I went to Georgia State for a bit—mainly I wanted to get out of Athens, and Atlanta had that big-city appeal. Being a professor’s kid is a lot like being a preacher’s kid—you either drink the Kool-Aid or you rebel. You can try to impress your parents, their friends, and everyone else who decides that just because your mother’s brilliant, you must be, too, or you can disappoint early and often. I was precocious, of course; but by high school, I had turned inward. I had one friend who understood—Craig—the son of one of my mother’s colleagues. We met at a faculty holiday party, the only two children whose parents hadn’t bothered with babysitters and instead marched us from fundraising event to university function to student art gallery show. Together, we bore the brunt of the endless pressure to perform, the tut-tuts of teachers, who shook their heads at us with assertions about wasted potential. It was Craig who convinced me to go to college. We’ll go together, he said, brushing the hair out of my eyes so he could see me better. We need degrees, he insisted. We need experience, I argued, not a piece of paper. But I filled out the application anyway because that’s what Craig was doing. We celebrated our acceptance letters with wine snuck from my parents’ cabinet. To our future, he said. To our escape, I muttered. And I believed it.

My reasons for trying to talk Craig out of spring rush were entirely self-motivated. I worried about whom I’d eat lunch with and talk to after class. In the evenings, we had made a habit of watching Adult Swim on the futon in my apartment, cramming ourselves full of Dr Pepper and Doritos, laughing late into the evenings. The thought of doing that by myself was enormously depressing.