A yellow snarl surveils us from the sky. It’s summer 2004 and we, the temporarily privileged, have chosen this. In a small room overlooking Stuyvesant Square, built for Quakers and their friends, bronzed tendrils stretch from scant layers of Rocawear, Pepe, and the rarer Von Dutch, seeking the same refrigerated air that will condense and take out the passerby downstairs with strategic loogies. The summer course load for a pubescent gaggle of black and Latino nerds? Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz’s troubled ass. We won’t be so lucky again until college. For now, there are no textbooks, no books at all, actually. The scholarship program blew a bag at Kinko’s or, more likely, abused a university copier. The next summer, when I bring in my mother’s copy of Faces at the Bottom of the Well as a flex, I will wish that I had just slummed it out with the carbon glut—this is how I learn different editions mean different pages.

We tell our English instructor we want to keep reading Diaz (for all his bite and lust), she says the program cannot oblige—his content is too grown—but we’ve already read Ysrael and few of us can fathom it getting much more profane than that. Come August’s end, at least one of us will borrow Drown from the NYPL for continuity’s sake and depravity.

A pale token cuts through: sandwiched between 20th century Caribbean writers rests 2,500 words by Lorrie Moore. We take turns around the invisible Harkness table reading out How to Become A Writer, graf by graf. In the middle, a sudden HALT!

At undergraduate cocktail parties, people say “Oh, you write? What do you write about?” Your roommate, who has consumed too much wine, too little cheese, and no crackers at all, blurts: “Oh my God, she always writes about her dumb boyfriend.”

The instructor wants us to tell her, what does this mean? We’re a shy bunch still