Moving in Reverse Read Free

easy as I’d imagined it would be.
    “ Well, she clearly liked
you,” Darby said, shivering under her pale pink cardigan. “I can’t
wait for this week to be over and for us to be in,” she giggled.
“My mom’s going to want to know everything the second I get back to
the dorm.”
    I hadn’t told my mom that I’d even
been thinking about joining a sorority. I had a pretty likely guess
as to what she’d say if I did — that I should focus, that it was
silly, that if my grades didn’t stay as high in college as they’d
been in high school, I’d be “disappointed with my options.” That
was one of her phrases. Whenever she said it, I thought about three
mystery doors on a game show. Behind one, life as a janitor. Behind
the other, flipping burgers at McDonalds. According to my mom,
those were likely to be my options if I wasn’t extraordinarily
focused.
    Maybe she was right. I mean, they’d be
pretty disappointing, as options go.
    Behind the third door, though, was
what I’d been wondering about. What if behind the third door was
just a never-ending highway, all open road and new cities and
everything moving, never staying put. Maybe I would have picked
that third door, in retrospect. If I’d realized it was a choice,
when I’d made it.
    “ Are you coming, space
cadet?” Darby asked me, pausing outside the student center and
smiling thinly, as if she’d realized I’d stopped paying attention
to whatever she’d been saying about Rush today.
    “ I’m going to get a
coffee,” I said. “I’ve still got a ton of work to do tonight,” I
felt my shoulders start to slump, thinking about the stack of books
waiting in our dorm room, the hundreds of pages of reading I was
supposed to complete just to keep up in my classes.
    In high school, we’d taken a month to
read a novel — here, it was a week. The professor would lecture
twice on each book, and then we’d discuss it in smaller classes,
most of the time led by a grad student who would actually be the
one reading and grading all of our work.
    Except that I’d signed up for the
single discussion section that the actual professor taught for one
of my English classes, in contemporary fiction. It seemed, at least
to my overeager freshman mind, like a great way to take advantage
of Columbia, to learn from the best in the field in what I thought
would be my favorite subject.
    What I didn’t realize was that when
you were in the Professor’s discussion session, you had to read
every page of every book. Twice. Because if every word out of your
mouth didn’t sound like a crafted, researched dissertation, he
looked at you as if you should just get up and leave the room,
thank you very much, because you were wasting his time.
    The worst part was that Blake was in
the class with me. And every time he opened his mouth, it sounded
like he was reading the professor’s mind. He was eloquent,
thoughtful and confident.
    And then there was me. I sometimes
felt like I was lucky if I could get through a whole sentence
without saying ‘like.’ At Prospect Academy, where I’d gone to high
school, I was the top student in every class — here, every single
student had been the top student in their high school class. So I
worked harder, every day, than I ever had before — because in some
ways, my mom was right. That door with the janitor job behind it
wasn’t exactly appealing.
    But also I worried. Blake
and I had met in this whirlwind, fairy-tale summer, and now that
we’d settled into real life, nothing seemed quite as special. Most
of all, I worried that I didn’t seem quite as special, grounded in
homework and roommates and freshman awkwardness.
    Blake had fallen in love with me
because I seemed so different from everyone else he knew. But here,
I was exactly the same as everyone around us. If anything, compared
to the people around us, I came up short.
    It had become my worst fear. That he
would follow me to Columbia and finally realize how utterly
ordinary I