When Keisha wrote down Harvard University on the list her college counsellor gave her parents, it was because she knew that he would tell her that she wasn’t Ivy-league, straight-A, or high-class Harvard material. As a result, she would have considered her duty as the daughter of two highly-qualified, much-accomplished, singularly-accoladed academic “Education is success,” “first degree comes first” parents done, and subsequently would have got them off her back for not “fulfilling her potential, Keisha, goddamnit”. The counsellor, a short man, already balding in his 30s and straight from South Carolina, had taken one look at Keisha’s list of schools, saw Harvard squeezed in between the almost-equally impressive Williams College, and the infinitely lesser NYU Abu Dhabi (Keisha quite liked the idea of the Middle East), and said, “Yes.”
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