Rory
I did not expect to make a friend at a charity brunch, mostly because I didn't know charity brunches were a genre of event that produced friends instead of just tiny sandwiches and passive aggression.
The event was another Sterling-adjacent obligation — some scholarship fund luncheon the team had been roped into for photo purposes, all of us stiff and uncomfortable in borrowed blazers, standing around a room full of finger food too small to actually constitute a meal. I'd been doing my usual survival strategy — smile, nod, agree that yes, the weather had indeed been unseasonable — when a girl with auburn hair and an easy, genuine laugh peeled off from a cluster of donors and beelined straight for me like she'd been sent.
"You're the transfer everyone won't stop talking about," she
