Laymon’s mother goes away to do another fellowship at Harvard while Laymon heads off to college. He’s deeply relieved: he wants his mother to do well and be happy, but he also never wants to live with her again.

College feels a lot like high school. Laymon and a small group of Black friends form a close-knit group to help each other endure the school’s overwhelming whiteness. Laymon remembers holding himself back, speaking up in class only when he could present himself as an exemplary Black student. There was no room for him to be curious and experimental, or to make mistakes—in short, no room for him to really be a scholar. When he and his friends wrote well, their professors accused them of plagiarism. He was also low on cash again and spent a lot of his limited money on massive binges: “Cakes felt safe, private, and celebratory. Cake never fought back” (123).

During the early part of his freshman year, Laymon gets involved with a sharp, funny woman named Nzola. She has another boyfriend, a clean-cut doctor-in-training, and she goads Laymon about his past relationship with Abby, which is still the subject of gossip. She also cares for Laymon, finds him beautiful, and imagines the two of them as pragmatic, canny politicians: as she puts it, the Black Hillary and Bill Clinton.