college?” Mrs. Hadley asked me. (I was having a pronunciation problem with the
Yale
word, which was why the subject came up.)
    “I’m not envious,” I told her. “I assure you, I don’t want to go there—I can’t even
say
it!”
    As it turned out, it meant nothing—where Kittredge went to college, or where I went—but, at the time, it was infuriating that Kittredge was accepted to Yale.
    “Forget about
fairness
,” I said to Martha Hadley, “but doesn’t
merit
matter?” It was an eighteen-year-old question to ask, though I had turned nineteen (in March 1961); in due time, of course, I would get over where Kittredge went to college. Even in that spring of ’61, Tom

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