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and biology. He once explained to me how Buda and Pest were on opposite sides of a river. I told him "San" and "Francisco" were on the opposite sides of a bay.

    This Christmas, he tells me, will be his first trip back to his family in years. He's brought me a duty-free catalog from a Hungarian airline.

    "Can you please help me pick out presents for my family?" he asks shyly.

    We select perfume for his mom, a Walkman for his sister, cologne for his brother, and a watch for his father.

    "Thank you," he says. I know he can barely afford the gifts.

    He's brought an application for a scholarship he's hoping to get. We work on the application for three hours, taking a break at one point to get pizza with extra mozzarella. I volunteer to write him a letter of recommendation.

    "Really?" he says. He has a huge trusting smile that makes me want him to get everything he wants and needs. "You'd do that for me?"

    "Sure," I say. I have no idea why I like this kid so much.

    I go to my friend Carl's house to write a paper. There are too many phone calls at my apartment—and there's the smell. Carl is thirty, a fellow grad student. He and his girlfriend see me as a little sister, a role I've rejected until now. I let him make me tea and a sandwich and set up a desk for me in his apartment. We talk about Chile, where he went when he was my age and in the Peace Corps, and where he got sick and lost twenty-five pounds. He shows me pictures of him dancing with Chilean children. He looks skeletal, but happy. His girlfriend calls and says she wants to stop by and give me a hug.

    When she comes through the door, she takes off her jacket, but not her ski hat. She never removes her ski hat. Two people have told me she's bald, that she pulls out her hair. She's brought over some grapefruit her grandmother sent her from Florida.

    "Is that where she lives?" I ask. "No," she says.
    We're in the kitchen. She's opening the crate with a knife; I'm filling the kettle with water for more tea.

    "Listen, we've been talking," she says. With the knife in her hand, she gestures toward her boyfriend. "And you just need to forget about all this."

    "Forget about all this?" I say. I light a match and hold it to the stove. The flames rise in a hushed roar.

    "Yeah," she says.

    I blow out the match.

    Before she leaves, she touches my shoulder; I make myself count to four before I turn away.

    I take my tea, sandwich, and grapefruit to the living-room couch. The phone rings. After a few minutes, Carl comes into the room and tells me that another art history grad student wants to come over and say how sorry he is.

    "I've never met him," I say. "I've seen him around but we've never talked."

    "I know," Carl says. "But he feels just awful about what's happened. He's been through some heavy stuff too."

    When the doorbell rings, I sit up. I've been waiting for the friend's arrival.

    Carl opens the door and the friend's soapy smell fills the room. He has blue eyes and a face red from the cold. His hair is longer than mine, and curly. He's pulled it back into a loose ponytail. "He's so creative," my mom would say. She thinks any man with long hair is an artist.

    "Hello, El," he says, after greeting Carl.

    "Hey," I say, from the couch where I'm eating my sandwich.

    He's not more than five foot nine—or maybe ten. He stands by the door with his fingers laced together in front of him. He wants to say something.

    "I'm sorry," he says. He says it like he's the representative of everyone in the world who's sorry. He's the representative of the world , I think. The whole world is sending its apologies through him. I don't even know him .

    "Thanks," I say, because I can't say, "It's all right." But somehow it does seem all right, with him there, red-faced and earnest and soapy-smelling, telling me that he—and, by extension, all the world—feels bad about what happened to me. He's the first person I've seen since the incident who hasn't told me what I should