When I was about six, Tío Luis took me down to Miami with him to pick up— okay, we all know what Tío Luis was picking up in Miami, and it sure wasn't rays of sunshine in South Beach. (He did get me an ice cream cone there, though, for being such a good listener and holding his hand when we crossed busy streets, and not asking any questions about our supplier's massive Sig Sauer.) As I observed Manhattan spread out in front of me, I felt as awestruck as I had there once, except with a lot more understanding of the magnitude of where I was. The Greyhound might've bounced over the Triborough Bridge hard enough I almost bit off my tongue, but the flood of neon lights— even if they were from XXX Videos and Gentleman's Delight, as we drove through Hell's Kitchen— got under my skin in a way that made me forget that I'd spent the past twenty hours eating Ho Hos for meals and using my jacket as a pillow.

(Miami is also, side note, the tackiest place I've ever been to in my life, and I was raised by gangbangers who started exemplifying 'money can't buy taste' right around the time Curly got a new Rolex for every day of the week. I didn't even know you could buy Ralph Lauren pants with the logo covering half your ass until I went there, or that there were quite so many cosmetic procedures you could do to human faces and tits.)

I finally got my head out of the window (it only opened a crack) and stepped back into the doorway, to observe how I'd set up my room; I straightened my ACT UP poster, which was a little crooked, dangling precariously above my twin bed. We didn't share rooms at Columbia. The sound of parents cussing as they hauled heavy furniture and suitcases out of the elevator wafted in from the hall, of tearful goodbyes once they were done— I was about the only person who'd come here by myself, but I was used to doing things by myself, so it didn't bother me. There was a little trouble with the lady at the housing department, because I was supposed to get a legal adult to co-sign on the lease, but she relented without a whole lot of convincing. I was pretty good at getting people to do what I wanted, especially women— I was never on time for homeroom my entire senior year, after I started buying Mrs. Griffin coffee in the mornings to soften my late arrival. I didn't want to spend too long thinking about what it said about me, or who I'd picked it up from.

"Hey."

He had a nose like one of Darwin's finches, the kind that evolved to crack open big seeds— that was the first thing I noticed about him, when I turned around and saw him standing in the hall, one of his arms propped up against my doorframe. I didn't even mean it in a bad way; it gave his face character, added something striking to what would've otherwise been bland, shaving cream-commercial good looks, unremarkable in their symmetry. He smoothed his blond curls down over his forehead, in one neat motion, only for a couple to spring back up again. "Nice poster," he said, pointing at it, his finger hitting the center of the equation under the pink triangle. SILENCE = DEATH.

At first, I thought he was being sarcastic— braced myself for it— then realized the compliment was genuine. "Thanks."

I felt awkward as we scrambled for anything else to say, like I wasn't on sure footing talking to him, and that was a unfamiliar sensation for me; I shoved my hands into the pockets of my worn-out jeans, wrinkled from the long drive and flecked with dried cement, and was suddenly conscious of his pressed chinos. He could've strolled out of a country club, me off a construction site (which, incidentally, was the last place those pants had been. At least it wasn't Uncle Soda's horse farm in New Mexico, and its corresponding stink of manure.) He scrubbed a finger along the underside of his shirt collar, pulling it away from his neck, at least looking as uncomfortable as I did. "Do you want to come downtown?" he finally asked, which was also when he pulled a miniature bottle of Smirnoff out from behind his back. Green apple flavor. "There's this bar a couple blocks off where the NYU kids hang out, too."

I didn't even really have to think about it— I gave my room one last scrutinizing sweep with my eyes, before I picked my wallet up and turned to head out. We didn't even know each other's names. I was discovering that was how it went, sometimes, at college.


"You know Morningside Park, the one we passed on the way here?" Jason's breath swept against the side of my face as he leaned closer to me, hot and sweet from a half-drained Tom Collins— the ice in his glass clinked together, when he raised it back up to his lips. He was a lot more talkative with some drinks in us, like we'd been friends all our lives, not just people who'd moved onto the same floor today. "That's where a bunch of students were occupying buildings, back in '68. Protesting the school funding the war in Vietnam."

