Inci Atrek ’10

Duygu taught me big-city thinking. She had me change when I arrived in sweats to pick her up for dinner at an Italian restaurant. She kept her lips zipped when I struggled to navigate us out of the Downtown Crossing T station, terrified there was no exit to the Macy’s until I realized we were, understandably, underground. We spent the early mornings of our senior year walking around Lake Waban memorizing poetry, because the English professors and writers we knew could recite lines from memory. Her dream was to teach literature at university (she is) and mine was to be a novelist (I am). I now live in the big city where she grew up, am passably fashionable, and get lost a whole lot less. Everyone we meet plants a seed within us, but if we’re lucky, we cross paths with a friend who offers us a garden.