John and I drove to Chestnut Street. His parents lived just north of Rittenhouse Square, a neighborhood that made me feel like a phony. We parked his car and held hands on the way over to their town house. Cast-iron troughs, filled with fresh flowers, lined the two windows on the first floor, and each set of three windows on both the second and third opened out onto a narrow, cast-iron balcony. The front steps were polished marble, and the front door was made of dark wood with black trim. It opened as we climbed the steps, and his mother, wearing a pale green spring dress with low-heeled espadrilles, greeted us.

“You must be Hunan.”

The day I told John I was pregnant—a month before our wedding—reminded me of the day I met him. I was waiting for Reema at the base of the Ben Franklin statue on Locust Walk, on the University of Pennsylvania campus. It always felt weird on campus because I never looked like the other students. The other girls dressed like Reema and Aliyah—they wore long, corduroy pants that hung in straight lines from their hips, and thick, knarled yarn socks in luggish, brown leather sandals. They never wore close-fitting jeans that showed their curves, while I did—and I liked to wear the black leather boots that I’d spent a week’s salary on.

So there I stood, waiting, thinking that maybe it was time to quit college. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten into the University of Pennsylvania, anyway—my grades in school were always very good, but the only reason I could afford it was that Federal Aid leaped to the rescue. “But,” I asked Ben Franklin silently, staring at his wrinkled face, “did I want to spend the next thirty years paying back student loans for an experience I didn’t love in the least? Maybe this place you founded isn’t for everyone.”

Reema approached, strolling toward me in her Birkenstocks and a baggy white fisherman’s cable-knit sweater, her hair tied up in a haphazard bun. A backpack, bursting with books and papers, decorated her back like a camel’s hump. She smiled and waved.

As she came closer, I started to say “hi,” but Reema was intercepted by a tall guy with brown hair and bright blue eyes, who started talking to her without even acknowledging me. Reema smiled again, apologetically, this time at me. He was chattering about some class they had together, about a homework assignment he didn’t understand.

I tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, I think I was here first.”

He turned and looked down at me, his bright blue eyes squinting at me in the glaring autumn sun, his curly brown hair tousled by the wind, his broad shoulders shaking to readjust the weight of his monstrous book bag across his back in an elegant move.

I wasn’t impressed.