She was sitting on a leather couch, alone. She wore a simple grey sweater and jeans, no costume. Her hair was a messy bun, and she was reading a dog-eared paperback by the light of a strobe. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.
So Zayn gave up. He buried himself in thermodynamics, in the quiet hum of the library’s air conditioning, in the small pleasure of finding cardamom at an Indian grocery store forty minutes by bus.
He wasn’t laid in the way Chad meant. He hadn’t been placed into a box or a stereotype or a one-night statistic.
“I thought I wanted to be laid,” he said, the word feeling clumsy and foreign. “Placed. You know? Fitted in. But I think I just wanted to be seen. Not as the Indian kid, not as the engineer, not as a fetish or a funny accent. Just… seen.” Laid in America
“You talk in your sleep,” he lied. “Something about dark matter and a missing sock.”
He was leaning against a wall, calculating the parabolic arc of a ping-pong ball someone had tossed, when he saw her.
In the morning, he woke up on her futon, a thin blanket over him. She was already at her desk, scribbling equations in a notebook, a strand of hair tucked behind her ear. She didn’t turn around. She was sitting on a leather couch, alone
Everyone else was a vampire or a zombie. She was a girl reading Hawking at a frat party. That was the bravest costume of all.
Chad dragged him. “It’s a cultural imperative,” he said, shoving a red plastic cup into Zayn’s hand. The party was in a mansion off-campus, throbbing with bass and the smell of fake fog. Bodies moved in costumes: pirates, nurses, a terrifyingly realistic Slenderman. Zayn wore his regular jeans and a henley. He felt like a passport photo at a carnival.
Then came the Halloween party.
Laid in America. Not conquered. Not claimed. But held. And that, he decided, was the real thing.
Zayn walked back to his dorm at sunrise. The campus was empty, golden. He passed the water cooler with its tiny paper cups. He didn’t take one. He wasn’t thirsty for that anymore.
It was his third week as an international exchange student at a sprawling, sun-bleached university in Arizona. His roommate, a lacrosse player named Chad with a jawline you could cut glass on, had given him two pieces of advice: “Don’t make eye contact with the frat guys during rush week,” and “Get laid, bro. It’s America.” A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
She laughed—a real, unguarded laugh that filled the small room.
“You snore,” she said.