Work Text:
The thing about living with Emily Prentiss, Jack had learned, was that she was constitutionally incapable of doing anything halfway.
She had read everything worth reading and remembered all of it; she could place a half-heard quote from Didion or Arendt or Le Carré, identify an allusion three layers deep, and tell him exactly where a piece of writing went wrong and why. She spoke four languages with near-native fluency and two more well enough to lie in them. When she edited something, whether it was a report, an email, or a briefing document, she did it with a pen, in the margins, in handwriting so neat it looked typeset, and she never missed anything. Not once. Jack had been watching for years.
So when Jack dropped into the armchair across from her and said, “I need someone to edit my Common App essay,” he already knew the answer. He just wanted to see how she’d react to the next part.
Emily looked up from her laptop. “Sure. Send it over.”
“I was going to ask Dad,” Jack said, “but you went to Yale.” He paused, just long enough. “Dad went to Georgetown.”
From the kitchen, she could hear Aaron set down a coffee mug with slightly more force than necessary. She tried not to smile, but lost that battle. “Send me the essay, Jack.”
“Georgetown’s a great school,” Jack said generously.
“Goodnight, Jack,” his father said from the kitchen, in the same tone that had once made hardened criminals reconsider their life choices.
Jack sent the essay and went to bed looking extremely pleased with himself.
Emily read the opening line and put her book down.
Twenty minutes later, Aaron appeared in the doorway with a book tucked under his arm. “Still at it?”
Emily angled the laptop slightly away from him and dimmed the screen before he could sneak a glimpse at Jack's Word document. “He’s a good writer.”
“He gets that from me,” Aaron said.
Emily said nothing, which was its own answer.
“Georgetown has an excellent English department,” he added, with dignity, and went upstairs.
She waited until his footsteps reached the top of the landing. Then she turned back to the screen, clicked Track Changes, and started from the beginning.
Common_Application_Essay_Draft.docx
Prompt 1: Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, please share your story.
By the time I graduated from middle school was fourteen, two different serial killers had considered my father enough of a personal inconvenience to make him their primary project. This essay is, in part, about what it is like to be adjacent to that.
My father was the former Unit Chief of the FBI’s Behavioural Analysis Unit, a title that tells you almost nothing about what he actually did, which was spend twenty years thinking like monsters so that other people didn’t have to. I grew up understanding, in the abstract, that his work had weight.
Then I turned six, and the abstract became very concrete, very fast. [Emily Prentiss Hotchner: i need you to understand that i have read thousands of words of classified material in my career and this opening still stopped me cold. Good. Keep it.]
A man named George Foyet had decided my father was worth the effort of a personal vendetta. My mother and I were relocated under federal protection. I was barely six, so I thought it was exciting; a new name and a new city, the vague glamour of a secret. [EPH: ‘the vague glamour of a secret’ — keep this.] It wasn’t. My mother did not survive the experience. My father got there in time to save me. I was in the study. He was in the living room. I’ve had a lot of years and a lot of therapy to find the right way to carry those two sentences, and I think I finally do. [EPH: Jack.] [EPH: do not touch this paragraph. the pacing is doing everything.]
The second time was slower, and in some ways that made it harder. From the outside, my life between eight and eleven looked entirely ordinary; I had homework, weekend soccer games, and a decent free kick I was proud of. What I didn’t know, underneath all of that, was that a man named Peter Lewis was running a methodical campaign against my father, poisoning people, manipulating evidence, and using psychological methods I still don’t fully understand to destabilise everyone around him. [EPH: ‘methodical’ is the right word. clinical. good.]
It went on for months. I kept showing up to soccer practice; my father kept waiting.
[EPH: i didn’t know you knew how long it had been going on; your dad never —]
[EPH: ignore that.]
