Despite our both being the O-Generation—a concept I have to admit rings terribly true the more I think about it—Corinne isn’t an immigrant. Or the child of immigrants. It’s a distinction that’s mostly irrelevant except in moments like these, where it could easily place us on two different wavelengths. There’s no Haitian in her, no Jamaican, no Puerto Rican. Her Blackness is American, born and raised. Stolen and enslaved, technically, but still, it’s rooted here. She never aspired to be here from another shore elsewhere. She might not understand.

“If I give up on Columbia, then . . . I don’t know.”

“Then it’s like you’re no longer Haltiwanger Hungry?”

“Something like that.” My logic is stupid on the face of it, but somehow I feel no judgment emanating from Corinne.

“Look,” she eventually says. “Take it from someone whose last birthday gift from her dad was an eighteen-karat white-gold diamond bracelet he then begged me to mail him back because it was accidentally sent to me by his assistant when he meant it for his girlfriend . . .”

Yikes.

“. . . and then a dog to make up for that fiasco—months before I go off to college. Parents don’t always know best.”

Yikeser.

Although the image of Corinne opening her mail to find a diamond bracelet in there, rolling her eyes, and tossing it aside before returning to her reading is very easy to imagine.

“Whatever happens at Princeton for me,” she continues. “I know I’m not going to be exactly the daughter Gilbert pictures. Or Chantale for that matter. From now on, we get to shape ourselves. Isn’t that the point of college?”

An exhausted Palm Tree waddles back toward us, tongue out and panting. His eyes fill with puppy recognition at the sight of Corinne, and he eagerly sniffs her hand as she takes out a bottle of water and collapsible bowl from my doggy bag.

“Look at this. Corinne Troy: dog person. Who would have guessed?”

“I’ll miss the little inconvenience next year,” she says, smiling as she watches Palm Tree take massive gulps of water.

“It’s a good reason to visit home.”

“I hope he remembers me. I bet you I’ll drop my bags at the door, the first weekend back home, and Palm Tree here will be renamed Pumpernickel and elegantly licking African herbal tea in a corner.”

We gather Palm Tree’s supplies along with a very, very tired pup and head home to the Wyatt.

“My mom mentioned you the other night, by the way,” she says as we walk, much slower without Palm Tree pulling us forward.

“Your mom?”

The one who is a dean at Columbia University, I think, always a little too quickly.