Semiformal

Rachel’s parents had failed to make reservations in time for Parents’ Weekend so they are visiting now, almost a month later, pulling up to the hotel three hours after they’d planned to arrive. Three hours isn’t bad. It is, for them, practically prompt. They still have a full hour before they have to be at Friday night dinner at Hillel House, in whose two-story brick building students gather every week to share prayer services first, then a traditional dinner. For the services, at least, they would be on time. They could keep their daughter waiting for hours, she thinks, but they’d never stand up God.

Rachel leans against the hotel, a cinderblock monstrosity of a Sheraton three blocks from campus. She wonders why the grayest cities build the grayest buildings. In the winter rains, the boxy structures of concrete and stone camouflage into the steel Philadelphia sky.

Seeing her parents’ car approach, Rachel points vigorously at the sign for the hotel’s underground parking lot. Her father looks confused. He glances around as the cars behind him, having just sailed through a green light, find they can’t go any further and begin honking vehemently. They lean on their horns, a chorus of angry honking, the high sopranos of the compacts, the low basso profundo of the Cadillacs, the pitch-perfect altos of the SUVs.

Rachel continues jabbing her finger while her mother and father look around, until her father, eyes moving slowly, allows his gaze to follow his daughter’s frantic, flailing hand. Their car turns down the ramp, then disappears around a curve into the garage. She heads...