For Eunjin’s fourth birthday, her mother gifted her a1/16th size Stentor. It was the smallest available in the store, but whenEunjin tucked the instrument under her chin for the first time, she still had to stretch her left arm to reach the finger tapes.
—
The night after Eunjin’s performanceat the gallery, the two of us went to our friends Leah and Alex’s dorm to smoke weed. It was our Thursday night ritual. Most students didn’t have class on Friday, so the atmosphere on campus was energetic, full of release. The sound of rustling leaves accompanied my evening walk, which made the campus buildings seem more imposing than usual.
Alex and Leah lived together in a double on the seventh floor of a building across the street from ours, pushing together their twin mattresses to create a king-sized bed.
Leah was the kind of beautiful that made you want to hate her but also be her best friend. When I met her in my University Writing class freshman year, she was still sleeping with much older drummers of niche Brooklyn bands, but a few months later she started dating Alex, who went by they/them pronouns. They had delicate, birdlike features and a shaved head. They were also the only person close to me who I didn’t know the percentile of. I tried, but I didn’t even know where to start. Would I compare them to men or women? According to the beauty standards for men or the beauty standards for women? Alex was too complex and unique a person for me to place on any scale.
Leah took out some weed and rolling paper from a wooden box under her bed. Alex rolled the joint on the kitchen counter, expertly nudging the paper into a tight cylinder. We crouched on the fire escape and watched the glittering lights of skyscrapers downtown.
The four of us smoked until everything in the room started to look like boobs: the ceiling light, the blueberries on the kitchen counter, the smudged tail of Alex’s eyeliner. We giggled for fifteen minutes before falling into a deep silence, each of us entranced in our own thoughts.
I looked over at Eunjin. The fingers on her left hand were pressing invisible strings, a similar movement to pushing down the keys on a piano. Her right hand was swishing back and forth, moving an invisible bow.
One time, in freshman year, I asked Eunjin if she ever worried that she wouldn’t make it as a violinist. “Not saying that you won’t be able to make it. You’re obviously incredibly talented. But does it ever give you anxiety? Do you ever think about trying to go a safer route?”
“Yes it gives me anxiety, but no I could never do anything else,” she said.
“Why?” I asked. When we first met, after I found out that her goal was to become a concert violinist, I wondered if she was like the other artistic students I knew, the ones who simply were below average at everything except their art. But it was the second semester when we had this conversation, and I knew that she had gotten As in all of her classes, even Principles of Economics with a notoriously demanding professor.
“I just have to. I can’t explain it. Some people just have a thing in their life that they have to do at all costs, that brings them meaning in a way that nothing else can,” she said. “In the end, it doesn’t matter whether I become rich and famous, whether I get into a prestigious orchestra or become a soloist. I still have to do it. And even if I fail and end up teaching violin at a middleschool orchestra in the middle of nowhere, I don’t think that I will look back and regret my choice.”
I couldn’t think of a statement that I could relate to less. I wondered what it was like to love a discipline as a first principle. You could say I loved Harvard Law, but even that was predicated on external reasons: to prove to my dad that I had accomplished everything he had dreamed for me, and to prove to everyone from my high school that I had made it further than they ever could, to become someone rich, powerful, and important. Absent Harvard’s status in the world, I couldn’t have cared less about the school.
Eunjin’s love was different; it was a love that required no justification or conditions, like the way you would love a human being, perhaps a child or a spouse. It was symptomatic of a larger difference: Most things I loved were means, not ends. Most things she loved were ends, not means. It applied to something even as simple as smoking a joint. As soon as I inhaled, I waited for my head to mellow, for the world to slow down. When she inhaled, she savored it; claimed she liked the smell, liked the pain that it sent down her throat, liked envisioning the smoke entering her lungs and circling back up the exit of her nose and mouth, like it was traveling along roller coaster tracks inside her body. She noticed me staring and smiled, and I looked away quickly, silently impressed with how she didn’t appear self-conscious when she noticed me watching her.
—
Later that weekend we decidedto go to a party at St. A’s, Columbia’s not-so-secret secret society. St. A’s was oneof those places where the 0.01 percent congregated to separate themselves from the 99.99 percent. You were tapped freshman year, often by someone you went to prep school with, and if you made it through the recruiting process, you’d get access to the five-story brownstone with its own full-time staff in exchange for some nominal dues (nominal for the type of person who’d get tapped, not for a normal person). But in my humble opinion, the most important perk was that you got to say you were a member of St. A’s. I was not a member, and neither were my friends, but out of the four of us, Leah was the most likely to be a member, given that she was the most conventionally beautiful and came from the wealthiest family of the four of us. So it made sense that she was the one with the friend who was supposed to get us into the party. However, we had already been waiting in line for twenty minutes, and the friend wasn’t responding to her texts.
I had walked by this building a billion times without realizing what it was. From the outside, it looked like just another brownstone in the university’s vast Upper Manhattan real estate portfolio, with the campus’s signature redbrick facade trimmed in limestone and a turquoise roof. But if you looked closely, between two turquoise-framed dormer windows on the roof was a carved cartouche with the Greek letters Delta Psi surrounded by a stone wreath.
To pass the time, I asked my friends to debate the age-old topic that no one grew tired of discussing: what was the most attractive major? I was firm in my conviction that it was art history; Eunjin agreed, but Alex contended it was physics, and Leah argued that it was political science. She named quite a few attractive people who were majoring in political science.
“But poli-sci is the largest major,” I said. “We have to think about this in proportions. Which department, on average, has the hottest people? Not what most of the hot people are majoring in.” Besides, I was a political science major, and when I looked around in my own classes, I was not impressed.
“Then that would be physics,” Alex said. “Intelligence makes someone attractive. And physics is the major for smart people.”
“I thought computer science was the major for smart people,” Leah said.
Alex scoffed. “God no, computer science is for sellouts. Physics is for the actual geniuses.”
I shook my head. “You are missing the spirit of the question. It isn’t what majormakessomeone attractive. It’s what major are the attractive people happening to pick?”
“If not art history, then definitely not computer science,” Eunjin said. “They don’t even shower.”
“Fair enough,” Leah said.
Finally, Leah’s friend poked her head out of the door. Leah squealed when they saw each other. She usually didn’t squeal when she saw me, but I wasn’t offended; only certain types of people appreciate squealing, and I am not one of them. Her friend said a quick word to the guy manning the door, and a few seconds later, the four of us were inside. A couple of students who looked like first-years stared at Leah’s friend and then stared at the four of us, following our every movement with envy. I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel kind of nice.
At first, it looked no different from your average frat party, except the alcohol was better, the people more attractive, and everywhere I turned someone was snorting cocaine. I was wearing a dress and realized I looked like I was trying too hard. Noone else was wearing a dress. They were wearing crop tops and shorts. I might as well have worn a sign that said I didn’t belong.
Midway through my third vodka Red Bull I pushed through the crowds to get to the ballroom, where I could take a picture of the iconic chandelier dangling from the ceiling. But I stopped when I felt Leah sharply elbowing me in the side.
“Don’t do that,” she whispered to me.
I tried to be more discreet when examining the stately architecture in the gaps between all the dancing bodies. I looked at the Arts and Crafts–style library, the decorated overmantels, and the striking marble fireplace dedicated to a member from back when they only let in WASPs. Nowadays they let in anyone who had money, even new money, even money from abroad. You no longer had to be rich and white. You just had to be rich and act white.
