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i.
Freshman year is really an awkward time for everyone, regardless of how cool anyone really likes to think they are. There is only so much posturing that can go on at the bottom of the food chain, where you can't drive and haven't honed your partying skills to the point where you aren't the one puking in the bathroom or on the lawn at parties.
And that amount of awkwardness only seems to breed more awkward, at least in Kat's world, so freshman year isn't quite a time period she likes to look back on.
Reliving it at the Lowenstien party had been bad enough, but at least at that point she had been practicing the parts where you keep your clothing on.
The other awkward part of freshman year is when the juniors and seniors are fucking under the bleachers and you realize that isn't quite what middle school relationships were made of, so you fall for the wrong guy because he's cute and you're kind of confused and there really aren't that many people who know your name. But he does.
What Kat has not told anyone is that the thing with Joey wasn't just sex, for a short while, because every girl is a sucker for feeling special once in a while, and he once bought her roses.
--
ii.
Bianca thinks Patrick might have made her sister go crazy at age eighteen.
Which is a bit young, really, to completely lose your mind, and Bianca hopes she gets at least to twenty-one before she gets that ridiculous.
Because a) Kat has never been into the whole PDA thing - okay, Kat has never been into the whole sex thing, period, and this is pretty weird as it is, this boyfriend deal.
It was worse when Kat said she wanted to transfer from Sarah Lawrence to whatever UC Patrick was at, but it's almost as bad now that they're home on vacation and freaking her out via domesticity. At this rate, one day Kat is going to end up barefoot and pregnant in a muumuu with three shrieking babies and a teakettle and, like, a rolling pin.
Bianca's not exactly sure of the logistics of the whole thing, but the rolling pin is essential.
Also b) whenever Kat cares about someone it is in her weird "I'm going to abuse you incessantly so just shut up" way, so when Bianca walks by and overhears her and Patrick talking about the moon and the sun in that weird cute way of theirs, she shudders and tries very hard not to think about it.
--
iii.
Kat, when she is twenty, wants to change the world.
She doesn't realize it in so many words, but she writes the songs and reads the books and has all the right late-night conversations.
She talks to Pat sometimes and he laughs and asks if she realizes what's happening to herself.
She tells him he's being ridiculous and should stop it because honestly, who says that, and she's really not taking herself as seriously as he seems to think she is.
That's when he usually tells her to relax and she can hear his lazy lopsided grin in his voice, and she makes a fed-up noise in the back of her throat and that just makes him laugh at her even more.
After she hangs up the phone, though, she always smiles.
She still has the corsage he bought her tucked away in one of her drawers back home, next to a pair of earrings that belonged to her mother and a letter from a penpal she once had that she can't remember why she kept, but habit is a strong force if not a logical one. She figures she's entitled to her useless displays of sentimentality once in a while.
--
iv.
There is a man, later, who wants to change Kat.
After their father dies, she and Bianca, recent graduate of Berkeley, who would have guessed, both fly home from their respective lives, and the man next to her on the plane hands her a tangerine.
"Airline food is always awful," he says at five thousand feet with a smile, "and you look like you could use something good."
She smiles and thanks him, and he leaves his number on a napkin that she almost tears up and throws away but ends up keeping because she's never quite broken the packrat habit, because everything she's ever gotten really attached to has left so she keeps the pieces that it leaves behind.
"You know," he says, as they are exiting the plane and he hands her the suitcase she stored in the overhead bin, "you don't always have to fight."
The phrase sticks in the back of her mind through the funeral and for a month afterward until she finally picks up the phone.
A tangerine is not quite a guitar, she supposes, but it's a start, and maybe it would be nice to have someone taking care of her for once.
--
v.
Katarina, when she is older, will look back on her high school and college days and smile awkwardly in the way her father once did when asked about Woodstock. It's not, she tells people, like it was a really serious phase, more like the typical hotheadedness of the young.
Her husband is not Pat, and he never sang on the bleachers in an attempt to win her affection but he always remembers her birthday and their anniversary, and if she misses unpredictability once in a while she doesn't think about it too hard.
The last time Bianca came to visit, looking very forward-thinking career-woman in her suit and pearls, she asked when Kat had been declawed and it really, Katarina thinks, wasn't that funny, and she doesn't realize it but there's a shadow of her former self in her unamused snort.
"Seriously, Kat," Bianca says, looking very earnest and well-meaning, "who would've thought things would turn out this way?"
Katarina shrugs. "Sometimes things just happen."