Plays Well With Others: A Novel by Sophie Brickman

Author:Sophie Brickman [Brickman, Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Humorous, General, City Life, Women, Family Life, Epistolary, Satire
ISBN: 9780063371200
Google: 3M7iEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0063371200
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-08-05T22:00:00+00:00

Dan nearly collapsed into tears afterward, he’d been so moved. What could be a better indication that he’d inched closer to that white-hot center than his son, clad in culottes and a tiny blazer, tromping over the mud of a Civil War ground, reciting Walt Whitman?

Whatever. Dan could handle that application, and the accompanying ninety-second video she’d heard other people had hired professional film editors to cut.

Annie would make an appointment for a tour at Hudson-Green, but it was in these war room meetings, when St. Edward’s took center stage, that she found herself trusting her gut even more. The Wikipedia entry on Thatcher had a list of successful alumni who spanned heads of state, inventors, and stars of stage and screen, and though the school had its flaws—rumor had it there were no windows in any of the classrooms, and the pressure cranked up in the older years—she loved how the student body was wildly diverse, and the application she’d filled out almost monkishly ascetic. Thatcher didn’t care where she went to college. Didn’t care where she lived. Didn’t care how many higher degrees she had. Didn’t care what she thought Sam’s strengths and weaknesses were. Didn’t care if the D.A. knew your family. What they cared about was the raw intellect of the child, which could be reduced to a number. And while that number likely missed all sorts of important things about one’s child, and was based partially on questions she’d come to understand were both biased and dated, at least it was concrete. The rest of this process had become so nebulous and fuzzy, she could barely stand it. As one reporter had written, accepted Thatcher children seemed to “acquire something like a reverse mark of Cain, a sanctification that will stay with them forever, whether they live up to that early promise or not.”

Sam would live up to the promise, she just knew it. And didn’t he deserve to spend eight hours a day in a place that encouraged him to lean into his eccentricities, that didn’t press him into a mold forged over a century and a half until every uniform-clad boy spat out was a carbon copy of the same generally excellent, and entirely indistinguishable, young gentleman, fated to pass one another on the dance floor at various benefits, twirling through passable versions of the Spanish bolero?

The email from Thatcher about next steps came with the names of five certified IQ testers—four women and one man.

Noah B. Siegler’s website was bare-bones. There was a small, fuzzy photo on the “About Me” page of the rumpled, professorial midsixties doctor, straight out of central casting. Under the “Testing” tab was a bulleted list of the assessments he was qualified to administer. There wasn’t just the Stanford-Binet and Rorschach, both of which Annie recognized, but also the DAS, Kaufman, Beery, Bender, NEPSY, and over twenty more.

“Beery and Bender and DAS, oh my!” she whisper-sang to herself, to the tune of “Lions and tigers and bears.” People sure like having different ways to rank their children.

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