And we’re off. I tell her about the debate team, our almost-victory last year, about the opportunity of attending a school like FATE, which could have easily gone to a thousand other kids. I tell her about how I begged Mr. Vu, my academic adviser, to set up a meeting with her based on her profile because her play about the Diaspora was so incredible. That part isn’t BS.

“I loved your play,” I tell her emphatically. “My parents moved here from Haiti in their twenties. Their extended families are around the world now. The only relative I know is my dad’s brother Lion. But they’re not close.”

Her eyes are on me with unprecedented intensity, as if the loud hurricane playwright of the past twenty minutes had merely been a role and now we’re on to the real thing.

“So. Why Columbia?”

I had prepared for this part. I wrote an application essay answering this exact question, for Pete’s sake. I go through all the reasons I had thought up in the numerous essay drafts. Columbia’s Core Curriculum, which touches on Art History and Music Humanities, making sure that all the students, regardless of their majors, share some unified body of knowledge.

I list the interesting majors, the teachers, the fact that the college doesn’t float above the city but is a part of it with an active alumni network of those who graduate and then stay put in New York, enriching the community.

And when I’m done, after pausing at the right parts, passionately rambling at others, and meaning it all too, Donielle Kempf is still looking at me, only now it’s with a slight, almost confused frown.

That was . . . not the response I was expecting.

“Well,” she eventually says. “That’s all great, Henri. But . . . anyone could have told me that. Why Columbia—for you?”

What the fresh hell? I wasn’t expecting her to be on her feet clapping—okay fine, maybe a little bit—but . . . this?

“Is there anything else I should know?” She leans forward like she’s expecting something specific and . . .

I let out a nervous chuckle.

“I’m a Scorpio on the cusp of Sagittarius?”

She returns my awkward laugh before glancing at her phone again. Dumb, Henri, real dumb. My brain feels like a hallway with a bunch of locked doors I keep trying to rattle open, but nothing reveals itself.

“Seriously, Henri—why Columbia? You can get a great education in a hundred other places. Why this school?”

My mind spins through a hundred answers, but nothing sounds right. Because my dad wants it more than anything? Because I hear his voice lilt when he says Columbia? Because I saw his face that day they asked us to leave, and I’ll never forget it?