Chapter Text
To: je11y6ean_h
From: byronp86
Subject: School
Hay-Hay-Bo-Bay,
So, tomorrow starts your senior year. Seems really weird not to walk to SHS with you for the first day, same as we have the past three years. In your honor, today I am wearing the Grease t-shirt you gave me. Jossie already asked me if I was in the play myself and if I could sing. I told you I was going to change a little bit: I actually wasn’t embarrassed to demonstrate for her that I really can’t sing. Okay, let’s be honest: I was still embarrassed, but I did it anyway. Laugh at me all you want for that.
Gotta run. I joined the Circle K service organization and I’m working the ticket booth at a fund raiser tonight. You’d approve: It’s for the local teen crisis center. Among other things, they work with rape victims.
Love, By-By-Bo-By (that doesn’t work quite as well)
I wrote Hay a light-hearted email that afternoon, but in reality, I was not in a happy mood as I rushed off to work the ticket booth. It had nothing to do with the fundraiser, which was for a worthy cause, or the Circle K, which was fun and kept me busy. I was glad to keep busy.
We were two weeks into the school year, and I already hated everything. I hated my classes. I hated my major.
I’d applied to Duke almost a year before. I hadn’t realized how much I’d changed in a year until I tried to get into my old, seventeen-year-old-senior-in-high-school self’s head. Back then, everything had been either right or wrong. There was only one correct way of looking at things…and I was convinced that I wasn’t seeing things that one correct way. Now I knew that there are many different ways of viewing things, and most of them aren’t wrong…just different. Jeff taught me that. Suddenly, the idea of working in a closed lab under a strict set of rules didn’t appeal like it had back when I was trying so hard to be the perfect son, student and friend instead of just being Byron Pike.
The only thing I didn’t hate was my social life. I’d muddled through high school on the edge of everything, clinging to my one (really good) friend, but not really experiencing a social circle outside of that. I’d gotten so lucky the first day I’d moved into the dorm—the girl across the hall, Alizah, had brought cookies. Her mom was one of those women who spends her extra time baking. She had sent Alizah off to the dorm with containers upon containers full of baked goods. I guess she figured it was the easiest way to make sure Alizah made friends.
Anyway, Dad had just left and my instinct was to feel lonely and panic. Before I could cry or do something equally embarrassing, Alizah stepped into the hall between our doors and shouted. “Hey all y’all,” she called. “I’m opening another container. This one has…oatmeal raisin cookies! Come help yourself!”
A couple kids swarmed as soon as she started talking. Apparently, she’d been doing this on and off all day. I waited until the other kids were gone and then cautiously stepped over to the door. She held out the container and I took one. I looked at it instead of her. “Hi, I’m Byron,” I said quietly. “I live across the hall.”
“Nice to meet you, Byron,” she said with what I would soon learn was a thick Carolina accent. “I’m Alizah—with two As and an H.” She pointed to the name tag on her door. She watched me as I inspected the cookie. “It’s okay,” she said jokingly. “Y’all can eat it. The other kids have been eating my mama’s cooking all day long, and none of them have died yet.”
I had to smile at that, still looking at the baked good. I took a big bite of the cookie and smiled tentatively directly at her; it really was good. “Your mom’s a good baker,” I commented.
“Believe me, I know.” Alizah eyed me critically. “Where y’all from?”
“Connecticut.”
She grinned. “Wow. You’re a long way from home. Me and Jossie—that’s my bunkie and best friend—we come from right down the street, really. Y’all need anything, let us know.” I smiled back at her as I went back to my room. “Welcome to Dixie, now, Byron.”
Even though Alizah and Hay had nothing in common, I felt the same kind of connection I had with Haley when we’d first started hanging out together. Alizah was tall and lanky with thick auburn hair and bangs that hung down the sides of her face. I would soon learn that she was incredibly laid back and easygoing. She was always a good one to take your problems to because she never overreacted or freaked out—that was Jossie’s job.
