“It was a Christmas gift from my uncle. It’s from Hermès. He bought it in Macau, it’s cheaper there.”
“Ah, well it’s so beautiful. I’ll have to look for the same one.”
“Thank you,” she said. She looked at me for an extra second. My name was on the tip of her tongue, I could tell, but she couldn’t conjure it from her memory.
The first thing I did when I arrived back in my dorm was look up Hermès scarves. I could not find an exact match on the official page for Hermès, so I spent over an hour searching through the websites for department stores, resale marketplaces, and consignment shops that specialized in Hermès, experimenting with different keywords in search engines and even looking through cached pages of the websites with the largest collections of scarves. Still, I couldn’t find an exact match. This filled me with a strange sorrow, as though I had lost a prized heirloom or found out a treasured piece of jewelry had been a fake.
As a consolation prize, I watched Hermès scarves unboxings on YouTube until my eyes started to hurt. About ten videos in Iforced myself to shut down my laptop to actually do some work. Even after I closed the videos, I could still hear the chirpy voices of the vloggers, their unbridled materialism thinly veiled as an artistic inclination toward fashion and exaggerated vocal fry echoing like a pop song stuck in my head. I unzipped my backpack and took out a few printouts of readings I still needed to do, grabbing a highlighter from the front pocket. I stared at the blank wall in front of my desk and took five deep breaths.
I didn’t understand why I was so upset. It wasn’t like I could afford the scarf now anyway. I had hoped to bookmark the link so that I could buy it later, or at least have the option to buy it later. But by the time I could afford it, I would’ve forgotten all about it. That is the beauty of capitalism: as long as you can suppress your current consumerist impulse, the market will always feed you a new one. Besides, I didn’t even wear bright colors. And I didn’t like Hermès. I associated it with nouveau-riche international students who always dressed in tacky head-to-toe designer. But the idea that I could never own the exact same scarf, which had dazzled me from the moment I saw it, made me feel an aching, childish envy for Laura, that she could enjoy yet another thing that I so soulfully wanted but couldn’t have. I wondered if she would bring the scarf with her to Cambridge. She said it had been a gift from her uncle; maybe it had been to celebrate her acceptance to law school and had even come with a card. “Congratulations to my beautiful and accomplished niece on your acceptance to Harvard. I always knew you could do it.”
—
I decided to enroll inHistory of the Modern Middle East, even though it conflicted with the Continental Theoryseminar that I had wanted to take since freshman year. I told myself that History of Modern Middle East would help me become a better global citizen, as didn’t I already know enough about Europe? Weren’t people on campus always complaining about how the Columbia Core Curriculum was too Eurocentric?
I did not sit close to Laura this time and instead took my normal seat in the middle of the front row. When class was dismissed, we both rushed to the lectern to ask the professor a question. I let her ask hers first since I wanted to hear what it was, and felt pleased that she was just clarifying the date of a particular event, while I was actually asking a thoughtful question that would demonstrate the depth of my intellectual curiosity. I was even more pleased when she stayed to listen to the answer to my question. After the professor finished answering, we both walked out of the lecture hall, and I found myself trailing just a few paces behind her. She exited the building onto Amsterdam; it seemed she was heading in the direction of the law school. I didn’t have class until two hours from now and I frequently studied at the law school library, so I decided there wasn’t any reason I couldn’t head that direction as well.
But instead of walking down 116th to enter the lobby of the law school, she made a left to head north, turning right over the bridge that crossed over Amsterdam. There was only one place she could be going to: East Campus, known as the social dorm for seniors, which every weekend filled up with hordes of drunk students headed to a party they hoped would be cool enough to warrant a noise complaint. I followed her through the reception area, swiping my ID to move past the turnstiles. To the right were the elevators that took you to the suites in the high-rise, and to the left was the courtyard that took you to the six-person townhouses. She walked a few paces in front of me to the courtyard and turned to enter the third town house. I was about to follow her up the steps to the front door but realized that would surpass the line of plausible deniability. There was nothing up those steps except her dorm. Besides, wasn’t I supposed to be going to the law school to study?
I continued walking through the courtyard, pretending that I knew where I was headed. By the time I reached the other side, she was nowhere to be seen.
I didn’t see anyone else walking to the town houses, but I knew some of the dorms had windows overlooking the courtyard where I was standing. If someone happened to see me from their window, wouldn’t they find it strange that I was just aimlessly wandering around this dorm building? Wouldn’t it make more sense if I was here for a purpose—for instance: to visit someone? Instead of returning to the lobby, I walked up the spiraled concrete steps that I had seen Laura walking up just a few minutes ago. I would pretend that I was visiting a friend in this suite, but they weren’t home, which was why I would soon be walking back down the spiral steps.
