Mid-August, 1986: the city a swamp, window units rattling, buses gasping for breath. Everyone with wet skin, chugging soda from wet cans. The disk drives whirring: Courtney worked on her college essays, composing them on the Apple IIe computer my father had bought and put in his study. There was an unspoken agreement not to speak loudly, or play music, or otherwise disturb her when we were nearby. I would creep past and hear the patter of the keys as she typed. Or I would hear her letting out a long sigh.

Or I would sneak into the room. She sat there in front of the black-and-white screen, intent, immobile, not even noticing that I’d come in—or so I thought.

“Get out,” she said, without turning her head from the screen.

“I was just checking if you needed anything.”

“What’s another word for achievement?”

“Um, feat?”

“I’m proud of my feats during high school. I don’t think so.”

“How about conquests?”

“Shut up.”

“If you need me I’ll just be enjoying my summer vacation—”

“Get out.”

Her applications became a family obsession. For us the process of applying to college had been vested with outsize significance, as if the overwhelmed junior administrators who made up the admissions committees at top schools were in fact deciding our ultimate worth, as if there in some dank New England basement they were weighing our souls on silver soul-scales. It’s hard to even express how feverish, how snobbish, how riddled with collective self-importance, how idol-worshipping that whole business was, at our school and all the more so at home, where Dad looked forward to our matriculation at colleges as a kind of anointment—for these would be Ivy League colleges, book-lined palaces out of which we would one day stride triumphant in our mortarboards, with snappy a cappella numbers ringing in our ears and our tentative footholds in the overclass made solid and permanent.

When Courtney was just a freshman in high school, Dad led our whole family on an Eastern seaboard trip that just happened to include Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton, where we were the youngest non-Asian kids on the campus tours. Dad had graduated from Cornell, but he never took us there, even Cornell wasn’t good enough. He wanted something else for us, more ease, more access, a status-granting vitamin X that had not been part of his youthful diet, but he didn’t really know what it was, or where we might acquire it. He decided it must be at Yale.

As a seventh-grader my interest was limited to the pizza we ate in each town, and I was young enough that I was not overly mortified, or at least not as mortified as Courtney was, by Dad’s endless questions for those backward-treading tour guides. I do remember that after we passed a science building on one of the campuses he asked a question about “the new physics.” The guide, ever cheerful, didn’t have an answer for him.

During Courtney’s junior year, the college bulletins started flocking to the house, in bright, chirruping clusters, and Dad’s anticipation grew all the keener. At night he would nestle into a chair and open those bullish gazettes as if peeling the wrapper from a fine cigar, reading even the brochures for schools we never would’ve considered. “Juniata College!” he would announce bluffly as he turned the pages. “Let’s see here.” My own leafing through the brochures had revealed them to be nearly identical; at every college, winsome students tossed Frisbees across a grassy quad, performed plays, and conducted experiments in science labs. But Dad would actually read the text—sometimes aloud, when a sentence struck him as funny. “A dedication to harvesting the seeds of intellectual inquiry!” he’d snort. “Why wait for them to grow?” (He’d go on in that way until he had beat the thing to death.) “Educating the leaders of tomorrow,” he’d say, and then, lowering his voice: “with tomorrow’s curriculum.” Or he might hold up something for us to see: “A nice picture here of their new parking garage.”

Yale was his first choice and Courtney’s. Her application for early admission was due in mid-September. By the time the school year started, she’d more or less finished the essays, but she kept tinkering with them when she was at home. She didn’t let anybody else read what she’d written. Soon, though, I had assignments to do, and one afternoon shortly before her deadline, I went to the study to type up a history paper while Courtney was at tennis practice. The computer had been left on, and one of her essays-in-progress filled the screen.

“My intellectual interests are wide-ranging,” it said. “One of my favorite courses in high school was 11th grade English,” it said. “I also believe in the importance of community service,” it said. “My participation in athletics has taught me invaluable lessons,” it said.

How jarring it was to read those sentences, written by Courtney, about Courtney, and yet containing nothing of Courtney. I didn’t recognize her in those polysyllabic assertions, the candidate-speak. It made me feel strange, to see all the games she’d played reduced to invaluable lessons.

Those were the early days of home computers, and I’m still not sure how it happened. I opened a new document, typed my paper, printed it out, closed the document. Maybe I’d closed the word processing program as well, I don’t remember. But that evening, a wail sounded from the study. The essay wouldn’t open. A message on the screen told her the file was password-protected.

I sat under the kitchen lights, staring at the vinyl tablecloth.

“What did you do?” Dad kept saying to me.

“I don’t know,” I said. Soon I was crying too.

Then Dad was on the phone to the software store, to the company that had made the software, but the file still wouldn’t open. At some point my sister had printed out a draft, but we went through the garbage and couldn’t find it. She had to rewrite the essay in two days. She’d stared at the lost essay for so long, she must have known much of it by heart, and the next day Mom called her in sick to school, so that she could stay home and finish—what I’m trying to say is that the rewriting she did, of a two-page personal statement, was not a superhuman feat. Yet we all treated it as though it were. She would’ve never done anything in such a slapdash way, writing entire paragraphs at the last minute, though that was the way I wrote everything. She finished, and my father drove the application to the post office, and all was calm.

A day later, however, she went back and reread her essay and discovered two typos, which she’d missed in the rush to finish it. An essay with two typographical errors had been sent off to Yale, and there was nothing she could do. I was to blame, I knew. I had ruined Courtney’s application.

Later on (and I mean years later) the loss of the original essay would come to seem emblematic, in that so much Atherton family data was eventually lost. All our papers and letters and records from those years were stored on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies, while technology moved on, until the files could no longer be accessed and the disks were thrown out. Whatever history of our family was contained in those documents, it wound up in the garbage.