North of the bookstore, a Santa Fe–looking stuccoed place to buy Birkenstocks and ponchos. A hangout for preppy bohemian girls, such as I was trying hard not to be. I wanted to be something more difficult, something other than what I was. I held a very deep misunderstanding about the world. I had this idea that if I wanted to be among people who were different from me, I should disguise my true self and become more like them. I perceived other people to be more authentic than me, and so in order to be more authentic, I became less what I was in the first place. I counterfeited in order to feel real or, more accurately, in order to hang around what seemed realer than the thing I started out as. You could call it class drag. But that was what the Ave was for, for some of us.