8. What Are Your Circumstances? - Lords of Serendipity

A few days later, and about three-point-one miles down the road from the Haven College library, Jack’s daughter, Katrina, was nearing the end of a morning run with her roommate Cham, who was also Sri Lankan and a few years older than Devi. The girls wore tiny shorts and sports bras, one white earbud each, and massive, luminescent running shoes. Katrina and Cham were small and bright like Devi but raised in jeweled aeries, gilded dovecotes. They had already reached their destination.

The girls came to an intersection and stopped running and smiled at each other, squinting in the earlyish light coming in high and bright along the town’s narrow streets. They exhaled, blowing cold October morning smoke.

A tall boy on his own run reached the same intersection. He had short, mussed brown hair and fighter-jet cheekbones, warm eyes, full lips, a strong jaw. He nodded at them and then quickly looked away, fumbling his phone out of a zipped pocket on his thigh, which was so firm and sharp-edged it looked chiseled off a bank building. He stared and stared into his phone, waiting for the light to change.

The light changed and the beautiful boy bolted.

The girls collapsed into each other and laughed at how scared he was of them until the traffic light turned amber. Cham straightened up, her brown eyes flashing with joyful, evil intent.

Let’s chase the boy.

Yes!

The light turned red. A Don’t Walk sign flashed.

The girls sprinted across the road.

A driver about to turn right slammed on his brakes, nearly hitting them. They didn’t notice, and he didn’t complain. The other oncoming cars suddenly slowed down but no one honked. This was a college town. A very good college, and so a very comfortable town. Everyone was used to beautiful young people presuming everyone around them would just understand.

Katrina and Cham ran hard on the smooth sidewalks, passing a succession of two-story century-old buildings that housed coffee shops and a used bookstore and an independent bookstore and also restaurants and pubs and juiceries and cosmetics stores that didn’t call themselves cosmetics stores; also running-gear stores and an Apple Store and consignment clothing shops and a music store that sold vinyl records and Sonos speakers. All featured large front windows and brick façades and signs that gave the business’s name in either a very winsome or a very severe font. The entire town smelled of roasting coffee and lemon verbena.

The girls picked up their pace, passing streetlamps with banners already advertising the college’s annual Christmas Gaudy. They were reprints of posters from a century earlier, Art Deco style, long and drowsy-eyed women in velvet Santa hats over hard shiny hair, holding swords, everything in a green glow. At the end of the bannered street the running boy didn’t turn left or right but instead kept going straight toward campus. They nearly had him on the tree-lined boulevard leading to Front Quad, where through the lady-finger clutches of the repeating bare-limbed trees you could see on both sides fields of green—turf laid that summer after the student encampments were cleared. The university had made the decision to water the new grass nearly constantly and to fertilize it, heavily, with sheep manure. No new tents yet.

Beyond the main green, the rest of the front of campus was given over to the college’s latest buildings, all of them sharp angled, shiny, and gleaming with mute confidence in the morning sunlight: the innovation center, the wellness center, the climate justice lab, the history and healing forge, the center for data and betterment, and, behind that one, larger and taller and black-tinted, greater in fact than all the rest, the data science building, while still under construction were the new life sciences center and the all-glass pyramidal addition to the college’s limestone art museum. All of these were named; many were memorials: here were the right and proper gravestones of the late American ruling class.

The running boy proved too fast for them. He suddenly took a side path and disappeared into a mass of other Haven students going to the dining hall after their morning workouts. They were bright and metallic and sleek and gleaming and diverse. A few casually wore keffiyehs.

Cham and Katrina stopped running in Front Quad, before the polished onyx pedestal where a statue of the college founder used to stand. Both bent over, hands on knees, breathing hard. Cham made a gurgling noise and, turning her head sharply to the right, hocked a glom of gunk at the base of the pedestal. Katrina arched, stretched, and looked toward the dining hall, searching for the shape of the running boy.

We’ll get his details next time, said Katrina.

He was a fucking Captain America doll. He probably makes you sign an NDA before hanging out.

Okay. So you don’t want to get his details, said Katrina, who wouldn’t have minded, herself. What do you want to get, then?

Cham cocked her head.

You’re asking me what I want to get? Really? I just want to get them, Katrina. All of them.

Right, said Katrina, not really knowing what her roommate meant, but nodding anyway.

Move-in day that September, Katrina’s father had looked like he never wanted to leave, or like he wanted to leave right away. Cham’s parents proposed they all go out for lunch, assuring him they would pay. Jack declined but agreed to photographs. He smiled, said little, allowed Cham’s father to pump his whole arm when they shook hands. He asked Katrina if she wanted to go see the amphitheater again and Katrina said she had to unpack and so he hugged her a long while and kissed the part in her hair and left.

