Priest_by_Sierra_Simone 3

package, the manicured, sleekly highlighted, expensively dressed package.”
She was all those things. She was indeed the perfect package on the
surface…but below it, I sensed she was so much more. Messy and passionate
and raw and creative—a cyclone forced into an eggshell. Small wonder the
shell had broken.
“I adorned the life that already had too many cars, too many rooms, too
many luncheons and fundraiser galas. A life already filled with two other
children who’d also graduated from Dartmouth and then proceeded to marry
fellow rich people and have little rich babies. I was destined to work
someplace with a glassed-in lobby and drive a Mercedes S-Class, at least
until I got married, and then I would gradually scale back my work and scale
up my involvement with charity, until, of course, I had the little rich babies to
round out the family portraits.” She looked down at her hands. “This
probably sounds ridiculous. Like a modern Edith Wharton novel or
something.”
“It doesn’t sound ridiculous at all,” I assured her. “I know exactly the kind
of people you’re talking about.” And I really did—I wasn’t just saying that.
I’d grown up in a fairly nice neighborhood and—on a much smaller scale—
the same attitudes had been at work. The families with their nice houses and
their two point five children who were on the honor roll and also played
varsity lacrosse, the families that made sure everyone else knew exactly how
successful and delightfully American their healthy Midwestern offspring
were.
“I rejected that entire reality,” she confessed. “The Wharton life. I didn’t
want to do it. I couldn’t do it.”
Of course, she couldn’t. She was so far above that life. Could she see that
about herself? Could she sense it, even if she couldn’t see it? Because I
barely knew her, and even I knew that she was the kind of woman who
couldn’t live without meaning, powerful and real meaning, in her life. And
she wouldn’t have found it on the other side of that Dartmouth stage.
“I was heartbroken over Sterling, yes,” she continued, still examining her
hands, “but I was also heartbroken over my life…and it hadn’t even
happened yet. I took the fake diploma they give you before they send you the
real one, walked off that stage and then right off campus, not staying for the
requisite hat-throwing or the pictures or the too-expensive dinner that my
parents would insist on. And then I went to my apartment, left a definitive