My sophomore year at Sarah Lawrence started at the crack of dawn in New Jersey, when I left my parents sleeping at a family friend’s place in Union and drove to Westchester. I remember telling them, grown-up that I was, that the first few hours of Registration Day were going to be a zoo and they were better off joining me later in the afternoon.
How prescient. I got to campus and ran smack into a housing crisis. My gorgeous off-campus dorm house, a rambling early-1900s home rented from nearby Concordia College, that I’d expressly picked because I’d get an enormous room all to myself, was suddenly equipped with a roommate paired in haste and probably not thoughtfully, either. I would have thrown a full-grade tatty but my situation was nothing compared to the students allotted rooms in the living rooms of other dorm houses, on campus. After a quick conference with Beth, my freshman roommate and anchor of friendship on campus, we proposed that my unknown roommate take Beth’s single on campus, and Beth move in with me over at Ressmeyer. Everyone was happy.
And the year went on. Eventually, a room cleared out downstairs – oddly enough, by an unnaturally quiet girl named Alexis who would have a profound and sometimes devastating impact on my junior year – and Beth moved into it. It was an amazing year, living in this glorious old house ten minutes from the incestuous bubble that was SLC. We had a big kitchen, a wraparound porch, and street parking. We had Trader Joe’s down the street, late evenings on the stoops with beer (never mind being 19), and long, funny talks well into the night.
It wasn’t a perfect year, it never is. Two of the friends we had in that house aren’t really friends any longer, for very different reason. One had her own layers of baggage about Beth and me, but mostly aimed at me. Our friendship dissolved in rather annoyingly close quarters, my senior year. Another brilliant girl in the house was a mixed blessing housemate – genius and funny and full of surprises, but also going through her own high-level trauma that impacted Beth more strongly than me. Both of these once-friends are names and memories that draw difficult ambivalence in us. They’re names and stories with which Josh and Stuart are familiar.
So the year came to an end, and this is Beth moving out of her sun-drenched room and into her forest-green Honda Civic, packing to head back to Texas to find herself, and Josh. It’s the first picture I remember taking of Beth with her adult confidence, a new mantle she was trying on and which she still wears so well today. There’s that Ben Folds Five teeshirt of which I was always so covetous. And those worn wooden steps that I sat on, or dashed down, or dragged groceries up.
It feels like my entire sophomore year, in one frame.

I don’t know who took this picture. It was the very last day of classes at ISK, in Nairobi, and no one was doing any work. I was with my friend Erik on the left, whom I’d wisely did not to date and is thus still a good friend, and the great first love of my adolescence, Siegfried, who was looking at my yearbook.
I think Siegfried was being coy, in this photo. We’d broken up back in September of the previous year, halfway between my birthday (August 31) and his (September 15). Really, I’d broken up with him. I’d found myself attracted to another friend of mine, a Brazilian, and the damage was done – Siegfried and his crazy moods were getting too much for me to handle and the Brazilian seemed like a sane option. Of course, he ended up doing far worse damage but that’s another story I may never tell here.
So Siegfried, with all his Italian passions (and, I suspect, a small dose of bi-polarity), absolutely stopped talking to me after the breakup, especially when I started going around with the Brazilian. I lost another, far more valuable friend in the breakup. It wasn’t until our end-of-year dance, in April, that Siegfried and I mended ways, as friends. Things weren’t perfect, of course, because of afore-mentioned Italian passions, but in this photo, at least, we are cautiously friends.
It’s funny to see me smiling because there aren’t many like that, from the end of that school year. I had a lot of miserable baggage, created by small schools and smaller minds (other international-school brats know of what I speak). When my parents announced we were moving back to Houston for my senior year, directly after this, I was almost physically lighter with relief. But it was a tough balance because those two years in Nairobi had taught me so much about myself and what my limits were. I grew exponentially in those years, and going back to the Houston of my freshman year felt like cramming back into a tiny, cheerleader-shaped closet.
So I’m smiling, maybe because it’s the last day of the year, maybe because my traumatizing haircut (a direct result of the breakup with Siegfried, who always swore undying devotion to my long curls) was behaving itself, maybe because Erik really was that awesome of a guy; a friend I made in that last year when I was shedding friends like snakeskin.
I don’t know what Siegfried ultimately wrote in that yearbook, and I don’t know where he is these days. I always remember him as a well-intentioned guy who loved me very much in his own manic way, a boy I would later describe as a Knight of the Round Table, hundreds of years too late. I can’t be as generous about other boys I loved, but that’s how we learn, right?
Anyway, it’s good to see myself genuinely smiling on one day that year.

I lived in Austin for three months in the summer of 1999, all by myself in a rented apartment on Guadalupe and 39th Street. It was an experiment in adulthood – I learned how to make dinner, manage an internship, pay rent, keep myself in line. I also learned how to not drink too much and how to change the damn tires on my car so that I didn’t hydroplane on I-10 going 87MPH – well, I learned that one the hard way.
I lived there, for all intents and purposes, with my then-boyfriend Alex. We had been together, long-distance, for my first and his second year of college, and I think that summer of adulthood was our undoing. My best memories from it very rarely involve him – they’re about riding around on William’s Vespa, or working for Ken, or dropping watermelons with Erin and Rachel. My worst memories of the summer very much involve Alex – realizing I would completely go to pieces if someone left the house during a fight, having to lie to his parents about whether he was living with me (he was! Rent free!).
One scorching Austin day, we went to the PetsMart to get food for one or another of Alex’s beastly little beasties (he was a fan of snakes and snapping turtles. Why I thought this was The Big One, I don’t know). There was a woman giving away puppies outside, swearing up and down that they were eight weeks old. They were two weeks if they were a day, and Alex and I felt so bad, we took one home immediately, checked for male genitalia and finding none, pronounced her Maggie.
I think we got a dog to save our relationship. And to be fair to Maggie, she was a little godsend. Puppies are adorable, and she took our minds off our ever-increasing fights. Of course, I took far better care of her, making sure she was fed and weaned and potty-trained, teaching her to walk around on a leash and not bark when I left the room. Alex mostly played with her. And then one day, about a week before I packed up to leave and after Alex had finally moved into his own place (his backyard in the photo), Maggie’s balls dropped.
It was shocking. Alex thought it was funny but I was traumatized. My sweet little Maggie was a boy. And she wasn’t even my boy anymore – she was Alex’s, staying behind in Austin. He promptly named her JB, after Jimmy Buffett. I have no idea where she is now, and she’ll always be Maggie to me.
Alex and I broke up less than a month later. Although when it happened, I was upset, it was like the anguish of amputating a limb that’s more pain than its worth. We were never right for each other, which was duly proved that summer. Still, I was glad to have Maggie in my life, before she became Alex’s JB.