It was a worn-out cliché, but sometimes I really did feel like I'd been born in the wrong generation— I could've been starting a cult of personality on a commune, and instead got stuck coming of age with Ronald 'it's morning again in America' Reagan. Uncle Darry— who voted for Reagan twice and went knocking doors for him the second time— rolled his eyes at me, though, when I brought it up once in his presence. "Kid, you just ask Uncle Ponyboy what the kitchens were like on those communes, if he's been tellin' you stories," he said with a snort. "You better move onto one where they've recruited some women, trust me, or else you'll be eatin' cockroach legs stirred in with every meal."

"That's cool," I still said. "You think we're gonna get to do anything like that?"

The drinking age got bumped up to twenty-one a couple of years back, but I had a fake ID and got in without being shaken down much; I assumed that the bouncer wouldn't waste a lot of time scrutinizing an Oklahoma driver's license, and I'd guessed right. The bar was all lit up in blue LEDs, making me feel like I was trapped in a glass bubble deep underwater, though that might've been a combination of Jason's vodka, which we were trying to drink under the table without the bartender noticing, and the straight whiskey I'd been shooting, which evoked Ernest Hemingway for me but tasted terrible. I hadn't been drunk in a while— to be honest, not since I was fifteen and pounding shots in frat basements like I wouldn't see tomorrow. I tried to ignore most of the parental advice Curly had jammed into the past couple of years, but I knew without it having to be said that I'd reminded him of my mother, when he found me on the garage floor. I pushed that, and thoughts of her, out of my mind.

Which was easy enough, because Jason had switched gears to launch into a monologue about his own mother. She'd gone to Barnard twenty years ago, and was some kind of expert developmental psychologist now, who'd written an award-winning book on raising 'easily frustrated, chronically inflexible children'. He kept calling her 'Carole', but it wasn't a me and Curly situation, as far as I could gather— she just got real into New Age in the seventies and thought that 'Mom' reified outdated hierarchies between parents and children. She'd moved to Vermont from the Upper East Side since he graduated high school and now commuted to her practice from a sheep farm. "I think she hoped I'd go into it too—" he shoved a handful of peanuts into his mouth from the glass dish, which I'd seen someone stub their cigarette out into— "but what I really want to do is make films. Like Woody Allen, or Jean-Luc Godard, you know?"

The music was so loud that I struggled both to hear him and parse the question. Even worse, I called them movies, and didn't have very sophisticated taste in them. "Did you like, uh, Scarface?" I'd tried to watch it with Curly, who was impossible— he kept nitpicking everything the entire time. At least I didn't say the first one that popped into my head, which was Pretty in Pink, a VHS tape my sister and her friends had worn grooves into.

Fortunately, he grinned at me, I passed the test. "Yeah, with Al Pacino? He was great in Dog Day Afternoon too—"

"Hey." A girl whose hair was teased so high above her head, it threatened to touch the ceiling, brushed my shoulder with her hand like she was brushing off an invisible piece of lint. Her neon green eyeshadow blared into my eyes. "Do you want to come to the bathroom with me?"

Jason gave me an encouraging nod; led as easily away as a lamb from its flock, I followed her, past the crowd and through the thick wooden door that said WOMEN'S. One girl was leaning against the sink, reapplying dark cherry lip gloss with a loud smack. She didn't watch us move in reverse through the mirror, though, even when this chick led me straight inside a stall and locked the door behind us. "Are you okay?" I asked, stupidly. "Is somebody botherin' you or something?"

Like I said— stupid. I thought I was going to get the chance to play the hero here, that some guy was hassling her, and out of everyone in the bar, she was waiting on a seventeen-year-old kid to defend her honor. She smiled at me the same way you'd smile at a cute, but not particularly bright, baby, who was trying to learn how to crawl but could only manage to do it backwards. Then she started to pull down her lace top and ruck up her sequined skirt at the same time.

What the fuck?

