Deep Cuts: A Novel

“I don’t know,” I said. It may have been the first time I’d said those words at Berkeley. I liked how it felt.

I made my way through Megan’s collection of magazines and Sex and the City DVDs, consuming them simultaneously with the tiny portion of my brain required for each.

game. And I’d never zeroed in on any one style, as Zoe had done so well in the years since this photograph, which made me feel recessive in the context of my peers, a vague smear of a girl.

Freshman year I’d been lazy about socializing—I’d said no when the heads popped in my door, spent Saturday nights tending to a poorly timed Elvis Costello obsession that dominated my imagination and endeared me to zero percent of my dormmates—but didn’t love the crushing loneliness that eventually resulted from this approach. Since then I’d been cl