The Foundation's first interview was like an exam, the second like an interrogation about the soul.
At the first, three experts spent an hour taking the Open Ladder apart screw by screw. A thin man with a tablet began with money:
"Start-up funding, a grant, let's say. And in a year? Mentors have to be paid every month, Ms Mohr, not from one grant to the next."
"In a year, the districts and schools will pay: an hour of mentoring costs them less than teaching a child for another year after they have been held back," I said. "The arithmetic is on page seven: an hour of coaching against the cost of a repeat year. The difference is a factor of eleven."
"Optimistic."
"Conservative. I halved the effect so that you would believe me."
For the first time he raised his eyes from the tablet, and made a note of something. The second expert asked what would stop the platform degenerating into an ordinary tutoring business for children who had everything already. The third, a woman with short grey hair, said nothing and listened the way people listen for a pulse.
"The admission rule," I said. "We take first the ones for whom school comes as a foreign language. Those who can pay are able to wait: somebody with money is already in their corner."
"And padded hours? Teenagers are inventive."
"Cross-signatures: pupil, parent, mentor. Clause nine of the charter. My friend thought of it after breaking my first interface in a single evening, and her name stands in the charter, because that is the rule with us: every method is signed by its author."
"And your point?"
"My point is that the rule works. You have just read somebody else's name in my application, and it did not occur to you that I might be hiding a co-author."
I answered from my own question cards, and for the first time I knew what it is to have the ladder you built for other people hold your own weight. On the question about risks I caught myself in the old reflex, apologising with my intonation, and remembered Hartmann's red note: "Assert." I asserted.
The second interview was conducted by that same grey-haired woman, alone, without a tablet, with the eyes of a radiologist. The project did not interest her. I did.
"There is a break in your record, Ms Mohr. For three years you were listed as the unofficial mentor of the school's strongest candidate. Then you stopped. The panel needs to understand: can you begin things, or can you only walk away?"
Breathing pause, four counts. Shame into a plan of action.
"I can count," I said. "For three years I put my hours into somebody else's result and called it friendship. Now I put them where the contribution can be seen. The Open Ladder is not walking away. It is the same hands, the same method, and for the first time my own signature."
"Granted." She made a note. "Then a second question. What becomes of the platform when you get tired? People like you flare up brightly and burn out fast."
The question was cruel and exact, like everything in that Foundation.
"The charter is written to work without me," I said. "Every method is signed and open, the hours are counted by a spreadsheet, the decisions are taken by a board. I built a system you can walk out of without bringing it down. Because I have already been a system nobody could walk out of. I did not care for it."
The woman gave me the long look of a radiologist whose scan has told her more than the patient did. Her face let nothing through, and I decided to take that as a compliment: impenetrability is the courtesy of the strong.
On the evening before the public essay my mother set a plate of toast on the table and sat down opposite me, in the headscarf she had worn since her first course of treatment as though it were a fashionable accessory rather than a necessity.
"Nervous?"
"I'm fine."
"Liar." She pushed the plate closer. "Tired girls need carbs. Eat."
I laughed, and suddenly understood that in my first life this scene had never happened, not once: before every exam of mine I had sat not in this kitchen but in the library, with somebody else's cards, somebody else's panic, somebody else's future. My mother watched me eat and asked no questions until the second slice:
"Have they announced the subject?"
"They put it up today. 'What Success Costs: On Visible and Invisible Support.'"
My mother snorted and went to put the kettle on:
"Well, you could write a book about that."
"I plan to start with the essay."
"Start." She set a cup in front of me and rested her hand on my shoulder for a second: the gesture that in our family stood in for whole monologues. "And the book you'll write later. When I'm better and can get in your way properly."
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