Look, I didn't grow up under a rock, or in some Baptist cult, even if Jennifer and I were waiting for a 'marriage' that we both knew wasn't going to happen. I'd been to parties— I grasped the general concept of a hookup, and how people washed them down with lukewarm beer. But I'd never met this chick before in my life, and we'd exchanged one sentence each. This was making the time I drunkenly made out with Nicole Gallagher in the Sigma Chi basement look like a church picnic. "What's your name again?" I asked, scrunching up my face, though I was pretty sure she hadn't offered it up to me to begin with. It seemed like a good start.

"Monica." Her tits were out, as the top fell down and bunched around her waist— she hadn't been wearing a bra. I tried to look away and ended up fixating on the gap between her legs instead, which wasn't any better. She was starting to grasp the awkwardness of our situation too, as more and more seconds elapsed with me pressing myself up against the door and making no sudden moves towards her. "So are we gonna do this or not?"

"… We're not," I said, trying to sound more apologetic about it than relieved— I still couldn't believe this was actually happening to me, and wasn't just some bizarre dream fueled by taking too much cold medicine and flipping through a Hustler before bed. (Tainted Love coming on right then, distant but still audible from inside, didn't help matters.) I might've stumbled into the middle of every heterosexual, red-blooded male's fantasy, sure, but I didn't really feel like cashing in my v-card up against Alicia K. sucks great cock, inside of a pink lipstick heart. My aunt Bonnie, who was a card-carrying NOW member, would've kicked my ass if she heard me say it, but this chick was so easy, I was starting to wonder if she didn't have a screw loose. Or if she wasn't—

Her shrug, as she pulled her top back up and fished a baggie of cocaine out of the waistband of her skirt, confirmed as much as I'd already started to suspect. One of her nails, on her pointer finger, was longer than the others. "You want some?" she asked as she cut a line on the lid of the toilet with a rolled-up twenty.

Looking at her, I remembered watching my tío Alberto's septum collapse like a faulty bridge one night, the spill of dark blood through his parted fingers. I shook my head. She rolled her eyes and turned away to snort it up, which I took as my cue to leave. I pushed open the door and ran into the stall next to her, saliva pooling in my mouth, as I threw up all the green apple vodka and straight whiskey I'd downed on an empty stomach.

Jason was still waiting for me when I came back, sitting so precariously on his barstool I was afraid he'd fall out of it. "You finish fast," he slurred, amused, looking down at the face of his silver TAG Heuer.

"You timed it?" I asked, and very unwisely, ordered myself another drink without so much as a side of fries.

He kept looking at my mouth, whenever I talked, instead of making eye contact. I didn't really know what to make of it. "Five minutes."

Our knees touched underneath the bar, and I left mine there, felt the heat of his skin from beneath the fabric. Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life came on, the lyrics drowning out any more of my conscious thoughts like a riptide.


I should've known I wouldn't fit in there the second I saw the manicured lawn on the brochure, in retrospect. Maybe my troubles started at the dorm 'get to know each other' event where we went around in a circle and shared what we did over the summer, and everyone else had gone on mission trips building schools in Nicaragua, or backpacking through southeast Asia and the Alps, and I'd been, uh, lifeguarding (yelling at the kids trying to drown each other and steal popsicles from the concession stand) and working on Uncle Darry's construction site (distracting Uncle Darry's crew, according to him). I tried to make up a fake vacation to the Bahamas once I got the picture, but my improv skills weren't really up to the task on such short notice, and as the guy next to me said (I later learned his daddy got Condé Nast Traveler off the ground), it was kind of a passé destination anyway.

Or the time I thought the metal detector at the front door of my high school, and the story of how my friend Scott got patted down once for bringing a fork in his lunch bag, would be good for a laugh, and everybody looked at me like I'd just moved to New York from Baghdad instead of Oklahoma. Okay, so Will Rogers was kind of a lousy school, sue me— apparently in the sixties, the preps used to fight the poor kids, but by the time I walked the halls, they'd all migrated to private on the West side and the poor kids were left to fight each other— but I didn't think it was that far out of the ordinary, until I heard the guy across the hall talking about the trip he'd taken with his French class to Paris junior year. Just about only field trip at Rogers was the time Officer Welch took some ISS frequent-fliers down to the county jail, to show them what their futures were looking like if they didn't shape up.

