Laid In America Page

It was his third week as an international exchange student at a sprawling, sun-bleached university in Arizona. His roommate, a lacrosse player named Chad with a jawline you could cut glass on, had given him two pieces of advice: “Don’t make eye contact with the frat guys during rush week,” and “Get laid, bro. It’s America.”

“You talk in your sleep,” he lied. “Something about dark matter and a missing sock.”

It wasn’t a line. It was a fact. Like gravity. Like the cosmic microwave background.

In the morning, he woke up on her futon, a thin blanket over him. She was already at her desk, scribbling equations in a notebook, a strand of hair tucked behind her ear. She didn’t turn around. Laid in America

She was sitting on a leather couch, alone. She wore a simple grey sweater and jeans, no costume. Her hair was a messy bun, and she was reading a dog-eared paperback by the light of a strobe. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

So Zayn gave up. He buried himself in thermodynamics, in the quiet hum of the library’s air conditioning, in the small pleasure of finding cardamom at an Indian grocery store forty minutes by bus.

Later, they walked back to her apartment, a small, cluttered place with star charts on the walls and a kettle on the stove. She made him chai with ginger and black pepper, the way his mother made it. They sat on her floor, backs against the bed, and talked until the sky turned the color of a new bruise. It was his third week as an international

Zayn thought about Chad’s words. Get laid. He thought about the app, the loneliness, the way his accent felt like a wall between him and everyone else.

The first thing Zayn noticed about America was the size of the cups. Not the big gulp buckets from 7-Eleven, but the tiny, thimble-sized paper cones by the water cooler in his dorm hallway. In his village in Punjab, water came in heavy steel tumblers. Here, you had to fold a triangle of wax paper and pray it didn’t dissolve before you reached your lips.

She looked up. Her eyes were the color of old honey. “Neither is this party.” “Something about dark matter and a missing sock

She laughed—a real, unguarded laugh that filled the small room.

He was laid, instead, into a story. Into the soft gravity of someone who saw him. And for the first time since he’d landed, Zayn felt like he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

Then came the Halloween party.