Tully wasn’t quite sure how it had happened, but somehow this sleeping with her professor had graduated into a full-blown affair. No pun intended. Perhaps Kate had been right and it had begun as a kind of career move for her; she no longer remembered. All she knew was that in his arms she felt content, and that was a new emotion for her.

And, of course, he was her mentor. In their time together he’d taught her things it would have taken her years to discover by herself.

More importantly, he’d shown her what making love was. His bed had become her port; his arms her life ring. When she kissed him and let him touch her with an unimaginable intimacy, she forgot that she didn’t believe in love. Her first time, back in those dark Snohomish woods, faded from her memory a little more each day, until one day she discovered that she no longer carried it around inside of her. It would always be a part of her, a scar on her soul, but like all scars, it faded in time from a bright and burning red to a slim, silvery line that could only sometimes be seen.

But even with all that, with all that he’d shown and given her, it was beginning not to be enough. By fall semester of her senior year, she was growing impatient with the rarefied world of college. CNN had changed the face of broadcasting. Out in the real world, things were happening, things that mattered. John Lennon had been shot and killed outside his New York apartment; a guy named Hinckley had shot President Reagan in a pathetic attempt to impress Jodie Foster; Sandra Day O’Conner had become the first female Supreme Court justice; and Diana Spencer had married Prince Charles in a ceremony so fairy-tale perfect that every girl in America believed in love and happy endings for the entire summer. Kate talked about the wedding so often and in such detail you’d think she’d been invited.

All of it was headline news, made during Tully’s life, and yet because she was in school, it was before her time. Oh, sure, she wrote the articles for the school paper and sometimes even got to read a few sentences here and there on air, but it was all make-believe, warm-up exercises for a game she wasn’t yet allowed to play.

She yearned to swim in the real waters of local or national news. She’d grown even more tired of sorority dances and frat parties and that most archaic of all rituals—the candle passings. Why all those sorority girls wanted to get engaged was beyond her. Didn’t they know what was going on in the world, didn’t they see the possibilities?