Heartbreak In Hollander 241: Years-Long Friendship Irreparably Scarred By Decision To Take An English Seminar Together

In recent, devastating news, area friends Sarah Reeder ’26 and Corsa Pacquette ’26 face a hurdle, nay, a calamity, in an unexpected form: their ill-advised decision to register for the same English seminar.

Reeder and Pacquette’s years-long, steadfast friendship was born in their freshman year WOOLF group (“LFG B17,” commented Reeder) and withstood the trials of multiple academic years, junior spring abroad, and even an entire semester of one of those schedules where your mealtimes just don’t match up and your friend might as well be dead for all you see them.

Reporters at the Haybale sat down with the pals to hear their story, commiserate with their loss, and help them forge a path forward, IWS-Couples’-Counseling-with-Amrita-Lash-style.

“We thought it would be fun,” commented Reeder, with a shake of the head and a tear just forming in the corner of her eye. “We’d never actually taken a class together, you know, except for CHEM 101 our freshman year, which doesn’t even count.”

“It doesn’t even count,” Pacquette concurred. Pacquette went on to describe how she and Reeder, when they took that first sneaky little peak at their courses’ People pages on Glow, found themselves – by sheer coincidence – registered for the same 20-person English seminar, ENGL 307: Suffering.

Reporters at the Haybale uncovered the following text conversation from that very day:

Reeder: “Omg omg ur taking ENGL 307 too??”

Pacquette: “wait yeah i am are you?”

Reeder: “Yesssss”

Pacquette: “this is gonna be so fun”

“There was a side to her,” commented both Reeder and Pacquette in one-on-one conversations with reporters from the Haybale.

“The second the first class started, I saw it. The beginning of the end.”

Pacquette described how in the first twenty minutes of class, Reeder raised her hand to speak not once, not twice, but three separate times – each time with that kind of flourish of the hand, that little lean back in the chair, that makes everyone else in the class just so certain that every word you are about to speak will be completely unintelligible without a graduate degree.

“Every time she made a comment, she managed to use the word ‘ontological,’” Pacquette stated. “Every time.”

The realization shook Pacquette to the core: her friend, her ride or die, was that fucking English major in the seminar room.

“Self-dissolution in the face of the Other?” said Pacquette, ruefully. “What the fuck does that even mean?”

But it wasn’t just Reeder’s pretensions, her artfully annotated PDFs printed from GLOW, that wounded Reeder and Pacquette’s friendship beyond repair.

Reeder shared with the Haybale how she discovered before class discussion even began, upon asking Pacquette what she’d thought of the second reading, that Pacquette wasn’t just that person who doesn’t do the readings: she was that person who thought that made her remotely interesting.

“It wasn’t that she didn’t do them,” insisted Reeder. “It was how she said it. That look. That little self-congratulation. Like, ‘Oh, you actually did the readings? I didn’t. You probably want to hear all about my PSET, and how hard it was, and how that’s why I didn’t even open the PDF. You probably want to hear all about how busy my schedule is, and how readings are actually pretty pointless if you really think about it, because you can literally just skim like right before class, or not, and it doesn’t even matter, really.’”

By the end of the first week of class, a friendship was dead, an unspoken class seating arrangement in shambles, and a lesson learned.

When asked to share some advice with other pairs of friends considering taking a seminar together, Pacquette and Reeder agreed entirely: “Don’t. Fucking. Think about it.”

“There is such a thing as knowing too much about each other,” said Reeder.

“Next time,” concluded Pacquette, “just stick to CHEM 101.”