Prior to being here, I thought I would find a good-looking, but troubled, brown-skinned boy who definitely needed me to save him with my love. We would be unified in the struggle against oppression and grow closer untangling our past traumas and problematic patterns of behavior in relationships, since so few people ever loved us right. Regardless, we would emerge on the other side healed and risen. Two Black, Ivy League–educated phoenixes, deeply in love and soaring high above it all.

The Black men here barely look my way, however, except Earnell, who’s more like a brother to me. Rejection from your own kind feels treacherous, like betrayal. If they won’t have me, who will? It’s not that the Black men here don’t date Black women. Many do. They just don’t date Black women who look like me: dark-skinned, nappy-headed, glasses-wearing, and tomboyish. They go after girls with long pretty hair who are brown- to fair-skinned, and who “beat their face for the gods,” as RuPaul would say, meaning they wear a lot of makeup, even though we are in the middle of the woods. I tried to put on lipstick once, imagining it might finally get them to see me, but I felt ridiculous and wiped it off.

Something in me turns away from my fantasy of the rising Black phoenix after I meet Bryce. I still don’t know if he’s attracted to me romantically, if he has a girlfriend, or if he’s just interested in making sure I get to heaven, but he looks at me like he can see inside me, like I matter. That’s the look I think I’m chasing in my pursuit of white Prince Charming, and it’s what I’ve never had from a Black man who wasn’t related to me, or like a family member in Earnell’s case. I was searching for it in Black men when I first arrived, for some evidence that I was important and visible. Now, Bryce has me looking for affirmation in white men.

I’m ashamed to admit that I’m trying to find some value in myself through the love of the “oppressor.” I compare myself to the white girls on campus, looking at my Black face in the mirror, dark and disfigured, like all the other unworthy things in the world, and wonder why white Prince Charming would ever pick me? Why weren’t you born a privileged prancer, like Manda Panda? I ask my reflection. I plead desperately, but she doesn’t answer. She never does.