Less than fifteen percent of the undergraduate population was Asian, which included international students from Asia. As in Houston, however, I kept mostly to whites, not realizing that upper-middle-class suburban white culture was what I had adopted as my own. It might have been refreshing to immerse myself for the first time among people who looked like me. But instead, I avoided friendships with anyone who might understand my deepest fears and stayed far from the Asian Americans, some of whom walked around in a set I referred to as “the Asian Invasion.”

Eventually, I ran in many disparate circles, and even got along well with Abigail, or Abby. A couple of months into the year, I felt something break and it was the ice that had existed between us. We spent the hour before sleep discussing our favorite topic, the male species of our class. “George wears tapered white jeans, and that’s all I’m going to say about it,” I declared from the top bunk, and a cackle issued from below. It was then that Abby said, “You’re nothing like my docile Asian friend from boarding school. Yoko never says anything.”

2.

SUSANNAH RAN OVER AS I tucked into some salad in the dining hall.

“Free on Valentine’s weekend for a double date?” she asked, her brown eyes sparkling. Susannah was nice. I had met her the first day of orientation in the line for lunch and knew she was a youthful version of her mother. Her voice went singsong in enticement. “Chuck has a car. The four of us could watch a movie and go out for dinner on Route 1.” Chuck was Susannah’s boyfriend, a junior and an officer of an eating club.

“And who exactly is this scintillating person?” I asked.

“He’s a politics major. His name is Guy Chung, and—” She gasped. “He’s Korean!”

I was never used to white people thinking I would get along with other Koreans, especially Korean guys. I wondered why Susannah didn’t pay attention to what my friends looked like—they mostly looked like her.

“Chuck showed him your picture in the Freshman Facebook.” She giggled. “He said you were cute.”

That softened things for me, as it would for any woman, and I agreed to her plan even though Valentine’s seemed a little aggressive.

On Friday night, Susannah picked me up at my room, where I’d changed into slacks and a sweater, an upgraded version of my library outfit. We met the boys, and the four of us walked to the car. I had checked out Guy in the Upperclass Facebook. The two Facebooks—the Freshman and the Upperclass—got a lot of reading time in every Princeton dorm room, and I’d heard some upperclassmen circled the photos of the freshman girls they intended to “conquer” before the year was out. Guy and I sustained a decent conversation. He was lean but athletic-looking, and he told me he played flag football, which I sensed wasn’t real football, not the kind they played in Texas anyway.

I was relieved when I caught sight of the theater; Chuck had let Guy drive and the couple was in the back making out. The movie was a new Star Wars, and Guy dutifully paid for my ticket. Afterward, we ate burgers and fries at a diner, and Guy paid for me there, too.

When we returned to campus, Susannah suggested closing the night at an eating club. At the movies, Guy and I had been silent, our eyes glued to the screen as if we were going to be tested on the material; at the diner, extremely focused on our chewing. I wanted to go back to my room, but Susannah insisted.

Our breath sent up steam into the night air. Susannah shivered, and Chuck slowed down to put his arm around her. But Guy? Long out of lockstep, he barreled ahead. The eating clubs were where reputations were made and destroyed, and whom you walked in with was a big deal if you cared about that sort of thing. Guy cared.

Once we were inside, it was Susannah’s boyfriend, not Guy, who offered to fetch me a beer. Guy had already walked away and did not say goodbye. We were too late for the DJ, and stragglers lingered in the tap room and parlor. I was cold and arranged myself in front of the fire, and after a while, I spied Guy in the corner talking with some people, his back toward me once again. The date was officially over, and he would become a stranger who looked away if we passed each other on campus, as though suddenly entranced by something over my head.

Susannah came over. She was a little drunk now. “Are you okay? Chuck’s going to talk to Guy and tell him we think he’s being an asshole.”

“No, don’t do that. I’m totally fine. I just got cold.”

Just then, Guy called out to someone at the door. “Jude!” I looked up in time to catch him striding over to a girl with more energy than he’d shown all night. I examined this Jude. She was tall, regal, and white. In her presence, Guy’s entire demeanor changed—he was supplicating.

