He was close enough now that he either had to kiss me or bite my nose off. Abruptly he walked away and left us alone with the books.

I walked home in the dark through the freshman quad. The streetlamps were on, lighting each side of the path. I watched the leaves shake and fall in the wind and felt the chill in the air. I pulled my coat tighter. It was late; most of the windows of the dormitories were black.

I saw a woman walking toward me along the same path, carrying overstuffed grocery bags in each hand.

As we pa.s.sed, I let myself sneak a look at her face. I'll admit right here, I'm a hopeless romantic. Going to college in the small town where you grew up (and staying in your parents' house) isn't exactly a recipe for an active dating life. Maybe I hadn't admitted it to myself yet, but I think the idea of meeting someone incredible was a big part of the appeal of coming here.

I was surprised at how pretty she was. She wasn't striking, like Daphne with her red lips and black hair. She felt, I don't know, real, unlike so many of the students I saw who seemed to order their universes by resumes and transcripts.

She had soft brown eyes and brownish blond hair, and full lips that were more warm than sensual. She wore no makeup, and her hair was tied in a simple ponytail. Her coat was too bulky for the fall, and she had on green surgical scrubs underneath. She gave me the briefest glance as we pa.s.sed.

I know this sounds crazy, but I felt a connection when our eyes met. Like I said, hopeless romantic. I wanted to say something, but as the distance between us grew, everything I thought of sounded more and more absurd. What do you yell from twenty feet away: Hi? Stop? I love you?

I shook my head and kept walking.

Then fate intervened. I heard a crash, and the woman cried out. One of her grocery bags had split and oranges were rolling in every direction--down the hill, into bushes, past the statue of our n.o.ble founder.

"s.h.i.t," she cried, "s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t." She started trying to scoop them up, but her other bags were dropping and spilling as she scrambled in too many directions at once. I noticed her eyes were full of tears.

"Hey," I said. "Hey, it's okay. It's just groceries."

She shook her head and put her face in her hands.

"I can get your oranges back," I said, possibly the lamest courtship promise of all time. She began to cry in earnest.

"Are you okay?"

She wouldn't answer me. I didn't know what else to do, so I started picking up oranges.

After a while, she said, "I don't care about the stupid oranges."

"Oh."

Now I felt truly ridiculous.

"That came out wrong. Just, please, you don't have to do that."

"Good. Because some of your oranges are in the creek."

She laughed suddenly.

"Oh, G.o.d," she said, wiping her eyes. "You must think I'm crazy."

"No . . . no . . . you just seem like you're having a really bad day."

"More like a really bad year."

"Oh. I'm sorry." I sat down against a retaining wall a few feet away. "Are you a medical student?"

She shook her head and gave a small, unhappy laugh. "No. I'm a doctor, sort of. I graduated from medical school last year. I'm doing my internship now."

"What kind of a doctor are you?"

"No kind, really. I'm training in neurosurgery."

"That's amazing. I mean, isn't that the hardest program to get into? Especially here."

She looked at me like I'd slapped her across the face. Her eyes were fundamentally gentle, but there was something else there--a sort of self-reproach, as if the only anger she was capable of feeling was aimed at herself; and it was a righteous, intense anger.

"I shouldn't even be here."

Her eyes welled up again. I'm embarra.s.sed to admit it, but she'd become even prettier since she started crying. Her eyes were damp and bright, with gold flecks in the brown irises.

"I know how you feel. I think everybody feels that way. It's like, what am I doing here? How did I even get in? But we can't all be mistakes, right?"

Somehow, that was the wrong thing to say. Something in her expression broke when I said that.

"Look, I'm sorry," I said. "I'm saying all the wrong things."

She shook her head.

"No. It's not your fault. It's nice to talk to someone--especially someone new. I don't get out of the hospital much."

"It's really hard, huh?"

"Honestly? It's worse than I ever imagined. I barely sleep. I eat McDonald's three times a day, usually standing up. When I'm not in the hospital, I'm supposed to be reading. I have no friends, no life. I have too many patients, and they're always yelling at me for keeping them waiting . . ." She shook her head. "Sorry. I shouldn't just unload on a total stranger like that."

"It's okay," I said. "I don't get out of the library much. It's nice to talk to an actual person."

She nodded.

"My dad's a businessman," she said. "He works all the time. I barely saw him growing up. Now he's rich and powerful, but he's not happy. He's angry all the time. What's the point of that?"

"I don't know. My dad's a teacher, and he spends all his time wishing he was big and important like your dad."

"Wow, you're really good at cheering people up."

She smiled for the first time. I laughed.

"Yeah, I guess that wasn't what you wanted to hear."

We were quiet for a while. I noticed we were totally alone. The path was deserted, and it was getting colder by the minute. The silence was almost absolute, except for the occasional rush of the wind through the leaves.

