As a senior in high school, you can’t go a single day without someone asking you where you’re going to college or what you’re going to do post-grad. I used to give the truth and say that I have no dream school and that I want to pursue creative writing, but those answers only elicit more questions like “Well, what schools are in your top five?” and “What are you going to do with a creative writing degree?” So, I’ve taken to lying.
It started small, with schools that I’d been accepted to like St. Edwards and Oregon, but eventually I’d told enough people that I was going to major in crop science with a focus in corn production at the University of Iowa that they were starting to believe me; I had to find something new.
On the first day back from Winter Break, I came to school wearing a University of London sweatshirt. Several people asked me if I had gotten in and they were shocked when I said yes. “It’s one of my top choices,” I told them. “But I’m not sure I could give up western luxuries, like dentistry and jeans, for four years.” They would ask me if I was joking, to which I would pretend to be taken aback by their lack of confidence in me. Their doubt was completely valid, of course, because I was lying, but in the wake of some surprising deferrals and rejections that were only magnified by the even more surprising acceptances, the senior class reeked with the naive optimism of “anything can happen in college admissions.”
I’ve really worked myself into a boy-who-cried-wolf situation. I’ve told so many people that I’ll be attending Davidson in the fall to major in Asian studies and a great many more that I’m going to train to become a rabbi at the University of Hamburg that no one believes a word I say anymore. To tell the truth, I like it this way. I’m not even sure what school I want to attend, let alone what I want to study. So in the meantime, I might as well lie to myself. Envision a world in which I’m TCU’s next underwhelming true freshman quarterback or “studying” to be a white collar nepo baby at Harvard or directing tacky student films at UCLA or at least some place where I’ve got my life all figured out.
