Testing Kate Read Online Free PDF Page B

lying,” Jen said.
    I closed my eyes for a minute, wondering if anyone had actually ever died from humiliation. I’d snored for years, since I was a kid. My parents, my friends, everyone who ever heard me, teased me mercilessly about it.
    “If you ever decide to get married, Katie-belle, you’d better pick a sound sleeper,” my dad had advised me more than once.
    I used to hold out hope that my snoring was cute, endearing even, until my college roommate decided to disabuse me of this notion by taping me one night. It was awful—I sounded like a dying rhinoceros.
    I opened my eyes and looked at Jen pleadingly. “Please just kill me now,” I said.
    “Come on, let’s get out of here,” she advised.
             
    We walked over to P.J.’s, which was still doing a brisk business despite the late hour. We ran into Lexi, also on a study break, and after we’d ordered iced lattes all around, the three of us returned to the law-school courtyard to sit and drink our coffee.
    “How late are you staying tonight?” Lexi asked.
    “I have at least another three hours of work tonight, and it’s already…” I checked my watch. “Shit, it’s already nine o’clock. I had no idea I’d been here for so long.”
    “That’s because the law school is like a black hole. You go in and lose all sense of time,” Jen said. “In a bad way.”
    It was a warm, sticky night out, and the air felt damp against my skin. Lexi and Jen lit cigarettes, and the rich perfume of the tobacco filled the air, mixing in with the smells of freshly cut grass and grease from the nearby dorm dining hall.
    “So, Kate, what’s up with you guys?” Lexi asked.
    “Who?” I asked.
    “Who do you think? You and Nick,” she said, and smiled knowingly.
    “Nick? Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re just friends.”
    Law school resembled high school in more ways than one. I didn’t know if it was the enormous pressure we were under or a result of the microcosm we spent our days in, but everyone seemed to regress. Gossip, especially speculation over who was sleeping with whom, had become a popular topic of conversation. I guess it was more interesting than chatting about the Uniform Commercial Code.
    “Oh, come on. You guys are always together. There must be something going on,” Lexi said.
    It was true; Nick and I had been spending a lot of time together. It was sort of inevitable. We lived in the same house and had all of our classes together, so we usually carpooled into school or else rode the streetcar together. The night before, Nick had helped me put together the computer desk I’d bought in a flat cardboard box from an office supply store, and the night before that we’d shared a cheap Papa John’s pizza, dipping the slices into the greasy garlic dipping sauce.
    “Really, we’re just friends,” I said again. “Anyway, I broke up with my boyfriend just before school started. I’m not ready to get involved with anyone right now.”
    “Why? What happened?” Lexi asked. She tucked one long slim leg under the other and looked at me with interest.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Why did you break up?”
    It was a good question. And the truth was, I really wasn’t entirely sure what had gone wrong between Graham and me.
    We had gone out for Chinese on our first date, and by the time we were cracking open our fortune cookies, we both thought that this was It, that the person sitting across the table was The One. We immediately started dating exclusively—dinners out, Sunday-morning pancakes, long walks across the picturesque Cornell campus on crisp autumn afternoons. A year later we were moving into the seventy-year-old Victorian house that had seemed so charming when the Realtor first showed it to us. The lace curtains at the windows, the huge bay window in the living room, the elaborate crown molding.
    Graham was the most intensely focused person I’d ever met. He was an academic by profession but a student by nature; he