Or the time— more like the creeping realization— that people looked a lot different than I was used to, and it wasn't just the clothes, or the haircuts, or the neutral manicures on the girls when all the ones back home favored fluorescent shades. It took me making faces at myself in the mirror for five solid minutes, wondering if I was already cracking up, until I figured out the problem once I started to grimace. They all had straight teeth.

But none of that really hit me until I was in Contemporary Civilization class, a couple of weeks into the semester, and I had to read out loud from a section of Nicomachean Ethics. I didn't understand shit in the book even after I reread every sentence about a dozen times, but I figured I hadn't screwed it up so bad until it was the next person's turn, and the guy sitting next to me leaned in close, eyes wide with what I thought was surprise and what ended up being the eagerness to be cruel— he was wearing a suit to an 8:30 class, which should've been my first warning sign. I wondered if he needed to borrow a pencil or something, was already reaching for my bag. "You know that's not how you say epitome, right, affirmative action?"

Affirmative action?

I wanted to hit him, but of course I didn't, Jesus, what was wrong with me for even considering it? This wasn't Will Rogers Senior High, for fuck's sake, where if they expelled every kid who ever fought, the place would be empty by lunchtime. I felt like I'd downed a bottle of IcyHot, all in one go, and it was coagulating inside my stomach; I should've at least been able to come up with a decent insult, but I didn't say anything to him at all. I pretended to myself later that it was because he was that far beneath my notice, not worth the effort of a reply. In reality, I was just shocked speechless, and this was after I'd spent all of Oklahoma history sitting in the front so Mr. Rhodes could 'keep a damn good eye on me'.

I was still dwelling on it that Friday afternoon, once my last class had let out, as I sat on a bench outside the library and pretended to flip through a Literature Humanities assignment. What really got to me was that we were reading out loud around this time in AP English 12 last year, and when Derek Henderson took about a month to get through each sentence in his section, tripping over the words like a runner wearing tennis shoes two sizes too big— I didn't say it, but I sure thought, Jesus Christ, what kind of head injuries are they getting on the football team these days?

"Excuse me?"

There was a girl standing in front of me when I looked up; her dark hair was French-braided so tightly away from her face, it looked like it hurt, straining at the edges of her scalp. She was the kind of pale that burned after twenty minutes in direct sunlight. "Sorry, are you in Lit Hum too, with Professor Davies?"

I nodded. She was in Contemporary Civilization with me too, I'd seen her at the door before— it was a required core class— but she always sat in the first two rows while I favored the middle. "I was sick, Tuesday—" I guess 'freshers flu' was also sweeping through the girls' dorms with a vengeance— "and I really need to borrow the notes from somebody." She started digging around in her bookbag. "Listen, I can pay you—"

"I'll give them to you for free, Jesus, who do you think I am, Ebenezer Scrooge?" I pulled my composition notebook out of my own bag and flipped to the right page, 9/15/87 penciled in the lefthand corner. "Here."

"You have really neat handwriting for a boy… Michael," she said, flipping to the inside cover, where I'd scrawled my name in permanent marker. I must've given her a weird look, because she added quickly, "that wasn't an insult!"

I wasn't really in the mood to dial up the charm, but she didn't deserve to be the target for my brooding, either. I forced myself to give her a disarming smile. "What's your name?"

"Nadezhda." If you gave me a month to figure out how to spell her name, based off the first time I heard it, I wouldn't have gotten it right. Then she grimaced. "You can just call me Nadia, though."

"Is that your nickname?" I didn't really understand how Russian diminutives worked then, either, but I didn't think she should have to make herself easier for anyone to digest.

She squared her shoulders a little. "It is now," she said, like it was that easy to reinvent yourself and become somebody new. Maybe in this city, it was.

We ended up walking down to the Met, which was kind of a hike from campus, but I didn't have other plans and didn't mind the company; I liked doing things for myself, but not being by myself, which was a distinction that at least made sense in my own head. There were a ton of hot dog stands in the square that surrounded its massive steps; I got us two. I wasn't much of a southern gentleman, and we were hardly on a date, but I felt weird about making a girl pay when I was with her all the same. Besides, I might've not had any class or good breeding or whatever ineffable force was making me stick out like a sore thumb, but I wasn't hurting for spare change— I'd been working since I was fourteen, old enough for a permit, and I still had most of the money from when I sold my car last summer on top of that. I didn't need to start peddling my notes.

