She left her bed and, crouching on the floor, began to pick up all the pieces of broken hair on the carpet—pointedly at first, and then, as Hannah ignored her completely, in silent, bubbling rage. Looking at her, all I could do was marvel at how easily she grubbed about on the floor, not seeming to care that her hands were touching the dirty carpet. In that moment, I wanted to weep for Hannah, for the fat, unpretty girl who was constantly surrounded by Nicole’s glorious beauty, a beauty so brilliant that it didn’t even need preservation to shine.

Sometimes, I have fits of acute awareness. They are hell. In those moments, I am highly, terrifyingly, aware of everything. I feel the thuds in my chest, the air passing into my lungs, the saliva sliding down my throat; I am aware of how finite I am, how fragile the mechanisms keeping me alive are. I wonder whether I am really any more than the sum of these mechanisms. I mean, I feel like I must be—the thoughts I think and the things I feel are breathed from a higher order. But everything I am can be turned off by one errant second, one stray bus or bullet; I am no more than a replicable machine.

Or am I just an infinite force trapped inside this replicable machine? I hate my body, hate its fragility and its unreliability. Except in the absolute assurance of eventual decay. Occasionally, I start awake and, shaking, stare at my hands, unbearably aware of their existence and their mortality; ashes to ashes, skin to dust.

Hannah introduced Asher to us late in the fall of freshman year.

He was the kind of thin that can never get fat, wore a Rubik’s cube named Eric around his neck, and was blessed or cursed with the kind of hyperintelligence that comes across as batshit crazy. When everyone in our freshman-year dorm first started getting to know each other, not a lot of people liked him. Of course, the paradigms of pop culture would shift on to his ground in a few months, and that would be that.

A large group of us was walking through my first snow, en route to get dinner at an Indian restaurant twenty minutes away from campus. I was freezing.

We crossed the main campus area and entered the Campus Arts District, which was lined with restaurants serving vast varieties of cuisines. As we walked past an Ethiopian eatery, Asher laughed and said, ‘They have food in Ethiopia?’

There was silence for a second before Eki said, ‘I’m from Ethiopia, and I’m pretty sure I ate every day while growing up.’

Hannah shook her head. ‘That wasn’t cool, Asher.’

A couple of people mumbled agreement. I concentrated furiously on not laughing.