Because another thing I liked about Thomas was that he kept me focused on school, since having a boyfriend quieted my deep-seated fears of really just being an ugly freak despite my best efforts to cover myself up with my gym-toned body and Harvard education. I took five English seminars that spring semester junior year, which meant at least a thousand pages of reading a week, a schedule that would have been daunting to most anyone else but was one that gave me a lot of satisfaction. I usually ordered a sack lunch from the dining hall and set up by seven in the morning at the newly opened Starbucks on Dunster Street, since none of my queer artsy friends ever set foot there, and would study in the same booth for upwards of twelve hours until it was time for dinner.

My reading covered a variety of topics, from a literary criticism survey that started with Aristotle and ended with Foucault, to a tutorial on AIDS literature where I devoured practically every play, novel, and memoir related to the disease that had been written up to that point, and wrote pages upon pages of response papers every week. But the class I most obsessed over was a nineteenth-century novel course that visiting professor Isobel Armstrong taught, because it introduced me to a whole array of women authors and characters I came to intensely adore.

Though I’d been exposed to Austen, the Brontës, and Eliot in previous classes, I’d only been assigned their well-known books, such as Emma, Jane Eyre, and Middlemarch. Professor Armstrong introduced me to unlikely heroines like the unassuming Fanny Price from Mansfield Park, the type of virtuous person I aspired to be but could never manage, or Lucy Snowe from Villette, another governess character like Jane Eyre but one who has a much more complex inner life. Though the book I clung to despite its imperfections was George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, for all sorts of reasons like its heroine Maggie Tulliver’s precociousness and the variety of her romantic entanglements, how she first falls for a studious hunchback in Philip Wakem but ends up swooning over the handsome rake Stephen Guest, even though he’s informally engaged to her cousin. Of all these heroines, Maggie seemed to be the only one who recognized the ardent pull of desire, as she runs off with Stephen during a boat ride on the Floss, the river that the book is named after.

And that river! It was a body of water that had played such an important role in my life, from the Angat, which defined the boundary of my childhood, to the Charles, which symbolized my induction to this new world, and my distance from the one I left behind.