Chicago

Chicago is where Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen first meet, during their opening night at University of Chicago orientation. The scene makes the city a threshold: Poppy has come hoping to leave southern Ohio and find a more exciting life, but her first connection there begins not with the artistic company she imagined, but with a quiet, equally solitary student whose awkwardness contrasts with her own loud, joking manner.

Arrival at University of Chicago

The meeting takes place on the first night of orientation, twelve summers before the later events recalled in the novel. Poppy is alone: her new roommate has followed her older sister and friends to college and quickly left the orientation activities. Alex is alone as well. He wears khaki pants and a University of Chicago T-shirt, although he has been at the school for only ten hours. The detail gives him an immediate air of attachment to the institution, while Poppy’s first impression is that he looks nothing like the artistic intelligentsia she had pictured befriending when she chose a school in the city.

Poppy approaches him and makes a joke about whether he attends the university. Alex stares at her blankly, and she stammers that she was joking. Their introduction is therefore not a polished exchange or instant rapport: it begins with a failed attempt at humor and the effort to recover from it. Chicago’s importance in the episode is tied to this uncertain beginning, when both students are out of place enough to be standing alone, but neither yet knows how to bridge the silence.

Two students, different expectations

Over the next fifteen painful minutes, they trade details about their lives. Alex is at the university on academic scholarships; Poppy is there on loans. She is the youngest of three and the only girl in her family, while he is the oldest of four boys. These brief disclosures give their conversation a concrete shape, even as they struggle to find common ground. When Alex asks whether she has seen the gym, Poppy responds with genuine confusion about why she would want to; the two return to shifting awkwardly in silence.

Their different temperaments are already visible. Alex is tall and quiet, and eager to see the library. Poppy is short and loud, and hopes someone will come along and invite them to a real party. The contrast complicates her initial idea of the people she might meet at a school in the city: the first person she encounters is not the imagined artistic companion, but someone whose interests and manner initially seem far from hers. Yet he is also the one person nearby who, like her, has arrived without company.

The city as a beginning

Poppy says she came partly for the punch and partly to avoid living in southern Ohio. That remark makes Chicago meaningful as a place of departure as well as arrival: it represents the distance she wants from home and the possibility of becoming part of a different social world. The scene does not dwell on a cityscape; instead, the university’s orientation gathering and the pair’s hesitant conversation carry the setting’s significance. Chicago is where Poppy’s expectations meet the actual person in front of her.

The encounter establishes the beginnings of Poppy and Alex’s relationship through small mismatches rather than dramatic recognition. She tries a joke; he does not understand it. He asks about the gym; she cannot see the point. Their brief disclosures expose differences in family position and financial circumstances, while their shared solitude gives them a reason to keep talking. In this way, Chicago marks the start of their connection without making the meeting seem effortless: the city’s promise arrives in the form of an awkward conversation between two students who have not yet learned how well their contrasting habits can fit together.