“What?” We were sitting on the cheap, burnt orange blanket that covered my bed. Some students bought decent comforters to replace the dorm’s linens, but I was thrifty. I only believed in the most essential of expenses, like chocolates from the various luxury chocolate houses whose beautiful boxes and tins currently decorated the two long shelves that circled the tiny room. My pink Fauchon one was still there, although Adela gave it a dirty look. My orange teddy bear sat at one end of the bed and studied us. He was French, brought back from a trip for me when I was a toddler, and very Gallic—that is, obsessed with food, feisty, and argumentative—probably because he had grown up in America surrounded by my stereotypes. Programs and theater flyers littered the long board of a desk, amid stacks of books. I was studying for the prelims I would have to take soon after I got back to the States in order to continue my Ph.D. studies. There were some four hundred works of French literature to memorize, along with the principal theoretical analyses of the same, so I’d been reading nothing but French classics for a couple of years now in preparation. I wanted to do my dissertation on the cultural renaissance in French-speaking, tropical, smiling Tahiti, but my department wouldn’t let me do that until I’d survived the capital of France and passed my prelims. Above my bed was an enormous map of seventeenth-century Paris, torn in one corner thanks to that yellow tacky stuff that’s supposed to hold things up. Cheap white toile veiled a window looking down at the picnic tables in the dorm’s courtyard, a major center of gossip.

Adela peered through it. “You’re so lucky,” she sighed enviously, not for the first time. “I can barely even see the courtyard from my window. Now look at that! Why didn’t you tell me Marina and Jack were sitting at the same table?” She turned back from the window and opened my mini-refrigerator to discover the narrow, long mint-green box of eight small macarons I had just brought back from Ladurée that afternoon. I sighed. That girl sure could sniff things out. She took a bite of a chocolate one, which made me feel as if her teeth were sinking directly into my heart, and switched back to her original subject. “Because we’re going to need a cute guy around here.”

“What?” I decided she must be talking about some other guy, one who wasn’t tall, dark, and gorgeous and who might even recognize me if he saw me again. I knew a few cute guys, honest. I mean, ones that knew me back and with whom I’d actually exchanged names.