Nadia was from Brighton Beach; she had two sisters, parents, and a dog, of which her favorite relative was definitely Snowball; she used to do gymnastics but quit when she realized she'd never go Olympic like Mary Lou Retton; she thought she wanted to major in English, but not if they kept making her read Chaucer. "Can I ask you somethin'… personal?" I asked like I didn't have an ounce of home training, once I'd told her that my uncle Tim loved our chihuahua Princesa— who he'd threatened to send back to the pet store at first sight— more than either of his kids. She had a heated bed with three different settings.

"Sure." She licked a stray drop of mustard off the side of her thumb.

"Is it… weird? You know, bein' a girl here and everything, since they just started letting y'all in?"

I expected her to deny it, or be pissed about the question, but in retrospect, we were all just getting to know each other and didn't have a lot of boundaries yet— I'd sat through some guy trying to tell me about his grandparents being first cousins the other night in the lounge, and him wondering if he had any secret birth defects, waiting to pounce once he had kids like a panther up in a tree. "It is weird." She traced a pattern on the sun-heated stone with her fingertip, around the shining patches of mica. "Sometimes I feel like I should've just applied to Barnard, like I'm still part of one big social experiment, you know? If I'm not doing well in class, it's not just a reflection on me. It's because girls can't keep up at Columbia."

I thought about my mother, about how her life might've been different. I found her SAT results nestled in Uncle Darry's attic once, when I was looking for my old catcher's glove. She was brilliant. "God, I'm sorry."

"Are you…" And I knew what she was asking with the way the sentence trailed off on a high note, the way she looked at me. I just never knew what to say. My ethnic background was as murky as a creek bed, I always dreaded filling out demographic forms and having to check off 'other'. People tended to assume I was Mexican, because of my family, and I thought of myself that way most of the time too, but I didn't speak great Spanish and the other Mexican kids at school didn't exactly consider me part of the crew. I wasn't Apache enough to be enrolled in the tribe, either, though my mama was and she'd tried. The Bureau of Indian Affairs kept certificates of pedigree on us— them?— like prize poodles, and turned out the blood had run too thin by my generation. Uncle Soda had tried to be nice to me about it once, gave me some speech about how blood quantum was all a colonial construct made up to breed us (them?) out of existence, but it didn't change the truth.

Neto had accused me of trying to be seen as one of the good ones on the way home from AC/DC— sure, I'd punched him, but that didn't make him any less right. I acted white, and I wanted people to see me as white, too. It rankled at me that here, it was like I'd wandered onto the set of the wrong play, and couldn't get any of my lines straight.

"First-generation?" she ended up asking.

"It's kind of complicated," I said with a thin smile. I didn't elaborate, or tell her what happened in Contemporary Civilization, or anything else. I liked being confided in; I didn't like confiding in others. Playing it close to the vest, the way Curly claimed he and I had in common. "Sorry I dragged all this up, right before the weekend." I brushed some breadcrumbs off my jeans and stood up. "You want to come back to my dorm? Travis Zimmerman bought a keg off of some of the guys from Beta Theta Pi." We always had a party spilling out of someone's twin-bed-sized room and into the hall, and half the time, you could find our RA there with a beer in hand. He gave me an ounce of pretty decent weed my second night, in exchange for listening to his theories about how the Mayans invented microwaves. He was an anthropology PhD candidate.

She looked at me like she wanted to peel me like a banana and expose all of my bullshit to the bright sunlight. Then she said, "sure," again, and the moment passed.


More notes— the Triborough Bridge is called the RFK Bridge now; ACT UP was a group working to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS; Columbia students actually did seize buildings during protests in sixties; in Uncle Darry's defense, Reagan absolutely swept re-election; Woody Allen's allegations aren't coming out until 1992; Barnard was (and still is) the women's college attached to Columbia; NOW is the National Organization for Women; and Mary Lou Retton was a gymnastics gold medalist in the 1984 Summer Olympics. That should be everything :)