If you were to put a mirror in front of her

She could be doing her hair,

Getting ready for a night out with friends

She could be laughing as she watches her favorite shows

She could be lighting an incense stick,

Getting ready for a good night’s rest

She could be diligently doing her work,

Making sure her education isn’t wasted

She could be sticking positive words of affirmation onto said mirror

Or she could just be staring,

Looking at her dark brown skin, her full lips, her hair that is her crown

She could just be looking

A stranger sits before me. On her right hand is a black support brace: a rock-climbing incident got the best of her. She’s wearing a red t-shirt adorned with cartoon sheep.  The curly script below the graphic informs me that the garment is from “Bä Häbä, Maine.”  I laugh and tell her I like it. My subject is, unlike the t-shirt, not from Maine – she hails from the West Coast, having traveled a long way from California to end up in Northampton, Massachusetts. We’re studying together at an outdoor table, both of our laptops open, squinting to see the screens and each other better in the direct sunlight.

Her given name is Sally, the same as her mother, and her mother’s mother before her. The family name, she tells me, but she goes by her middle name, Claire, instead. It’s simply a better fit.

For Claire, California is home. Northampton is home, too, if only temporarily. She briefs me about a few other places she’s been. Pisa, Italy, to see the leaning tower. She took a picture with the tower, of course, pretending to hold it up like everyone does, but she won’t show it to me for whatever reason. This doesn’t bother me. Keep your secrets, I think, I don’t need them for this assignment. She’s been to Venice, during the same trip. There she fell into a canal, which she tells me was quite a dramatic scene. Luckily she’s a strong swimmer, and a benevolent gondolier was there to help her in her time of need. It seems from an outside perspective that this memory is a special one to her – or perhaps not. She’s hard to read.

Claire’s preschool boyfriend was the son of a criminal. Her top song of 2021 was “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones. She showed me a picture of a beheaded squirrel drying up on the pavement outside of President Kathleen McCartney’s house. All of these things I learned at a Campus Cafe table on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.

Note: Quin uses any pronouns and so I will be alternating my use of “he,” “they,” and “she” throughout the piece.

I’ve known Quin for a couple of years now, but always framed in a Zoom or Discord window, headphones on, yellow-gold walls behind him. We’ve gotten to know each other in online fandom spaces.  We’ve been playing the roleplaying game Monsterhearts with a group of friends for almost a year now, but we’ve never talked in depth about our lives. Given the opportunity to interview Quin for this project, I was excited to finally get to learn more. Now I know that Quin has known those walls for as long they can remember, having lived in the same house for 22 years.

Quin has curly, dark hair, glasses, an even voice, and a full-bodied laugh. She is a self-described jack of all trades, finding time to play video games, tabletop roleplaying games, and classical guitar, when not busy as a junior chemistry major. Despite being busy, they legitimately like all of the things that they do. She finds fulfillment in academic success and hopes to help publish a well-renowned research paper one day.

Born to first-generation Russian immigrants, growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, Quin always thought he would have a future in the field of chemistry. Her parents are both paints chemists and he expected to follow in their footsteps. Early on, Quin was labeled a gifted kid, until their sophomore year of high school hit, and they cracked under the pressure. He was failing the class that had always been their focus: chemistry. Despite the falter of confidence, through the support of a beloved teacher, Quin found a love for chemistry outside of completing homework assignments, through an honest discussion of theory. When she enrolled in the University of Illinois, the subject matter wasn’t difficult, but the workload was overwhelming, and Quin struggled once again. Now, they’ve moved back home and are thinking about future careers where they can enjoy practicing what they’ve learned. After rambling to me about paint chemistry and particle accelerators, Quin jokes, “That’s what I love about science, it’s just like ‘Fuck it, why not?’” I’d say the same attitude goes for choosing jobs that bring you joy.

Ultimately, Quin gains fulfillment in seeing other people succeed. Quin tells me they want to be seen as approachable, that “As someone who’s been seen as abrasive, annoying [in the past], I would love to just been seen as someone who is open and can be talked to.” I’m glad, then, that I had the opportunity to talk to Quin, and I plan to reach out and talk with them again soon.

