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a monk enough justice for not having stopped them?
    Was three years of loneliness
enough of a punishment to finally allow myself to touch someone like Kate?

Chapter Five
    Kate
    The next morning I was up
early, headed to the shower before anyone else would be awake. My face might
have been young, but my body was aging. Sure, not in ways anyone would notice
unless they looked closely, but why give them the chance?
    Why let them study me,
especially in the fluorescents of the dorm bathroom?
    Even without unforgiving
lighting, I had the beginning of varicose veins, the jiggle in my thighs only
twenty-nine years of gravity can bring, and the whisper of cankles.
    It was best to keep that
under wraps for as long as possible.
    I also hoped to avoid the
inevitable bumping into Carter in a towel scenario for as long as possible.
Thinking about it was bad enough and, after last night at the floor meeting, it
was all I could think about.
    I still couldn’t figure out
why he was getting to me the way he was. Why I was talking to him like we were
in some kind of college co-ed porno. Maybe it was because he’d been the one
person besides Dawn who had spoken to me for more than five minutes, and yet he
still hadn’t laughed me back to the city.
    He believed I was nineteen,
and it was intoxicating. It changed me into a sultry, flirty freshman whenever
he was around.
    I needed to do my best to
try to not have him around.
    I’d skipped dinner last
night, deciding instead to read through the thick books I’d purchased with
Grandma’s stocks for my new Legal Studies life. Dawn didn’t go to dinner
either. But in her case I guessed it was because she didn’t eat anything that
wasn’t still breathing.
    She did, however, continue
to listen to her suicidal music with earbuds, which I considered progress and
enough proof she would do her best not to kill me in my sleep.
    I headed out into the cold
winter morning equipped with a travel mug of coffee and munching on a cereal
bar. I moved with the kind of purpose only a Hail Mary can create toward
Thompson Hall for my Civics class. Class one of twenty-five I would need to
complete my Legal Studies degree.
    My time here had to be about
who I would become when I got out, not about enjoying myself while attending.
It was about leaving here with a degree instead of a swollen liver.  
    Sure, by the time I
graduated and then graduated law school, I would be thirty-eight, but at least
I’d be doing something with those eight years. I’d have something to show when
I was through besides a crooked neck from answering the phone and carpal tunnel
from typing.
    College-take-one had only
given me a wickedly high tolerance. College-take-two needed to bring me something
better than a dead-end desk job and an even deader-end relationship.
    It needed to be my second
chance.
    Attending class without a
hangover, hell, waking up sober, was a good start.
    The snow crunched under my
feet as I continued across campus. It was fitting. Everything I was wearing
seemed to creak and crunch too because it was so new, bought for the part. A
few key designer pieces and the rest purchased at Forever 21.
    Forever 19, was more like
it.
    I wore black leggings and a
knee-length heather gray cable knit turtleneck sweater, with my new Uggs and
puffy purple North Face jacket. It was like I’d stepped out of Seventeen magazine minus the latent anorexia.
    I thought about law school
and smiled easily, even with my mouth tight from the cold. Living the fantasy
of my new college career, I let myself imagine meeting a new man there.
    I’d be able to admit my real
age by then. It wasn’t weird to go to law school as a thirty-four year old. What
I was doing now though, I thought, surveying the snowy, gray campus sprinkled
with students bundled up in brightly colored coats, was definitely weird.
    Sure there were those movies
where the main character wishes they could be older or younger when they blow
out their birthday candles, or when