Cham’s father, mother, and nanny stuck around. Cham’s parents were loud and grand and welcoming, as if they were hosting Katrina in her own room. They wouldn’t stop. And Cham didn’t seem to care. She unpacked, ignoring them. The nanny was silent the whole time, looking around the room. Katrina could feel her stare even while focused on Cham’s parents, smiling and nodding as they laughed at their own jokes. When they finally walked out, Cham closed the door and held up a hand, telling Katrina to wait. Cham counted down on her fingers, opened the door, and accepted a rubber-band-covered Styrofoam container of food from her hard-eyed, hollow-of-cheek nanny. The two stared at each other. Neither said anything. The nanny bobbled her head. Cham shook hers. The nanny touched Cham’s cheek and left.

Are you okay? asked Katrina.

Cham looked up right away and smiled. Hard.

Sure. How about you?

I’m better than my dad. He’s a bit—

Yeah, same. So.

So.

We’re roommates.

We are.

What’s your story?

I plan to major in religious studies and statistics. What about you?

That’s all?

Well, you just met my dad, who’s a professor of statistics, and my mom went here and—

I mean, your essay. What did you say on your admissions essay to get in here? What did you use?

Oh. I see what you mean. Sharon Olds. She’s a poet?

Nice. Never heard of her. Impressive. What was the poem, if you remember? You probably remember, don’t you.

Katrina smiled and cocked her head, pretending to try to remember. Then she said, This was her mother, one of the two whom she loved, the two who loved her most.

Cham shook her head.

I never get poetry. Anyway.

So what about you? Who did you use?

Cham shrugged. Oh, just something from José Ortega y Gasset.

The twentieth-century Spanish philosopher?

Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia.

Same, said Katrina.

Meaning?

I am also myself and my circumstances. And as for my essay, I just told the truth. Also, I was a varsity fencer.

Katrina smiled at her new roommate and cocked her head, raising her eyebrows. Katrina was very pretty, she knew without worrying too much about it, and also very thin, and had skin like porcelain, with faint blue vein tracings around her blue eyes. Normally Katrina’s smiling like this—sweetly, a little pleadingly—did what was necessary with people: secured their agreement, their forgiveness, or at least their acknowledgment that she was sweet and pleading and best left alone.

But Cham just cackled. She cackled and twirled her thick black hair, studying Katrina.

Katrina stopped smiling.

I guess I don’t really understand what you’re asking?

Cham grinned and winked.

Yes you do, said Cham. Come on, I know you do.

She didn’t.

But acting like she didn’t was better than letting any doubts show on her first day of college. Was coming to Haven really the fulfillment of her lifelong dream, or of her father’s lifelong dream for her? Which was really Jack’s version of her late mother’s lifelong dream. Katrina didn’t remember much about her mother, but she had decided this: that her mother would have been happy to see Katrina go wherever she—Katrina—wanted to go. And part of her really did want to come here, and she knew Jack only meant well in wanting her to come here. But still. Did she really want to go to Haven College after a whole life that kind of felt designed to get her in?

But because that wasn’t a question that helped her get into Haven, it wasn’t a question she needed to answer. Or wanted to answer. And meanwhile, she had some questions about her new roommate.

Why was she so in your face, so fast? What did she have to prove? Was she really like this, or was she actually just like Katrina and every other new student, anywhere—relieved, excited, scared to be starting college, and trying out this self and that self now that she didn’t have to be whatever self got her into college? And maybe, unlike Katrina, trying too hard to hide it?

The answer didn’t really matter. Katrina just wanted to experience something important, at last, with someone other than Jack. She didn’t think of him as the department photocopier. She actually didn’t really know what a photocopier was. And she loved him, and was grateful, but yeah, she got it. About what Cham was really saying. About just finding the right things to put into the applications, to get in. For so long, nothing seemed to matter more than that, than just getting in. And while Katrina had her reach schools, her target schools, and her safety schools, just like everyone else, the only one that mattered was Haven.

And beyond getting in, Katrina was kind of blank. Had she been given a different room assignment, she would have just as easily have imprinted on one of the other girls on the floor, whether the nonbinary climate activist, the Beijing baby-girl princess, the Macon debutante, the dark-academia girl writing a novel about a coven of art history majors planning to fuck a right-wing tech billionaire to death, or one of several suicidal ideators. But Katrina was assigned as her roommate the Sri Lankan girl with an island-sized chip on her shoulder. Who had been forward and loud her whole remembered life, a life that depended on having to be very quiet about something else.

So? Who are you and, to quote our favorite Spanish philosopher, what are your circumstances? What’s your story, Katrina?

You first.

You sure? Mine’s pretty good.

