About three weeks into the summer school program, around the time Lady Zhao and the professor were meeting for coffee most mornings, Lady Zhao had somehow cultivated in her own mind the impression that Lala was jealous of their closeness. This impression had arisen from a few tenuous engagements and run-ins. She believed that Lala believed that Lady Zhao didn't actually have an interest in esoteric philosophies at all, but had faked it in order to get to know one of their course lecturers and eventual dissertation markers on a personal basis. Lady Zhao took the initiative and confronted Lala, who, caught off guard, responded with some mockery â she initially thought Lady Zhao had been making a joke â in addition to honest answers â she really didn't have a clue what Lady Zhao was talking about, and certainly had not noticed the two associating so much.
"But I saw you see me and the professor in the coffee shop," Lady Zhao insisted. "We made eye contact! Don't lie to me."
After a day of reflection, Lady Zhao came to the realization that maybe her worries really had formed entirely within her subconscious; and at this point, she could have taken a step back, could have dropped the controversy, could have never spoken of it again. But somehow, Lady Zhao felt aggrieved. Lala's early attempts at humor to play down Lady Zhao's out-of-the-blue accusations were interpreted in Lady Zhao's mind to be snide barbs. Indeed, she sought to extract a confession of maliciousness as well as an apology out of her newfound foe. Poor Lala â she didn't know where on earth this hostility was coming from, or why. Getting harangued one morning in one of King Endowment's stark quadrangles by a highly caffeinated Lady Zhao, fresh from another sit down with Professor Beaver, she was about to say sorry just to end the odd affair, but before she could come up with the words, Lady Zhao was storming off, promising passionately to reveal to others on their course what a manipulative dirt-bag Lala was.
Lady Zhao's strategic problem was simply that Lala was a very pleasant person. In her efforts to bring others around to her perspective by, for example, arguing that Lala was being fundamentally anti-feminist in her behavior and was in fact a secret agent of the patriarchy (something Lady Zhao later found herself accused of), she only drove people away. She had enemized them. By the middle of their summer program, Lady Zhao was an outcast, a social leper, running between workshops and seminars avoiding interactions, and if forced to chat, ending up exchanging increasingly unsophisticated insults.
For the last step on Lady Zhao's staircase-graph from generally liked individual to persona non grata, she managed to ensnare aloof Ander, dragging him from his newfound heights of popularity down to half of an axis-of-evil.