Bo

Bo is Cima’s twin brother, who died in a motorcycle accident when they were both fifteen. Though he is absent from the events recounted in Cima’s conversation with Hig, her memories make him a defining presence: she describes their bond as uniquely close, and his death as a private loss that also gave her strength. The conflict over how that loss should be told—especially when a college counselor tried to make it serve her application—shows how fiercely Cima guarded the meaning of her brother’s memory.

Identity and Loss

Cima identifies Bo as her twin brother and says that he died when they were fifteen. The account supplies no further circumstances of the accident, and Bo appears through what his death means to her rather than through a narrated scene from his life. That absence is important: the reader encounters him in Cima’s recollection, where the closeness of the relationship and the fact of the loss have lasting force.

Cima describes Bo as the person closest to her, someone she regarded as a private part of herself. She understood that bond as both a source of grief and a source of strength. The two responses are not presented as alternatives. Her memory holds the pain of his death alongside the sustaining value of having loved him, and she resists the idea that either can be reduced to a convenient account for other people.

The Memory Cima Protects

Bo’s importance becomes especially clear when Cima recalls applying for college. She had been a strong student and expected to become a veterinarian, attend Colorado State, then return home to establish a large-animal practice. A scholarship opportunity to Dartmouth College opened a different future, but the application process brought her grief into the hands of a counselor who believed he could direct the story she should tell.

Sykes, the counselor at Delta High, instructed Cima to write about ranch life and Bo’s death. He went further, framing Bo as the twin who had been her closest companion and treating that loss as the appropriate centerpiece of her application. For Cima, this was not a neutral suggestion about what admissions readers might want. She felt that he had reached into a part of her life she regarded as deeply personal and claimed authority over how it should be presented. Her anger arose from the mismatch between her own private understanding of Bo and the polished account Sykes wanted her to supply.

The Essay and Its Consequences

Rather than follow Sykes’s direction, Cima wrote about the fact that he had demanded an essay about her dead twin. She made the essay longer than requested and used the incident to examine tact in ranch culture, why that restraint mattered, and the distance between people shaped by Western, land-based life and the Eastern establishment. In her view, the possibility that a ranch girl’s bereavement could make her appealing to an elite Eastern college exposed a broader disconnect. The essay was not a refusal to remember Bo; it was a refusal to let someone else dictate the terms of that remembrance.

Cima sent her application without allowing Sykes to review it, contrary to the school’s procedure. He tried to undermine the application afterward, but it was too late. Dartmouth accepted her through early decision with a full scholarship, and the college pressured the high school to the point that Sykes was forced to retire. These consequences made the episode more than a private disagreement: Cima challenged the counselor’s control over her application and succeeded in presenting her own account instead.

Grief, Agency, and Bo’s Legacy

Cima’s later unease complicates that victory. She says she knew she would be accepted and worries that she had understood how her anger—and the essay describing Sykes’s demand—might strengthen her candidacy. Even though her response was genuinely angry, she fears that she also turned the emotional force of the experience to practical advantage. She has prayed about having used Bo to get into college, a concern that shows how carefully she continues to consider her responsibility toward his memory.

Hig answers that she did not use Bo; he understands the essay as an honest expression of what she felt. His reassurance does not erase Cima’s uncertainty, but it offers a different reading of the same act: writing about the attempt to appropriate her loss may have been a way to protect the truth of her response. Bo’s lasting place in the conversation lies partly in this unresolved question. His death shaped Cima’s ambitions and her application, but she insists, through her anger and later reflection, that the significance of their bond belongs first to her—not to a counselor, an admissions strategy, or an audience seeking an easily legible story.