Yale

Yale is not a visited setting in the evidence surrounding Natasha Kingsley; it is an imagined destination, invoked as shorthand for educational opportunity and a future that might be planned. Daniel Jae Ho Bae treats it as a door-opener because it helped him, while Natasha’s changing response exposes the difference between an institution’s prestige and a life she can actually claim as her own. By the end, she has declined Yale, without deciding that college is permanently out of reach.

Yale as Possibility

Natasha’s thoughts about college first emerge under the pressure of her family’s impending removal from the United States. She has lived in the country since she was eight, and fears returning to Jamaica, where she says she does not know the people or family she would be expected to know. Her senior year, prom, graduation, and friendships are not incidental losses: they are the ordinary future she wants to share with her peers. College belongs to that same imagined continuity. She has only just begun an application to Brooklyn College and hopes that financial aid, perhaps combined with a scholarship, could make SUNY Binghamton or another in-state school affordable.

That plan depends on a document her mother spent two years saving to obtain. She traveled to Florida to buy a “good” Social Security card, meaning one bearing stolen numbers rather than fabricated ones; the seller claimed that a cheaper card with bogus numbers would fail background checks and college applications. The card might let Natasha apply for financial aid, but its existence also makes plain how access to education is entangled with the family’s undocumented status. Yale, when it later enters conversation, therefore stands beside a more immediate question: whether Natasha can pursue any college future at all.

Education Under Immigration Pressure

The legal process makes Natasha’s aspirations part of an account she is asked to give about herself. At the Fitzgerald law office, she fills out forms about the deportation case and a questionnaire asking for a full history of her time in the United States. She wonders whether she should describe how her family entered and hid, the repeated use of a fake Social Security number on school forms, or the memory of her mother’s journey to Florida to obtain the card. The paperwork turns ordinary educational preparation into evidence of the precarious conditions under which she has tried to plan a life.

The questionnaire also asks what America means to her, why she wants to stay, and how she would contribute to making the country greater. The staff member explains that anything Jeremy Fitzgerald can use to humanize Natasha may help. This request frames her future not simply as a private ambition, but as something she must translate into a persuasive case for remaining in the country. Her interest in college thus sits between aspiration and documentation: she wants the choices available to a student, while the process presses her to make those choices serve an argument about belonging.

The Yale Question

In a later office conversation, Natasha is asked whether she is interested in a pre-med track. She answers that she is not, and, pressed to be precise, says no. The interviewer then asks whether she wants to go to Yale and what her big dream is. Her answers resist the expected sequence from academic track to elite university to clearly articulated ambition: she says she does not even know whether she wants to attend college. Yale functions here as a direct test of whether she can—or wants to—adopt someone else’s picture of success.

Natasha walks out of the office into an empty reception area. When the man follows and asks whether the interview is over, she keeps walking, saying, “You said it yourself. I don’t really care about Yale.” He catches her by the arm and asks her to face him. He acknowledges that he has encouraged her to make mistakes while she is still young, but insists that Yale is a major opportunity: “Going there could open a lot of doors for you. It did for me.” His appeal is grounded in personal experience, not an abstract ranking. Natasha recognizes that he may be right and that she may be shortsighted, leaving the possibility of Yale open even as she resists being steered toward it.

Declining Yale, Keeping the Choice

Natasha’s eventual position is deliberately provisional. Later, she thinks that in a year she will be somewhere else, though she does not know where. She is unsure whether college is for her, “At least not Yale. At least not yet.” The qualification matters: the ending is a refusal of Yale for now, not a declaration that education has no place in her future. She asks herself whether she is making a mistake, allows that she might be, and concludes that it is hers to make.

That choice gives Yale its narrative significance. Daniel presents the institution as a source of doors opened; Natasha’s experience makes clear that opportunity cannot be separated from immigration status, money, and the uncertain ability to remain in the country where she has built her life. The contrast is not simply between ambition and indifference. Natasha has imagined college, researched routes to affordability, and begun an application elsewhere, but she will not treat Yale’s prestige as a substitute for knowing what she wants. Her decision preserves uncertainty while asserting ownership over it.