Candace Berelinsky P. Berg

Candace held many leadership positions in high school, including class president, Student Council vice president and treasurer. She was a National Merit Scholarship winner, a member of the National Honor Society, and she also made the Short Track Speed Skating Junior National Team. She received four varsity-letters in pole-vaulting. She played violin, clarinet, and an extinct style of harpsichord. She was elected an American Academy of Achievement Honor Student (top 400 chosen annually), Vogue Teen of the Year, and an Overall Great Person. She was valedictorian of her class, three times in a row. She was active in her school’s gay/lesbian awareness group. She can speak twelve languages, including Plutonese and Mandarin. She prevented alien colonization of Earth, a covert attempt to assassinate the president (of the United States), and intercepted a sidewinder-missile mid-air in a helicopter while the pilot was unconscious. She can defuse the atom bomb. She’s never been kissed (she proclaims), and her physician reassures her that she’s a virgin, which will (she hopes) be beneficial to score high marks in Art History class. Her brother has a high-ranking position in the mafia. Sometimes on Sundays she stands in the field outside of the Community Center and stares at boys doing drugs beneath the gym awning.
Candace Berelinsky P. Berg has experienced great tragedy. When she was ten years old her dog was put down because of terminal-staged melanoma. Its lips bled premonitory red dots onto the snow when she was playing with it in the backyard. Her mother, preternaturally skilled at guessing the illnesses of those around her, knew it was cancer at once. Candace refused to leave the room while her dog was being put down. She stared into its eyes, watching its neck flounderingly twitch while resisting constraint. It bothered her that she could not pinpoint the exact moment of its death.
When Candace Berelinsky P. Berg was fifteen years old, her maid succumbed to a painkiller overdose. It was later found out that the maid had been stealing them from Candace’s medicine cabinet - she had been prescribed them when she broke her arm working with mentally challenged and gravely malnourished children in Djibouti. At the time, Candace could not comprehend how anyone could commit such an appalling act. Other great tragedies that Candace Berelinsky P. Berg has experienced include: radiation exposure, mild schizophrenia, and breast cancer. Sometimes on Sundays she stands in the field outside of the Community Center and stares at boys doing drugs beneath the gym awning, thinking of a way to approach them without them ridiculing her. She did not participate in the school’s marching band.

Stats
SAT: 1600 (800 Verbal, 800 Math)
SAT Subject Test(s): 800 Writing, 770 Math Level 1, 790 Math Level 2, 780 Chemistry, 760 literature, 800 French
ACT: 45
High School GPA: 4.48 (out of 4.50) + weighted
High School: Jonathan Buffler Day School, Fort Lee, NJ
Hometown: Fort Lee, NJ
Gender: Female
Race: Caucasian

Applied To
Boston College
Brown University
Georgetown
Harvard College
Tulane University (early decision)
Yale University (early decision)
Oxford University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
etc.
Essay
Candace submitted the following essay to every school to which she applied, in response to generic variations of the prompt: Tell us about a person/experience that has had an impact on your life.

No.

I thought about leaving my application anonymous. I wonder if anyone would have read what I wrote, if I had done so. I don’t think that my name, or anyone else’s, has anything to do with what colleges read on applications and their required essays. What matters, you see, much more than the person or the person’s name, is the numbers and letters (most importantly the numbers) included extraneously with the application. I doubt that most kids applying to college are helping cancer patients because they enjoy doing so. It’s not about you, it’s about how you advertise yourself. It’s about making for lucrative brochure pictures once they accept you.

I spent the entire day yesterday on the front porch, in the obligatory wicker chair. Lately I’ve been wondering if…I should have ever saved the world from alien colonization. If it was worth saving. Seeing how it’s only made everything after the event in my life feel empty in comparison, I’d hoped that it would have been for the good of the people that weren’t going to have a chance, for those other than me. As it turns out, most of the world’s populace isn’t going to have a chance anyway, and the ones that do usually just ignore or displace it on those that don’t.

I’ve picked up a bad smoking habit. I had over five cigarettes today. Can’t say that I’ve thought much about the future of my habit, but I also can’t say I live much in the present. Most of the time, I’m absent-minded, imagining myself failing at the things that my parents obsessively impose on me. It’s very, excuse my language, fucking frustrating meeting educational and vocational standards—good grades, college, job family. One of these days I wouldn’t mind waddling off into the middle of a highway and gurgling a bottle of cough syrup like my brother does.

