I had tried my best to enjoy my college experience. Still, every break was tinged with sadness, especially when I went home with Lena to Boston—the place where I would have visited Victor whenever I could in my alternate timeline. And when I was studying in the library with Lena on Friday nights, I often wondered what it would have been like to take the Peter Pan bus over to Tufts and spend the whole weekend doing the same thing with Victor.
There was this wild despondency always lurking just below the surface. I rarely let my hair down, but when I did, it got nasty. I’d earned a bad reputation at college for drinking too much at parties and then weeping all night over things I couldn't talk about to anyone about even when I was drunk.
But that was nothing to tell Lena. The fact was I should be happy. There was absolutely no reason not to be. I was graduating with honors. I had my whole life in front of me.
I pasted on a smile for Lena, pretending to be all the things I should be. “Sorry, I was just thinking about everything I have to do before moving to New York.”
“Yeah, I bet. I can't believe you got such a great internship—” Lena cut off, probably realizing how that might sound.
Manhattan University had turned her down and pretty much every other med program she had applied to with me. But I knew she was happy for me and wouldn’t ever want to come off as catty or jealous.
If I had been animating her, I would’ve drawn some embarrassed smoke coming out of her head and a chibi version of her bending over backward as she said, “I mean, I do believe it. You’re brilliant, and you deserve the world. It's just such a great match for you. It's like your life couldn’t have worked out any better. That’s so cool.”
“Is it a great match for me?” I asked, my smile slipping just a little bit.
I never told Lena about my art dreams—we’d both been too busy just trying to get decent grades. But another detail from my parallel timeline spun into my mind then. The college acceptance email I never answered from RhIDS. What would it have been like to go there? To major in animation and maybe start making the stories that still unfurled in my head sometimes, no matter how much math I threw at them?
I loved Lena. There were no words in the world to express how nice it was to meet someone with a similar background and worldview after eighteen years of feeling like a freak. But…
Sometimes it felt like I was only pretending to be the person she thought of as her best friend, the person who’d gotten that internship.
“Having everything work out exactly as it should, feels super weird,” I confessed to her. “Like I'm playing a role somebody else assigned to me.”
Lena nodded knowingly. “Sounds like you're struggling with imposter syndrome. I was reading an article in Psychology Now about how a lot of grads feel like that, no matter how much they’ve achieved.”
I grinned at her answer. Lena’s forbidden love wasn’t nearly as secret as mine. Ever since I met her, she’d been obsessed with modern psychology.
“So have you broken it to your dad that you’ll be interning at that kids’ therapy program instead of trying to get a job that will look good on your next round of med school applications?” I asked.
Lena rolled her eyes. “No, he’s still getting over my perfect Indian boyfriend dumping me. No need to pile on.”
Now it was my turn to dig. “Are you still getting over your Indian boyfriend—who, by the way, was not so perfect if he didn't see your value, girl.”
Lena had been a little off ever since our trip to Daytona for spring break. We’d gone there just a few days after Rohan, her zero personality Indian boyfriend, dumped her, claiming he just couldn't date someone without his mother’s approval. I had thought that it would be a good way for my best friend to finally blow off some steam. And the first night, she’d actually put on a bikini and talked to some hockey players who’d flown down for spring break too. But she’d ended throwing deuces the next day and cutting out early.
She hadn’t seemed that broken up about Rohan when we flew down to Florida, so I had to wonder if something else had happened over spring break.
Granted, it could just be guilt making me think she was acting weird. I got so wasted the first night of our spring break that I woke up the next morning with a hangover to end all hangovers. Lena was nowhere to be found when I crawled out of bed. And when the two other friends we’d flew down with and I came back from our hair of the dog mimosa brunch, which had turned into late afternoon shots, we found her packing up her stuff.
