Swim

I late?” she asked.
    I looked at my watch. Ten a.m. “She’s all yours,” said Lonelyguy. “Are you trying to get into college?” Caitlyn asked him. “No, he’s trying to get into women’s . . .” I stopped myself before I could say pants.
    “Hearts,” he said with a charming smile. “I’m Gary, by the way.”
    “Caitlyn,” she said, smiling back. I sat there (“Like a lox!” I could hear my grandmother moan) while they eyed each other appreciatively. It made me wonder why Gary the Lonelyguy was lonely in the first place. Clearly, he wasn’t having any trouble with Caitlyn.
    Eventually Gary picked up his backpack. “Do you have anything free later today, Ruth?”
    My last applicant was at one. “Would two o’clock work?”
    “I’ll be back,” he said. “Do you have a card or something?” I did, a very nice one, with my e-mail address, and the words application counselor beneath my name. My grandmother had had them printed up at Kinko’s the month before.
    Gary slipped the card in his pocket, raised his coffee cup in another toast, and then was gone.
    “Huh,” said Caitlyn. “Cute.” She reached into the tiny purse she’d carried last time and extracted a wad of paper that, once unfolded sixteen times, turned out to be her essay.
    I sipped my coffee and read it through while Caitlyn wandered off to provision herself with a smoothie. “For a California girl, spending two weeks in Paris was a truly transformative experience,” it began. Stifling a yawn, I arranged my face into a pleasant expression and broke things to Caitlyn asgently as I could when she came back with her cup.
    “It’s very competent,” I began. “Very smoothly written.” She took a slurp of her smoothie. “So that’s good?” She slipped off her cropped denim jacket, revealing an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt. Had the Flashdance look come back again? Had I missed it? I made a mental note to see if she was wearing leg warmers.
    “Competent’s okay, but okay’s not going to get you into Berkeley.” I tapped the first page with my pen. “Now, I can tell you had a great time in Paris.”
    Her brown eyes sparkled, and her hands danced in the air. “The flea markets were awesome! I found this cameo? On a silk ribbon?” Her fingers traced a line along her neck.
    “That sounds beautiful. Really. But there’s none of that passion on the page,” I said. Her essay hadn’t even mentioned the flea market. Instead, she’d written about the Louvre, and the Seine, and various and sundry cathedrals. The whole thing could have been lifted from a Let’s Go guide.
    Caitlyn gave me a blank look, pulled one knee up against her chest, and poked her straw deeper into her smoothie. “Passion?”
    “If you loved the flea markets, you should write about the flea markets.”
    “But that’s, like, shopping! No college is going to admit me because I like to shop!”
    “They might if you can write persuasively and with passion. If you use this essay to tell them who you really are, what you really care about. If you . . .” I rubbed my cheek. Suddenly I had a headache. What if I was wrong? What if she wrote her essay about the flea markets and the admissions people decided she was an overprivileged brat?
    I took a deep breath.“Okay. Maybe not shopping. But passion. Something else you’re passionate about.”
    She shrugged, rolling her straw wrapper between two fingers. Her nails looked worse than they had the week before. “The thing about this . . .” I tapped my pen on top of her essay, remembering the word Lonelyguy had used: generic. “A hundred kids could have written this.”
    She shrugged. “There were only twenty kids on the trip.”
    “Well, twenty kids, then.”
    “Fine.” She gathered her pages and began to refold them.
    “Well, wait. We can talk about it, if you want. Try out some different...”
    “That’s okay. I know what I’m going to write about.” The zipper on the purse was so loud I could hear it over the blenders, and over the two twentysomething screenwriters at the next table who were talking intently into the single cell phone that lay open on the table between them.
    “Well, should we talk about the interviews? You’ve got one coming up in . . .” I clicked open her file. She shook her head.
    “I’m okay. I’ll just work on this for a while. See you next week.”
    “Caitlyn . . .” Too late. She was up, and she was gone.
    I sat there for four more hours, for three more