Yesterday I watched him unplugging the toilet with the valiant theatrics of a super-hero. He had this maliciously gleeful grin on his face, something I haven’t seen him exhibit for years. It’s so easy…to convey how you feel through someone else’s implanted voice. Maybe this is why it’s so easy (language) to bullshit college essays. I’ve read more of them than I have fashion magazines. You can almost predict the turgid words that are going to be used in ten-word intervals. On my Word Processor, the version I’m currently using, it automatically corrected my fabricated word “intervallically” as “interracially.” It’s obstinate to innovation.

I read this essay about a girl…dreaming about what her pillow looked like. How cold her floor was in the morning. I also read an essay about page X of so-and-so’s autobiography—my, how genuinely self-righteous and epiphanic!—and then, finally, I came across an essay that someone wrote rebelling against writing college essays. I must say, I feel subjacent jumping on the band-wagon.

For the first time in my life I’ve been invited to a party. When I arrived, I didn’t understand. All I could think about was that if the penguin boy kept flailing around the way he did, he’d spill the red plastic cup of beer in his hands. And he did. Everyone seemed enthusiastic to talk to as many people as possible in a competitive manner.

Now that all my applications are finished my mother encourages me to go outside and spend time with my friends. What beautiful days take place outdoors! She finds it easier to repress that I don’t have friends. The ones I’ve tried to make sit in front of the super-market all day staring at the cheer leaders. What I don’t understand is: are all the cheerers, leaders? To cheer do you necessarily need to be a leader? Are they called cheer leaders because they lead other people to cheer? But then, wouldn’t they be cheering for the cheer leaders, and not the team that the cheer leaders are advocating? Why do I always get the feeling that someone wants to kiss me but can never be sure of it?

The truth is, I didn’t prevent the alien colonization of Earth alone. I had assistance from my parents, and a couple recommendations from professors that gaze at me in ways that are void of education.

Will using words like “puissance” to describe music theory abet my chances of acceptance? I applied once to the Simon’s Rock college of Bard, and was rejected. If only I knew then what I know now about writing college essays! It is crucial to pertain to the subject; it is best to use words such as puissance to describe music theory.

Example: In Peter Schaffer’s play Amadeus, Antonio Salieri, describing the raw emotive puissance of Mozart’s work, etc. It wasn’t about music theory, it was about opera—but that’s of no matter to me; hints of plagiarism send pangs of amoral ardor throughout my body.

I daydreamed earlier today of a woman in a vermillion cowboy-esque shirt, unbuttoned inappropriately for a professor (she was a professor), approaching a disconsolately handsome boy sitting on the hood of a beguiling sports car. The professor is androgynously alluring, with attenuated eyebrows and rustically blond hair. She assizes the boy, “Shouldn’t you be in class?” They stare into each other’s eyes longingly. Then, the boy blurts. “For some reason I get the idea that the way you’re looking at me is not educational.” She continues to stare into his eyes, flushed, then hops up next to him on the hood of the car, and…

…And then I get daydreamer’s block, because I can’t imagine what would be the most plausible outcome of this situation. I want them to elope with each other (I want the boy to—) but I can’t comprise a situation realistic enough for this to execute successfully. You’re probably wondering, well, since it’s a merely a daydream, it’s not necessary or reasonable to make sense—but it is! Who’s to say that my daydreaming isn’t any less real than my tangible life anyway.

