“I’m Anya,” she announced. “My mother packed turmeric capsules, silk pillowcases, and a framed photo of our temple room, so if anyone wants to discuss immigrant parenting as performance art, I’m available.”
Sophia and I looked at her. Then we laughed.
Anya grinned like she had known I would.
That was how it started. Not dramatically. Not with some grand declaration of friendship. Just three girls in a beautiful old dorm room with too much luggage and too many selves to carry.
Sophia came from Korean money so old and polished that no one talked about it directly. Her family donated to museums, hospitals, and universities in the kind of amounts that made people describe them as “private.” She dressed as if she had never once needed to prove a thing to anyone, which fascinated me because I was still choosing outfits around one visible label per day like a superstition.
Anya came from South Indian wealth that was newer, louder, and far less apologetic. Her family owned hotels, shippingcompanies, and at least one political scandal she refused to explain before coffee. She wore diamond studs to breakfast and sweatshirts to dinners where everyone else wore silk, not only because she didn’t care, but because she cared selectively and with great violence.
By dinner that first night, we were already sitting on my bedroom floor eating takeout from containers because Sophia had declared the dining hall “spiritually beige,” and Anya had decided Bellamont potatoes were a crime against every culture on earth.
Katherine sat on the bed beside me, quieter than usual. She had not been assigned to the dorm. Her parents had arranged for her to continue staying at the Montgomery estate because Mrs. Montgomery worried Katherine “needed quiet.” Katherine pretended this was a relief, but she came to my room every afternoon anyway. Sometimes before I had even finished class.
At first, no one minded. Sophia liked her sharpness. Anya liked provoking her. I liked having all the pieces of my life in one room, even if they never quite fit together properly.
Katherine helped us with assignments before any of us asked. She corrected Sophia’s lab notes once and earned an icy stare that would have made a weaker person apologize. She reorganized Anya’s biology flashcards by concept rather than chapter because she said the original structure was offensive to logic. She sat at our kitchen table explaining cell signalling pathways while I made coffee and pretended I understood enough to deserve my place there.
We became a unit quickly. Or maybe it looked that way from the outside. Sophia and Anya liked me first. That was the truth. They invited me to lunch, borrowed my lipstick, came into my room without knocking by the second week, and asked me questions about my life as if they genuinely expected answers.Katherine came along because she was Katherine and because where I went, she still believed she belonged.
I let her believe that because I loved her. I also resented it because I wanted something that had not passed through her hands first.
By October, Thad had become a fixture too. He was a senior then, a finance major with a clean apartment off campus, a circle of friends who wore loafers without socks, and a family name that made mothers smile before daughters did. He brought coffee to my morning lectures, picked me up for dinner in town, and kissed me in public with one hand settled at my waist like I was something he had already decided would photograph well beside him.
Katherine hated it. She never said so directly. She only became quieter when he entered the room. She corrected my assignments more sharply after I spent the night at his place. She watched him touch me with a blank expression that made me feel more guilty than if she had screamed.
And still, when Sophia or Anya asked whether Katherine wanted to come out with us, she always said yes.
* * *
That was how we ended up at the Harbor Club in late October, all four of us dressed too beautifully for a place with sticky floors and bass loud enough to rearrange your pulse. The Harbor Club was not technically on campus, which made everyone pretend it was more dangerous than it was. It sat near the old wharf, beneath a seafood restaurant owned by someone’s uncle, with dark walls, cheap lighting, and a bouncer who recognized enough Bellamont students to stop checking IDs carefully aftereleven. Wealthy college students loved places like that because they could pretend to be reckless in controlled environments.
Sophia wore a black slip dress and looked like she had been born disapproving of the room. Anya wore silver and kept announcing that the music was terrible before dancing to every song. Katherine wore a navy dress I had chosen for her because, left alone, she would have dressed like she was attending a graduate seminar.
“You look pretty,” I told her while fixing her lipstick in the bathroom mirror.
She glanced at herself, uncomfortable with the compliment.
“I look like I’m pretending to be someone I’m not.”
“Everyone here is pretending.”
“You say that like it’s comforting.”
“It should be.”
She looked at me through the mirror for a second too long.
“It is for you.”
The words landed quietly. I lowered the lipstick.
“Katherine.”
“Never mind.” She blinked, then looked away.
Before I could answer, Anya burst into the bathroom and declared that a boy from her economics class had called her exotic, and she needed either legal counsel or a drink. We chose the drink.
