The summer after my junior year of high school, my friend Thomasin and I spent a couple of months attending art school in Paris (which sounds ridiculously fancy for a couple of teenagers, and kind of was). We lived in dorms that were filled with college students during the regular school year, and while we were technically supervised, we really…weren't. Which meant we did our best to get into as much trouble as possible, and when that turned out to be not very much trouble at all (because we were both a little more "nervous good girls" than "madcap European bon vivants"), we hung around the dorm with our friends, essentially playing grown-up.

Our favorite weekend activity: trucking down to the grocery store on the corner for cooking supplies, and then using the tiny kitchen in our dorm to make what felt, to us, like sophisticated meals...but were actually just the most rudimentary pasta dishes ever. We ate them with chopsticks, sitting in a circle on the floor around the one big cooking pot we shared, because we hadn't thought to bring things like bowls and forks. We would have told you that we didn't just go out and buy bowls and forks because we "couldn't afford them" or because we were "too lazy to go to the store"…but neither of those reasons would have been the truth.

The truth was that we didn't buy them because we didn't want them, because the very best part of those meals was that we ate them crowded around a single pot with friends we thought we'd have forever, laughing until we couldn't breathe.