Eventually, Wally came around, of course—it was impossible to dislike Daniel, even for someone as cautious and quiet as Wally—and eventually, Francis finally worked up the courage to ask me out on a date, too. I’m convinced it’s because Daniel figured it out and told him to get off his ass before he lost his chance.
By the end of our second year, our group had become a darling among the professors. We were such an eclectic mix of minds, half of us concerned with the beauty and artistry of maps and the other half with the math and precision of them, so that every project we tackled became an electrified debate between the two philosophies, pushing all of our studies even further.
In fact, it was this very drive to always explore every idea from both angles that gave Tam and Daniel the very first inklings of inspiration that would ultimately turn into our grand project—what we believed would be our crowning achievement, a creation that would change the cartography industry forever. Our Dreamer’s Atlas.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Professor Johansson encouraged us to consider graduate school there at the University of Wisconsin, and the dean sent us to conferences and competitions on scholarship, whetting our appetites even more. In our third year, Tam found our sixth member, a big, loud, lovable boy everyone called Bear, who had transferred from New York earlier that spring on scholarship, and then in our fourth year, just before graduating, we met Eve, who would be joining the geography department the following fall with us as a fellow graduate student.
Eve was, at that point in my life, the most glamorous person I’d ever met, even being as young as we were. I was short, plain, and hopeless with makeup, and she was tall and beautiful, with dark skin like Francis’s and perfect hair, always. She was from Washington, D.C., where her father worked as a diplomat, and there was a sophistication to her that I had never seen in California or throughout the rest of our grubby undergraduate dorms. I was nervous around her for weeks, until I relaxed enough to realize that her elegance was just a cover—she was as shy as me, or even Wally, in her own way.
There was a lot of her I didn’t see. A lot of me I didn’t see either, until it was too late.
In contrast, even though Bear wasn’t the last friend to become part of our little family, he constantly worried about his place in it, in a way that Eve didn’t seem to quite as much. I think he needed us the most, is what it was. He was just like a cartoon bear: giant, cuddly, outgoing, sensitive, always wanting to be with us, like we were his cubs—and happy to let others have the glory. Bear was also an incredible artist; his restoration work in the practice studio was almost as good as Tam’s, but he lacked her brilliance. Everyone did really, even as smart as we all were. But it always felt to me that Bear was worried he didn’t quite measure up—his grades not quite as good, his history with most of us not quite as old, even his family not quite as well-off as the rest of ours, although none of our families’ wealth compared to Wally’s—and it made him ferociously protective of all of us, of our friendship. He was the heart of our group, even if Tam and Wally were the start of it. He was the one who always managed to keep us together. Who pushed hardest for our Dreamer’s Atlas project, that final year of our Ph.D. program.
We were so young then, so ambitious. We believed we were going to revolutionize the field of cartography with our big idea. We were going to change maps.
It was uncommon for so many dissertations to be linked like ours were, but there also wasn’t a friendship like the one our group had. Since the very beginning of undergrad, all the way through our Ph.D.s, we all purposefully had chosen the same topics from different angles for term papers, all done the research together, and all written our conclusions together, after endless exploration. We even had started publishing together in small university journals, as joint authors. Some of us were more famous than others already, but we all were beginning to make a name for ourselves. That final year of our doctoral program, Professor Johansson, who had read Wally’s proposal for the Dreamer’s Atlas idea and then sat through Daniel’s impassioned speech to convince him why he should approve it, wholeheartedly agreed to sign off on it after we each passed our individual oral defenses. He was so proud of us, I thought I saw tears sparkling in his old, kindly eyes as we all burst into cheers and hugged Daniel, and then him.