Jossie was everything Alizah wasn’t. She was a petite snub-nosed brunette, always in motion. Unlike most southerners, she talked ridiculously fast and I think her brain worked even faster. She did remind me of Hay in a couple of ways—for starters, she was loud and unbelievably chatty. She got worked up over every single little thing, and you could hear her in my dorm room from hers—with both of our doors closed. For some reason, Jossie was an especially big fan of mine. She followed me around everywhere and kept making me say things. She just loved my “New England accent.”
Jossie got off on wild ideas, but unlike Hay, who could talk about some crazy idea for hours but had the sense never to follow through on it, we had to restrain Jossie from actually doing some of the nutty things she thought up. She’d come stand in my doorway while Julio and I were studying and say something like, “Hey guys, let’s go to La Bamba’s at two thirty this morning. We can pretend we’re drunk and order one of those mega-burritos that no one ever really eats.”
Despite Jossie’s wealth of ideas, Alizah was really the leader of the two. She had a quieter way of suggesting stuff that made you listen. She’s the one who came up with the idea of joining the Circle K. The three of us had gone to the activities fair together, looking at all the different clubs and groups you could join. Alizah and I liked Circle K because it was volunteer work and made us look (and feel) like do-gooders. That’s not how she’d convinced Jossie to join, however. “It’ll be a great way to meet boys,” she’d said.
And it had worked. Sorta. Most of the members were actually girls, which didn’t bother me any. Alizah did fall madly in love with the only other freshman guy in the club, Paul. At least, I think that’s what happened. I’m not too aware of what girls flirting looks like, but I think that was what she was doing. She spent a lot of time giggling while talking to him and gently touching his arm.
(This is also what gave me the idea that maybe, just maybe, Jossie had a little crush on me. I hadn’t told the girls I was gay yet—I was waiting to find an opening to nonchalantly slip it into the conversation—so it was possible she liked me that way. But since she hadn’t come out and said she like liked me, or touched me beyond a Hay-style smack to the arm, I hadn’t had to address it. I was hoping that telling her about Jeff would be enough to convince her that I was not crush material.)
Paul, for his part, became the fourth member of our group of friends—not so much because of Alizah, although he did enjoy flirting back with her—but because of me. Apparently, he hadn’t met too many guys on campus yet, and I seemed to be exactly what he was looking for, for whatever reason. We both liked sports but not as much as your average guy seems to. We weren’t into the fraternity scene, and although we both did well at school, neither one of us was into really geeky stuff—the kinds of things Nick liked. We both had mostly hung out with girls through our teen years, although Paul was definitely straight. And had several tales about his escapades with girls that, had I had any doubt about my sexuality, would have definitely confirmed for me that I did not want a woman in any way.
Paul and I were supposed to be manning that ticket booth on Labor Day, but at the last minute, he got his position swapped out with a senior girl named Anna that I had never met. He ran the refreshment table instead. Anna and I sat down to take money and we were steadily busy for well over an hour before we had any down time. She smiled at me when the line died out. “You’re a freshman, right?” she asked.
“Yup.”
“How are things treating you so far?”
I didn’t really want to be honest about things and talk about my concerns with a stranger. But I didn’t see any point in lying. Maybe she was the perfect objective listener—someone who didn’t know me at all, but knew the school. “Well, I love the school and the people.” Anna turned her head to the side. She knew the opening of a gripe session when she heard one. “But I’m not so sure about anything else. I already hate my classes. I’m an engineering major, and I thought I would like it. But…”
“But,” she picked up my thread, “you don’t.” I shook my head. “Well,” she said slowly, thinking about that, “You have a couple of options. Sometimes, majors get better after you’ve finished all the stupid, boring intro classes. I’m a business major, and my freshman year, I was sooooo bored. But I love it now.” I nodded seriously. “But if the problem isn’t about the classes being boring because you already know what you’re learning, then maybe you need to switch majors.”
