“Same to you, Henri Haltiwanger,” he replies as he stands. “Although you understand that if it comes down to a single spot, I’d snap your neck and throw you down a ravine, right?”

“Of course.” I smile. He’d make a phenomenal Hunger Games tribute.

The room shrinks applicant by applicant, each greeted by a rotating cast of what I assume to be faculty members, and after what feels like an eternity, it’s my turn.

“Haltiwanger? Henri Halti . . . H? Henri H?” comes the would-be interviewer, reading from his folder and chewing a pen cap as he walks. He’s younger than expected, with long hair tied into a bun and a stained T-shirt under his jacket.

“Here!” I yell out, standing up at the ready. “I mean, er, présent!”

“Sorry about the wait,” he says, with what I now recognize as the default French-Canadian accent, as he leads the way to an interview room. “Every year we get more applicants willing to trek here for an in-person interview. I guess that’s a good thing, but that means a longer waiting time for some. . . . New York, right? Halwangue?”

None of the butterflies I had chomping at the walls of my stomach when I met with Donielle Kempf are in session right now. Whatever the hectic circumstances that got me here might have been, something about the cold Montreal air has killed them dead.

“Yes, New York. And it’s Haltiwanger,” I say with a smile. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Halti? Halti! Are you there?” a stilted image of Ming in his FATE jacket says. “Where are you, dude?”

I’d been sitting in the fire stairwell of the Design School for a good twenty minutes, the bottoms of my feet still jittery from the hour-long interview, when Ming’s name popped up on my phone.

“Canada,” I manage. “It’s a long story, but I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“M’kay,” Ming says before following up with, “Are you eloping with Corinne Troy?”

“What? No! I was interviewing for McGill! Corinne just came with. I’m crashing at her aunt’s.”

“Oh.” He seems disappointed and looks over his phone’s camera, out of my line of sight to someone I can’t see.

“Wait, is that what people are saying?”

“In a word, yes. But that’s okay! I’ll find a way to put that toothpaste back in the tube. I’ve got you down here.”

Elope? They think we’ve eloped? “I hate high school.”

“Our penance for sins committed in a past life,” Ming agrees. “How was the interview?”

“Good. Great, maybe?” I allow myself to be positive. “I think I gave my interviewer a link to an illegal website where he could get the Jordans he was looking for. So who knows? Maybe that was some Canadian moral test I failed, but beyond that . . . it went well?”