My younger sister Josephine was the one who told me I'd been admitted to Stanford. It was May 1995, and I was hoping to transfer from Vassar College, where I had just finished my sophomore year. A friend and I were driving from the campus in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to the south shore of Massachusetts. We kept missing exits and began to bicker, and I finally decided to stop at a pay phone off Interstate 84 to call my mother for directions -- never mind that she was in Ohio.
As I tried to describe exactly where I was, Jo picked up an extension and said excitedly, "Hey Curtis, did Mommy tell you that you got into Stanford?" My mother read aloud the acceptance letter that had just arrived.
Nearly three years later, Jo called me with her own Stanford news: she had not been admitted to the Class of 2002. In the message she left on my voicemail, she sounded less disappointed than embarrassed. She was not surprised, she said. True, she'd been telling me all along she had no chance of getting in. But my own reaction was different: I was shocked.
Sure, the numbers were against her -- Stanford accepted only about 13 percent of its applicants in 1998. But I couldn't understand how a school that would want me wouldn't also want Jo. In fact, though I fear this sounds creepy, I often think of Jo as me but better: she's more cheerful, she's actually good at basketball and she has never flunked a math course.
While I am close to all three of my siblings, Jo and I are by far the most alike. We have the same sense of humor, the same reactions to people and the same fascination, despite our best efforts, with magazines about celebrities. We cut each other's hair, I edit her papers for school, she tells me what clothes to buy. Despite our five-year age difference, people regularly ask us if we're twins.
In addition to enjoying Jo's company, I respect her. When I filled out the optional reference form for her Stanford application, I said that she is interesting because she has interests (Polaroid photo transfers, marine biology); that she is thoughtful (I don't think I've ever had a birthday or illness without a hand-drawn card from her); and that she is funny (she's a first-rate storyteller, and no detail escapes her attention, especially if it's somehow mortifying to her or someone else).
Jo first thought about applying when she came to visit me during my senior year. She could picture herself -- and I could picture her -- at Stanford. I would be gone by the time she arrived, but I imagined recommending certain professors or dorms and visiting her on campus.
My feelings about Stanford have been overwhelmingly positive ever since I arrived. Even after Jo's rejection, those feelings remain: I still wear red Stanford sweatpants; I still plan to donate paltry-but-I'm-only-23-years-old amounts to annual giving. But something has changed. For starters, when I hear how competitive Stanford is, I now feel more queasy than proud. And I feel my connection to Stanford -- which would have been strengthened had my sister enrolled -- growing increasingly tenuous. I live clear across the country, and most people I know have graduated. Certainly I don't resent the University for rejecting Jo, but I do feel awfully far away.
For a while, I had hoped Stanford would be another of the things Jo and I shared, but it isn't. A lot in our lives is ours together; Stanford is only mine.
As for Jo, she's now a freshman at Princeton. (I know, I know -- cry me a river.) In a strange twist, Princeton is the school I applied to early, and was rejected by, when I was a senior in high school. I went to Vassar because I didn't get into Princeton, and I transferred to Stanford -- knowing little about it except that it was far, far from Poughkeepsie -- because I didn't like Vassar.
Today, my wish for Jo is that her college experience will be filled with as much happiness as mine ultimately was -- that the world will open up for her at Princeton the way it did for me as I stood at a pay phone off Interstate 84.
Curtis Sittenfeld, '97, is a staff writer at Fast Company, a business magazine in Boston.
