Born and raised in Chicago, Zara earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of California-Berkeley, with Distinction. She also, most recently, was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to Turkey.

She is currently at work on her first novel. 

Email: zkhan008@gold.ac.uk

 

On Campus  

A Novel by Zara Khan 

Chapter 1 

Ayda opened the door to the bar, and they were already inside, waiting for her. She apologized for being late, saying she had been caught up. Really, she had decided the makeup she’d meticulously applied looked too overt and had run back inside to wipe it all off. It was the start of her third year and, back then, she was always concerned with her appearance. 

“Here, sit down,” Sami said. “Peter meet Ayda. Ayda, Peter.” 

“I gave Mary a much too formal handshake so it’s only fair you get one as well,” Peter said. 

“I appreciate it,” Mary said, “although you did out yourself as having just come off a banking internship.” 

“Oh god, Sami, where do you meet these people?” Ayda asked. She took a seat next to Mary who gave her knee a small squeeze. 

“You said you’d both play nice,” Sami said, looking at Ayda from across the table; his eyes glinted with amusement. 

“We are impressed you managed to make a friend so quick,” Mary said, “it took Ayda and me a whole semester to find each other.” 

“What did we do until then?” Ayda asked.  

“I was actually a nice person back then, thank you very much.” 

“I knew you were going to say that.”  

Except for them, it was nearly empty inside. At first glance, it seemed like an average brewery; TVs in the corners, vintage posters on the walls, a menu with all the beers scrawled in chalk, right above the bar. On most nights, the hall to the right of them stood relatively empty, but it was a Thursday, and in a few hours, there would be a line down the block of students ready to have the weekly special of a personal wine bottle full of beer for only ten dollars. 

“I’ll go and order you something, what do you want?” Sami asked. 

The three of them were all drinking beer. Ayda wanted something stronger to dull the nerves that come with an evening of small talk with someone new like a glass of wine or a rum and coke but feared the latter might make her come off as a bit of a lush and the former, a bit too pretentious. 

“A beer’s fine, thanks.” 

“Wait, let me go,” Peter said, standing up. It took a while for him to lift his tall body out of the wooden booth. He was so conventionally good looking—if he were only born a decade earlier his symmetrical, all-American face might have been enough to land him a summer job at Abercrombie or, at the very least, on the inside of a TJ Max catalogue—that he now, under new standards, might almost be considered unattractive. 

“No need to risk Sami’s brand new I.D. being taken.” 

“He’s legal,” Mary said, “I vote we keep him.” 

“You ordered a fake I.D.?” Ayda asked. 

“Don’t be so righteous; you have one too.” 

Peter came back with a can of sour beer. It was opened and slightly sweating down the side. When he reached out to hand it to Ayda, her hand struggled to grip it and slid along the can. He placed it in front of her and took a seat between Ayda and Sami. Ayda felt a warm glow, despite the cold, moving through her body. It was this sense that, from the outside, she looked as though she was living life just as she should be; in the right place, with the right people. Their youthfulness, all their straight teeth and clear skin, melted onto her, and she wished her parents, or all those indifferent adults who’d loomed so large over her childhood, were sat right across from them to see how much of a normal, well-adjusted adult she had turned out to be. 

The conversation started out pretty standard. Peter and Sami talked about various people on their tennis team while Ayda and Mary argued over the enduring relevance of a book they had to read for class. They were breathlessly discussing the fallacy of the American Empire when Peter and Sami joined in. Mary recited long, depressing historical facts to illustrate the dangers she found inherent in any project of nation-building. The more she talked, the more emotional she got. Sami and Ayda discussed how immigrants often used the master’s tools to get ahead and now found themselves left with no tools of their own to dismantle his house. Peter held all of the silences he was supposed to. He only chimed in to agree or bolster someone else’s point. When he did, Ayda found herself unable to look away. He liked to move his hands a lot when he talked. His movements matched the precise rhythms of his words. He was the composer leading an orchestra, except it somehow felt like he was performing in it too. 

They spent the next few hours tucked away in that booth at the back of the bar. The rowdiness of the surrounding room trickled in, yet they sat, deaf to the sounds of their peers’ debauchery. They ordered a few more rounds and Ayda felt drunk—warm and giddy. Her palms shone with a pleasant sweat, and the wood felt nice against her bare thighs. When 1 a.m. hit and the bar shut down, they went outside. 