“I’ve thought about that,” I said. “I wanted to be in this particular major because you work in a lab and everything’s structured and organized. I used to love that. Now, I’m realizing that I can live outside the confines of a world where everything is completely black and white.” I sighed. “I just think I would get very bored with an engineering job really quickly.”
Anna smiled again. “Have you talked to career services? They helped my freshman year roomie pick out a major. They’re really good to talk to and very helpful. You should try heading in there one day when you’ve got a couple hours.” Some more people came up to buy tickets and we quickly served them. “Think it over, Byron. And the Circle K—it’s like a family. You can come talk to just about any of us any time.”
Paul had plans with his roommate after the fundraiser, so I walked home by myself. I wanted to talk to someone else about what Anna had said—someone who knew me better. My first instinct was to call Jeff or Hay. But it was Labor Day, and Jeff was at a barbecue with his family. Hay was at work. Even if they had been free, I didn’t really want to talk to either one of them about this, not because I don’t value their opinions, but because, in one form or another, they’d both pretty well predicted this. Jeff had said he’d always pictured me working with people. And when I’d first told Haley about my major, she’d laughed and said, “No, really. What are you really studying?” before basically saying the same thing Jeff had. I didn’t think Jeff would come out and say ‘I told you so,’ but it wasn’t something you could put past Hay.
I almost called Adam, but despite his insistence that I stay in close touch, he hadn’t replied to any of the emails I’d sent him, other than to drop a quick line to say he was pledging a fraternity. Jordan and I had talked on IM the day before and he’d mentioned he was spending the day at the beach. I didn’t want to talk to Mom and Dad until I’d made some decisions about things. So I figured it was just going to have to wait.
The whole dorm floor was virtually deserted. Pretty much anyone who lived nearby had gone home for the weekend; anyone else who could bummed a ride to the beach. As I approached my door, I could hear music playing softly. I thought Julio might be around—he’d pledged a fraternity and had plans at their house for the day, but I hadn’t known when to expect him home. But my door was shut and the music was coming from elsewhere. Alizah was alone in her room, lying on the couch she’d stolen from her older sister, watching a video on her laptop. I stood in her doorway. “You’re back early,” I commented.
“My fam was being psycho,” she said cryptically. “I had to get the hells out of there.”
“Well, I’m actually glad you’re here,” I said, brushing at a spot on my shorts. “I needed someone to talk to.”
Alizah paused the video and sat up, patting the seat next to her. “You found someone. C’mon in here and tell me what’s on your mind.”
“It’s about school. My classes and my major and stuff.” She watched me seriously, beckoning for me to go on. “I hate them.”
Alizah cracked a brief smile. “You Yankees sure don’t beat around the bush,” she said, but then she sobered back up. “I wondered about that a bit. When y’all first got here, you were, like, ‘Rawr! Engineers! We run the world!’ And I haven’t heard y’all talk about it since classes started. It’s as if something took the wind out of y’all’s sails.”
I looked at her blankly for a moment, barely holding back my sarcasm. “‘Rawr?’ Really?” She shrugged, hiding a slight grin, and I turned the sarcasm off. “I don’t know where to go from here. Anna from Circle K said that sometimes classes get better after the first year. But I somehow don’t think that’s going to happen for me.”
Alizah leaned back against the arm of the couch and put her toes on my bare leg, wiggling them around. I hadn’t realized how ticklish my lower thighs were until just that moment. I had to resist the urge to jerk back from her. “Well, Byron, if you’re not an engineer, then what are you?”
I thought about that for a moment. I knew myself so much better than I had a year before, but that meant that all the ideas I’d had about who I was going to be had changed too. “I really don’t know right at this moment. My best friend and my boyfriend both think that I should work with people. But that doesn’t really narrow things down, does it? Even some engineers work with people.”
