I did not expect to make a friend in the first week.
I had prepared myself for loneliness the way you prepare for bad weather. You know it is coming, you pack for it, and you wait for it to pass. I had my books, my routine, my phone calls home. I told myself that was enough.
Zara did not get the message.
She started sitting next to me every morning like it had been decided somewhere without my say. She always had a snack she would share without being asked, and she always had something to say. Her mind moved fast and loud and warm, and I found, to my surprise, that I did not mind at all.
"Do you ever stop talking?" I asked her on Wednesday.
"Not really," she said, handing me half a granola bar. "Does it bother you?"
I thought about my quiet apartment in Queens. The thin walls and the sound of someone else's television and the particular silence of eating dinner alone.
"No," I said.
"Good." She turned back to her notes. "Because I wasn't going to stop either way."
By the end of the first week I knew the following things about Zara Miles.
She was from London originally, which explained the accent I could not quite place. She had wanted to be a doctor since she was seven years old, when she had broken her arm falling out of a tree and had been so fascinated by the X-ray that the doctor had printed her a copy to take home. She still had it somewhere, she said. Framed, possibly. She was not embarrassed about this.
She was terrible at mornings but never late. She drank her coffee with so much sugar it was barely coffee anymore. She laughed loudly and without apology. She had strong opinions about everything and delivered them with the confidence of someone who had never once been told to be quieter, which I found both exhausting and deeply impressive.
She also noticed things. Small things. The kind of things most people walk past.
On Friday she sat down next to me, looked at my face for roughly three seconds, and said "what happened."
It was not a question.
"Nothing," I said.
"Marcelin."
"I got a letter from the financial aid office," I said. "It is fine. I just need to submit some extra documents. It is nothing."
She looked at me for a moment longer. Then she opened her bag, took out a chocolate bar, broke it in half, and put one half in front of me without saying anything.
I ate it. I felt, for no reason , slightly better.
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't mention it," she said. "Now tell me what documents they need and we will figure it out."
We figured it out. It took forty minutes and two phone calls and Zara on the floor of the library corridor with my laptop balanced on her knees, but we figured it out. When it was done she stood up, dusted off her jeans, and said "sorted" like it had been nothing.
It had not been nothing. I had been sitting with that letter in my bag since Tuesday, taking it out and reading it and putting it back and trying not to think about what it would mean if something went wrong with my funding. I had not told my mother. I had not told anyone.
I had known Zara for five days.
"Why are you helping me?" I said. "You barely know me."
She shrugged. "I know you enough."
We fell into a rhythm the way you fall into rhythms when you are both tired and overwhelmed and it turns out the person next to you is going through the exact same thing. We studied together in the library on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, which mostly meant sitting across from each other in silence broken by little complaints sometimes. We ate lunch together when our schedules matched. We texted about the reading, about the professors, about Stephanie Ryan, who continued to be excellent at everything in a way that felt almost personal.
"She answered four questions today," Zara said one evening, stabbing a piece of pasta. "Four. And she was right every time. Who is right four times in a row?"
"People who have been preparing for this specific room their entire lives," I said.
"I hate that you remember that." She pointed her fork at me. "Stop being so calm about her. It is unsettling."
I was not calm about her. I was deeply, specifically not calm about her. But I had learned early that the moment you let Stephanie Ryan see she was getting to you, you had already lost something. So I kept my face even and my notes tidy and I saved the panicking for the privacy of my own apartment.
"She is just another student," I said.
Zara gave me a look that said she did not believe me at all.
She was right not to believe me.
On Sunday Zara came to my apartment for the first time. She stood in the doorway and looked at the room and said "it is very white in here" which was true and then she came in and sat on my bed because there was nowhere else to sit and insisted that we were going to make it nicer.
"It does not need to be nicer," I said. "It needs to be functional."
"It can be both," she said. She was already on her phone. "There is a market on Sunday mornings two stops away. We could get plants, prints, Little things. Come on."
"I have reading."
"You always have reading. The reading will be there when we get back. Come on."
I went. I told myself it was because arguing with Zara was more exhausting than agreeing with her, which was true. But also the apartment was very white and very quiet and the idea of spending another Sunday inside it alone made something in my chest feel tight.
We spent two hours at the market. Zara bought a small plant she named Gerald, after my caretaker, which she presented to me as a gift. I bought a print for the wall, something warm and simple, and a candle that smelled like something I could not name but that made the apartment feel less like a waiting room.
On the way home Zara linked her arm through mine the way she always did, like it was the most natural thing in the world, and talked about something, I cannot even remember what, and the Sunday light was doing that thing it does in New York in September where it comes in sideways and turns everything gold.
I thought, quietly, that I was glad she had not waited for later.
That evening I put the print on the wall and the plant on the windowsill and lit the candle and sat on my bed and looked at the room.
It was still small. The walls were still that tired shade of white. The radiator still would not kick in until October.
But it looked, for the first time, like somewhere a person actually lived.
I took a photo and sent it to my mother.
This time I knew exactly what to write.
Getting there, I said.
And for the first time since I had landed, I actually meant it.