I watch the door. I don’t even reach for the dictionary tucked into my parka pocket. Sempiternal and verisimilitude will have to wait. Bouncing my knee nervously, I try vainly to remember it’s unlikely Juniper and I have booked the same session.

People file in the double doors behind me. I watch kids in Brown sweatshirts and bright-eyed parents enter the room, quickly picking out seats and, probably, checking out the competition. I couldn’t care less who the competition is.

The doors close. Despite telling myself I likely wouldn’t see Juniper, I can’t help it. I’m disappointed. I guess I was stupid to guess she’d be in today’s ten a.m. session just because we’d both been in the ten a.m. BU presentation. It’s typical me, hoping nothing ever changes.

The presentation begins. I pull out the dictionary.

While the presenter regales us with the usual routine of facts and figures, photographs and platitudes, I focus on the words. Quixotic. Definition: impractically idealistic, foolishly unrealistic, e.g., a quixotic undertaking.

I thumb the pages until finally the presentation ends. We’re divided into tour groups, and I halfheartedly follow my guide, who looks impossibly thrilled to be escorting twenty parents and kids like me through his campus in the snow. While David, the sophomore who’s concentrating in public health, escorts us into the Ruth J. Simmons Quadrangle, I check out. I catch myself repeatedly watching crowds of visitors and groups of students, looking for familiar brown eyes and wavy hair.

Knock it off, I order myself.

We finish our route, ending up in front of the campus center. David the Sophomore Concentrating in Public Health enthusiastically wishes us good luck with our applications. I decide to keep wandering the campus. The freezing weather reddening my nose and watering my eyes, I stuff my hands into my pockets and walk into the College Green.

This campus is different from BU, contained and classically old. The uniform brick of the buildings, the white columns framing wooden doors, wrought-iron fences around quiet quads. Wandering to the corner, I reach the Italianate tower that caught my curiosity on the tour. The tower’s bricks climb higher than every other building nearby. Four clocks the color of old copper face the campus in every direction. THE CARRIE TOWER reads the inscription carved over the door. I circle the structure and find more details carved into the back.

It’s a memorial. It commemorates Carrie Mathilde Brown, from her husband.

It feels futile. Sure, everyone who walks this campus will see her monument, and everyone who reads the inscription will know the name Carrie Mathilde Brown. What the tower can’t tell them is the color of her hair, the sound of her laugh, what kind of friend she was, what she enjoyed. If we could reduce everybody’s essence into enduring physical objects, we would. But we’re only pretending the memorials we erect could possibly embody those we’ve lost. Memory and memorial may share a linguistic root, but they’re estranged brothers, not twins.

I think of pulling well-worn novels from bookshelves. I think of folding Thanksgiving tablecloths and eating plates of eggplant parmesan. I think of stacking pages of student dissertations on Hawthorne and Melville and Twain.

Even if you wrote every memory imaginable on to a memorial a million feet high, you would fail to capture infinite others.

I walk from the Carrie Tower onto Prospect Street and gradually explore the rest of the campus. The brick buildings blend together, especially under the ubiquitous blanket of frost. They’re undeniably impressive, colonial and imposing in a way I know characterizes the college dreams of countless of my classmates. I barely taste the sandwich I get for lunch in the student center, my eyes drifting to every unfamiliar face that enters.

Heading onto one of the campus’s identically tree-lined roads, I wrestle down a growing dejection. I’ve circumnavigated dorms and paused in front of libraries, passed gleaming genetics buildings and entered empty foyers. No sign of Juniper. I’m left to confront why I’m, okay, obsessed with this girl. I could distract myself from this college tour if I were wondering when or whether I’d run into her. With the chance we’ll reconnect pretty much gone, it’s only me and the emptiness of this idea of my mom’s. I don’t want to concentrate in public health. I don’t want to read in the Ruth J. Simmons Quadrangle. I don’t want to remember Carrie Brown or her husband.

I head downhill for the bed-and-breakfast.

When I reach the room, I find Lewis napping. With the feeling only starting to return to my fingers, I decide I need a shower to warm up. Standing under the scalding water, I systematically remind myself of every reason it’s good I didn’t find Juniper. Now is definitely not the time to be interested in a girl who could live in Georgia or Ohio or wherever and who has elaborate plans involving possible PhDs in California or London. Oh, and who has a boyfriend.

I step out of the shower and pull on clothes. When I open the door, Lewis is putting on his shoes.

“You have dinner plans?” I ask. It’s nearly seven, and it occurs to me I’m going to have to find dinner for myself. I remember walking past a pretty promising burger place near campus.

“We have dinner plans.” Lewis jumps up. Glancing into the mirror over the desk, he runs his fingers through his hair. “I have a friend here who mentioned a party at one of the coed frats. We’ll find a restaurant in town, then head to campus.”

“Yeah, no,” I reply. I don’t even enjoy high school parties. The idea of going to a college one with Lewis doesn’t improve the prospect.

My brother ignores me. “It’s time to quit moping,” he continues. “You have to get out and experience a real taste of college.”

“I’m not moping,” I say, frustration flaring in me. It’s only partly true, but I’m not taking orders from Lewis.

Lewis’s expression changes, solemn and searching. “Look, I know you’re having a hard time with the Mom thing—”

“The Mom thing?” I interrupt.

“It’s shitty,” Lewis continues, undeterred. “But you have to start living your life. Mom and I are both worried about you.”

The casual way he invokes Mom pisses me off. He doesn’t know the first thing about what worries her. Knowing would involve visiting or phone calls or even a damn email every now and again. There’s no way he’s worried about me, either. If he were, he could’ve visited or called or written me.

But those thoughts are weapons for a battle I’ll never fight. “Living my own life wouldn’t include going to parties,” I say instead.

“How do you know until you try?” Lewis counters. “You might meet a girl there who’ll make you forget whoever you were hoping to see in Providence.”

I don’t bother wondering how he knows I didn’t run into Juniper. He’s probably guessing. “Forget it,” I say. “I’m not going. You don’t need me there to get wasted.”