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that—probably the scoutmaster had been informed that her presence would be provisional, and was then told, more curtly, that the experiment had failed—until I began to think I had imagined her. Such a delicate girl, with her perfect, tailored uniform. Erect in her bearing, total in her indifference. I did become friends with Lidya and Marta, after a fashion, sitting in dingy teahouses together and taking up the hems of our skirts. Though we lost touch a few years later, when I was smuggled out on the orphan ship, and I have no idea what became of them or any of the others.
    As for Vera and me, it would be a long time before we came face to face again.
    9.
    My attempts at mimicry, so successful with the Donne School teachers, didn’t go as well outside the classroom—friendship being, after all, more delicate than intellect. You can fake your way into fear or respect or passing grades, but not affection. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me when Itried to imitate my roommate, Margaret, who was the most beloved person I knew.
    I watched her carefully whenever we happened to be in the room at the same time, or whenever we met in the halls: the way she poked her friends in the ribs with delight when they said something particularly nasty, and the way she laughed, scrunching her nose up to just the degree that her few light freckles were hidden by her mirth. Her beauty, compounded by her happiness. Though I liked the freckles, actually: she was the one who powdered them to death each morning, trying to pretend they didn’t exist.
    When she was away in class or out with a friend, drinking soda and smirking at the outfits of the passersby, I opened her drawers and lifted her sweaters up by the handful, pressing them to my nose and smelling the rosewater her housecleaner had sprayed them with after washing. Periodically, she sent a box of clothes back home to be cleaned and received a fresh shipment, which wasn’t something I could aspire to, personally. (To whom would I have sent them? To what address? The past, c/o my deepest wishes.) But I saved up and bought a bottle of light cologne to scent my own wardrobe, which Margaret did in fact compliment, one time.
    I watched, and I calculated the ways I could pick up her American habits: walk like she walked, smile like she smiled. Still, something was lost in the translation from her body to my own, the dialect of my limbs never quite tracking the lilting way she tossed her hair. To be American was to take what you wanted; to be American was to sit and laugh just so. Early on in my first semester the cafeteria served fries alongside their “famous” chicken-fried chunks of steak, and I noticed that Margaret alone ate them with both ketchup and mayonnaise, dipping one end in each sauce before taking alternating bites. I thought it was elegant, or maybe just efficient. Clever, in any case, and I found I liked the taste. Ketchup on its own was too sweet for me, but Margaret’s method simulated the mayo-thick salads I was used to from home, served as treats with our most celebratory meals—I never did quite get used to the idea of “salad” denoting iceberg lettuce and cold tomatoes arranged on a plate.Following Margaret, I dipped once, twice, with perfect confidence, savoring the bite of oil and the kiss of vinegar on my tongue. That is, until a girl named Sandy turned around to ask me for the salt and pepper shakers and visibly blanched at my behavior.
    â€œWhat in God’s name,” she asked, “do you think you’re doing?”
    I went still, one half-doused fry hovering above my paper ketchup cup. “Eating?” I said. But since she caught me off guard, I didn’t have time to affect the cool voice I was piecing together from Margaret’s intonation, and so it sounded like I suggested I was Yeeting? Which likely didn’t help my case. Sandy squinted, taking in the ketchup, the mayonnaise, the little