She takes you to Harvard’s campus, which you’d never seen, and you find yourself engaging in some kind of weird retrospective fantasy. When she shows you the undergraduate dining hall, which basically looks like Hogwarts, you keep thinking to yourself: Maybe I should have gone to Harvard? Maybe I should have applied? You keep thinking back to why you applied to the colleges you did, and you remember—for the first time in years—that you chose your college list almost completely at random. You wanted to go to a city and you wanted to get out of Pennsylvania; those were the only two criteria. You wish you could accurately describe the bone-deep ache of walking on that campus, the too-late realization that you’d fucked up your whole life by not having sufficient ambition. Who are you? You are nobody. You are nothing.
She takes your arm as you walk among the buildings, as if you would have belonged there, as if you belong there, like she does.