I get his point. It’s not just that we’re the only two wearing suits in a room of about forty. Only a handful of the other applicants look like Canadian high school students. They look closer to the disaffected twenty-something-year-old New Yorkers you see hanging around St. Marks Place in the summer, arms full of sleeves and sides of heads androgynously shaved. Misfits by design. Some are rocking high fashion at the moment, and I wonder how the girl in nine-inch stiletto heels that look handcrafted even made it up to the building.

The majority have some headphones around their neck or a tablet on their lap, not looking to socialize. I wonder if the mind game of meeting the competition is why McGill’s interviews are structured in such a bizarre way. No back channels and informal meetings: just three days across three different weeks where applicants are invited to show up for fifteen-minute chitchat with members of the staff. A great Canadian equalizer.

A small huddle of younger applicants in the corner are animatedly chatting and comparing sketches and mock-ups on their tablets. Were we supposed to bring portfolios?

“Don’t worry,” Steve says. “I don’t have one either. The program doesn’t require them. Just ‘An Unbridled Passion and an Open Mind,’ whatever the hell that means. Shitty slogan, if you ask me. Most of the people who bring fancy portfolios today are probably just trying to make up for shitty grades.”

A short woman with long hair and a leather binder under her arm hears him as she passes us by, and she frowns. Going by his smirk, it’s exactly what Steve intended. He casts me another look and follows it with the very question I’m dreading most today. “So, what’s your thing?”

“My thing?” I repeat.

Steve extends his arms out and tilts his fists inward.

“This is mine,” he says proudly. “Suits. Designed this one from scratch and still had to take the GED for a chance at this freaking program.”

“That’s, um, insanely impressive,” I say, because it very much is.

It’s a very good suit. The kind you might see with a four-hundred-dollar pocket square on a mannequin in a Fifth Avenue window display, next to a headless wife and two headless kids.

Steve goes through his family history and how the DelMattises were originally in the wedding dress industry and that he learned at age nine how to hem his first suit in a family of six sisters. The McGill program is his chance to strike out on his own, even though he’s got a two-decade late start and an alimony payment. He’s chatting away his nervousness, and I don’t mind letting him. Eventually, Steve gets called in.

“Good luck, dude!”