"Listen, I know it's none of my business, but if you want to talk about anything . . ." I was aiming for heroic rather than nosy, and I probably came down somewhere in between. "Like you said, I'm a total stranger. Anything you say is pretty much anonymous."

She looked at me for a minute. It was a curious expression, like she was sizing me up and weighing her options. Was I trustworthy? Could I ease her mind? I guess she decided it was worth a shot, since after a little pause she shrugged, more to herself than to me. She closed her eyes and seemed to focus her thoughts.

"When I said I shouldn't be here . . . I really shouldn't be here. I don't deserve to be here."

She took a deep breath and looked me straight in the eye.

"I'm only here because of my dad."

She sighed and leaned back against the wall. "I've never said that out loud before." She laughed. "I think about it a lot, though."

She smiled at me with those full lips, and her cheeks looked rosy and warm, even out here in the cold.

"I always wanted to be a neurosurgeon. I'm not even sure why. I've been saying it since I was a little kid. I think when I was in elementary school, I said it once and saw how people reacted. I guess they thought it was amazing that I even knew the word. School was easy for me. I got straight A's. College was easy too. Chemistry, biology, I could learn them in no time. Neurosurgery was the best, the hardest, so I knew that's what I was going to do. I never imagined anything else.

"But medical school . . . all of a sudden, everything was different. Nothing came easy anymore. It was like trying to memorize the phone book. I was drowning. I kept my grades up, kept telling everyone I was going to be a neurosurgeon. On the outside, I was fine, but . . ." She paused. "I felt like I was in a fog. One night I called my dad from a pay phone so no one would hear me. I was crying. I said, 'Do you want me to make straight A's?' He was just sarcastic. He said, 'No, I want you to make C's.' I failed every cla.s.s that semester." She looked down. "A breakdown like that . . . Do you know how many spots there are for neurosurgeons? There's two of us in my intern cla.s.s. Thirty total in the country. I was finished."

She trailed off, shrugged.

"But . . ."

"My dad worked it out with the school. They wrote it off as a research semester on my transcript. I slept late, worked out, did some easy lab work a couple of hours a day. I took the tests again and got straight A's. They backdated the grades. My F's just kind of . . . disappeared." She looked right at me. "I'm sure there's some nice new building on campus with our name on it."

I let it all sink in.

"You asked him to do this?" My question came out more judgmental than I meant it to.

She shook her head. "No. But I went with it. I didn't say no." She sighed. "So you see, you feel like a mistake. But I know I am."

We walked toward her apartment without talking. It was well past midnight, and even in this academic hamlet, it wasn't safe for women to walk alone along the river at night.

I thought about her story. I guess I knew things like that happened, but to hear it for sure . . . it's the kind of stuff that makes schools like this an impossible dream for people like me. And yet I couldn't shake the feeling I got from her. Her eyes were kind and playful at the same time; they looked right at you, as if you were the most important person in the world. I couldn't think of anyone I'd rather have leaning over my hospital bed, telling me everything was going to be all right. Or was I just going easy on her because she was pretty?

Finally, I said, "I think you're too hard on yourself. In the end, you took those tests. You made those A's."

"My transcript is a lie."

"I'm not denying that. And I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying you can't torture yourself like this. It's not good for you. It won't help your patients."

She smiled, but she didn't look convinced.

"Do you have any hobbies?" I asked.

"What?"

She looked at me like I was crazy.

"Hobbies," I repeated. "Things you do for fun. When you're not beating yourself up."

She thought about it for a second.

"I like opera."

"Really? I've never even heard an opera."

"Well, I haven't been in years, since I stopped letting my dad pay for things. Now it's too expensive. But I have my CDs."

She smiled genuinely for the first time that night, then she caught herself.

"So," she said, stopping and looking right at me. "What should I do?"

"I really don't know."

"I could use some friendly advice."

"What would happen if you came clean?"

"They'd fire me. I'd never get another job in medicine."

"And if you didn't? Like I said, you made those A's in the end. Can you make peace with yourself?"

"I don't know. Could you?"

"The truth is, it would be pretty easy for me to tell you to do the right thing. It's not my career. It's not my dream at stake. I don't know what I'd really do if I were you."

We reached her stoop.

"This is it," she said.

We were standing below a brownstone with a short staircase up to her door.

"Are you going to be okay?"

"Yeah. It felt good just to say it out loud. That's a start, right? I just need some sleep. A shower, go for a run maybe."

I looked at her pretty face, her warm smile. I didn't like what she had done (or had let happen), but she was so kind, so gentle. I wanted her to stop hurting all the same.

"Some first date," she said.

I hesitated, then took a shot.

"Can I see you again?"

She studied my face. For a second, I thought she was going to say yes.

"What would we do?" she asked, smiling. "See a movie? Grab some pizza? I think tonight kind of exists in its own universe. Total strangers. Moonlight confessions. Isn't that what you said?"

"I guess so."

"We have a secret," she said, holding out her hand.

"We do," I said.

She squeezed my hand, and I felt it through my entire body.