I don’t want to call Elizabeth Ann Margaret untalented. But construction on the state-of-the-art Loge Student Center began her freshman year at RhIDS. And she claimed that she’d decided to get an MFA in experimental animation because all the jobs at commercial animation houses were just so utterly boring. But I’d heard it from another undergrad program mate of ours that since her father no longer had powerful connections, she couldn’t find a house willing to hire her based on her skills alone.

In any case, she was always giving me backhanded compliments. Or worse, taking way more credit on our group projects than she should have.

“Wow. How do you think she affords all of that?” the person she was gossiping with asked.

The other voice was male, and I also recognized it right away. It belonged to Asher Peretz. He was a playwright from Carnegie Mellon’s MFA Dramatic Writing program. But he was doing an interdisciplinary thesis year with our class because he had written an experimental play that revolved around an animated character having to decide whether to stay in his cartoon world or join our real one.

He was really cute in a bookish guy next door kind of way. Like, he was that actually hot guy Hollywood cast in films to play the nerd. They just threw a pair of glasses on him so that people watching wouldn’t say, “Hey, none of the nerds at my school look like that!”

So yeah, Asher was Hollywood nerd hot. But he was also friendly. He contributed to class discussions without monopolizing it like so many of the other guys did. And his feedback was always helpful and encouraging. He was just super accessible. Like an Israeli Paul Rudd.

I wasn’t surprised to hear Elizabeth Ann Margaret talking about me. But I was taken aback to hear him asking her follow-up questions. He’d never been anything but courteous to me. He’d even asked to hang out a few times like maybe he wanted to be more than friends.

Not that I took him up on any of his invitations. Letting group meetings happen at my house occasionally was as close as I ever got to socializing with the opposite sex. This mess with Victor was bad enough as it was. It wouldn’t have been fair to drag a nice guy like Asher into it.

At least, I’d thought he was nice. But here he was, gossiping about me with Elizabeth Ann Margaret behind my back.

“You didn’t hear it from me,” she told him in a dramatic hush-hush voice. “But our working theory is that Dawn’s the daughter of a drug kingpin or something. I mean, she has a car with a driver that takes her everywhere. And she’s the only black person in the MFA program who isn’t here on scholarship. How else could she afford her lifestyle?”