Erin giggled and held out the joint. James, waved a declining hand as he passed through the wreath of smoke, sitting in the window seat on the other side of the room and tipping his Budweiser.

            “Aw come on man, you’re fuckin’ up the rotation!” Harold shouted. James didn’t even bother to address his class clown friend.

            “Hi I’m Jeanine, a dark haired girl said sitting down.

James smiled, ignoring Harold’s shouts of “Puff, puff pass!”

“James,” he said. She took his hand and shook it softly the way women sometimes do, the ice in her drink clinking softly. She smiled back at him and he noticed tiny sparkles in her blue eyes.

An awkward silence followed and then she said, “I guess you guys are out of here, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” and even though he’d known for days and months and years, even though he’d known since the day he arrived at this school that this day would eventually come it hurt to actually say it, to acknowledge that it was over and face the reality of figuring out what on earth he was going to do with his life now. Would he find himself doomed to a cubicle, chained to a desk? Would he marry and have children, would they have his eyes or his mother’s. And who on earth would there mother be? She was saying something about how she envied him, this Jeanine. How she’d be glad when the classes and lectures and papers were over and he could remember feeling like that, perhaps even saying those exact words. He knew now he wrong he was then. But there’s no explaining something like that, so he smiled at her, and nodded politely and when she put her hand on his it was warm and soft but it chilled him a little to know that she was here for 2 more years and his time was over and whatever rare and wonderful flower might bloom between them, no matter how bright and luminous, no matter how fragrant, would be dead by dawn in the wan light and the gray mane of the crisp cool breeze, of the distant horizon that he would set sail into, in a silver station wagon that could hold all his worldly possessions and would carry him home and beyond to whatever future life might hold for him after. And then she was pulling him away by the hand, this girl he’d just met, and he followed her because she was a girl and he was a boy and because her lithe form was casting shadows in his subconscious of other women that he’d loved, and of the kinder gentler days of his second year at school when things finally came into full swing but the classes had not yet started to grind out the hours of his day. She wore tight jeans, and had a dancer’s legs, and her hair flowed down her back and shimmered as they passed the light of one hallway and then another. She pulled him into a room and kissed him in the darkness and he tried to forget about everything, tried to lose himself in the moment.

“I’ve had a crush on you for like, the past year and a half,” she said. And he wondered how because he thought he didn’t even know her until she recounted a seven degree, friend of friend chain which linked the two of them in the most tenuous way. Then he vaguely remembered the party where they’d met, in passing, and he didn’t tell her that he’d barely noticed her that night because he was so in love with Sarah at that time that he scarcely looked at other women. She kissed him with a mixture of innocent curiosity and drunken ardor and he wondered if it was right as he took her in his arms. Something about the fact that he’d graduated made the nominal two year difference in their ages seem larger, and even though he knew that she knew he’d be gone soon, even though he suspected that was part of his allure to her, the fact that he wouldn’t and couldn’t tell tales out of school, he wondered how he’d feel in the morning, having to disengage so suddenly and finding himself thousands of miles away by this time tomorrow night. But then she kissed him on the neck and none of that seemed to matter. And all his thoughts fell away with his clothes, and then in the darkness it was just the two of them in that moment, and he was a man and she was a woman and there were stronger, deeper forces at work than thought and will and right and wrong. He felt her shiver, and heard her sigh and he sank then, into bliss, and for a few moments of blessed relief the constant prattle of his mind ceased and gave way to something purer and simpler.