Then one afternoon, Lewis appeared at one of my soccer games, just watching from the bleachers, and within the week we had disappeared again — different name, different city — except this time I was old enough to understand exactly what I was leaving behind, and to know that my father had to give up more than I could ever have imagined go further still, in ways I wasn’t cleared to know about. [EPH: ‘give up more than I could ever have imagined’ is imprecise and slightly melodramatic. you’re better than that.] The people he trusted most held everything together without him. [EPH: we did what we had to do.] We stayed gone and kept waiting.
At six, a new name felt like a costume. At thirteen, it felt like subtraction. [EPH: this is the best sentence in the essay.] This time, I knew exactly who I was leaving behind: my team, my school, and the particular way people who had known me for years said my name — [EPH: ‘the particular way people who had known me for years said my name’ — it’s precise in a way most adults couldn’t manage.] and I had to decide, consciously and repeatedly, which parts of myself were portable and which I was going to have to rebuild. You find out quickly what’s actually you, and what is just circumstance. The things worth keeping, I held onto very tightly. I’m still holding them.
[EPH: good. don’t elaborate. the reader doesn’t need to know what they are.]
The new city was fine, and that was almost the problem. It was fine, and I was twelve, and I had left behind my team and my school and everyone who knew my actual name. One night, my father made dinner and asked how I was settling in and I told him it was his fault — all of it. He put his fork down and looked at me in the way he always looked at things he had decided to absorb, and said 'okay'. We finished dinner, and I went to bed feeling worse than before I’d opened my mouth. [EPH: ‘things he had decided to absorb.’ you know your father very well.]
Later that night, I found him at the kitchen table in the dark, just sitting there. He didn’t hear me. I stood in the doorway and thought about all the things I hadn’t been paying attention to: that he picked me up from school every day, cooked dinner every night in a kitchen that wasn’t ours, and cleaned the apartment on weekends while I did homework. He never once suggested any of this was hard for him. [EPH: no. he wouldn’t.] I had been cataloguing my own losses so carefully that I had not stopped to count his. [EPH: this sentence is why you’re getting in everywhere.]
The next morning, I came downstairs to apologise and he was already at the stove making eggs. He said good morning and asked how I wanted them. I have thought about that breakfast more than almost anything else in my life.
[EPH: .]
I have been shaped by loss and by people who dedicate their lives to walking toward danger so that others don’t have to. I know what it costs. I know what it looks like from the inside of a study while it’s happening in the living room. I want to be one of those people anyway, not because I’ve romanticised it, but because I understand it clearly, and I’ve come to believe that’s exactly the right reason. [EPH: we’ll talk about this tomorrow when your dad is at his consult. this is not a comment on the essay.]
I am also the captain of my school’s hockey team. I switched from soccer in ninth grade, because I find that I prefer a sport where the spectators are harder to surveil.
[EPH: …you’re getting in everywhere. you’re also over the word limit. let’s work on this together. don’t tell your father I said any of that.]
Nobody talked about it, but by 6:45pm on Ivy Day, they had all somehow ended up in the kitchen.
Aaron was making tea he didn’t particularly want and moving around the kitchen pretending that he was absolutely not watching the clock, while Emily was sitting at the dining table with a book she had not turned a page of in twenty minutes. Jack was eating cereal in his hockey jersey, laptop open in front of him, and if his leg was bouncing slightly under the table, no one mentioned it.
At 6:52, Emily looked up from her book.
“Hey,” she said in an almost-whisper, so that Aaron, on the other side of the kitchen, couldn’t hear. “Whatever happens, that essay was extraordinary. I want you to know that I thought so before any of this.”
“You cried at the breakfast part, didn’t you?”
“I did not cry.”
“You wrote a single period and nothing else. That’s your crying tell.”
“Whatever happens,” she said again with an assuring smile, and went back to her book. Jack smiled into his cereal.
At 6:54, Aaron sat down at the table with his tea, opened a copy of The Atlantic, and read the same paragraph four times.
At 6:58, Jack logged into the Ivy Leagues’ admissions portals, and the kitchen went very still.
