Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College enters the story through Cima’s recollection of winning a full scholarship from Delta, Colorado, and of resisting the local gatekeeper who tried to dictate how she would present herself. The opportunity promised access to a future she could scarcely picture, but its path ran through a painful demand: to make the death of her twin, Bo, useful to an admissions committee. Cima ultimately secured admission on her own terms, and the institution’s intervention helped end the authority of the man who had tried to control her application.

Scholarship and Local Gatekeeping

Cima explains that Dartmouth College offered one scholarship each year to a student from Delta High. The award had been endowed by the alumnus who built the local fiberboard plant. In Cima’s account, its annual selection was less an open process than a small local fiefdom: Sykes chose the student, and families in town had reason to remain in his favor. The arrangement tied a prestigious college opportunity to the influence of a single man in Cima’s home community.

When Sykes summoned her, Cima was already imagining a future for which she had few points of reference. Her days had been shaped by ranch work: feeding hay before daylight, running cross-country after school, returning to chores with the horses, and doing homework. The possibility of Dartmouth brought images of ivy-covered buildings and college life, but those images belonged to a world she did not yet know. The scholarship therefore represented more than a change of school; it opened a distance between the life she understood and a future she could only begin to imagine.

The Essay and Bo’s Memory

Sykes told Cima that her application essay should describe ranch life and the loss of Bo, her twin. For Cima, Bo’s memory was private, a source of grief and strength that she had not expected to place at the center of a formal application. She experienced Sykes’s direction as an intrusion into that private landscape, made more disturbing by the authority he held over the process. The scholarship’s promise and the demand attached to it arrived together: the route outward seemed to require her to make intimate bereavement legible to strangers.

Cima did write about Bo, but she refused the framing Sykes had prescribed. Her essay, twice the requested length, described the counselor’s demand itself and developed an argument about tact in ranch culture, why it mattered, and how it differed from the expectations of an Eastern institution. She also examined the unequal cultural exchange embedded in the application: the possibility that Eastern admissions readers might find the story of a ranch girl and her missing twin appealing, even though her community did not want its grief converted into a bid for sympathy. The essay made the conflict over Bo’s story part of its subject rather than treating that story as a credential supplied on command.

Admission and Institutional Consequences

Cima sent the application without letting Sykes review it, despite a protocol that required his approval. He tried to undermine the application afterward, but it was too late. Dartmouth College accepted her through early decision and awarded her a full ride. The college also pressured the high school, and Sykes was forced to retire. The result reached beyond Cima’s individual admission: the person who had controlled access to the scholarship lost his position after she bypassed his authority and the application succeeded.

Cima’s recollection preserves an unresolved edge to that success. She says she knew she would be accepted and worries that she understood how her anger, redirected into the essay, might strengthen her candidacy. She has prayed about whether she used Bo to get into college. Hig answers that she wrote what she genuinely felt, distinguishing honest testimony from exploitation. The exchange does not erase Cima’s unease; it shows how the application’s victory remained entangled with her grief and her awareness of how institutions interpret personal stories.

Cultural Divide and Narrative Significance

The episode presents Dartmouth College both as a real opportunity and as the Eastern institution against which Cima measures the assumptions of ranch life. She does not reject education or the possibility of leaving. Instead, she contests the terms on which her background and loss are made valuable to people outside her community. Her essay insists that ranch culture has its own forms of tact and that the difference between Western, land-based people and the Eastern establishment matters.

The story is recalled in conversation with Hig while they work in a garden, giving a past educational decision a place within their present exchange. Hig mentions that his uncle went to Dartmouth and asks whether Cima was an only child; she indicates that she was not. From there, her account moves from the mechanics of a scholarship to a more personal question about what can be asked of someone seeking a future. Dartmouth’s narrative importance lies in that double role: it is the destination Cima reached, and the institution whose admissions process gives shape to her conflict over privacy, grief, and self-representation.