So’s mine.

All right. Well, leaving aside my stellar transcript and top scores and coxswain for varsity crew, I think what got me in was . . . wait, picture it, Cham said, using her hands to frame a scene.

You’re a little girl, eleven years old, and you’re reading in your room in the Sri Lankan embassy in Rome when you hear all these people crying. You look outside and you see the refugees pressing against the iron gate that leads into the courtyard. You see a girl your age crouched down at the very front, surrounded by people stamping their feet. Her clothes aren’t like your clothes. She’s not even wearing shoes. She needs your help. You don’t know what’s going on, but you know she needs your help. You go downstairs and there’s lots of grown-ups in the front room, talking and talking, like usual, and doing nothing, like usual. Your mother sees you and tells you to go back upstairs and she calls for your nanny to come get you but you don’t go back upstairs. The nanny tries to stop you but actually she doesn’t try too hard. She’s new but already she knows you very, very well, and she knows what you want to do and that she can’t stop you. She knows that little girl needs you and that you won’t be stopped. So Nanny looks away as you run through the house to the back entrance beside the kitchen and you go outside and you sneak along the wall surrounding the courtyard all the way to the gate and the security guards are yelling and hitting the gate with batons and don’t notice that you’re down near the ground, right in front of the little girl, who is beautiful and has these big brown eyes that can see everything, and the only person to notice before Nanny and Mother come and grab you away is a photographer, and then this picture is all over the internet the next day: The Ambassador’s Daughter and the Refugee Girl. And you don’t know how it happens because you’re little but suddenly you’re having a tea party with the Refugee Girl in the living room, with lots of people taking pictures, and Nanny waiting nearby, and then you hear that your parents are going to adopt the Refugee Girl, and they do, and you become sisters and Nanny raises you until you’re sent to boarding school and the Refugee Girl learns a lot from you but you learn a lot more from her because of what she went through to get to that day at the iron gate. She has a sense of life that never leaves her. And you do a lot with this story, including, of course, writing about it for your admissions essay, which gets you into the college you want.

Wow. That’s, yeah, that’s a pretty amazing story, Cham. Intense. So that’s how you got into Haven?

No. Oxford.

Wait, what? You got into Oxford?

No. My sister did. She’s the Ambassador’s Daughter. I’m the Refugee Girl. I’m the ambassador’s adopted daughter.

I guess I didn’t expect that.

No one does! That’s my move, said Cham.

So your father’s actually an ambassador?

He used to be. He took early retirement when, well, the government changed or fell or something. It happens all the time in Sri Lanka.

So you grew up in Italy?

Cham shrugged. I kind of grew up everywhere.

And why’d you choose Haven?

Well, my family currently lives in California. So . . .

If you wanted to be far away, why didn’t you go to school back in Sri Lanka?

Cham jerked her thumb at the window, at the great old trees and ivy-wrapped, copper-topped gray stone Gothic buildings shadowed by giant, gleaming, all-glass cubes.

This place probably has more money than the government of Sri Lanka. I don’t even know if they have universities there.

Fair.

Your turn.

Katrina shrugged.

Okay, so my story isn’t dramatic like yours, said Katrina. My picture hasn’t been all over the internet or anything. And my sport was fencing, not rowing. But for me, it was just, I don’t know, I guess growing up with a mom who went here, and while she was here she met my dad, made this place pretty important. When I was little she died of breast cancer, leaving me with my dad, who’s sort of neurodivergent, and I kind of raised him while he raised me, and together we just wanted to fulfill my mother’s dying wish, which was for me to attend Haven.

Cham was quiet. Then she snorted.

That’s like the whitest white-person story ever. High school fencing and breast cancer and a neuro-fucking-divergent single-fucking-parent dad!

Katrina shrugged. Cham had taken the bait, thinking this was really who she was, just like Haven’s admissions people had. Katrina didn’t know who she really was, yet. But now she had four years to figure it out, and a roommate to help her.

Whatever, said Katrina. At least my life’s more than a fundraising video.

Cham shrieked and jumped across the room and hugged Katrina, who giggled and hugged back. And so, that day, they became a singularity—morning runs, coffee runs, eating and studying, laundry pickups from the Vietnamese section of town, readings, plays, parties, after-parties, a weekend in Montreal before it got too cold. And while they each played up their differences—quiet, polite little girl, and loud brown terror—in fact they were far more similar than not. Katrina didn’t drink because of an undiagnosed allergy, while Cham would demand everyone do shots and fill glasses while never taking a sip herself. At meals and around campus Katrina ignored the way both men and other women looked at her, and Cham flirted with everyone and never went home with anyone. She was the pick-me girl who would tell you to fuck off if you actually picked her for anything.

