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had attended prep schools in New York. That explained your immediate alliance—your social scopes were not limited to your high schools but encompassed small-world networks of the well-heeled: second homes, clubs, family connections. That, or you’d simply identified your kin on sight, and if I ever attempted to breach your city walls, you would instantly peg me as a barbarian.
    Sitting at lunch one day with the Matthews Marauders, I was furtively reading an essay from that morning’s Crimson about the author’s attempts to squelch her inborn competitiveness with her classmates over grades, summer internships, and boyfriends. (“Then I realized,” she wrote in the generously italicized and disingenuous epiphany, “that I didn’t have to be the best . I just had to be the best me .”)
    â€œLet’s start the pregaming half an hour earlier tonight,” Kevin said. “We may as well maximize our hangout time together before classes start.”
    â€œFine by me—I can’t get enough of your guys’ dumb jokes,” Ivana said teasingly.
    â€œYeah, right,” Justin said. “You know they’re hilarious.”
    I imagined one of the hulking chandeliers above us breaking free and crashing on our table in a blizzard of glass.
    When I tilted my head back down, I spotted you grabbing two pears from a basket and walking to the exit, none of your private-­school mafia in the vicinity. A chance to stage a seemingly random encounter.
    I abandoned my partially eaten lasagna on the dishwasher track and followed you outside, maintaining a discreet distance as you cut across Harvard Yard. The chiming of the Memorial Church noon bells was drowned out by the sputtering roar of a lawn mower. A monarch butterfly juked flirtatiously in front of me. You were biting into one of the pears and heading toward Matthews. I could enter with you, make you aware that I lived in the same dorm, maybe jokingly remind you of our shared name-first, descriptor-second introductions that night in the common room.
    You got waylaid by something written in chalk on the pavement. I swerved around you and over to Matthews, where I waited by the entrance, pretending to be immersed in my phone. When you approached, I pushed the door open and held it. Up close, your skin appeared like the unperturbed shell of some creamy European confection.
    â€œThanks,” I said, flustered, as you stepped in.
    I’d mixed it up; I was the one doing something for you. I would’ve been better off making the bad pun I’d formulated during my chase: Pair of pears?
    Yet the verbal blunder didn’t offset my small chivalrous gesture. You smiled at me. Not the coy smile of your Facebook photo—a genuine one, flashing the full range of your front teeth.
    It was like entering Harvard Yard again on move-in day. Cue the timpani.
    Not wanting to seem as if I were tailgating you upstairs, I loitered in the lobby, browsing the fliers on the bulletin board. “Stressed or sad?” one read. “Anxiety and depression are the two most common mental health diagnoses among college students. Schedule an appointment with university health services today.”
    â€œHarvard isn’t for everyone,” my guidance counselor had told me in my junior-year advising session, words I ignored as boilerplate dissuasion he dispensed to every Cambridge hopeful in hedging against the school’s stingy acceptance rate. “It’s true that it can open doors for you later, but you might well get a richer college experience elsewhere, in a place you can find yourself more easily. This is often the problem when you go somewhere primarily for its name.”
    It’s convenient, in hindsight, to blame Harvard. But it wasn’t the guilty party.

Chapter 4
    T he eve of Harvard’s weeklong shopping period, in which students sample classes before selecting them, I was on my bed, laptop scalding my thighs,