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By Root 281 0

look like me don’t drink whiskey by themselves in bars barely past one in the afternoon. Granted, it wasn’t the kind of dingy dive bar that ruins reputations, but a respectable Princeton institution that serves classic pub fare along with whatever is on tap. It’s proudly decorated with orange-and-black paraphernalia and even sells a poster-sized version of a mural depicting Brooke Shields sitting in a booth across from Einstein, Toni Morrison, and other less instantly recognizable local luminary. Parents still bursting with pride were dining in the back room with their sons and daughters—freshmen and freshmeat who also arrived early for the pre-Orientation programming—enjoying one last lunch as a family before leaving their children alone to embark on their miraculous college journeys.

“My friends aren’t here,” I said. “Just me.”

My first cryptic yet intelligibly human response made him break out into a smile. His teeth, it almost goes without saying, were thermonuclear white.

“I’m Dave,” he said, extending a gentlemanly hand. “And you are…?”

“I’m Jenn,” I lied. “With two n’s.”

“Two n’s?” Dude was emboldened by two multisyllabic replies in a row. “And how do you defend this blatant overuse of unnecessary consonants?”

Dude thought very highly of himself, and he considered this comment to be charming as all hell. As a female, I didn’t have to play along in the same way. Just sitting there, seemingly agog at his patrician charms and in possession of a functional vagina, really was the only participation required on my end. And yet I couldn’t stop myself.

“I need two n’s,” Jenn-with-Two-N’s continued in this facetious, flirtatious vein. “Because one’s naughty and the other’s…”

“Nice?” he offered.

“Or not.”

Dude laughed really, really hard. He thought I was being ironic, which I was. But he was unaware of the full extent of this parody playing out before him. Ours was a multilayered mockery of a conversation, one occurring within a set of quotations within quotations within quotations. I was tired of having these types of conversations. I had a ~relationship with a philosophy major at Columbia that existed entirely within multiple sets of quotations.

“Why haven’t I seen you around here before?”

“I don’t go to Princeton,” said Jenn-with-Two-N’s.

“I didn’t think so,” Dude said. “By the time you’re a senior, you feel like you know everyone even if you don’t.”

“Maybe it’s because you all look alike,” I replied, gesturing my glass toward the corner table. “That is, in your racially diverse way.”

This also made him laugh. “I should be offended.”

“But you’re not.”

“No,” he said. “Because it’s true.”

I finished my drink in one long gulp. It was starting to burn less. Jessica Darling is a puker. But Jenn-with-Two-N’s could handle her liquor. Dude lifted his finger to alert the bartender that we’d like another round. He was drinking Stella Artois.

“So you don’t go here,” he said.

“No.”

“Work here? Live here?”

“No,” I said. “And no.”

“So if you don’t mind me asking,” Dude said, cracking his knuckles in such a way that required him to flex his lats, delts, and pecs, “what are you doing here?”

“I…don’t…know.” Each word a mystery unto itself.

Dude smiled because he thought I was joking. But it was a tight smile, one that betrayed his concern that I might be a bit of a nutcase, a drunken one-night stand not worth the psychotic hangover. He asked a question designed to get a better sense of what he was dealing with.

“So what do you do?”

“Breathe,” I blurted in a bad German accent. “Eat. Fuck. Shit. Not necessarily in zat order.”

I was quoting my landlord, Ursula, but Dude didn’t know that. He looked over a muscular shoulder to the boys in the corner, perhaps wondering how he was going to get out of this bet but still save face.

“‘What do you do?’ is the first question people in the States ask when they meet someone,” I said. “No one asks that question in Europe. It’s considered rude. Over there, people don’t want to be defined by their jobs. Over here, it’s the only way most people define themselves. I’m an i-banker.