LaGuardia was a public school, but Olga was surprised to find the student body quite different from her neighborhood schools in Sunset. She was shocked how many kids in the art program lived in Manhattan. Whose parents were not rich, but were professionals: public defenders, college professors, government officials. She felt too embarrassed to ever let anyone know what fuckups her parents were. It was easy enough to avoid since most socializing outside of school was spent going to raves or sneaking into the Limelight. Places where the music drowned out the need for intimate conversation.
* * *
OLGA HAD HOPED college would be a way to reinvent herself on her own terms. She had been unprepared for the culture shock. The place was implausibly white, and implausibly wealthy. Most students attempted to mask their wealth, which, for Olga, only made the revelations more jarring. Like when her hallmate, who wore sweaters with holes in them and once asked Olga to buy her falafel because she was “broke,” casually mentioned that her father was taking her to Paris on the family jet for the weekend.
There were so few minority students that they clustered together and, in the face of such white cultural dominance, attempted to “out-’hood” each other by any means necessary. She couldn’t tell if it was a performance for her benefit—because in those days saying you were from Brooklyn had an edge to it—or if it was just generalized identity exploration, but here too, she met with a kind of duplicity. The girl who made a show of dating a member of the Crips turned out to have been a Jack and Jill kid whose parents owned ten McDonaldses. The guy who told a story about his best friend “doing a bid” for dealing—a story Olga immediately recognized as paraphrase of Nas’s “One Love”—was an alumnus of Phillips Andover, a place Olga had never even heard of until she got to campus. When Olga asked him about it, he got in her face saying, “You don’t know my life! I did Prep for Prep!” One weekend, Mabel, curious what it was like to go away to school, came up to visit. She loved the campus and the bookstore, and even came to a sociology lecture—the subject that day was infidelity—and was riveted. But when Olga took her to an off-campus house party the BSU was sponsoring she took one look around and declared, “These people are mad corny. Let’s bounce.” Olga felt validated. They ended up at a hip-hop club downtown where Mabel commanded attention, as per usual, on the dance floor. It was ironic how close she and Mabel were during her college years, given the physical miles and the cost of long-distance calls, but for Olga, feeling lost amid all the posturing, Mabel’s authenticity was a touchstone.
Her brother had loved his Greek experience so much that Olga briefly considered pledging—there was a chapter of his sister sorority on campus—but their first recruiting event was a screening of a film about the Young Lords and Olga decided she’d been indoctrinated enough in this area and bailed. After not finding her place with the students of color, Olga took to hanging out with the international kids. She found it ironic, then, that the minority students branded her a “sellout to the community” because of this. What she wanted to say, but didn’t, was that she’d already sacrificed more for the “community” than they could possibly understand. She brushed it off. Olga liked the international students. They were the only other people who seemed to find the place as alien as she did. Olga found it refreshing that those who were rich were unapologetically so: driving luxury cars, putting up oil paintings in dorm rooms, hiring personal chefs to cook elaborate birthday dinners filled with wine and arguments about film and literature. This, Olga felt, was what you were supposed to do with money. The friendships were never particularly deep, but they helped to pass the time, and they expanded her world.
When college was over, Olga again struggled to find her way. She floated between Mabel’s world and the Eurotrash dinner parties—now being held in Manhattan pied-à-terres—enjoying both, but never feeling like she fully belonged in either place. Mabel, having stayed in Brooklyn, had a vast network of friendships and club hookups from school and work that she afforded to her cousin. It helped Mabel too, Olga realized. Having a cousin who was “artsy” and “cool” offered her a differentiation point, though, in those days, Mabel’s body was so banging that she differentiated herself well enough on her own.
She was, in fact, out with Mabel when she met Reggie King and for any number of reasons, Mabel was a fan. First, Mabel had always been a big freestyle head, so she was already an admirer of his work, but also Reggie’s flash was very much Mabel’s style. And Mabel’s sense of humor was right up Reggie’s alley. Plus, Mabel loved the VIP access that Olga’s relationship granted her by extension; the night that they all met, Mabel ended up going home with one of the hype men from Mobb Deep. When Olga broke things off with Reggie, Mabel was furious. She was as mad as if she had been Reggie’s cousin. Her anger irritated Olga, who felt she was encouraging her to stay with Reggie to keep her own VIP status, which made Mabel curse her out, screaming about how a pendeja like Olga didn’t deserve happiness. And although, with Abuelita’s intervention, they eventually squashed their beef, it wasn’t ever really the same after that.