Cecilia shuffles a deck of cards over and over again for almost the entire duration of our interview. It’s her new hobby. I haven’t seen her anywhere in the past week without her deck of cards. She practices over and over again to keep her hands busy at the tables in the library cafe, or after we all eat dinner together, or in my room while I’m interviewing her. It’s a great habit, and it’s nice to have a deck of cards handy. Cecilia and I and the rest of our friends been playing card games we know from childhood—simple ones, but relatively violent, like Spit and Speed and Egyptian Rat Screw. It’s hard to interview someone when you’re snatching and slapping cards, though, so we don’t play now, but Cecilia is perfectly happy just to shuffle her deck.

I ask her if she likes to eat breakfast. She says sometimes, but not necessarily. Only when she wakes up in time. She hates breakfast for dinner, though. We talk for a while about our opinions on the various dining halls at Smith. Cecilia tells me she avoids eating at Tyler because the rugby team eats there after practice and stink up the entire dining hall.

Cecilia and I both have perpetually messy rooms. She tells me that it’s embarrassing to have people over when your room is messy, because then you have to clean your room in front of them. Most of the time, when she has people over, she just shoves everything in her closet.

I ask if she has siblings. Two sisters, she says. The older, Sophie, is a Scorpio sun and Sagittarius moon, twenty-five, and in grad school. She lives in LA and she’s really good at picking up hobbies, Cecilia tells me. She’s really into communal living, acupuncture, gardening, and astrology. The younger, Monica, is a senior in high school. She has a boyfriend, who is weird, but kind of cute. Ugly-cute. Monica is a Cancer, but Cecilia doesn’t know the rest of her chart because she doesn’t talk about it. She likes Latin, psychology, and classics.

As I took notes, Cecilia leaned over my notebook and made fun of my handwriting. “You write like the girl in that movie who capitalizes everything because it’s unfair to the other letters. You’re such a Marxist.”

I protest that I am nothing like the girl in Paper Towns, who capitalizes random words in a sentence, while I capitalize every single letter. I am a Marxist, though, but I muse that it would make more sense for someone who capitalizes everything to be a capitalist.

Cecilia asks me if I have an inner monologue. I tell her that I do, that my brain is always talking. Cecilia’s not sure if she does. She says that she has to always vocalize her thoughts, that even if she’s alone, she’ll talk to herself. We’re really different in that way. I think that there’s a lot that I think but don’t say.

When I asked Cecilia if I could interview her, she asked me if she could lie about her answers. I told her that was okay, and that maybe I would learn more from the lies she chooses to tell than simply the stuff that happens to her. I can’t attest to the truth of Cecilia’s words, but I hope I’ve been true to her character. 

When I ask her about where she’s from, Michelle spends a lot of time detailing San Francisco’s highway system. She tells me where each one begins and ends, which part of the city they run through, whether she thinks they’re useful to the city’s residents or not. The overpass she now lives next to used to designate the boundary of a Red Line district.  Crossing under it is “harrowing” due to the painfully narrow sidewalk, which lacks a protective railing.  And the erratic drivers.

     Michelle’s father’s family is originally from New Orleans but was displaced by a highway, eminent domain taking the house her great-grandfather built. The highway’s middle lane now runs through where it used to stand. I was surprised to hear that her family was from a historic black creole district. Michelle tells me that her father’s family is black creole. She identifies as white. She has curly, blonde hair (she tells me it’s brunette, I say that I don’t understand the distinctions white people make between blonde and not-blonde, she asks me if I’m just looking to pigeonhole her as a dumb Cali blonde, I tell her that today I’m a journalist and I morally cannot misrepresent her like that, she grins and tells me that I can go ahead and do so if it’ll make for a better story), fair skin, and blue eyes. Michelle remembers multiple times in her childhood when strangers attempted to “rescue” her from her father, who has much darker skin than she does. No, she didn’t ever appreciate the thought:  Her dad wears reflective safety vests and stops to take ridiculously zoomed-in pictures of birds. Human traffickers and pimps do not.

     Yes, people are annoying. No, of course she doesn’t hate them. I’m referring to the people who see her as different from her father, she’s moved on and means people in general. Diversity is more than culture and skin color, diversity is the person in her class she avoids talking to because they stand too close and won’t stop making “your mom” jokes. No, of course she doesn’t hate them. She thinks they’re wonderfully annoying — she can’t be around them, but every day after class she sees them walk off screech-laughing with a couple of friends. Yes, all three of them annoy her, but they clearly love one another. Who is she to say that they’re being human the wrong way? Anyway, she’s just spent ten minutes rambling about San Francisco’s highways, so I’m probably annoyed about how boring this interview is. Nah, I’m not annoyed. I like the way she’s being human.