THIRD PRIZE, NONFICTION
Tor Olsson’s Reputation Precedes Him AUDREY KOLKER
T
he Legend of Barefoot Kid crosses state lines two weeks into the school year, when my friend Lila calls to tell me about the insane time she’s having at college in Minnesota. She spends the better part of an hour discussing people I’ve never met and parties I didn’t attend while I hide in my dorm room from the nine strangers I apparently live with now, until she stops, mid-anecdote: “Wait,” she says, “have I told you about Tor yet?” *** Tor Olsson is a first year at Macalester College who doesn’t wear shoes — hence, “Barefoot Kid.” Two months into the semester, he is already a campus idol. Most of the freshmen — Tor’s classmates, hookups, enemies and friends, tablemates at his future alumni events — are somewhat devoted to him. He features in their TikToks and stars in their drunk group chat messages. They ask him to sign pieces of paper with his feet; They steal a pair of rainbow Puma slides from his dorm; They start and spread rumors that he got kicked out of the Whole Foods on Selby Avenue — no shoes, no service. Spotting Tor, even if he’s just sitting in Café Mac eating ketchup straight out of the packet, is a celebrity encounter. just ran into him in the science building, Lila texts me, barefoot king. He is a central part of life at Macalester, as fixed and as focal as
the Twin Cities: Minneapolis on the left, St. Paul on the right and Tor in the middle, talking to everyone, his feet callused and filthy and bare. *** I’ve spent a grand total of 41 minutes on a FaceTime call staring at Tor, and I can report with confidence that for an enigma, he looks normal. If you took a child actor, some best friend on the Disney Channel, and stretched him out into a college freshman — over six feet tall, rail-thin, and sporting a haircut the internet lovingly deems “the white boy swoosh”— you would end up with a guy who looked like Tor. (I write “wholesome (?)” in my notes.) Tor is half an hour late to our interview. He’s late to most everything, I learn. There is a lot that’s more important to Tor than being on time: his religious studies class, the cross country and track teams, a global perspective on climate change, the six-foot long tapestry of a (fake) DaBaby tweet (“my dentist say im grindin even in my sleep”) hanging in his dorm room and the fact that I know that he knows that DaBaby was cancelled. We talk about bagpipes and astronauts and his recent meditations on spirituality, until finally I ask Tor how he thinks his classmates perceive him. He says, “So you’ve heard that around campus I’m sort of known as like the guy
Yale Daily News | 13
