When Audrey sauntered in, perfectly fashionably late, everyone turned. With her shiny, red-gold hair and her infectious laugh, she was impossible to ignore. She was flanked by a pair of thin blonde girls, all three of them in denim cutoffs so short the pockets were visible, and as she sat down, she said something to the blondes that made them cackle like hyenas. I was captivated. Throughout the meeting, I watched Audrey from underneath my eyelashes, wondering what it would be like to make my way through the world so self-assuredly. She never so much as glanced in my direction.

But when Tiffani (purposefully, I think) kicked over my can of soda on her way out the door, it was Audrey who materialized by my side with a wad of paper towels.

“Here,” she said, handing a few to me and dropping the rest to the floor, using her sandaled foot to wipe up the mess.

“Thank you,” I said.

She flashed a bright smile as she nudged the mass of soaked paper towels in the direction of the trash can before abandoning them in a pile at its side. “No worries. See you around.”

That “see you around” shifted my entire perspective, made the entire college experience stretching before me seem doable. And, with Audrey by my side, it had been.

CHAPTER THREE AUDREY

Other than the afternoon I interviewed at the Hirshhorn, I’d only been to Washington, DC, for an eighth-grade class trip. I had exactly one distinct memory from the visit—that of a classmate with food poisoning decorating a White House carpet during our tour—but it was otherwise a dim haze of monuments and museums.

I should have come down one weekend to apartment hunt, but after I accepted the offer, the reality of leaving New York hit me like a wrecking ball and I couldn’t imagine wasting even one precious second of my remaining time there. My last two weeks in New York were a blur of indulgent dinners at favorite haunts; drinks upon drinks with friends, acquaintances, anyone I’d crossed paths with in my tenure there; and late nights roaming the streets, trying to commit every crowded, trash-heaped corner to memory.

One such night, buzzed on spicy margaritas and feeling the weight of my impending move, I’d gone home and inquired about a random apartment on Craigslist. When I awoke in the morning to an email from the landlady, I did just enough research about the neighborhood to convince myself it wasn’t a scam listing and told her I would take it. But even my meager concern felt like overkill: the woman used an email signature that included a motivational quote in rainbow text, for crying out loud. How bad could one of her apartments be?

I arrived in DC the afternoon before my scheduled move-in, and so I crashed with my college friend Cat. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d seen each other—two years ago maybe? At Amber’s wedding? I vaguely recalled unsuccessfully trying to pull a blushing Cat up onto a bar with me at the after-party—but when I told her I was moving to DC, she immediately and enthusiastically invited me to stay with her as long as I wanted.