So they’re reclined on the hood of the car together. The vermillion cowboy-esque shirt appears iridescent in contrast to the drab surroundings of the professor and her…student. Her student! Of course; how could he be anything but? She has an erudite, unkempt beauty to her; in fact, she looks better than she did when she was in college herself and had a nubile, coquettish frame. Are professors supposed to have their shirts unbuttoned that candidly? he wonders. But she’s one of the kooky English professors, administers one of those abstract lit classes that’s unheard of by most on campus; she’s written a couple of excessively frank, subsisting-in-the-face-of-adversity, artless novels that are praised by Oprah viewers. To the contrary, the boy is a naturally gifted writer. They are both restless insomniacs—she struggles to be, he, physiologically. Last night he imagined something living beneath the sofa. He rearranged all the books in his room so they were facing upwards. He can’t stop himself from breathing too fast, or mitigate his frantic heartbeat. The other faculty won’t stop talking about his virtuosity; could the forlornly precocious student draw the attention of the most neglected professor on campus? A prevalent rumor a couple weeks ago that she slept with one of the janitors.
He almost shakes in his stillness, gawking at her behind his feigned composure. The thought of her ministering to his misery excites him, that she’s a prosaic writer even more. He’ll read all her books, savoring every turgid adjective, every foreseeable twist. Crimson! Scarlet! Garnet! Sparkling snow, blistering suns. Rough, tender hands.
In every college essay I read, these kids recall incidents of when they were “little”, gorge themselves on cliché flashbacks that they think will cause the admission’s officers to empathize. I wonder if they even do it consciously. Not all adults are your parents.

The woman in the vermillion cowboy-esque shirt visits his dorm-room after hours. She finds it empty, so she wanders in, cautiously admiring its state of disarray. What she doesn’t know is that he’s only down the hall, taking out the trash. She sits down on the edge of his bed and peers into the journal he has opened on his nightstand. There’s an entry…about her. It’s the most recent one; he must have just been writing it.
“I met my new English teacher today and she was very kind not to report me for skipping class but I just want to touch her breasts. I just want to touch her breasts. I imagine that she’s self-conscious about how small they are. I imagine her areolas are dilated. I imagine that she knows how to fall in love.”
The boy slides back into his room and sees his teacher there, reading his journal. She purses her lips and, preoccupied by ethic, critiques him, then knowing what she will inevitably succumb to, leaves the room solemnly.

At the school that I went to there was a math professor that passionately loathed football players. She was notorious for failing the entire varsity line. She was beautiful, with restraint (enhanced in certain areas), and I noticed that most boys paid attention to her classes more than others, they just didn’t pay much attention to what she lectured. How old do you have to be to fall in love with your professor? I can’t say that I haven’t daydreamed about the prospect myself.
“What would you do if your sensual English teacher was ‘excited to work with you?’”
To become an integrated member of any faculty one must be deprived of some sort of crucial aspect: intimacy, a fix. I don’t know much about being an adult otherwise I’d provide a longer list. However, I do know that every hermetic pedagogue must fantasize about their students from time to time. Not doing so would be inhuman, idealistic.
Overheard by an astute student during one the vermillion professor’s lectures: “In accordance to…Quite a relevant point that…vacillating…Finnegan’s Wake…George Orwell, ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’…is getting tired…Which had such a profound impact upon…Often, sometimes, there was a tinge of, something unheard of, I’m not really sure how to explain - …‘cultural criticism’…literary criticism was inexplicable from…thus…these critics continually failed to express…failed to distinguish…” etc. It turns us on that our professor is wearing a vermillion cowboy-esque shirt yet could not be further away from being a cowboy.
The boy nibbles a bit of his tongue in his sleep.
“I’m aggressively ignoring you.”
“Why?”
“Because you never attend my lectures.”
“It’s nothing personal.”
She incredulously piques her brow.
When deliberately coy professors doff their glasses without relinquishing their ocular fixation!

