Gabrielle Hamilton is looking at me like she’s deciding if I’m worthy of her hawk-like gaze. Her restaurant is called “Prune” and is lauded by restaurant critics but also by my mother, who sent me pictures of her meal there last year when I had typhoid and was on a steady diet of white rice and bananas. I cried with envy.
Earl Sweatshirt looks so young. His baby face bears a sparse mustache I associate with high school boys trying to prove they’ve hit puberty, and he’s swallowed by an oversize Yankees jersey. Maybe it’s just because I’m so close to the stage, and to other people he seems older than his nineteen years.
I logged on to Facebook to check it out. Her sister was fourteen, a freshman in high school. She had about a thousand friends and did not have 113 likes—it was up to 115 now, in the thirty minutes that elapsed since Allie’s text.
There are always eggs at my house. Well, I’ll clarify that—there are always eggs somewhere around my house. Usually the hens are obedient and lay in their nest boxes, but they love to hide their work from us. Occasionally we’ll pull hay bales from the barn to find a cache of eggs tucked in a corner, like the work of a lazy Easter bunny. Sometimes they have been there for years; when we were younger, my siblings and I would throw them against trees deep in the woods, where their sulfur was overwhelmed by the smell of pine.
“Where are the lesbians?” was the question that gave birth to this article. It was raised at a Nass meeting by one of our editors, and not one person in the room was able to offer insight. That the question would was even asked is in itself an issue. Why do so many Princeton students tell me they do not see a strong gay/lesbian/bisexual (various individuals preferred each term) women’s culture? At a school our size, how was there this seemingly hidden population?
The way it came to me was in a letter. I think a lot of people got them, but I don’t know. It was from Dean Rapelye or maybe Malkiel, and it said something like “you are one of the particularly outstanding students admitted” and to “please consider coming to Princeton.”
