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they are in front of a fortune teller
machine, or while they are holding a possessed totem, and then magically
overnight they are, but I didn’t have time to wait for magic.
    I had to make my own.
    When I reached the lecture
hall, I tried to quiet my mind, slow my stampeding heart as I sat down at the
back of the auditorium. I hoped it was far enough away to avoid suspicion. Sure,
I’d made it into the dorm, somehow convinced Carter and Dawn, but this was my
first class. All I needed was the professor asking me where my AARP card was.
    Or someone from the
administration barging in with my doctored transcripts and kicking my ass all
the way back to New York City.
    I opened my laptop and sat
at attention, ready to learn, learn, and learn when Carter took the seat next
to me.
    Was he following me?
    I hadn’t counted on a
stalker, especially on day two, although, if there was anyone who I would want
to stalk me, I would definitely choose him. I couldn’t help but sniff the air
around him as he settled into his seat, filled with the sharpness of the type
of body spray they advertised on MTV.
    I might have been trying to
avoid the inevitable bumping into him in his towel fresh from the shower, but
his scent made me picture it immediately: his sculpted upper body, the taut
lines of his stomach, and the damp towel around his waist covering the rest…
    “Legal Studies too, huh?” he
thankfully asked before I could go any lower. A waft of freshly brushed
peppermint breath hit me.
    “I thought you were a
senior?” Even as a freshman I would have understood he should not be in this
class. As an adult I definitely understood it.
    “I failed some classes my freshman
year,” he explained. “I’m going back and making up the required classes this semester.”
    “How stereotypical,” I said,
which I had every right to because it was basically what I was doing. Of
course, with a ten year gap instead of his three and the whole lying to
everyone thing.
    He leaned in closer to me,
so close I sensed dampness coming off his hair. “Less than you think.”
    “I’m not going to fail,” I
said, even though he wasn’t asking. I was trying to convince myself. My real freshman
year, I absolutely would have bombed this class. I mean, I failed Rocks for
Jocks back then. But not now; not this time.
    “I wasn’t talking about you,”
he said, breathing out. “Things can happen you never plan on. That’s all.”
    “Why, what happened?”
    His eyes went dark, his skin
blanched white. He shook his head. His silence was suffocating.
    “Never mind,” I said, trying
to cut through it.
    “Sorry,” he sighed. “The
point is, I graduate at the end of this year or I pay my own way.” He paused. “I
guess that is kind of stereotypical, huh?”
    I bit my lip. My picturing the
hot RA in his towel was, too, just like his smothering sweet attempts to help
the lost freshman girl—the lost freshman girl who he seemed to keep finding.
    He leaned back in his chair.
“I’m working on being less predictable. For instance, I was probably the only
twenty-one-year-old in the world to have been sober on his birthday.”
    “You’re only twenty-one?” I
asked before I could stop myself. Only —I was supposed to be younger than
him.
    He stared at me for a minute
before answering, “Twenty-two.”
    Like that made it better. Hot,
thoughtful, and sober, this guy was seriously too good to be true. Except for
the being-seven-years-younger-than-me part.
    He squinted. “Twenty-two,
three months and four days. I’m a Libra, the scales. I guess that makes sense.”
    “You’re telling me an awful
lot about yourself considering we met yesterday.”
    Students starting filling in
the seats around us, but it was like we were alone in the lecture hall. Maybe
that was the real reason I couldn’t get Carter out of my mind—when I was with
him it was like I didn’t have to pretend, which, considering my whole life now
was fake, made absolutely no