Susannah left. Alone, I peered into the flames and wondered whether it was fair of the Korean Guys of the world to be so cavalier in their rejection of me. Maybe the answer was simple and had nothing to do with our race. But if I was honest, I did not want Guy either, did not want to be with another Korean because in this world would we ever be greater than the sum of our parts? In the end, I didn’t blame Guy Chung. Perhaps he had engineered his life at Princeton to be one of tokenism, too.

Suddenly, I felt a tap on my left shoulder and looked left, but no one was there, and then there was a tap on my right, but no one was there either, and then I realized someone was playing with me and it was the stunner Nik Federov from the dorms.

“What’s going on, Hyeseung?”

I told him I had been on a date.

He glanced over at the corner of the parlor. “I don’t know him. Did you have fun?” he asked tentatively. Nik was a good guy. He didn’t push when I shrugged and just asked, “Want another beer?”

When we returned to the fireplace with our cups, Susannah, Chuck, and Guy were gone, and the club was very quiet. Nik wound his arm companionably around me. I looked over into his kind and handsome face. He stroked my shoulder. I realized I wanted to touch him, this boy who was a year older than I and not Keanu Reeves, and then his fingers moved to my face, and when we kissed, his tongue was warm and not disgusting in my mouth, but lovely.

Susannah, apologetic, ran over the next morning at brunch, but when I told her I had been making out with Nik Federov, she went from embarrassed to ecstatic. “Serves Guy right,” she said with pleasure. I told her I didn’t do it to get back at Guy, but that naturally it wouldn’t bother me if he did end up hearing about it. “I doubt he got anywhere with that Jude chick,” I said, and we clapped our hands over our mouths and giggled. As for Abby, her eyes rolled back in her head when I walked in that morning. “The Walk of Shame?” she exclaimed. “I’m so jealous! Fed is gorgeous. Tell me everything!” And I did tell her everything, except that it was my first real kiss.

Nik dropped by in the afternoon. By then, some of my neighbors had heard the news, and, titillated, everyone hung around the common room. “Not the first Guy, but another guy!” was the refrain. Nik came in bearing a gift of chocolates, and I thought it was nice but wanted to say, You didn’t have to.

3.

I ROLLED AWAY FROM THE window Abby had left open and tugged the covers over my head. Still, I could hear the sounds of spring outside, could smell the hydrangea and meadowsweet, which had in recent days suddenly erupted on the campus. I hadn’t been outside in two days, not since leaving my last class and tripping over reading groups in shady patches on the grass and sunbathing girls on beach towels, a copy of Lolita or Pride and Prejudice splayed over their faces. Sidestepping a spirited game of Hacky Sack and another of ultimate Frisbee, I had made it home and been in bed since, alternately sleeping and wondering how to avoid the merriment of spring. My internal weather was supposed to have been different at Princeton, but here I was again, drowning under the same water. The idea of dying became a meditation.

Friends dragged me to eating clubs. The mansions housed billiard rooms, libraries, tap rooms, hot tubs, and formal dining rooms with oil paintings and tapestries, but it all felt like Avery Stern’s ninth birthday party—children playing dress-up in Mother’s pearls. I lay in bed up to the moment I had to leave, then extricated myself from warm sheets, threw on my jacket, and followed the group out. As we closed in on the clubs, the music grew thunderous, my friends raucous, but I trailed behind, a lone remainder. When it was time to enter the first club, my tactic was to stop suddenly, walk backward from the door, and shout, “I forgot something in my room, I’ll meet you at the next!” They knew I was putting on a show. Stretching out their arms, my friends protested, “Hey, no, don’t pull that shit again!” But it was too late; I was already halfway down the lawn.

It was on a night I had steeled myself to stay out as penance for my depression when I heard some news about a high school classmate. In a stroke of irony, Harrison had also ended up at Princeton, though I never saw him on campus and hadn’t spoken to him since our breakup in high school. While I observed a lively game of beer pong, a friend from the dorms joined me.

“I met the weirdest guy just now. He said he’d gone to high school with you,” she said.

The Solo of Rolling Rock crackled under my grip. “Oh yeah?” I asked casually, praying she’d stop talking immediately. I was someone different now—albeit still sad, still tentative—and I needed the past behind me.

“Yeah. He said he did something really bad to you right at the end of high school. He said he didn’t know you’d react that way.” She took a sip of beer.

“Sounds like he was pretty drunk.”

