Bailey’s Juilliard rejection letter

Bailey’s Juilliard rejection letter is a material reminder of the future Bailey Walker had imagined and of the grief Lennie Walker carries after her sister’s death. Bailey had dreamed of attending the Juilliard School in New York City; Lennie’s decision to preserve the rejection, and later to throw it away, makes the letter a small but consequential object in the sisters’ story.

The Rejection and Bailey’s Plans

Bailey was rejected by Juilliard. She enrolled at Clover State the following fall, the only other college to which she had applied. Lennie understood that Juilliard had been Bailey’s dream and could not imagine that her sister would not try again. The rejection letter therefore represented more than one unsuccessful application: to Lennie, it stood for a future Bailey still might pursue.

Lennie Keeps the Letter

Bailey tossed the letter into the garbage with an apparently casual remark that the family would have to make do with her. Lennie recognized that the gesture did not mean the rejection was unimportant. Later that afternoon, she retrieved the paper from the garbage and kept it for more than a year, folded inside the pocket where she stored the cloth and reeds in her clarinet case. Its hidden place among her musical supplies ties Bailey’s unrealized artistic ambition to Lennie’s own clarinet and to the private acts through which she holds on to her sister.

Disposal During Grief

While sitting at Bailey’s desk, Lennie takes out the letter and, without reading it one last time, crumples it into a ball and throws it away. The gesture occurs as she revisits the ordinary evening when the phone call announced Bailey’s death: Lennie had been doing chemistry and waiting for Bailey to come home for dinner. The rejection had remained with Lennie long after Bailey discarded it; now Lennie lets it go without recovering or rereading its contents. The act changes the letter’s role in the story from a preserved trace of Bailey’s dream to something Lennie can finally discard, even as the grief surrounding the desk and the remembered phone call remains.