Alizah’s expression didn’t change, but she did quit wiggling her toes. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, sometimes your friends know you better than you ever could know yourself. Jossie’s the one who suggested I should join the school paper in high school, and I loved it so much that I’m now a journalism major.” She pulled her feet off me entirely, tucking her knees up under her chin. “I think your friends are right. And I’m going to pile on top of that now. Y’all told me that you wanted to save the world when we joined Circle K. Remember, because Jossie told you that you were her superhero?” I rolled my eyes at the memory. Actually, Jossie had shouted, ‘Save me, Byron, you’re my only hope!’ in the middle of the quad in front of probably a couple thousand people. “There are jobs out there where you’re saving the world, a small chunk of it at a time. Peace Corp, environmental jobs, social services…there are a lot of ways you can be someone’s superhero.”
I’d mostly been joking when I said that bit about saving the world, but Alizah did touch a nerve—mostly in a good way. I’d picked biomedical engineering above all the other types because it was for a worthy cause—curing cancer, preventing genetic abnormalities, basically making people better in future generations. I liked feeling as if I were making a positive difference in the world, no matter how tiny. I definitely wanted to find a job that, on some level, made the world a better place. I nodded at her and she grinned happily. “Anna suggested that I see someone down in career services to help me find the right major for me,” I told her.
Alizah stretched back out across the couch, the way she’d been lying before I’d come in the room, narrowly missing my crotch with her heel as she did so. “Good to know the upperclassmen are good for something,” she said lazily. I picked her feet off of my lap one at a time, plopping them down on the couch next to me. She laughed. “Now that you’ve got your next move planned, let me ask you something.” I turned and gave her my best faux-serious, ‘I’m-listening’ face. “What’s this about you having a boyfriend?”
***
Luckily, Alizah was pretty cool with my subtly-dropped bombshell. I brought over the picture of Jeff and me to show her and told her a little bit of our backstory: how we’d been childhood friends who happened to meet again years later and be attracted to each other. Other than her saying, “I’ve never met a real, out-of-the-closet gay guy before,” which made me blush, I could have been showing her a picture of me with a girl. I decided that not making a big deal out of it was definitely the way to go. I wasn’t a celebrity—I didn’t need to make my sexuality headline news or anything.
I barely paid attention in my Tuesday morning class; I copied down the notes and followed the lecture, but I didn’t have the slightest clue what any of it meant when I left the lecture hall. There were four hours until my next class and I was all caught up on homework and reading, so instead of heading back to the dorms (and getting sucked into watching All My Children with Jossie, which seemed to happen more often than not) I wandered over to career services. I don’t know why, but I was nervous when I walked in. “Um, hi,” I said to the student worker behind the counter. “Do I need to have an appointment if I want to talk to someone?”
“Honey,” she replied, “If you had an appointment, I’d be shocked. What can we do for you today?”
“I’m not happy with my major, but I don’t know what I should be studying.”
I don’t even remember all the tests they gave me that day. Some of them were aptitude tests like the ones we’d taken back in high school; others were personality tests or skills tests to figure out who I was and what I already knew. When I left a couple hours later, I had the results to a personality test in my hands and nothing else. They were going to drop my results in my mailbox tomorrow sometime during the day. I was on edge all through my afternoon calculus class—I spent more time looking at the results of my personality test than the questions on the board.
I went to the Circle K meeting that evening with a whole different perception of myself. I’d always seen things and myself one way, but this test was telling me something else altogether. It seemed to suggest that rather than the logical, rational person I wanted to be, I was more of a feeling, intuitive person. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized it was completely accurate.
Jossie came over to me as the meeting ended. “I missed you today,” she said, leaning on the desk where I was still sitting, “All My Children just isn’t the same without you.”
I smiled faintly at her. “You can catch me up on Thursday,” I told her, not really paying attention. I was staring at that paper again.
Jossie snatched it away from me. “What’s this?” she asked, squinting at it but not really reading it. “Is it a love letter? Hey, Alizah, Byron’s got himself a love letter!”
