I didn’t much care for friends. I wasn’t a girl’s girl; in fact, other women usually became catty or jealous of me, because of my personality or looks or ambition, who knows. All my closest female friendships had disintegrated over the years, women becoming initially infatuated by my confidence, wanting, perhaps, to be me, instead of befriending me. Then becoming angry with me because their boyfriend flirted with me or because I was too honest when they asked my opinion about an outfit or hair color or a personal project they were working on. I wasn’t great at being supportive. Once Magdelena began to blow up, other women seemed like competition to me, anyway, potential backstabbers, threats to my growing power. No one was going to undermine or stand in the way of what I’d started to build.

Maintaining friendships, especially with other women in the fashion industry, sabotaged my time, my single-minded pursuit of success.

Quinn and I had something different, though, an extra layer of softness, a security in our relationship that I had with few others. Freshman year at NYU, we had met at a grimy frat party, a far cry from a campus school’s raging kegger, but full of hormonal, predatory teen boys nonetheless. Quinn had noticed one guy getting into my space, continually touching my arm, my ass, despite my protestations. Quinn didn’t know me, didn’t know the guy, but told him to back off, asked me if I was okay.

We’d spent the rest of the night together, sharing fries across the table at a twenty-four-hour diner. After years of being the queen bee in high school, I wanted genuine companionship. I was tired of lording myself over people, having people please me instead of being honest with me. Quinn was my first experiment. From then on, we were inseparable. He was quippy and smart and not intimidated by me; he was the first person who ever called me on my bullshit, saw through my callousness. When he came out as queer to his family, I went to his home in New Jersey and held his hand as he faced his devout Christian parents on their living room sofa.

When he began seeing Sam, I learned along with him about the gender spectrum, about what it meant to date a Black nonbinary person and helped him broach tough conversations with Sam. Quinn, in turn, introduced Sam and me to his father’s Korean roots, teaching us how to cook sundubu-jjigae and hoeeddeok and introducing us to writers like Ch’oe Yun and Shin Kyung-sook.

Later, he cheered me on as I pivoted away from the fine arts and applied for internships in fashion, eventually for jobs. When I told him how I screwed over my competition for the Magdelena job he wasn’t happy, but he didn’t reprimand me, either. He let me be myself, blind ambition and all.