The boy needs to talk to someone about a bad habit he’s picked up that he doesn’t have. “For some reason I’ve started cleaning the toilet with my tongue.” In fencing class, he defeats the instructor within five minutes having never wielded a foil before. He is unmannered to particulars—hasn’t memorized restaurant menus and rehearsed the names of gourmet dishes, picks his nose until it bleeds, never long-windedly debases his ex’s to potentials—writes until 4 A.M. in the morning and knows how to feel. The professor procures solace in writing pedantic essays on abstruse topics that have antiquated. As an adolescent, she was one of the quiet, self-effacing, telluric girls that sprung straight out of the ground, planted in the dirt garden of the self-righteously neglected section of the backyard. Girls brimming with pneumatic romance, and their aerial love is never quite enough for anybody to feel satiated by it. Occasionally they’ll write a line in an abstract poem that is strikingly profound, but besides these limited windows of coherence no one can decipher the hidden meanings of what they scribe aside from the corresponding boys and girls that have sprung from the ground. If you squint your eyes and look hard enough you can even see the crown of their heads still caked with dirt.
Sometimes I can randomly feel my brain leak serotonin. I try to keep it level in hopes that my happiness won’t ooze onto the street from my ears. I imagine it as a silver puddle, seeping into storm drains and flushed away, indefinitely. Years of stifled anti-depression, and to what end?
The truth is, I just want to sleep with everyone. I used to care about plots and crises and being coerced into Harvard, but now I know the truth. I saw a boy under the influence of phencyclidine stare a buck deer right in the eyes and conceive a transient and insightfully transcendent yet dooming epiphany in them. The buck stuck its tail between its legs and magnanimously backed down.
It’s about who you know. It’s about your “connects.” It’s about who’s got a more expensive blackberry. What are you abouting about? I don’t know, my insomnia has confounded me! We should talk about the vermillion professor. She’s been…acting out of sorts lately. She no longer participates in mandatory faculty meetings to discuss what color the balloons fastened throughout the hallways should be on Halloween. Her demeanor suggests something immoral on her mind.



(dis)
COVER

The boy seeks desperately for adjectives to tack on the vermillion professor and desperately seeks out pictures of her on the insides of the jacket sleeves of the reproved books she’s written and intently skims the books themselves aroused during the scenes where adolescent girls starkly unveil their sexuality with a palate of brisk clean strokes of the back hand and self-repudiated peach fuzz and back hairs study of imagination and slippery close attentive to sinuous demands I have no idea what she’s referring to but the syntax is redemptive? occasionally she’d lower her elbows onto her desk with a languishing and dejected facial expressions must’ve been some time in fall the roguish leaves were frolicking in the air fickly poking people jammed in traffic on the highways that sag closest to the water where the amusement-park junkies stare at graffiti for days. Got lost reading her in bed thinking of ways to best her when he already has which derails his subsequent writing. A meretricious and atmospheric tale of intoxicative and bawdy love. Before administering her lecture she comments on the “dernier cri” of his sneakers. On the way home to his dorm he has a panic attack in ten degrees below Fahrenheit and faints beneath a mail box absconding the direction he’s not directed towards. Everyone’s terrifying when their heart’s beating too fast, even lovers. And the vermillion professor lingers at her desk, her skin resembling the hemispheres of his brain, the meager wrinkles beneath her eyes morosely visible, enough to covet being inside of her and manhandling her too ardently, bruising her frail shoulders, her gnarled body and acicular delinquent chest. When you need what you want you’ll never want it again.
“I don’t know about you guys but I’m sorely worried my life’s going to end before it starts.”
“What in God’s name do you mean?”
“I’m waiting for my life to start!”



(exp)
LORE

Desk is frenetic and prepossessing. The maids don’t even bother to clean her office anymore. I’ve witnessed her trying to swat flies off the ceiling, her vermillion shirts aloft and exposing her midriff, the trunk of an emaciated tree. There’s better food in indigent states, third-world countries. The disconcerting quality of reading something cynically existential written by an adult. Standing in front of the entrance to your old high school, supine, arms dangling languidly. Extreme misfits nothing-stricken perched on the front steps famishing for attention. I left my phone in the cup-holder of the car. There’s a spider crawling up my leg. I read a story about a spider that a naughty boy let loose in his sister’s bed; bit her and paralyzed her from the waist downwards. All the social workers have pop-psychology degrees, haranguing girls with dormant mothers; pep-talks on submitting their homework on time.

