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“Geez, so you’re not planning on having a life, huh?”
    She smiled wistfully. “I guess not. Between school and physical therapy, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything else.”
    “I’m in the same boat,” I commiserated. “I’m not overloading, but I’ve got class everyday, and I nanny for a family in Lincoln Park after school.”
    Our professor walked into the lecture hall, signaling the beginning of class and the end of our conversation. Despite it being the first day of the semester, the instructor hit the material fast and hard. We went over the course syllabus briefly before he launched into a lecture.
    I was half-focused on whatever the teacher was talking about and diligently copying the information down in my notebook. The rest of my attention was spent observing the girl beside me. Raleigh didn’t appear to be equally curious about me, however. Instead, she looked focused and intense, scribbling down everything the instructor said.
    As our professor droned on and on, I found myself drawn to the soft, pale skin of Raleigh’s knees and her smooth calves that the skirt of her dress revealed. There were no scars, no blemishes of any kind. It was amazing and quite a bit distracting. Before I realized it, Professor Glasglow was wrapping up his lecture and the students around me had begun collecting their things, packing up laptops and notes into their bags. Raleigh too already had her notebook in her bag and was putting her textbook away.
    “Do you mind if I take a peek at your notes?” I blurted out in a panic. “He started to talk pretty fast at the end, and I want to make sure I got it all.”
    “Sure thing.” Raleigh twisted at the waist and pulled a purple notebook from the backpack slung over the back of her wheelchair. She didn’t look annoyed that she’d already put her books away. “You can give it back to me whenever.”
    “I could copy them here, if you don’t have to run off.” I choked over the final words. Why had I said that? She couldn’t run . “I just mean, I don’t know about you,” I self-corrected, “but I don’t have any place to hurry off to right now.”
    Raleigh gave me a smile I’d come to recognize. It was accommodating, almost reassuring, or at least it was designed to make me feel more comfortable about my word choice. The smile killed me. She shouldn’t feel sorry for me; she was the one in the wheelchair, not me.
    “My aunt is supposed to be picking me up,” she said. “You can give me the notebook back in anatomy on Wednesday.”
    “Oh, um, yeah. I can do that.”
    Raleigh exited the classroom, leaving me behind feeling like an idiot. I shook my head and muttered to myself. For someone who was apparently book smart, I seemed to fall short in a lot of other categories.
    I opened up Raleigh’s notebook to the first page and compared the careful, legible handwriting with my own frazzled scribbling. I always felt so frantic while trying to take notes in class. I was amazed by the thoroughness and neatness of her notes.
    It only took a few minutes to copy the parts of the notes I had missed. I tucked my notebook and Raleigh’s back into my bag and I hustled out of the building, hoping to catch her before she took off for the day. The north campus parking lot wasn’t terribly large, but with so many students milling about, it proved impossible to identify her flash of blonde hair.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    The next morning I met up with my friend Maia at the university library. Similar to our daily lunch meet-ups with Kelley and Lauren, Maia and I tried to get together at least once a week to study during a mutual free period. We usually didn’t get much homework done, though; more often than not we ended up studying undergraduate girls instead. It was nice having a queer friend on campus. I hadn’t had many friends in Memphis, let