University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is the setting where Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen meet during orientation and, over the following year, build the friendship that becomes central to their lives. The novel gives little institutional description for its own sake. Instead, the university is shown through the two students’ contrasting expectations, finances, coursework, and emerging habits of companionship; its campus and the surrounding city become the first places where their differences start to fit together.

Setting and First Encounter

On the first night of orientation, Poppy notices Alex among students who are both new to the university and alone. Her own roommate has abandoned the orientation events to follow her older sister and friends to college, leaving Poppy without an easy companion. Alex, meanwhile, wears khaki pants and a university T-shirt despite having arrived only hours earlier. Poppy approaches him with a joke about whether he attends the University of Chicago. He takes it literally, and both become embarrassed when she has to explain herself and he recounts changing his shirt after spilling on it.

Their clothes immediately give the encounter its comic friction. Poppy wears a neon orange-and-pink floral jumpsuit from the early seventies; when Alex looks her over, she reads his reaction as though her outfit openly rejected his khakis. They have no real shared context beyond the confusing campus tours, dull panels about city life, and their mutual dislike of each other’s clothes. The mismatch does not make the meeting intimate at once: their first conversation is awkward, and they struggle to find things to say. But it gives their later ease a clear starting point in mutual difference rather than instant recognition.

Student Lives and Unequal Resources

The conversation at orientation sketches two distinct backgrounds. Alex is at the university on academic scholarships, while Poppy is there on loans. She says she is the youngest of three and the only girl; he is the oldest of four boys. These details locate their meeting within different family and financial circumstances without turning either into a simple representative of a category. At this first encounter, they are still tentative strangers: Alex is tall, quiet, and eager to see the library, while Poppy is short, loud, and hoping someone will invite them to a proper party.

Neither arrives with a settled academic plan. Alex is considering prelaw or literature, and Poppy has not decided what to study; she jokes that she mainly came for the punch and to escape southern Ohio. The contrast between his attention to the library and her impatience for a party makes their temperaments legible before they become close. The university gives them a common setting, but not a common orientation toward it: Alex approaches its academic spaces with curiosity, while Poppy is drawn more strongly to the life beyond the classroom.

Coursework and the Growth of Friendship

A year after meeting, their connection has grown beyond the first-night awkwardness. After a road trip home, they begin exchanging occasional texts: Alex sends blurry pictures of the Linfield movie theater as he drives past, while Poppy sends him a photograph of a ten-pack of shirts she found at the supermarket as a birthday present. Over about three weeks, the messages become phone calls and in-person plans. Poppy persuades Alex to go to a movie at the Cineplex, where he spends the screening hovering over his seat to avoid touching anything. The episode conveys both his particular fastidiousness and Poppy’s increasing willingness to draw him into shared activities.

By the end of that summer, they have signed up for two core-requirement classes together, one in math and one in science. Their work is not effortless: Alex hates math, as Poppy does, and they spend many nights trying to manage the homework. They study in one another’s dorm rooms, where Poppy’s new roommate, Isabel, sometimes looks over their shoulders and corrects their work while eating celery, which she calls her favorite food. The detail places their growing friendship inside ordinary student routines: shared assignments, dorm visits, and the small presence of a roommate who joins their academic life without displacing the closeness between the two friends.

Their academic preferences also diverge. Alex loves his English classes and devotes hours each night to the assigned reading. Poppy finds her courses uniformly boring and lies beside him on the floor, browsing travel blogs and celebrity-gossip magazines while he studies. The contrast is not simply that one works and the other does not; the scene shows how companionship lets them occupy the same room in different ways. His concentration and her restless curiosity become compatible habits, and the university’s coursework supplies a recurring backdrop against which their friendship develops.

Campus, City, and Narrative Significance

The relationship takes shape across both campus and Chicago. After dinner, Poppy and Alex walk through the university grounds with cups of hot chocolate. On weekends, they range through the city in search of the best hot-dog stand, coffee, or falafel. Poppy remembers being happier than she had been in a long time: she loves the city’s art, food, noise, and new people enough to make the school portion of the experience bearable. The university is therefore neither an isolated academic setting nor merely a credentialing institution in her account. Its importance is inseparable from the urban life around it and from the person with whom she explores that life.

In a later conversation, Poppy recalls Clarissa, her roommate at the University of Chicago, and Isabel, her sophomore-year roommate, as well as Jaclyn, a friend from the communications department. She tells Alex that all three had crushes on him. The recollection makes the university a continuing point of reference in their shared history: its dormitories and department connect Alex not only to Poppy’s own early memories but also to other people in her student circle. By the time Poppy has dropped out, their friendship has already become a source of happiness that exceeds her satisfaction with her courses. Alex later graduates from college and prepares to pursue an MFA in creative writing at Indiana University, while Poppy looks back on their student years as the beginning of a bond first formed in an unfamiliar campus setting and sustained through study, city walks, and the life they made alongside their education.