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“What does that have to do with anything?”
“There aren’t as many women in STEM, so some of the dudes there get warped ideas about what’s okay or not. It can get even worse when you enter those fields and they see you as encroaching on their territory. One of the other premeds in my study group insisted I be the one to make coffee runs.”
“How do you handle situations like that?” I asked her.
“I encroach.” Ji-Hyun wasn’t a smiler, but her eyes gleamed with confidence. “That particular guy had to find another study group.”
Yunie passed her cousin in the hallway, the two of them swapping turns for the bathroom. My best friend toweled off her hair in the drier climate of the common room.
“Ugh, I can feel the dirt seeping back into my pores as we speak,” she said.
“From here or the sandwich place?”
“Both. What did you do to that guy’s laptop when we left?”
I pointed at one of Ji-Hyun’s empty beer cans on the counter. Once Yunie was looking, I flicked my finger. It shot out like a rocket, telescoping across the room, impaling the can. I pulled it back just as fast, leaving a bullet-sized hole in the brewer’s logo. Exactly like it did in said guy’s laptop screen.
I’d figured out this trick trying to turn my light switch off while in bed. But it could be weaponized, too. We’d had to make a very quick escape out of the cafe.
“Oh my god,” Yunie said, giggling hysterically. “Didn’t anyone see that? It was fast, but I could still kind of make out your finger for a moment there.”
“Eh.” I shrugged. “Who’s going to believe them?”
10
The party was technically in the room down the hall, but functionally it had spread over the entire building like an alien spore. A pulverizing beat rattled the plates in the kitchen. Unintelligible conversation from the hallway trickled into the suite. As soon as Yun
ie and I stepped out Ji-Hyun’s door, we’d be in the thick of it.
Before we did, though, Ji-Hyun lined us up at attention. She solemnly placed an empty red Solo cup in our hands and poured almost-as-red liquid into them from a pitcher that had long sweated away its ice. The ritual sureness with which she was moving silenced any questions we might have had.
Ji-Hyun stepped back and took stock of us.
“I promised your parents that I would keep the two of you safe,” she said. “And I intend to keep that promise. You don’t hesitate to call me if you need me, and you don’t consume anything that I don’t give you myself.”
Yunie tried to say something, but her older cousin cut her off.
“However,” Ji-Hyun went on. “In the real world, there won’t always be someone looking over your shoulder, and it’ll be up to you to use your best judgment. The way to keep your head is to learn your own limits without letting anyone else pressure you beyond them, including me. The two of you are smart girls. Do you get what I’m saying?”
We both nodded. Yunie took a tentative sip from her cup and made a face.
“This tastes revolting,” she said.
“That’s because it was mixed inside a picnic cooler,” Ji-Hyun said. She drank directly from the pitcher and lowered its contents by an inch in one swig. “Now get out there and have fun.”
? ? ?
The hallway was mobbed. Someone had rigged a light filter that switched from purple to green to blue and back again. Candy-colored people milled about in the square inches allotted them. The bassline was determined to reach all the way to my back teeth.
With Yunie presumably trailing in my wake, I pushed forward through the crowd, hoping that some cues on what to do would rub off and stick to me like lint drawn by static cling. Sure, I’d been to the odd house party thrown by one of my classmates, but there I could usually talk shop with a teammate or gripe about a teacher with a lab partner. That option wasn’t available right now, so I just listened dumbly to as many people as possible.
If I had to say what the biggest difference was between the high school scene and college, it would have been the amount of facial hair on the guys. I mean, this was like a lumberjack meetup being held on a crab fishing boat. I imagined the boys at SF Prep being forced to turn in their razors at graduation, dumping them into a cardboard box.
But the second-biggest difference seemed to be the self-assurance wafting through the air, thicker than cigarette smoke. Everyone spoke like they had the utmost confidence in the way the world worked.
Like, they were literally talking about how the world worked. “. . . and that’s why piracy doesn’t represent a loss of incremental sales to the artist. Plus it forces them to go on tour more, so they connect more with their fans. I’m really doing them a favor by not paying for the album . . .”
“. . . see, the Swedes parent their children the right way. They make them use knives at the age of two, and they keep them outside in freezing weather. Kids today are too spoiled . . .”
