Tap & Gown by Diana Peterfreund

class graduate without me—Lydia and my other friends, all gone.
    She shrugged. “It might be if I were still living on campus. I don’t notice so much now that I’m not living in Strathmore anymore.”
    No wonder I’d never met her. Of the twelve residential colleges on campus, only Strathmore and Christopher Bright had freshmen living within their walls. Freshmen from the other ten, including my Prescott, lived together on Old Campus and only moved into our residential colleges sophomore year. Eli administrators claimed the strategy helped us make friends outside our colleges. Strathmore residents, by contrast, tended to be more insular. If there was someone I didn’t at least know of in my class, they probably belonged to Strathmore or Christopher Bright Colleges. The fact that Jamie had been in Strathmore during undergrad probably didn’t do much for his natural isolationist tendencies.
    At the top floor, Michelle stepped out into the dining room and scanned the seating area. “Okay, let’s eat here.”
    As if there was anyplace else to sit? I followed her to the buffet line and grabbed a tray.
    “As it is,” she said, spearing a rice-and-tomato-stuffed bell pepper and adding it to her plate, “I don’t really see a lot of my old Strathmore friends much. I’m mostly up here with grad students and other scientists.”
    I grabbed a pepper stuffed with ground beef and slid my tray alongside hers. “I think the community I’ve got in Prescott is one of the things I’ll miss most when I graduate.” Well, that and the community of Rose
    & Grave. But if I accepted Jenny’s offer, I wouldn’t really be leaving them, would I?
    “Must be nice,” she said, and with her face turned away toward the frozen yogurt machine like that, I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or bitter. Not everyone at Eli was as attached to their college as I was to Prescott. I knew several students who had even transferred colleges to be closer to their department of study, their significant others, or, in some cases, the gym. But Strathmore and Christopher Bright residents tended to be more into it than others, as a result of their early bonding experiences.
    As we sat down, I took a quick survey of her plate. Meatless. “Are you a vegetarian?”
    She nodded. “Vegan. That’s not going to be a problem, is it?”
    I laughed. “I guess I’m beginning to notice stuff like that more often now. My boyfriend is a vegetarian.”
    “And he hasn’t managed to convert you yet?”
    “Nope. We still haven’t decided how to raise the kids, either.” I took a big bite of beef-stuffed pepper and pondered if Jamie would find that joke amusing or not. I mean, kids?
    “Meat scares me these days. The hormones, the chemicals, deforestation and resource allocation—and then there’s the possibility of widespread quality control issues. The danger of mad cow makes hamburger decidedly less appetizing.”
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    I swallowed with some difficulty. “You’re a real killjoy Michelle.”
    “Wait until you hear me get into my spiel about ozone depletion and skin cancer.”
    Proving she wasn’t remotely kidding, my Geology T.A. proceeded to scare the crap out of me for the next twenty minutes. The world, in her opinion, was on the verge of coming to an end, thanks to rampant consumerism and industry and pollution by, well, us. Oil was running out, not that we were doing anything about it, soil erosion and depletion were at an all-time high, the global effects of climate change were and would continue to be catastrophic to food production, wild spaces, and of course, there was that pesky severe weather, of which we could only expect more as the global climate became increasingly warmer and more unstable, atmospherically speaking. Super-storms, super-floods—and that was just from the sky. Related to nothing we’d caused (for once) we really needed to rethink the wisdom of building enormous cities on top of fault lines (hello, Los