Ayda felt a premature sadness; it was as if she was eight years old again, anxiously watching the clock tick through Sunday’s last hours before she had to leave her bed for school’s drafty halls. She wanted them to all go home together or, at the very least, make plans for next week but didn’t suggest anything for fear of coming off as overly eager. 

They took turns hugging each other, and all praised Sami for his talent in picking friends. Then Mary and Ayda walked back to their apartment, arms linked, heads pressed together, making their way through the thick black night. 

 

/ 

 

Ayda met Mary the spring of their freshman year. Ayda had spent the fall homesick for a place she’d spent the past eighteen years yearning to escape. It had been so all consuming and unexpected that she spent her first semester dimly dragging herself to and from class, lacking conviction in almost everything she did. When she came home for the holidays, ready to go back to the way things were, she was shocked to discover everyone had moved on without her. In the wake of her absence, her parents had taken up hobbies, like charity work and art collecting, to fill up their time. While Sami had texted her every day while she’d been away, he was wrapped up with the stress of college applications and the intoxicating promise of a future that powerful people sitting in old gothic buildings would soon decide for him. The only place Ayda felt any semblance of happiness was at her grandmother’s house, where she spent most of her days waiting for Sami to be done with school. 

The house was old and made of red brick. Intricate, embroidered carpets paved the floors, and photographs of Ayda smiling over the years lined the walls. Her grandparents had lived here her whole life. Her earliest memories of the world had taken place on this square plot. It was a speck of life in the otherwise lifeless desert of suburbia. While her grandfather spent his days driving around strip malls to run obscure, needless errands, her grandmother stayed home with her. They cooked dishes Ayda couldn’t pronounce and read books on the couch, their feet tangled together under a wool shawl. Pressed against her, Ayda was reminded that her life didn’t just belong to her, a fact she’d nearly forgotten while plagued by college’s isolation. 

At the start of her second semester, on the second day of Gender Studies, a Professor lectured on the radicalness of Betty Friedan. Shocked, Ayda looked around the class. Most of the students, white girls with tote bags that said “Girls just want to have fundamental rights,” “The future is female,” and “Boss is the new black,” were diligently copying down everything the woman said. In the back, a girl with black paper clip earrings raised her hands and said, “haven’t we moved beyond exalting homophobic and racist women who write mediocre books? The Feminine Mystique did exactly what it was supposed to do: middle-class white women are still figuring out how to orgasm while black and brown women shine their kitchen floors.” 

The professor scolded Mary for not respecting the generations of women who’d fought for her right to take a class like this. Ayda caught her gaze. She rolled her eyes—her way of rebelling against authority—and got a smile out of Mary. After class, Mary walked up to her and asked if she felt like ditching the section they had in an hour. Ayda had never ditched a class before and was petrified of the consequences that might come with it, but she was also petrified of what might happen if she said no. With her hazel eyes and velvet slip dress hanging off her thin frame, Mary looked so important that Ayda couldn’t help feeling like she had been hand-selected for something special. 

As the afternoon sunk into the horizon, they hiked the hills behind campus and wove together random, idiosyncratic details to craft a narrative of who they wanted to be to the other. Everything took on a heightened urgency as they talked through short, fast, clipped breaths. Ayda wanted to reach into herself and pull out the thread of yarn that made up her life for Mary to see. Yet the more she talked, the more she realized the shaky precarity onto which she’d staked everything, but it was exciting, knowing that, at any given moment, everything could change. 

Dusk settled, bathing everything below them in soft orange light. Mary pulled out a perfectly rolled joint from her jacket pocket and asked Ayda if she smoked. 

“The opportunity’s never really come up,” she said.  

Mary inhaled. “Here.” 

Their eyes became glassy, everything became funny, and the world became a generally nicer place. The sun glittered against Mary’s strawberry blonde hair, and that feeling Ayda used to have, of constantly wanting to fast forward her life to get to somewhere good, fell away. The city, sprawled below them, glinting under the faint light, felt like it belonged to nobody but them. 