“Does he, now,” Alizah said blandly, used to this sort of thing from her best friend. I rolled my eyes at both of them as Paul came over to join us, draping himself over Alizah’s shoulder.
“Paulie Boy, your friend has a love letter,” Jossie repeated. She held it out and he took the proffered paper, skimming it over. “What kind of words of luuuuuuuuuuv has someone written our young Byron here?” She drew the word out, fluttering her eyelashes at me as she did so.
“If this is a love letter, it’s a pretty lousy one,” Paul drawled. He’s from rural Tennessee and his accent is even thicker than Alizah and Jossie’s, and subtly different. I hadn’t even been in the South for a month and I was already beginning to pick out where people were from based upon how they pronounced certain words. “Byron,” he said, turning to me with a grin, “You gotta get yourself a new lover if this is what kind of correspondence you’re getting.”
I grabbed the paper back and folded it up. “My love life is just fine, thanks,” I commented. Paul raised his eyebrows at Jossie, who turned to me, ready to ask for more details. I cut her off. “This is the results of my personality test,” I explained as I stuffed the paper in my back pocket.
“Oh come on, Byron,” Jossie said, successfully distracted from my earlier comment, “You really need to take a test to know who you are?”
“Apparently so.”
Alizah invited Paul out for a smoothie with her in the student center and he accepted, so when we left the meeting, they headed one way and Jossie and I headed the other. “I can’t believe it,” she said, “but I’m actually going to pay money to do laundry tonight. I forgot to bring my sheets home with me this weekend and they definitely need a launder. I only got half a load, though. Wanna throw some stuff in to make it a full one?”
I thought about that. I wasn’t going to get Jossie to wash my boxers or anything, but I couldn’t pass up the offer to let someone do some of my laundry for me. “If you’ll throw my sheets in with yours, I’ll pay for the dryer.”
“Deal. My laundry basket is on my desk. Just toss them in; I’m going to take a shower before I head downstairs to the washer. If I leave my door open, will you watch my room for me?”
My door was open when I went in. Julio was at his desk, typing away furiously at his keyboard. I couldn’t tell if he was writing a paper or instant messaging his girlfriend, Elena. He looked up as I dropped my school bag on my own desk. “Well, look who’s home. It’s Mr. Popularity.” I raised my eyebrow at him. “You had two phone calls while you were out this evening.”
I started stripping the bedding off my bunk. “Oh, really?” I replied. Two phone calls? I hadn’t had two people call me the same day that I could ever remember, going back years now. Only three people had called me the entire time I’d been at school: Mom once, to ask me a question and to check up on me; Hay once, because, in her own words, “Jordan wasn’t home;” and Jeff, who was calling on a regular basis. Jeff never called on Tuesdays, though, because he knew I had Circle K and that I sometimes went out for smoothies or burritos afterward.
“Yes, really. First was someone named Claire?” Julio phrased that as a question. “She said to let you know that she’s saving all her birthday money and some of her allowance, so make sure we have room for her when she comes to visit us.” I gathered my sheets in a ball and stood in the doorway. “Who is this Claire and should I be worried that she’s coming here?”
I tossed the sheets; they landed precariously on the top of Jossie’s laundry basket across the hall. “She’s my baby sister. She just turned thirteen. I promised her she could come for the weekend if she could afford a plane ticket, but I wouldn’t worry one lick about her actually making it here. She’s not exactly financially responsible; she’s overdrawn on her allowance 99 percent of the time.” He chuckled. “Who was the second caller?”
He turned around from his computer; that’s how I knew he was writing for school rather than for pleasure. “A girl calling herself Hay. You have a friend that is named after a greeting or dried grasses?”
It was my turn to laugh. “Sorta. When we first became friends, she noticed that if you shorten Haley and Byron, you get Hay and By. She thought it would be funny for me to get her attention by saying ‘Hey, Hay,’ and for her to say goodnight by saying, ‘Bye, By.’ The nicknames stuck. Only she and Jeff and I use them, though.”