“I’m totally lost as to what to do with you. I’m lost as to what to do with you…me.” She confesses to the mirror. She cradles herself, “Sshh now don’t be like that…”—Alarmed!: she’s forgotten his name.
Her writing reads as if it makes sense but doesn’t. She spends time alone because it fuels her image of herself; he spends time alone because he’s inured to it. Within five minutes of talking to her one can tell that she’s argued her entire life and although one would think this would make her good at it, she simply takes content in being wrong. She doesn’t believe in marriage yet thinks about it every day.
“In your story you break one of your fingers while carrying groceries for you mother. True or false?”
“True. I have brittle fingers.”
“‘Murderously’ does not mean capable of murder or murder-like.”
“I’m…sorry.”
“For making a grammatical error?” She admires his pleadingly obsequious face.
A bird slams into the window, cracking it into glass veins. The two of them stare into each other’s eyes. She has a mature beauty to her that makes him feel unique in having discovered it. His lips hopelessly parted. In his mind, he leans in to kiss her. In her mind, he leans in to kiss her. He takes in her neck, her un-dyed eyebrows. When bad authors are maturely beautiful it shamefully makes him want to read what goes through their minds. His mouth is dry.
The bird screeches in distrait at the window. It’s flailing hysterically; a hurricane must be approaching, a tornado.
She perceives him as a neurotic corgi. Then: Am I just too old for a boy to kiss me? Both of us were better off staying with our ex’s that were incapable of intimacy. She’s been compulsively reflecting lately what defines sexual abuse. How can inundating someone with love be abusive? Now: I am indignant because I want to sleep with you and you are too young.
“You should best get going; God’s going to piss soon,” she says impassively, rearranging her desk.
As he wanders home in the dark he tries to avoid the moon’s gaze. All the goofy beguiling girls on the way home from their metaphysical 300’s are shivering. They’d rather attire daintily than not freeze. He thinks about initiating a conversation with someone but can’t get over feeling the need to impress whomever he’s talks to. It hurts him to believe that there could be anyone that isn’t lonely yet as perspicacious as him.
“It was easier in high school when you could get away with loving someone because sex was novel.”
Isn’t loneliness a separate kind of intelligence? The ability to exaggeratedly percept and discern, sometimes even accurately. To feel more acutely. Isn’t that enough to be envied of?
No! No more!

With a 5:1 student-faculty ratio, the Zachirias faculty has a higher level of one-on-one involvement with each student’s education than found anywhere else in the country. In addition to our predisposed to workshop classrooms, Zarchirias has toothsome brochures.
You are different. Sometimes us too.

He wipes off congealed spit from his laptop screen. He takes a ferocious bite out of his protein bar. 32 grams of protein before an hour awoke. He snarls.

[a mod 2 = 1^ (a + 2) mod 2 =/= 1]

Every night merging into morning trying to concoct a new method of conveying eloquent articulation: verbally and on paper. Magical realism. Post-modernism. Who’s to justify he suffers any less than an alcoholic. Vexed at not attaining a state of flow. Or:
Her hair maniacally skitters about her desk. Her room spins smugly. She stares out the window at the screeching bird; she tears at her hair, nearly ripping out her roots, and begins to weep in despair.
I know this is going to ruin his life…but I think I’m in love.
Tongue?
A squirrel?…under my desk? Awhaw, that’s cute.
She gets up, swaggers over to the stove to boil water. Her office looks conceptual, the slovenly drivel of papers on the floor.
“What is happiness to you?”
“Not being anxious.”
“What is adulthood to you?”
“Being less self-aware.”

There’s a carnival in the sky. The streetlights are drooling horizontally off of the dorm flats. There’s a Japanese fighting fish tattoo floating around belligerently. A couple of interim-narcissistic crystal-meth addicts huddled in a corner behind the coffee shop. On the subway, everyone wonders about who they’re seated across from, grateful not to be in their position. If the train were to stop and everyone was forced to talk to each other, who would he talk to? The male nurse? He wonders who his professor would talk to—definitely the male nurse. She’s probably in her office, writing an essay. Does she sleep there? Is there a sleeping bag tucked into one of her drawers?
An essay: To which I say: French idiom. Every mediocre crime of Woodward in 1999, at bottom, and you will usually find that, it is quite natural—or betrothed—many years later (yes, there are those occasional bestsellers that bypass this stereotype), and the media gestation of the second grueling lemming, who takes the New York Times Book Review to heart. Thumbs up, hip anthology!
“I think what she’s trying to say is that well…authors have been complimenting and praising each other’s books too generously…I can’t tell you all the back covers I’ve come across with the words ‘brilliant’ and ‘savvy at reaching into the depths of so many human conundrums’ and ‘breathtakingly clothed in originality’…when in reality, you see, their work is either mediocre or has the vast imagination of a seventh-grader but lacks the vocabulary and knowledge of our language to put their imagination into words.
“The reason they compliment each other so much is because they don’t want anyone to naysay their own books, they want the media in itself to sell. What happens is that when customers get home with their new purchases and open them they are exposed to an ostentatiously praised pile of shit, which causes them to see the entire literary genre in a negative light. Sometimes I’m convinced that the authors exchange what they specifically want commended on the back covers and inside jackets of their novels; bribes, deals; I wouldn’t discount a full-blown conspiracy.”

