In August 2016, when she landed on the leafy, almost comically picture-perfect campus of Ithaca College in upstate New York, Makai probably seemed, to the other freshmen, like she was doing just fine. She fell in quickly with a core group of friends, and soon they were watching TV in the lounge, cruising to house parties, and venturing over the hill to frats at neighboring Cornell.
No one could see that Makai was completely spinning out.
She sometimes got so gripped by social anxiety that she could barely form sentences. Sitting with her new friends in class or eating in the dining hall, she could feel her heart racing so fast that it made her dizzy. Her new crew was so foreign, so East Coast, with their preppy clothes and still-married parents, whereas Makai, who was raised by her mom after her parents divorced, still wore the thrift-store sweaters that had fit in perfectly at her artsy California high school.
She'd never partied so much. She'd never felt so on display, like her sexual worth was being assessed by guys every time she walked into a room. She went along with it, but keeping up the cool-girl charade was exhausting.
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