“Ahh,” he said, “That explains why she said, ‘Is By there?’” I shrugged at him. Hay’s sometimes hard to explain. “In any case, she said she would call back sometime after nine and try to catch you then.”
“Great.” I dug around in my pocket and pulled out a dollar bill, which I ran across the hall. I stuffed my sheets down into the basket with Jossie’s. Mine were plain white jersey; hers were white satin covered in red hearts. I smiled a little bit; that was so Jossie that I wasn’t even surprised by it. I tucked the dollar bill under the basket so it was sticking out a little bit but mostly hidden from view and went back to work on my calculus homework.
I was beyond thrilled when the phone rang that evening. First because it meant I could put my calculus aside, and second because I knew who was calling. Julio didn’t even make a move for the phone, even though most of the calls were for him. “Hello.”
“By!” Haley exclaimed by way of greeting. I grinned. Even if I felt a little downgraded in that she only called me on days when she couldn’t reach my brother, it went away when she was actually talking to me. “It is so good to hear your voice. Do you have a Southern accent yet?”
“No way,” I replied as I took the phone out in the hallway. Jossie’s door was still wide open, and I could see she’d taken the laundry downstairs. Alizah hadn’t made it home yet, so I went ahead with my next comment. “If I ever say, ‘y’all,’ you have my permission to shoot me.”
“Duly noted. I just need to figure out where to get a gun, now.” I shook my head. “I didn’t call to discuss me plugging you with bullets, though.”
“No. You called because Jordan’s busy for the evening.”
There was a slightly frosty pause. I’d meant that as a joke, but she took it seriously. “Actually,” she said after a moment, “I didn’t even try calling Jordan tonight. I called because I was worried about you.”
“Me?” I squeaked. “Why are you worrying about me?”
“Oh, stop the bullshit,” Hay said, no longer sounding irritated, but instead slightly concerned. “I read that email you sent me yesterday. How long have we been best friends? Three years? I know you like I know myself, By. Maybe even better. The more cheerful you sound in email, the less happy you are in reality. You turn on the fake to hide your feelings, but I can read you as easily as if you were a book. I don’t know why you bother trying to hide things from me.”
I sagged a little bit, because everything she’d said had been completely true. I sighed deeply, thinking about what to say next. She waited me out, because she knows that I can’t be forced into stuff. “I’m having trouble with my classes.”
The pause turned incredulous. “You can’t be flunking already,” she observed.
“No,” I said slowly, “but I’m flunking in the major department. I’ve already figured out this isn’t the right major for me.”
For someone who loves to talk my ear off, she was mighty quiet that evening. “Really,” was all she said. I waited her out this time. “I don’t know what to say to that,” she added when she realized what I was doing.
“‘I told you so?’” I suggested. She didn’t respond right away, but I could hear her grin over the phone. She wasn’t going to say it, but it was definitely implied. “Look, Hay, I don’t know why I didn’t just listen to you and Jeff to begin with. You both said that engineering wasn’t where you pictured me. I’m not a cyborg, I guess,” I finished, remembering her early comment that ‘biomedical engineering’ sounded like a job for robots.
Her voice was surprisingly quiet as she spoke back up. “No, you’re not a cyborg. For the longest time, I think you were trying to be one, so that you wouldn’t have to deal with your emotions and feelings. Robots have it easier than people do, I think.” Haley sighed. “What are you going to do now? Once you figure out something’s wrong, your next step is always to overthink a plan.”
I chuckled at that. “I went to career services today to see what they recommend as a better fit for my personality. I’m hoping they’ll suggest something that makes me want to stand up and scream, ‘Yes, this is who I am!’”
“If that happens,” Hay said, sounding more like her usual self, “get someone to tape-record it, okay?” I shook my head at her again. “But what if they don’t find something you love?”
I’d thought about that, too, of course. “I’ll take their suggestions and do some searching for similar careers. There’s got to be a place out there for me.”
“I’m certain there is. Keep me updated, okay?”