At the end of their freshman year, they moved in together. Mary found an apartment a few blocks from campus that came with two bedrooms and a rooftop they could climb onto from the living room window. They spent that summer drinking wine as they debated the illusionary nature of love, the miserableness of the nuclear family, and whether Mary was bisexual or just bored. How funny they were back then, two nineteen-year-old virgins, thinking they could uncover all of life’s secrets if they just talked to each other for long enough. 

Ayda, whose friendships up until this point had consisted of shallow conveniences, alliances formed in the face of loneliness, and Sami, whom she had known for so long that he felt more like an appendage of her than an actual independent person, had never known such a deep and totalizing love as Mary. They were each other’s entire worlds and gave themselves over to the other with a frightening urgency, knowing it was only a matter of time before boys, bills, and babies would come and take them away from their little apartment on the edge of Ridge Road.  

 

/ 

 

“Sometimes I forget Sami’s only a freshman,” Mary said, tossing her keys onto their dining room table. 

“He’s looked like a fifty-year-old man since we were kids.” 

“You know what I mean; becoming friends with a twenty-two-year-old and inviting us to a dive bar to meet him.” 

“I know, maybe there’s something wrong with Peter,” Ayda said, “hanging out with a bunch of underage children.” 

“They have an interesting dynamic. He probably just loves the way Sami constantly looks at him like a well-trained puppy.” 

Ayda didn’t say anything. She opened the fridge and took out something to eat. 

“Don’t be jealous,” Mary said, ‘he still looks at you like that.” 

“I’m not jealous; I’m just hungry,” she said, smearing peanut butter over some stale crackers. ‘How are you not?” 

“I had dinner with Jessica before.”  

“You have another friend?” Ayda said, her mouth full of starch and sugar, “how could you?” 

“I told you we were going to Todd’s last week,” Mary said, laughing. 

“So, you liked Peter then?”  

“He was nice,” she said, ‘but I’m always wary of a confident white man.” 

“Losing a tennis game is probably the hardest thing he’s ever had to experience.” 

“I know you liked him.” 

“What makes you say that?” 

“Your laugh was all squeaky and pitchy.” 

“I was just drunk. And you know I involuntarily do that whenever I’m around men taller than my father.” 

“If anything,” she said, “I think Sami’s better looking.” 

“Seriously?”  

“Oh, come on, the bluest eye? Be less original.”  

“Congratulations on being more perceptive than I am then.” 

“Well, we’ve always known that. I’m tired,” she said, getting up, “do you remember if I locked the door?” 

“Yeah, you did. And his eyes—” 

Mary stopped outside her room but didn’t turn around. 

“They were green.”

 

Chapter 2 

 

Sami invited them to a tennis team party a few weeks later. It was in the city, in Pacific Heights. The Golden Gate shimmered beyond the window as people stumbled down the stairs. Sami was somewhere upstairs when Mary and Ayda, newly made up with silky hair running down their backs, arrived. Peter was sitting on the stairs of the entryway to the house. A group of girls surrounded him. They had pale skin, pink cheeks, clear eyes, dark jeans, and differently neutral-colored cotton tank tops underneath their denim jackets. 

“Now the party can really start,” he said as they walked up, “Thelma and Louise are here.” 

“I don’t know if I want to know which one of us is Thelma,” Ayda said. 

“I’m obviously Louise,” Mary said, “you would never be able to shoot someone.” 

“At least I get hot sex with Brad Pitt.”  

“Speaking of,” Peter said, “we need to have a quick consent talk before everyone goes in.” 

“You can take the boy out of the fraternity, but you can’t take the fraternity out of the boy,” someone in back yelled.  

“Did you know he was in a frat?” Ayda asked Mary.  

“The fact that we know him is becoming more and more embarrassing by the day.”  

“We take consent really seriously here,” Peter said, “and, yes, thank you for pointing out, Michelle, that we are not a fraternity and under no obligation to do this. We just want to ensure everyone feels safe at our parties.”  

He reached into the pocket of his puffer.  

“We also don’t want to passively lecture at you guys, so whoever names a pillar wins a prize,” he said, pulling out five warm cans of beer.  

The girls went crazy. It’s as if they were thirteen years old again and Peter had just announced Justin Bieber was hiding somewhere backstage.   

