Chapter 4

Chapter 4

To silence any second thoughts, I opened my laptop right there on FaceTime with Maya.

Without hesitation, moments before the midnight deadline, I logged into the Common App portal and changed my acceptance from Columbia to Stanford. The cursor hovered over the “Confirm Change” button for just a second before I clicked, watching my future transform with a single mouse click.

me since junior year to join her

year, Aiden and I had made a promise over late–night study sessions and shared dreams. We’d work hard, ace our SATS, and head to Columbia together. The aerospace engineering program there had been his dream since the day his dad took him

were twelve.

never loved the idea of harsh New York winters or felt particularly drawn to Columbia’s engineering focus, I’d spent three years of high school making it my goal. Every AP class, every SAT prep session, every extracurricular -all carefully chosen to match

dinners, talking about how nice it would be to have both of us at Columbia, casually mentioning all her friends whose children had found their soulmates during freshman orientation.

Columbia anymore. The thought of walking those same campus paths with him, sharing classes, running into him and Madison at the library or campus coffee shops – it made me physically ill. Or rather, after today, if I kept trailing after Aiden like his faithful shadow, I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in

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