'I'm definitely starting to feel pressure'

MELROSE -- No wonder Abigail King's eyes flutter shut near the end of classmates' presentations on the hominid ancestors of modern man. She's added applying to West Point to a schedule already crowded with running on the cross-country team, playing cello in the Melrose Symphony Orchestra, keeping up with piano, working on the school yearbook, and doing homework. In honors anthropology this last period of the day, Nikko Patten-Weinstein -- soccer player, trombonist in the marching band, drummer for the rock band Ravin Klaim, potential Berklee College of Music student -- tips his chair to the wall behindhim and closes his eyes, too.

As inevitably as the trees of this leafy suburb turn gold every autumn, most seniors at Melrose High School spend the fall preparing entries for the Great American College Sweepstakes. They take -- or retake -- their SATs. They worry about money and debt -- or trust in parents' checkbooks or loans or scholarships. They build dreams about the next four years and beyond and brace for disappointment. They fret about college essays or wonder whether to

go to college at all. They yawn and complain of fatigue. They sigh and complain of stress. "I'm definitely starting to feel pressure," King says. "It's like in races. A couple of times I think I'm going to give up. I think I'm going to die. But there's no reason to stop 2 feet short of the finish line. It's manageable, but sometimes it's really tough."

"I'm not terribly worried or freaked out," Patten-Weinstein says. "But apparently I'm stressed. I came out with shingles. That's a stress-related recurrence of chickenpox."

Last year, King's father suggested she had the traits the United States Military Academy and United States Naval Academy seek. "I said, `You're crazy, Dad,' " King recalls. The more she learned, the moreshe thought he was right. Now the academies, each of which accepts fewer than 15 percent of applicants, lead her college wish list. She's a three-season runner, fit but not strong, so in addition to everything else King is training for a physical aptitude test that asks her to do 29 push-ups in two minutes and to hold herself, arms flexed, above a pull-up bar for 23 seconds. Some weeknights King doesn't go to sleep until 3 a.m. "Weekends," she says, "I get to bed at 9."

Surely there are seniors who cram less into a day and onto a resume -- and who expect less of themselves -- than King. Surely there are seniors whose personalities cushion them from pressure. "I don't find a lot of things stressful," says Nick DeVita. "It's shopping for the next four years of your life." But guidance counselors call this the most competitive class in years, with more than a quarter taking at least one advanced placement course and one-fifth enrolled in two or more, all of which means the air crackles with the tension of college-hunting season.

"What's awful," says Samir Bachiri, "is I'm probably competing against all my best friends."

"Everyone is hush-hush about where they're applying," says Jenna Spataro. "My guidance counselor gave me advice. If you're saying you love this school, then someone says, 'If Jenna can get in I can get in,' and they take your spot."

In a column in the school newspaper last year, Spataro wrote: "Our school has turned into a very competitive and hostile atmosphere regarding class rank." She observes less of that now. "I think people grew up, honestly," she says. "Last year it was crazy. You'd always hear people talk about other people, who got a better grade."

Spataro noticed senior girls in the classes ahead of her occasionally spatting with their friends. "That," she'd think, "will never happen to me and my friends." It would never happen to friends who were Spice Girls one Halloween, Pink Ladies another, and who arrived at this year's seniors-only Halloween dance dressed as Disney princesses -- Spataro as Snow White, her friends as Ariel, Jasmine, Belle. But it is happening. "We sometimes get mad at each other," Spataro says. "Stuff about boys. Or, `I'm so stressed.' It's, like, 'I'm stressed, too.' "

'I think I'm unique'

The time has come for seniors applying to colleges to imagine who they will be, then present who they are to admissions committees evaluating piles of applications from students just like them. "It's not like I'm a fabulous skater or great at a musical instrument," Spataro says. "I don't think I'm the same as everyone else. But if you didn't know me, you'd think I was regular."

For Denise Applegate, applying to Endicott College in Beverly is the first step toward achieving her dream of owning a hair salon. It's a dream she's nurtured since she played with her Barbies' hair and later, in sixth grade, started practicing on friends by cutting Liz Hall's locks. Applegate wants to study business first, then learn hairstyling. Her backup plan is to head straight to beauty school. "Ever since I was little, I always loved it," she says. "Now it's kind of making me nervous. I'm not sure I'll be too good with actual clients."

Process and pressure converge in the college essay, in using a few words to say a lot about themselves, preferably with a topic that sets them apart. One girl is overheard vowing not to write about changing the world because that's what everyone does.

Everyone includes Jacob Lefton, ringlets grazing his wire-rimmed glasses, save-the-environment fliers in his backpack, and a quick "Why?" when his English teacher, talking about "Beowulf," says it takes someone special to slay a dragon.

Last spring Lefton worked on an ill-fated Proposition 2 1/2 override, later cofounded a nonprofit, Education First, that raised $2,000 at an August concert, and this fall helped Mayor Robert Dolan win another term. "I also learned a lot about what I, as an individual, can do to change my world," he writes in a draft for Amherst and Wesleyan.

"I think I'm unique," Lefton says. "I think I have a fair chance if they don't throw my application out because I don't have a fourth year of language and I don't have 1,400s on my SATs."