When I reached the top of the stairs, for a brief moment, I wondered what would happen if I pressed my hand against the metallic handle and the door actually opened. What if I actually wandered into her room? I let my imagination run wild, exploring the possibilities of what I could find. Maybe I’d open her passport and discover that her real name wasn’t Laura Kim, but she was actually a legendary K-pop star who hid her identity to pursue a normal college experience. Or maybe I’d find a strange medication and upon looking it up would discover it was meant for a rare life-threatening disease, because of which Laura onlyhad three more years to live, so of course the empathetic, reasonable admissions officers of Harvard Law School would let this poor girl with subpar grades and scores live out her dying wish of obtaining a JD.
I didn’t bother trying to open the door. I wasn’t a weirdo or a creep, and besides, I knew it would be locked. All of these doors automatically lock.
On the surface of the door there were six name tags, each shaped like a cup of boba tea. Laura’s was green, like a matcha latte. I gently pulled the edge of the name tag. The double-sided tape put up more resistance than I expected. I used both hands to pull, careful to ensure the paper would remain intact. I slipped it into my backpack. When I returned to my dorm, I took out the name tag from my backpack, satisfied that it had not succumbed to any creases during my walk back home. I found myself staring at the name tag for long periods of time, tracing a finger along the curved tails of thea’s, the sloped shoulder of ther.
I pinched both sides of the name tag, then ripped it in half again and again until the pieces were just little green shreds of construction paper, until I was sure that even the most fastidious jigsaw puzzle–solver could not put them back together, and sprinkled the shreds into the recycling bin, watching them float to the bottom like confetti.
—
It had been a monthsince Alex and Leah’s falling-out and Columbia Housing had still not gotten back to them about an alternate arrangement. Alex had been staying with a friend from their sociology class but they were worried they were becoming too much of a burden, so Eunjin and I offered to hostthem in our rooms. I felt a little guilty about helping Alex after I had just heard from Leah about how much they hurt her, but Eunjin convinced me that there were two sides to every story, and that I would be indirectly helping Leah by keeping the two of them apart. And even though I was closer to Leah, Alex was still one of my best friends. I had privately been grieving the possibility of losing their presence in my life, and was relieved it wouldn’t have to come to that.
Alex chose to sleep at Eunjin’s because they both liked waking up early, but they would be leaving most of their clothes and toiletries in my room. The first night Alex moved in they brought a bottle of Moscato that the three of us shared while sitting on Eunjin’s bed. Moscato was my favorite wine because it tasted the least like alcohol and the most like sparkling grape juice. We swished big gulps in our mouths and pretended to be pretentious connoisseurs contemplating the flavor profile.
“I’m getting…baby’s breath,” Alex announced, scrunching their nose. “Not the flower, but the literal breath of a baby who has maybe just eaten some mashed-up sweet potato or something. You know, the kind from those tiny jars.”
“Mmm…yes, yes,” Eunjin said. She pressed her cup against her face and breathed in. It left an impression around her mouth like a halo. “I am certainly getting a whiff of that as well. You could say it’s one layer out of many. But the utmost layer, on top of those layers of baby food—”
“No, baby’s breath after they’ve eaten the food,” Alex corrected her.
Eunjin repressed a smile. “Thank you for your correction, Alex. Beyond just the whiff of baby’s breath after they’ve eaten the food, such as mashed sweet potato from those little jars”—Alex nodded—“I’m also getting the taste of cake. Specifically, a decadent strawberry sponge cake made with the sweat and tears of a million nuns from England who’ve trained underground their entire lives to perfect the execution of said strawberry sponge cake.”
“Ah, yes, but you must be more specific,” I said. “What era of England? Didn’t you know that vintages of this Moscato are supposed to evoke different eras, and you of course can’t essentialize the hundreds of years of English history into just one tasting profile? That would be incredibly problematic of you. Dare I say…racist?”
“Of course,” Eunjin said with affected solemnity. “I would never dare to essentialize a culture of such richness and diversity that has traditionally been overlooked by the rest of the world. The erasure of English history is something we take very seriously over here.” Eunjin took another sip. “I would say that this evokes the England of Henry the Eighth’s rule. Jane Seymour’s servants were the ones who made this cake at Wolf Hall, and upon tasting it that’s how Henry knew that she was the one for him. Anne Boleyn’s cake, a rum raisin–type confection, just didn’t compare.”
“Yes, exactly!” Alex said. “And what are you getting, Elizabeth, from your tasting profile of the Moscato?”
“Hmm.” I looked up at the ceiling while pretending to stroke an invisible beard. “Honestly, I’m just getting a lot of plastic. Do they put plastic in wine these days?”
“I think that’s just because we’re drinking out of plastic cups,” Eunjin said.
“Oh,” I said, and we couldn’t stop giggling.
After we finished the first bottle of Moscato, we headeddownstairs to get another one. Now that we were over twenty-one we finally weren’t limited to the overpriced liquor store on 115th that only stayed in business because they’d look the other way when you showed your bent Illinois driver’s license. We returned to Eunjin’s dorm with the same brand of Moscato, and by the time we were halfway through the bottle I had forgotten all about my awkwardness around Alex. We were sitting on the bed, each holding the same plastic cup as before.
