I’d met Shay Simmons my freshman year of college. It was the first night of rush week and I was standing on the grass outside the Delta Alpha Gamma house. Their opening party had begun and my family expected that I would join this sorority. This was the “right” house. Brad belonged to their brother fraternity, as had both of our fathers. All I had to do was cross the lawn, go up the porch steps, and enter the house.

I couldn’t do it. I could not get my feet to move.

“Hey, are you okay? You look a little lost.” The first thing I noticed about the girl speaking to me was her concerned expression. The second was her bright-purple hair and how she’d shaved one side of her head.

“You have no idea how right you are,” I said to her. I was lost in a way I hadn’t realized until this very moment. “I’m supposed to go inside and I . . . can’t.”

She glanced over her shoulder. “I can’t blame you for that. Those girls are terrible.”

“It’s not that. If I go in there, then I’m saying I agree to it. That I’ll end up being my mother and the things I want for myself don’t matter and I’ll never make my own decisions ever again. That I’ll marry the boy they picked out for me and spend my days at the country club and lunching with the other bored housewives. I’ll be saying that I accept it, and I’m not sure I can accept it.”

“That sounds heavy.”

“They’ve chosen everything for me. Including the two majors I’m allowed to decide between.”

She made a sound. “You aren’t allowed to pick your own major? You’re the one going to school. Not them.”

“I can major in economics or be prelaw. But I don’t want to be a lawyer.”

“What do you want to be?”

Her question hit me hard, slamming against my chest so that it was difficult to catch my breath. It was such a simple question, but it suddenly felt cosmic and profound. “Do you know that you’re the first person in my life who has ever asked me that?”

“That’s . . . sad.”

It was. It was ridiculously sad. And I had a secret wish, one I’d never admitted aloud, something I wanted to be. A career that mattered, where I could change lives. I decided to say it, to see how it made me feel. “I want to be a teacher.”

“Really?” She smiled. “Me too. I’m majoring in math with an emphasis on teaching. I’m hoping to teach at the high school level.” She studied me carefully, as if forming an opinion. “A bunch of the girls in my sorority are majoring in elementary and secondary education. You should come over and meet with them.”

I’d always been grateful for whatever fates conspired for us to meet that night. I joined her sorority, and even though she was two years older than me, Shay became my best friend and closest confidant. She changed my life in so many ways, mainly by showing me that the things I wanted did matter and that I was strong enough to make my own choices. That it wasn’t normal for your parents to map out your entire life, not allowing you to have any say in it. She was always there for me, and I was grateful that her job kept her in Houston, nearby. It allowed us to stay close.

When I was applying to all the schools in the area after I’d completed my year of student teaching, she was the one who recommended me to the headmistress and helped me get my position. And she’d been kindly letting me sleep on her couch for the last three months.

Shay was the first person I wanted to tell about Tyler and the penthouse, but when I got back to her place, she’d left me a note saying she had a date. I tried to wait up for her, but I passed out before she got home and she had already left before I woke up the next day, which wasn’t surprising. She had her Mathletes practicing and drilling both before and after school. She intended for them to win nationals this year.

I probably could have texted her, but this was an in-person conversation. And I needed to have it soon. Talking things out with Shay made it so I could let them go and move on.

Delia Hawthorne was the other member of our triumvirate friendship. She and Shay had been first-year teachers together at Millstone and they’d instantly bonded. There had been a short period of time when I had been a little envious of their friendship, but once I started working at the academy as well, we became an inseparable trio.

Because of Shay’s early-morning plans, Delia picked me up to drive me to school. I’d attempted taking public transportation on a few occasions but it turned out that having zero sense of direction was a problem. I kept ending up in different cities. Not even Google Maps helped; I had no idea how far six hundred feet or a quarter mile actually was. Delia and Shay informed me that for purely selfish reasons they were going to arrange to drive me to and from school. “I mostly don’t want to drive to Oklahoma to pick you up the next time this happens,” Shay said.

It was their way of being my friends without making me feel like I was relying too heavily on their charitable hearts. Which was something I struggled with every day. How it was so important to me to be independent and able to strike out on my own without my family paying my way and here I was letting my friends pick up the slack. It was one of the many reasons I was looking forward to moving into Tyler’s place and getting my own car. I would start picking up my own slack.

Caught up in my own thoughts, it took me a minute to realize that Delia was doing her daily rant and I’d missed the first part. But since they were always the same, I knew I hadn’t missed much. “And then I told Mr. Ramon that studies have proved that scientists with artistic skill were more likely to win awards than those without. Einstein himself said that imagination was more important than knowledge when it comes to science. And where do these students get imagination? From art!”

Pretty much every car ride to school involved Delia getting upset about the advanced sciences teacher, Mr. Tristan Ramon, shading the art classes she taught. She was our resident flower child, a bohemian artist who had been born in the wrong era. Usually she was all about inner peace and tranquility and artistic expression, but something about the way the very cute Mr. Ramon teased her made her more than a little crazy.

Fortunately, not much was required from me during these diatribes. My job was to nod and to periodically comment about what a jerk and/or how stupid Mr. Ramon was (even though both Shay and I agreed he obviously had a crush on Delia and didn’t seem to understand that teasing her was not the way to her heart). Which left me with time to think about Tyler and moving in to his apartment.

Thoughts of Tyler and second-guessing whether I’d made the right choice had led to me being so distracted this morning during class that I hadn’t been able to focus properly on my kids. I finally gave in and showed them an educational movie. Which they were neither entertained nor, I suspected, educated by. I was pretty sure that a quarter of them had just fallen asleep.

I also had to put one of my students, Denny, in a chair next to my desk since he wouldn’t stop throwing wads of paper at the other students. The past two weeks he had been acting out behaviorally, which wasn’t like him. I wasn’t sure what I could do to help him get back on track since this was the first time I’d had to deal with a situation like this. I made a note on my desk to get in touch with his parents and to discuss it with Delia and Shay when I got the chance.