“Of course!” I shifted slightly. “So how was your first day back at school?”
She groaned. “Another year at Shithole High School,” she said mournfully. “There is one upside this year, though. Becca and I have lunch together, so I’m not eating alone like I did last year. And Matt’s already said he’ll go to the football game with me on Friday. Oh, and I forgot to tell you: I decided to join glee club.”
She was off and running. Despite her insistence that school sucked so badly this year that she was tempted to drop out, after only one day, she had twenty minutes worth of stories to tell me. When she let me go reluctantly, it was because she already had homework and needed to get busy on it. I smiled as she hung up. No matter how pathetic Haley had made herself sound, she was doing okay back home. And no matter how unhappy I was with my classes, I wasn’t doing too badly myself.
I just hoped that career services was going to be helpful.
***
For the first (and probably last) time in my life, I skipped a class that Wednesday.
I’d attended my first two classes of the day and had headed back to the dorm to have a sandwich and finish my calculus assignment before my final class. I stopped at the mailboxes and peeked into the one for my room. A manila envelope with my name on it sat inside. I snatched it up and hurried back to my room, my homework (and lunch) forgotten.
The pages were infuriatingly organized. At the top of stack were, each on an individual sheet of paper, the results of my tests. I skimmed them, turning the pages quickly. Most of them were just reinforcing what the first test had already told me. Finally, at the back of the pile were several pages of suggestions and recommendations.
I found one sheet that was basically exactly what I was looking for: the school’s top five recommendations for careers that would suit me. The first three were all therapist or counseling jobs, of different varieties. Physical therapy would mean actually getting a medical degree. School guidance counselor? That didn’t sound too terrible. Substance abuse counselor? I didn’t feel like I was really the right one to do that, since I’d never even seen an illegal drug. The fourth career was teaching. I smiled when I saw that one. I could briefly imagine Jeff and me teaching in classrooms across the hall from each other, but I didn’t actually want to have thirty small faces all staring at me at the same time. That was why the guidance counselor was sort of appealing.
But as soon as I saw the final recommendation on the sheet, I stopped thinking about counseling. I stared at that suggestion for a full minute. No bells started magically ringing or anything like that, but I still knew I’d found exactly what I was looking for.
I didn’t have the urge to shout to the heavens like I’d told Hay I’d want to do. Instead, I hopped on my computer and started typing. Within minutes, I was looking at Duke’s website. Just as I suspected, this wasn’t something you could study here. I was briefly pained by that. I’d finally found a place where I fit in socially. Did I really want to leave to follow another major that could turn out just to be another pipe dream?
As much as I didn’t want to think about leaving Alizah and Paul and even Jossie, I knew that if I wanted to explore the possibility of this career that made me feel happy for the first time in weeks, I would have to do just that. I found the listing of the top schools in the nation for my hopeful-future major. I spent the afternoon reading reviews of every school on the list, comparing information and looking at everything I could get my hands on.
Three hours and one missed class later, my stomach was grumbling. I’d never eaten that sandwich. I took a brief break and put some ham and cheese on bread, quickly stuffing it into my mouth. There was one school that I just kept coming back to. It was one I’d heard of before and it had a great reputation…and an interesting history. I loved the look of the program…and the location. I found myself comparing all the other schools to this one.
That’s how I knew it was my number one choice.
There was only one trouble. It was about as far away from home as you could get without going to Hawaii.
Mallory, as the oldest, had set the trend for college. She was only a couple hours from home, just outside of New York. It seemed that each sibling who made the decision on where to go went just a little farther from home. Adam had picked out his school in Ohio next, and then I’d selected Duke and Jordan had picked Florida. Despite how far away from home Jordan was, he was still pretty well a straight shot down the coast.
My dream school was on the coast, too: the opposite coast.
Despite any nerves I had about that, I decided that sometimes, you just have to follow your dreams. I spent the rest of the afternoon filling out the application to be accepted as a transfer student in the fall.