Tara Dolan, who doesn't know what she'll do if she doesn't get into the University of San Francisco, writes her essay about the band Radiohead because, she says, "you might as well write about something you're passionate about." J.P. Burke, known to watch a 23-minute episode of anime on his laptop during lunch, expects to write about Japanese animation or space travel. Student actor Larvel Scott writes that he wants to study math or engineering at Maryland's Morgan State University "in case my first three movies are failures." Thanh Truong, an aspiring doctor, writes about her mother because "I love her."

Truong remembers huddling on her mother's lap with a brother and sister on a crowded boat that left Vietnam a dozen years ago. What little food her mother had she gave first to her starving children. "Now she always forces us to eat because she's afraid we'll be hungry," Truong says. "My parents expect me to go to a really, really good college," she adds, "and be somebody useful to the world."

Caught in a time warp

Buffeted between a present that includes a new boyfriend and a rapidly encroaching future, Lauren Picard has a 2 a.m. epiphany. "I started thinking about how my life is going to totally change," she says. "I'm sick of hearing, `Your real friends are in college,' and, `The good things are in college.' But if things are working now, why won't these be the friends I keep? Why am I looking forward to getting rid of what means so much to me?"

Caught in the same time warp, Lefton is pulled by what lies ahead. "I feel like an adult in a kid's body," he says. "People say, `Don't grow up too fast.' It's conflicting inside my head. I don't want to grow up too fast, but high school is not the right place for me."

Some seniors are moved by pride as well as the desire to persuade admissions committees of their worth. Anthony Teixeira, one of four students applying early to MIT, retook the SAT because his 740 math score included a careless error he didn't have time to fix. Scott, aiming for a 1,200 in one sitting, has signed up again even though the sum of his best verbal and math scores is 1,210. "It's just to prove to myself I can do it," Scott says.

In this middle-class city, in a still-faltering economy, money is a frequent subtext, whether it's Scott aiming for a "free ride" and quoting his mother's motto, "Owe no man nothing but to love him," or Bobby Forsey hesitating to add the private Dartmouth College to a list made up almost entirely of state schools. "I'd get out of college with basically a mortgage to pay," Forsey says. "I want to pay for it myself. My parents don't like that idea, but it's something I'd like to be able to do."

Patten-Weinstein's basement is music central, with his drum set by the sink and his recording equipment beside the stairs. He and his mother and brother live on child support from his musician father. If Patten-Weinstein gets into Berklee, he'll commute. "I'm very comfortable at home," he says. He'll also study trombone, not drums, in part for a better shot at a scholarship. "Not too many people play trombone," he says.

While his classmates started the year worrying about which schools they might want to attend, Patten-Weinstein's bandmate David Crespo was pretty sure he wouldn't go to college next fall. Now the cross-country team cocaptain is changing his mind. "I've gotten a few letters from colleges. From cross-country coaches," Crespo says. "I'll leave my doors open, I guess."

Different paths

Amid all the college hoopla are students aiming for community colleges who won't apply until the spring, and students, some of whom know what they want to do after graduation and some of whom don't, who don't want to go to college. "I kind of want to take a break from school and do music," says Mannie Goveia. "A big fear of mine is with other people going to college that's not going to be a possibility, playing music."

Sitting with friends in the back of the cafeteria, sewing ribbons to new pink pointe shoes, Jessica Kitchens, whose schedule includes two AP courses, is as driven as any college-bound classmate. But instead of applying to college, Kitchens, who plies and pirouettes at the Ballet Workshop of New England six days a week, is auditioning for ballet troupes.

"Last year, everyone started talking about college. It makes me sick," she says. "I thought I'd apply to a couple of colleges as backup. Now I really don't want to. I'm going to pursue dance, and if it doesn't work out, next year I'll do that. It's hard, though, because everyone is `You really should go to college.' Everyone. Even my friends."

The shadow of their generation's day of infamy, Sept. 11, 2001, colors how some view the future.

Dan Goodhue, voted the boy with the "best laugh" by his classmates, looks more goofy than tough in the Raggedy Ann costume he wears to the Halloween dance. The grandson and nephew of military men, he plans to enlist in the Marine Corps and later become a cop. "This is big-time stuff, especially with what's going on in the world. Like, after 9/11, it just fired me up to defend this country even more," he says. "When the war started in Iraq, that's when my parents started driving me toward college. I still have the same mind-set," he adds. "It's the hardest branch. I want to go in for the rough stuff. I want to see what I'm all about."

By the time firefighters rushed into the burning World Trade Center and other firefighters later recovered their bodies, Forsey already knew he wanted to be a fireman, like his dad, after college. "It kind of solidified it more," Forsey says. "Just the whole brotherhood aspect." He is undaunted by the dangers and his father's warnings. "He says it's a lifetime of nights, weekends, and two full-time jobs. I'd like to be able to do something I'd be proud to say I did," Forsey says. "He wants an easier life for me. He wants me to use my head." Forsey's compromise? To practice law when he's not in the firehouse.

A weary Scott faces his unfinished applications.

"I cannot stress enough how much sleep plays a vital part of your life. I've just been tired this whole school year," he says. "College, junior year, you think it's going to be a piece of cake. It's not. It just seems unreal, like it's not really happening. You wait so long. Then this is it."