“Sober!” 

“It’s not; it’s conscious!” 

“No, it’s enthusiastic!” 

“It’s both of them, you idiots, it’s also revocable. Give me my beer!” 

Ayda turned to Mary who had been looking around, a bit bewildered, giggling to herself.  

“For a second, I thought he was referring to the five pillars of Islam, and I was like, how would anyone here know them—I don’t even know them,” Ayda said.  

Mary laughed harder. 

“Ayda, we’re not in Kansas anymore.” 

The last of her words got lost in the crowd; everyone seemed to be going crazy over the possibility they might win one of the last two coveted cans of beer.  

“Right, everyone be quiet,” Peter said, standing up. “Please,” he softly added, surprised he was able to inflict such silence.  

He pulled out his phone, flicked a finger over it, and turned on its flashlight. Its glare traveled over the crowd, resting on bare protruding shoulders like a slowly moving snake.  

“Amy,” Peter, said, stopping the light on a small blonde girl.  

“Ongoing.” 

He tossed her a can. She smiled and caught it effortlessly.  

The light moved back through the crowd.  

“Last but not least,” he said, “Thelma.” 

The light moved up and down her chest, erasing any possibility she might be able to disappear back into the crowd. 

Ayda’s sex education, up to this point, had consisted of overly gory birth videos and PowerPoint presentations on the dangers of contracting an STD. She’d spent the University’s mandatory online consent training online shopping, only engaging when she was required to click and move onto the next module, never thinking anything on it might ever be necessary to enter a party. 

She and Mary had spent their first two years largely avoiding the collegiate party scene. Masquerading as adults, they ran around town, flashing their fake I.D.s to recite Frank O’Hara poems and obscure Shakespeare lines to each other in empty Irish pubs. 

Mary stood next to her; eyebrows melted together. Mary, who participated in safe sex workshop trainings and wrote lengthy essays about how to reframe teaching consent, was probably teeming over this whole performance. Ayda got scared that if she kept stalling, Mary might try and lecture at everyone. 

“I don’t know,” she said. 

Why had Peter called on her? Since they’d first met, they’d run into each other one more time at a mutual friend’s apartment party. She thought he’d bought the uninterested disposition she’d shown him, a mask for the weak wobbliness she’d really felt. Or had he liked her more than he let on? Did he somehow think she might know the answer and actually want to win a stupid can of sweaty beer? 

She looked up at him, and he held her gaze. His eyes, which had looked as if they were holding a laugh under them, morphed into something that looked slightly embarrassed, even apologetic. 

“It’s verbal,” he said, handing Ayda her prize, “sorry, last one’s always the hardest.” Her hand was so shaky she nearly dropped the can, but Peter’s grip was steady. He held it until her palm wrapped around it. 

The crowd bounded inside. The house had an old Victorian archway and a detailed door, painted blue. Mary went to the kitchen to find them a drink. Everyone else was gone, in search of the house’s promised fun, leaving Peter and Ayda alone at the entryway. 

“You do know what verbal means, right?” He asked her in a low voice.  

“Yes means yes,” she said dryly.  

“Since consent can often be expressed without words, non-verbal is usually included too.” 

Ayda couldn’t quite place the Peter in front of her with the one she’d been crafting an impression of over the past few days. Stubble grazed his jaw. She had thought that when they’d next meet again, he’d be clean shaven. Some part of her still believed that this was all an elaborate joke, him, here, alone, talking to her; that Peter was about to laugh and reveal he’d just been putting on a performance. 

 

She gave him a thumbs up.  

“Right, exactly,” he said, smiling.  

“Ok. Thanks for the lesson.” 

She slipped into the nearest empty bathroom. Her face was red and looked unreadable, like the blank screen of a website before it fully loaded. When she opened the door, Sami stood outside. 

“I saw you go in,” he said, “isn’t this so funny, all of us trashing some rich family’s home?” 

“My house is nicer than this.” 

“Yeah, but you weren’t dumb enough to go and let other people ruin it.” 

She opened her can of beer and was surprised at how flavorless it tasted, like dirty water. 

“Do you want this?” 

“Yeah; let’s find you something else.” 

They walked out together, and he bent down to rub his head against her shoulder. She petted him as if he was a small puppy. 

