“I daydreamed about Ivan all the time, imagining different conversations we might have, how he might look at me, touch my hair, kiss me. But I never thought about having sex.” Fiction by Elif Batuman.
Svetlana and I were reading the course catalogue. It was like the book of all human possibilities. I thought there was something wrong with the way it was organized.
Now we lived in different buildings, and eventually we would live far apart, and I would never hang out in her bedroom. How brief and magical it was that we lived so close to each other and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to follow the right leads.
When it came to choosing classes, Svetlana liked taking introductions and surveys, “mastering” basics before moving to the next level. I had a terror of being bored, so I preferred to take highly specific classes with interesting titles, even when I hadn’t taken the prerequisites and had no idea what was going on.
It had taken me months to realize that Lakshmi wasn’t rich. Her clothes came from invitation-only sales in New York that she went to with Noor’s friend Isabel, or from some kind of consignment store where rich women and teens off-loaded barely worn couture items, using the proceeds to buy one another’s anxiety and A.D.H.D. medications. I had never heard of such goings on, which Lakshmi spoke of as routine.
Once they were engaged, Johannes put on a huge campaign to convince her that engagements were dumb, and got her to break it off. Then he tricked her into having sex with him . . . and then he disappeared forever, because that was his M.O. Afterward, the girl scarcely knew what, if anything, had happened to her—whether it had been real. “As soon as she wanted to speak of it to another,” Kierkegaard wrote, “it was nothing.
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