Parallel

spent her weekends working in an astrophysics lab at Georgia Tech (the chair of the department is an old friend of her dad’s), helping grad students with their research and doing some of her own. Our classmates at Brookside weren’t sure what to make of her. I’m guessing she blends in a little better with the Ivy League crowd. Not that Caitlin cares about blending in. She never has. At Brookside, she and I sort of floated on the periphery of the popular group. The social hierarchy was a little warped because of the magnet school thing—athletes generally dominated the scene, but if you were a science track or drama kid with above-average looks and decent social skills, you had mainstream cachet. So the “cool” crowd was a fairly eclectic mix of kids from each track. Caitlin and I were part of that crowd, but since we hung out with the golf team instead of football players and sometimes skipped parties to do homework, we weren’t social royalty.
    “The best part is, Yale doesn’t have course requirements,” Caitlin is saying, “so I can basically take whatever I want. Today I shopped Statistical Thermodynamics and Intro to Relativistic Astrophysics, both of which were awesome. I’d love to take them both, but they overlap by fifteen minutes. Plus, IRA has a prereq . . . which I could probably get them to waive . . . but I dunno. I think I’m leaning toward Thermo.”
    Only Caitlin would be this excited about classes with names like “Statistical Thermodynamics” and “Relativistic Astrophysics.” I mean, seriously. What do those words even mean?
    “Although it’s not like I have to make a decision today,” she adds, finally pausing for a breath. “I have till the end of the week to decide.”
    “Didn’t classes start last week?”
    “Yeah, but we get two weeks to finalize our schedules,” Caitlin explains. “They call it shopping period. You can visit any class you want, and your schedule isn’t final until it’s over. Did I mention how much I love this place?” As if there were any doubt; Caitlin has wanted to go to Yale since elementary school.
    “Life should have a shopping period,” I muse. “It’d keep people from getting stuck with life-altering decisions they didn’t really want to make.”
    “Ab—”
    “How are things with Tyler?” I ask, steering the conversation toward happier ground. Three weeks ago, our best guy friend stood up on a chair at a packed party and proclaimed his love for Caitlin, call-and-answer-style (I’m not exactly clear on the mechanics, but apparently, there were some cheerleaders at the party who assisted with the effort). With my being gone for the summer, Caitlin and Tyler had spent nearly every day together. She had to have known how Tyler felt about her, but Caitlin says she was too busy pretending things hadn’t changed to see how much they had. To be fair, I don’t think Caitlin was quite as shocked by the big announcement as Ilana was. I’m not sure which shocked her more—that I stole her part or that Caitlin stole her boyfriend.
    After waiting four days to go on their first date (Caitlin wanted there to be a “respectable gap” between the end of Tyler’s relationship with Ilana and the beginning of his relationship with her, plus, although she’d never tell Tyler this, she was totally weirded out by the idea of kissing him, an issue Tyler resolved three minutes into their first date when he parked his mom’s minivan on the gravel part of Kent Road and pulled Caitlin into the backseat), my two best friends proceeded to have a seventeen-day, completely intense fling.
    They were inseparable until they both left for school, Caitlin to Yale and Tyler to Michigan, without ever defining the relationship. Caitlin is refusing to call him her boyfriend, despite the fact that they talk on the phone every night and aren’t seeing other people. Tyler, on the other hand, is using the G word and the L word every chance he gets. Playing it cool is apparently not in Tyler’s game plan for this particular relationship. Last night, he left me a two-minute-and-forty-six-second voicemail in which he belted out the lyrics to a Caitlin-inspired rendition of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.”
    “Things with Ty are good,” Caitlin says. “He wants to come visit at the end of the month, but I told him that’s too early . . . it’s too early, right?”
    Before I can answer, there’s a loud knock at my door. I peer through the peephole, expecting