“No, actually he seemed sober, like he needed to unburden himself.”

I shook my head. “Well, I don’t know what he could be referring to. Like I said, sounds like he was pretty drunk.”

I walked home alone. Abby was still out when I got back to the room. I undressed and took a long shower, letting the hot water pelt my back good and raw. In the mirror, my reflection stepped out of her robe, put lotion on her face. “He said he did something really bad to you right at the end of high school,” my friend had said. What had happened then, at the end of high school? Harrison had broken up with me months earlier. I had gotten a B in Calculus. I did not graduate in the Top Ten. Since leaving Texas, I had been afraid to focus on that painful epoch of my life, and even now tripped round it.

And of course, I had been voted “Thinks She’s Smartest.” Hadn’t my Superlative been the humiliating non-award I deserved? Many years later, my husband would recognize this for what it had been: school-sanctioned bullying, which my parents should have done something about. But, loving reassurance lay in the future. Here, in the present, as a freshman in college, I willed my personality to shrink. I swept the brush through my hair.

But then, what my friend divulged in the tap room clicked together like shifting glass in a kaleidoscope:

Harrison had been the yearbook editor. He had seen all the Superlatives sheets as they came in, and perhaps Mrs. Loring knew and looked away. Was it possible that my title was decided not by election but by someone who had wanted to pull me down a peg? Maybe the entire senior class hadn’t hated me—only Harrison had.

Now he was blabbing to random people on campus, trying to redeem himself. But I couldn’t have anyone here know how “superlative” I’d been in high school. My first day on campus had been an assault on my expectations that college would be for learning what the real things are. Over the course of the year, what I’d found at Princeton was the world as it ever was: an unaccommodating place I would have to bend toward. Inside the crucible of my senior year in high school, I had been melted and altered. Was the firing not over? This small, burnished, and black substance was the soul of myself, and no late revelation about my worth could change it now.

In the mirror, my eyes shone steely and cold. Arrested by a look I did not recognize in myself, I stopped brushing my hair. The kaleidoscope rotated some degrees then, the colored glass falling into a new configuration.

In high school, my self-made identity as “the Smartest Girl” had sprouted as the socially acceptable answer to a more complicated identity, one I did not let myself explore. In the end, the most significant education I’d received was to strip myself of anything inconsistent with the station I’d been assigned. In high school, I had fallen short of the requirements of that station, and someone—a white boy—had taken it upon himself to punish me.

Now, nearly a year later, I had accepted the Superlatives as truth, and nothing could prevent me from sliding back into depression. Over the next weeks, I spent more time with Nik. Neither of us wanted anything serious with the other. He simply knew to call or stop by once in a while. Eventually though, I heard he was hooking up with someone else, and I went back to lying in my bed and wanting to die.

4.

TWO WEEKS INTO MY SOPHOMORE year, sometime well past midnight, I boarded the New Jersey Transit to New York’s Penn Station to find the City That Never Sleeps to be, for once, asleep.

“Alone alone alone,” I chanted, shuffling around the Amtrak waiting area. Between the TGI Friday’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, a homeless man also shuffled. “Alone alone alone,” did I hear him say?

Coming round the other side of Penn Station, I ventured out a little, cast my eyes toward the direction of Times Square, and was met with a bright aura of light from the north, the signs and screens playing for no one. A newspaper somersaulted across the avenue like a tumbleweed in the desert. The purpose of this spontaneous, solo, middle-of-the-night trip was escape: I needed to step out of the beautiful house of mirrors that was college. But I had wanted clamor, disorganization, and life from the city, not eerie quiet.

I ducked back into the station, where I paced underneath the central ticker-board until the tiles whirred, announcing the 5:07 a.m. train to Princeton. An hour later, I was back, with the perfect dawn breaking on the south end of the campus.

Abby was already at morning practice when I climbed into bed, and I was relieved I didn’t have to answer any questions about where I’d been. Despite the easy distance, Princeton students rarely visited New York, their lives restricted to the bubble that was campus, and if there were ever a poster child for Princeton, it was blond-haired, blue-eyed varsity rower Abigail Mayfield Cross, healthy in mind, hardy in body. Abby was kind—she saw the sadness in me this September, but found it alien and didn’t know what to do. That made two of us.