What does it mean to be a “first-generation” college student? Rachel Aviv investigates the case of Mackenzie Fierceton, who was championed as a survivor of the foster system—until she was accused of lying.
Brandt also asked Morrison about the episode, which Mackenzie had reported the day before, when Mackenzie had woken up to Lovelace touching her breasts. Morrison said that Lovelace had made an innocent mistake. “She thought it was funny that [Lovelace] mistook her”—Morrison—“for a 15 year old girl,” Brandt wrote.
While Mackenzie was in the hospital, Morrison was released on bond, and she began calling people close to Mackenzie to tell her side of the story. Rachel Webb, one of Mackenzie’s teachers from elementary school, said that Morrison left a message on her voice mail. “She said, ‘You know me—I would never hurt my beautiful girl. Mackenzie is making this all up. As you know, she’s mentally ill.’ But here’s the thing,” Webb said. “We had never talked about her being mentally ill.
Lisa Smith, the mother of Mackenzie’s friend, said that Morrison called and “tried to be really sweet with me and get me to change my mind about what had happened, but when I said, ‘I’m not interested in hearing what you have to say,’ she got ugly.” Once, at the airport, Smith ran into another Whitfield parent, who commented that “Mackenzie wanted to go to an Ivy League school, and this was her way in.” Smith said, “I was, like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. This girl is traumatized.
Mackenzie moved into a second foster home, because the first was chaotic; while she was there, the other foster child had attempted suicide. The second arrangement fell through, too, and she was moved into a third foster home, with a young couple. During her free period at school, she roamed the halls looking for teachers who might be willing to chat. “I just wanted some sort of closeness with an adult,” she said. In a psychological evaluation administered by the D.S.S.
When Mackenzie had applied to Penn, the university’s automatic coding system had categorized her application as “first generation,” because she had not filled in personal data about her biological parents. Mackenzie said that her college counsellor had told her that, as an independent student estranged from her family, this information was not required.
Mackenzie said her reaction to the question about family was “Fuck that—I don’t have one of those.” Without providing context, she marked that she was the first in her family to go to college. “I had so much anger and grief, and I didn’t want them to be affiliated in any way with this new life I was building,” she said. “I wanted so deeply for people to understand what it means to not have a family, and I had this fear of people being, like, ‘What happened to you—that doesn’t count.
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