The Three-Day Affair by Michael Kardos

school’s old telescope that filtered out most of the spectral frequencies of light pollution. Later, I’d learn that this type of lens already existed. Still, it was new to me, and apparently to everyone at my school. The superintendent got me in touch with a local camera manufacturer, which followed my design and made a prototype. There was an article in the paper with a photo of me on the school’s roof, looking through the telescope at the night sky. The local network news covered the story. We made popcorn, and when my face came on the television screen, my mother cried. My father mussed my hair and kept repeating, “Look at that. Just look at that.”
    The following spring, I got accepted into Princeton and Harvard and every school I applied to. Don’t get me wrong: I was a good student. Plenty of As. High SATs. But thousands of kids with As and high test scores get rejected from the top schools.
    No, it was the telescope lens.
    Was it a clever school project? Sure. Was it worthy of all the attention ? Not really. But teachers wait years and years for a student to take the initiative in a scholarly pursuit, and when they see it, it’s as if all of their years in the profession—the meager pay, the administrative headaches, all those parents to deal with—finally amount to something. My letters of recommendation must have made me out to be the next Stephen Hawking. Colleges evidently saw me as their budding cosmologist to round out their well-rounded class, when the truth was, all I’d done was invent something that’d already been invented. I wasn’t even especially interested in science. But growing up in a city where the night sky is a constant dull orange , I just thought it would be nice to see some stars for a change.
    • • •
    At Princeton I was struck by how everyone around me seemed to get on so easily so quickly. I’d left Bayonne, driven an hour or so on Route 1, and arrived at another world, one that I didn’t quite trust. My only prior visit hadn’t prepared me at all. It’d been a cold, rainy day in April. I’d taken an abbreviated campus tour, returned home soaking wet, and come down the next day with a head cold. But now, under a rich blue sky, kids loafed on the quad in laughing clusters while others threw Frisbees and footballs and still others sprawled on blankets as if they’d spent their whole lives among centuries-old Gothic buildings and flagstone walkways cutting through acres and acres of sweet-smelling grass.
    Some of them had. In my incoming class there was a Purdue and a Chrysler and the children of national politicians. And while not everyone was from a rich or famous family (plenty of others, like myself, worked food services to help pay for their education), it was hard to ignore the fact that the guy down the hall had the same last name as one of the new buildings on campus, and that in the dormitory adjacent to mine lived an actual Middle Eastern princess.
    In those first baffling days of my freshman year, everyone seemed to be forming fast friendships. They seemed to know instinctively which organizations to join, which to avoid, which of the “eating clubs” had the best parties on tap for the weekend, and how to get passes to those parties.
    Even my roommate had slid easily into Princeton life. The day he moved in, he taped inspiring quotations to the wall over his desk. “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.—Ralph Waldo Emerson.” And: “Anything in life worth having is worth working for.—Andrew Carnegie.” Lying in our extralong cots late that night, we gave each other our brief histories, and then I asked him if he’d like me to set my alarm.
    “I already have mine set for four thirty,” he said.
    I asked if he was serious. Classes were still a week away.
    “If I wanted to sleep,” he said, “I would have stayed in Missouri.”
    He had worked hard and traveled far to arrive, finally, someplace worthy of his ambitions. And he was