would work. Our good-bye that night was for real and forever. I probably should have said it directly in the moment, but I chickened out, knowing it would hurt, both to say and to hear. Instead, I just let him go.
* * *
It turned out there were a lot of things I had yet to learn about life, or at least life on the Princeton campus in the early 1980s. After I spent several energizing weeks as a summer student, surrounded by a few dozen other kids who seemed both accessible and familiar to me, the fall semester officially began, opening the floodgates to the student population at large. I moved my belongings into a new dorm room, a one-room triple in Pyne Hall, and then watched through my third-floor window as several thousand mostly white students poured onto campus, carting stereos and duvet sets and racks of clothes. Some kids arrived in limos. One girl brought two limos—stretch limos—to accommodate all her stuff.
Princeton was extremely white and very male. There was no avoiding the facts. Men on campus outnumbered women almost two to one. Black students made up less than 9 percent of my freshman class. If during the orientation program we’d begun to feel some ownership of the space, we were now a glaring anomaly—poppy seeds in a bowl of rice. While Whitney Young had been somewhat diverse, I’d never been part of a predominantly white community before. I’d never stood out in a crowd or a classroom because of the color of my skin. It was jarring and uncomfortable, at least at first, like being dropped into a strange new terrarium, a habitat that hadn’t been built for me.
As with anything, though, you learn to adapt. Some of the adjustment was easy—a relief almost. For one thing, nobody seemed much concerned about crime. Students left their rooms unlocked, their bikes casually kickstanded outside buildings, their gold earrings unattended on the sink in the dorm bathrooms. Their trust in the world seemed infinite, their forward progress in it entirely assured. For me, it was something to get used to. I’d spent years quietly guarding my possessions on the bus ride to and from Whitney Young. Walking home to Euclid Avenue in the evenings, I carried my house key wedged between two knuckles and pointed outward, in case I needed it to defend myself.
At Princeton, it seemed the only thing I needed to be vigilant about was my studies. Everything otherwise was designed to accommodate our well-being as students. The dining halls served five different kinds of breakfast. There were enormous spreading oak trees to sit under and open lawns where we could throw Frisbees to relieve our stress. The main library was like an old-world cathedral, with high ceilings and glossy hardwood tables where we could lay out our textbooks and study in silence. We were protected, cocooned, catered to. A lot of kids, I was coming to realize, had never in their lifetimes known anything different.
Attached to all of this was a new vocabulary, one I needed to master. What was a precept? What was a reading period? Nobody had explained to me the meaning of “extra-long” bedsheets on the school packing list, which meant that I bought myself too-short bedsheets and would thus spend my freshman year sleeping with my feet resting on the exposed plastic of the dorm mattress. There was an especially distinct learning curve when it came to understanding sports. I’d been raised on the bedrock of football, basketball, and baseball, but it turned out that East Coast prep schoolers did more. Lacrosse was a thing. Field hockey was a thing. Squash, even, was a thing. For a kid from the South Side, it could be a little dizzying. “You row crew?” What does that even mean?
I had only one advantage, the same one I’d had when starting kindergarten: I was still Craig Robinson’s little sister. Craig was now a junior and a top player on the varsity basketball team. He was, as he’d always been, a man with fans. Even the campus security guards greeted him by name. Craig had a life, and I managed at least partially to slip into it. I got to know his teammates and their friends. One night I went to a dinner with him off campus, at the well-appointed home of one of the basketball team’s boosters, where sitting at the dining room table I was met by