“Yes, it does.” Karina smiled, feeling the first ray of sunshine in weeks.

When she showed up at the Botany Lab the following Friday as instructed, a half-dozen other students were there. Dr. Choi matched Karina with Claire, an effortlessly pretty freshman from Pasadena, and tasked them with grafting stems for a hybrid breed of tomatoes. Karina hadn’t worked with vegetables since her mother gave up gardening four years ago, but she recalled intuitively how to pluck suckers from tomato plants, and the earthy scent on her hands felt good and familiar.

Claire was bubbly and talkative, and when they finished up, she proposed that the whole group go out to a Thai restaurant, where they drank beer and shared heaping bowls of noodles and curries. The other lab kids, four girls and two guys, were all science majors of some kind. They were studious; their workload was heavy and their tastes fairly tame. Claire, who seemed like she could be friends with anyone, for some reason took Karina under her wing and invited her along everywhere. Outside the Botany Lab, the group studied together, ordered pizza to their dorm rooms, and occasionally went to a keg party, but rarely had more than a couple of beers. So, it was at the lab that Karina found her first group of friends.

It was nice to have the companionship of a social pack, a group of people to travel with on the large campus. Karina finally felt as if she had a place to be, without awkwardly looking around at everyone else. She felt her old sense of confidence returning. Karina shared the bare minimum about her family life with her new friends: she was an only child, her parents divorced when she was in high school, her dad was a banker who worked a lot, her mom stayed home. All these facts were accurate. It was not the truth, but it was enough to satisfy her friends.

They were all now discovering, at eighteen, the people they wanted to be, unconstrained by who they’d been before. Karina held out hope that she too could be someone new, that she might have a fresh start.

20 | Karina

January 2014

Karina laid eyes on James as soon as she entered the first session of the Environmental Policy seminar, a class intended only for upperclassmen, which she’d had to lobby her adviser to take. James was sitting in the far-right corner of the rectangular table, a goatee and John Lennon glasses camouflaging his youthful face. As the professor explained how the seminar would work, she stole glances at him, conveniently seated in front of the room’s only clock.

The seminar would culminate in a group project to be presented at the end of the semester. The professor encouraged them to form groups that reflected different disciplines and strengths. Karina looked around the room and wondered if it had been a mistake to push so hard to be there. What did she have to offer her classmates other than one semester of basic college courses? She glanced up at the clock, and John Lennon caught her eye and gave her a small lopsided smile. When her stomach lurched, she knew she would stay in the class, no matter how unprepared she felt.