That Thursday afternoon Catherine did everything necessary in a logical and orderly manner. She notified three of her professors via email of her decision to withdraw from the college, without giving them specific reasons, but Dr. Munsch she informed in person. He was her favorite teacher, a rumpled old bachelor who invited his classics students to his apartment several evenings every semester, serving them a supper of Kentucky Fried Chicken or Chinese take-out and, incongruously, bottles of expensive wine.
​Dr. Munsch rose as he always did from his desk when Catherine entered his office. He was smiling, happy to see her, but that smile vanished as Catherine broke the news.
“Some things have come up,” Catherine said. They had gotten on well together, and she could have told Dr. Munsch everything with confidence that he would remain her advisor and advocate, but for now she wanted to keep what was happening bound up tightly inside herself.
At the provost’s office the dean promised to give her incompletes in her courses rather than failing grades, and the man at the bursar’s office, a Mr. Watts who wore black glasses and dark hair shorn to his skull, gave her a partial refund on her room and board. When he asked where he might send the check, she gave him Sally’s address at the dormitory.
Mr. Watts frowned, but he bent his head and wrote the address on the form.
She ended her afternoon in the cafeteria, picking at a salad and listening to Myra and Jonathan discuss the death of Dido and the later scene where Aeneas meets Dido in the Underworld. Ordinarily Catherine would have joined their talk and banter, but this evening she found it difficult to focus on such ideas as Dido’s silence or the motives of Aeneas.
When she left the cafeteria and walked down the lighted pathway to the dormitory, it was already dark and the November air was cold and hard on her face. In her room, she found Sally sitting on the floor, packing some of Catherine’s books into the boxes Sally had procured that afternoon from the liquor store. On top of the tiny refrigerator stood a bottle of New Amsterdam Gin and another bottle of diet tonic water, Sally’s most recent drink of choice.
“I’ll start on the clothes.” Catherine got down on her knees, dragged her suitcase from beneath the bed, and slid it on the floor to her dresser.
Catherine began folding sweaters and putting them carefully into the bag. She could feel Sally watching her across the room.
“That’s what Brett said.” Probably, Catherine thought, it’s what everyone she knew would say.
For the first time that day Catherine felt the tears start to come again. She had sworn to herself not to cry anymore, and she ducked her head and began packing socks around the sweaters.
The woman on the sidewalk who had approached Catherine after she had left the clinic had promised assistance and had directed her to the special home across town.
Catherine’s mother and father had divorced when she was eight. Her father lived somewhere in Nevada. She had not seen him in many years, though he sometimes sent her a card for her birthday or at Christmas. Three years ago, after Catherine had left for college, her mother had married a man with three younger children and a home of his own. Fred was a good man, a loving father and husband, and he had welcomed Catherine into their home. She had spent a summer and some holiday vacations there, but it was never the same as the apartment she and her mother had shared. It was their home and Catherine did not belong to it.
When they had finished the packing, Catherine helped Sally edit an essay due for her class in management. Sally was a careless, indifferent writer, and though she used the checks on her computer, her papers were always rife with grammatical and spelling errors.
“You’ll have to bring your essays when you come see me,” Catherine said.
Later, after she had brushed her teeth and put on pajama bottoms and a t-shirt for sleeping, Catherine lay in her bed beneath the quilt that tomorrow morning she would fold and put into Sally’s car. The lights from the parking lot outside her window cast a soft yellow glow over the room, and she put her hands on her belly and looked at the stack of boxes and the suitcase standing beside the door and then looked at the shadows on the ceiling as she tried without success to imagine everything her life might become.