Later that October morning, after they had chased that boy in vain, after their chlorophyll water and showers, Cham walked with Katrina to mail a letter to her dad, in which she asked if she could spend Christmas with Cham’s family in California. But only after Jack came to campus to see Katrina perform in the Christmas Gaudy, of course. That could be their Christmas this year. Cham made fun of her for writing a letter, but Katrina knew her father and the best way to get him to say yes. Cham’s parents and the nanny were coming too: Cham was also in the play.

Earlier that semester, at the first meeting of the cast and crew—there were no auditions because auditions were hierarchical and exclusionary, according to the directing collective—plans were made to stage a protest production of the play in the form of a sit-in and virtual lecture from an activist scholar. There were plans too for a membership drive for the DSA and a new encampment, right on the stage, even if it was December.

Learning of the protest plans, the Chinese students who had initially signed up left the meeting. And Katrina tucked away her copy of the original script for the play that her mother had performed in years ago, the day her parents met, which Jack had mailed to her when he found out she was going to be in it.

Meanwhile, Cham actually read the poem the Gaudy was based on. She wanted to see what was so wrong about it that the other students were planning a protest version. Seeing Katrina’s copy of the old script, she came up with an idea.

The other students thought they were being so radical. But what could be more radical than performing the actual play itself? Even if it was just the two of them doing their parts while the rest of the students occupied the stage in chants and protests?

At first Katrina had worried Jack would be upset: disrespecting the Haven Gaudy was disrespecting the memory of her mother. But then Katrina bet her mother would have agreed with her and Cham that the protest the other students were planning was the real disrespect. Would Katrina and Cham get in trouble for doing something that might seem like a counterprotest? Probably, but what did it matter? They had already gotten into Haven, and didn’t they have academic freedom or whatever?

Still, Katrina had misgivings.

Why? What? Cham asked. They were in their dorm, sitting across from each other on Nordic mattresses donated to the college by a luxury hotelier and social justice advocate who had recently received an honorary doctorate.

Well, aren’t they trying to draw attention to a genocide or whatever?

Or are they turning a genocide into a chance to show off how right they are?

Well they are right, aren’t they?

About?

It’s a genocide, isn’t it?

Cham shrugged.

Is that a yes?

It’s a yes. Fine. But it just pisses me off to see all these bossy white girls wearing their keffiyehs and marching around telling everyone what it’s like in Gaza. They have no fucking idea. And isn’t the college always saying we’re supposed to question everything? So why can’t we question them?

Actually, Cham, a lot of them are pretty informed.

You’re right. They watch a lot of Gaza TikTok. I’m just saying . . .

What?

I’m just saying they wouldn’t last thirty seconds in Gaza itself.

How do you know?

Trust me. I know what people do when they’re super desperate.

Do you? Katrina cocked her head and softened her eyes, leaning toward Cham, remembering her story.

Cham sat back, got up, and stepped past Katrina.

No. I just know that I don’t know everything.

You kind of act like you do, though.

It’s my look, girl. So are you in, Katrina, or not?

Are you going to do it either way?

No. Only if you do it with me.

Really?

Really.

Katrina smiled.

Okay.

After mailing the letter to Jack about Katrina spending Christmas with Cham’s family in California, the two of them went to a mandatory research methods session at the library. The session featured Puck, Haven’s new research chatbot, which had replaced the staff person who used to run these seminars. The startup that created Puck was founded by an alumnus who had attended Haven on a hockey scholarship.

The students sat at a heavy wooden table, laptops up and logged in, lip oils and water bottles and knitting needles and phones arranged around them. At the head of the table was a large, curved screen displaying historic figures personally selected by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a research residency in the college’s history and healing forge. Toni Morrison; Henrietta Lacks; Frederick Douglass; Rosa Parks; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Nelson Mandela; Barack Obama; Michelle Obama; Pope Gelasius; George Floyd; Pope Leo. Over which floated a giant calligraphy-style question mark, its dot black and thick and flat. Like a hockey puck.

A prompt box opened.

Hey! Welcome to Introduction to Research Methods. I’m Puck. Here at Haven, we question everything, so ask me anything! Just log in on your device and search up Puck and I will find you and take care of the rest!

Later, when they were all leaving the session, one of the students knocked a pile of handwritten notes and crimson threads onto the floor, which Patricia had sent along while working from home. The notes and threads would remain there until the library closed, at which point one of the Guatemalan night cleaners put them all in the shopping bag she discreetly kept on her supply cart. School project paper. Thread for mending. Save a trip to Walmart. Her kids would whine that all she’d brought home from work was scrap paper this time. The night cleaner’s kids were so spoiled. They had no idea. It couldn’t be Stanley mugs and AirPods every shift.