“Look at you, all grown up,” she said.  

Peter and Mary were in the kitchen, talking behind the makeshift bar. 

“All I’m saying,” she said, “is that I hope you give the same talk to your players before each party. And that they don’t see it as some fucking game to play with girls like you did but actually take it seriously.” 

“They know, we take turns doing it,” Peter said, “and it’s just normally a standard speech. Oh hey,” he said, seeing Sami and Ayda. “Sorry if I offended you too,” he said to Ayda.  

They all turned to look at her.  

“I personally feel ready to not rape someone tonight,” she said, “so mission accomplished.” 

The three of them laughed, and Ayda felt easy and blithe. It was intoxicating, bringing them back together like this; they made her feel powerful in a way she’d never come close to feeling on her own. This person they saw her as, funny and captivating, felt more and more like the real her the more time they spent together. 

 

/ 

 

Ayda Amara and Sami Noor had known each other since they were six. Sami was one of two new students to join the elite primary school Ayda had been attending since she was four. He was one year below her and the only other kid with chestnut skin. The other kids, sheltered, insulated, and wary of newcomers, called him Aladdin at every possible chance. Neither acknowledged the other. Childhood passed with an unvarnished innocence where likability was mostly correlated with one’s ability to have fun. 

Puberty came as a curse to Ayda, new unwanted hair, new unwanted hips, and new unwanted breasts. Her body, which had once been a tool she used to climb trees or race around the park, now felt like an inescapable prison.  

Sami, on the other hand, when his time came, became a star. Everyone marveled at his new deep voice, his new towering height, his new filled-in body. The fact that he just happened to be a bit brown was a circumstance forgiven by his newly acquired beauty. 

Ayda watched him with a blithering jealousy, but underneath it all was this sense that he’d somehow always belong to her. Their school swelled with new students, yet Ayda and Sami were still the only brown ones. Over the years, she’d been watching him, and as she imagined, him her, each curiously drawn to their unchosen twin flame. 

During Ayda’s junior year, her parents reconnected with Sami’s at an event supporting Syrian Refugees. Her mother, a high-level finance executive, and her father, the CEO of an unsustainable energy company, couldn’t be bothered by people they didn’t find as important as them. Sami’s parents, a pair of History Professors who helped resettle refugees in their spare time, had opened the event. Impressed by an intelligence that they’d forgotten still existed in the world, her parents invited Sami’s parents over for dinner the following week. As the adults talked about property taxes and the city’s increasing crime rates, Sami and Ayda snuck onto her parents’ back porch—a scene that would repeat itself over the next two years and serve as the set to their clandestine friendship, away from the prying eyes of school. 

Ayda spent most of her first semester on the phone with Sami by the dumpster outside her dorm. 

“You made any friends yet?” 

“No, contracted an STD yet?” 

“Not yet, but one can still dream. ” 

“I can’t believe I’ve been here for three months and you’re still my only friend. I thought I’d have moved up in the world by now.” 

“My parents ask why I spend so many hours on the phone with you. I don’t know what to tell them.” 

“I saw Janice Breslin post a photo with new college friends.” 

“Oh Janice, remember when she shat herself at lunch.” 

“Maybe that’s what I have to do to meet people around here.”  

“All Janice did was join a sorority.”  

“Those girls are all case studies in internalized sexism,” she said, “and vaguely racist too.” 

“I don’t know if anyone’s told you this before, but maybe it’s your attitude?”  

“Oh, fuck off.” 

His laugh fuzzed up her speaker. It was such an achingly familiar sound. She wanted to reach out and hold it. 

“Just think, in a year you’ll be busy with all your new college friends, remembering the days when you used to talk to that depressive girl from high school.” 

“You know what—I’ve already forgotten how to long divide. I’m too afraid to even ask what a 401k is, and I doubt I’ll ever know how to file taxes, but somehow, I’ve always known we’d be friends.” 

Sami ended up getting in everywhere he applied. Much to everyone’s surprise, he took a year off to backpack the Appalachian Trail. On the first of every month, he sent Ayda wrinkled postcards with esoteric notes about the divinity of nature. Then, with thousands of other teenagers who thought too they understood everything about the world and how to fix it, he headed off to college.