(spe)
LUNK

She calls him, having obtained his cell number from his application form. She asks him to meet her at Starbucks in an hour. He says “Alright,” and he watches the small network-connection symbol on his phone’s screen go gray before hanging up. He takes a thirty minute shower, settling down in the tub in a vertical fetal position. The night air is prickly. Car headlights flashing to and fro hone his anxiety. It’s snowing.
When he reaches the Starbucks she’s already there, seated composedly in a corner beneath lights of tentacular modern design. The inside of the Starbucks is the closest he’s ever been to a space station. She gives him a decisive smile and when he sits down she leans across the table and kisses him, flimsily sucking on his bottom lip. He’s never tasted lipstick before. Suddenly he realizes that she’s old enough to wear it and not look tawdry. She jiggles her car keys and they walk out of the café with the fervid anticipation of lovers about to indulge in their designated art.

But:
He’s got his own house perched on the tip of the back-road before it trails into the forest. The forest is still part of the campus but it is mostly just a tool to those who find meaning in inhaling salubriously and somehow clearing their mind to the avail of the naturism picturesqueness of their environment. The music is blasting; the bass vibrates the car apprehensively all the way to the front-door. The sun is setting. He’s sitting on a leather swivel chair, facing in the opposite direction of his computer (a Word Document on the screen) and playing video games on the plasma TV hung up on the wall. The inside of the house looks like a methodological and cozy cabin. His friend is stoned, lying down on the couch and swatting flies in his mind. She knocks on the door. “Come in!” She does, and he turns the music down with a clicker he picks up from the floor. She smiles and laughs speciously while he strickenly devotes his attention to the TV screen, then pauses the game. He leads with a “Well” and a greeting that’s suppose to implicate that he’s open-minded to eccentricity. She reveals who she is, the professor, the novelist. Ah, he says, and claims that he’s read her most recent book because he saw a picture of her in Time magazine and thought she was hot. She laughs, and then asks him, “Well,” what did he think of the book? Surprisingly, it was a lot better than he thought it would be, smiling modestly. Except for using the word “aggressively” too many times, he actually enjoyed it a lot. She juggles her shoulders and says “Oops,” blames her editor, and goes on to talk about how of course, she’s read what he’s written, he’s famous on campus, heard all about him.

Was that supposed to happen?
Or:
She hones in on his inner thigh with her hand immediately when the car stops, flicks off her seatbelt and scampers over the container that separates the two seats to straddle him. There’s something surreal about how old she is and still being able to straddle a boy and take his breath away. She pushes his lips into her neck and starts rocking back and forth.
And then:



(grope)
FERVIDLY

In conclusion, I haven’t even decided if I want to go to college. I mean, does he know that he teaches her as much as she teaches him? What if they were to never “succumb to the lust of solitude and the empty well within.” What if they made it to bed.
I caught them rolling around in the backseat of her borrowed car, trying to devour each other as peremptorily as they could with the condemning knowledge that they wouldn’t have the chance to for very long. I opened the car door and liberated the boy from his torment. I stared the carnivorous bitch down, her jaw quivering with carnal voracity, and slammed the door in her face.
The downward spiral was harried and fierce. It was the spring of my ninth grade year and with each passing day I secluded increasingly within. My peers were waging a battle for superficial domination, and I stood, wavering in the wind, an agonized and confused martyr. Fuck. My intrinsic-subconscious-anorexia-nervosa.
Please, accept me into your unbridled and incinerating arms. Free me from my adolescent caginess. I am yours alone to uphold.

“Really, it all comes back to sitting on the car next to her. That moment felt eternal. I didn’t think about how precarious authors stay precarious authors. I just thought about her, there, next to me, old enough to be maternally succoring and yet still irresistibly entrancing. I didn’t think about the consequences, that she would be fired if we were caught.
“I never knew that age is not just a number.”