Jack stared at the screen and then picked up his phone, opened the camera, and hit record, sweeping it across Aaron and Emily before either had time to object.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s happening.”
“Jack, turn that off,” Emily said, in a voice that was already not entirely steady.
Aaron unfolded his hands and let his typical calm Unit Chief expression slip for just a moment. Jack was seventeen now, and no matter how many unsubs Aaron had faced down across interrogation tables, his son's eyes still got him every time. He said nothing about the camera.
Jack turned back to the laptop and refreshed the pages one by one, his finger trembling almost imperceptibly on the trackpad.
Penn - accepted.
Brown - accepted.
Columbia - accepted.
Dartmouth - accepted.
He scrolled once more.
Yale.
Accepted.
“Em,” he said, and his voice came out younger than he intended.
She lasted approximately three seconds before she was out of her chair and her arms were around him and the phone tilted sideways, capturing the kitchen ceiling and the tail end of Aaron saying Jack’s name. Then, his hand appeared in frame, landing on the back of Jack’s neck the way it had since Jack was small.
The footage was forty-seven seconds long, but Jack posted it anyway.
got into yale. emily cried. dad pretended not to know what a camera was. anyway if anyone needs me i’ll be in new haven 👋
Emily liked it within thirty seconds. Aaron didn't comment, but snapped and filed away a screenshot.
Emily found Jack in his room an hour later, door open and on the phone with his feet up on the desk with the comfortable disregard for furniture that she was fairly sure he had learned from her. She caught his eye, and he flashed her a grin, the same one he’d worn when he’d said ‘you went to Yale’ all those months ago; he laughed, and she pulled the door closed behind her.
Aaron was in the living room, his book abandoned on the coffee table, looking for once like he didn’t know what to do with his hands. Emily sat down next to him with her laptop and opened it to a document she had never closed.
“There’s something you should read,” she said, and handed it to him.
She watched him find the opening line and go very still.
He read the whole essay without speaking. She didn’t look at him directly, choosing to give him the privacy of her gaze on the middle distance, but stayed close enough that their shoulders were touching, and felt the exact moment he reached ‘I was in the study. He was in the living room.’
He didn’t say anything for a long time after he finished.
Finally, he uttered very quietly: “He never told me he knew about the soccer game.”
“No,” Emily said.
Aaron closed the laptop carefully and set it on the coffee table. He was silent for another moment, and Emily didn’t fill it. She just sat next to him, close enough that their shoulders were touching.
“I should make him breakfast,” he said. “Tomorrow. Before he leaves for school. I should—” He stopped.
“Yes,” Emily replied. “You should.”
They sat for a little while longer. Down the hall, they could hear Jack’s voice rising and falling as he continued his celebration on the phone, entirely unaware of what was happening in the living room.
“He writes like you.”
Emily looked at him.
“The precision. He doesn't waste a word. He gets that from you.”
"He gets the important parts from you,” she said. “He just learned to say them from me.”
“He’s going to be okay,” Aaron said, almost to himself. “He was always going to be okay. I just— I’m glad he knows it too.”
“He’s going to be more than okay,” Emily echoed.
Aaron looked at her then, taking in how she was trying not to show how much she meant it, and his thoughts returned to Jack's essay.
…the particular way people said my name.
…the things worth keeping, I held onto very tightly.
He had read those lines and heard Jack. Now he looked at Emily and heard them again.
“Get some sleep,” she said as she leaned over to kiss him. “You have eggs to make in the morning.”
The corners of his mouth twitched, and by Aaron Hotchner's standards, it was practically a grin. “Same as always,” he said. “The eggs.”
“Scrambled,” she said. “He’s always wanted them scrambled.”
Aaron nodded like he was filing that information away, even though he already knew. He reached for her hand and his thumb found her ring, just like it always did, and she turned her palm up to meet his.
Down the hall, Jack was still laughing.
“He deserves the world.”
“He really does.”