You’re angry.

You’re angry because you just realized you forgot to turn in an assignment on Blackboard, and what a great start to your Friday morning. You had it written down, you swear to God, and now your quiz average is shot, and what the frick?

But while you’re walking past the science building, by pure chance, you pass by your suitemate, and she sees your face, snapping angrily out from underneath the drip-drip-drop of your umbrella, and she asks you if you want to go out to dinner tonight.

You’re miserable.

You’re miserable because Jacob was supposed to text you back today, and he didn’t, and you’re thinking you shouldn’t be all that surprised, because why should he? You’re nothing special, you’re plain, and he’s not looking for plain, because who would lower themselves to that standard when he doesn’t have to?

You’re thrown haphazardly over the couch, and your cell phone buzzes from across the room from where it landed when you threw it. When you drag yourself over to pick it up, it’s not a text, it’s your friend Becca, your BFF from home, and she wants to know if she can come up to visit tomorrow with some Scotch tape to mend that broken heart.

You’re crying.

You’re crying because your mom just called, out of the blue, 20 minutes before your history exam, to tell you your cat died, and you’re wondering how in the world you’re supposed to be able to focus now. What was she thinking?

And you’re trying to decide what you’re going to tell Annie when she calls you. What are you going to tell her when she gives her big sister a ring and wants you to make her feel better because she’s seven, and seven-year-olds can’t seem to handle anything.

And you’re absolutely positive your mind’s going to go blank the minute the exam’s in front of you, even though all the facts are running around in your head right now, a frenetic jumble you can’t even begin to imagine sorting through. But your mom texts you right as the professor’s walking through the door, just says, hang in there.

You feel like you’re having an out-of-body experience.

You feel like you’re having an out-of-body experience because you can’t really feel anything, and you can’t really feel anything because it’s an hour before your graduation, and your parents’ car broke down, and they’re not going to be able to make it, and they’re the only people that matter.

They’re the only people that have mattered since you left home four years earlier, thinking you were going to ditch that life and start a new one, only it took you about 30 minutes before you realized that that life wasn’t something you could afford to ditch.

And you know what they’ll say when you see them. You know that they’ll say it doesn’t matter, that they were there even when they weren’t, that they’re so, so proud of you, but it doesn’t matter because that blown tire blew out the most important moment of your life.

But Becca sneaks backstage with you, and she’s holding your hand and reminding you that someone’s there to do that. “Get it together,” she says, and she forces you to smile. “Or you’re gonna wash out the whole freaking ceremony.”

You’re heartbroken.

You’re heartbroken because you and Denis finally got the call, and it wasn’t the call you were supposed to get, not now, not ever. They were supposed to give you the all-clear. They were supposed to tell you that everything was fine, that everything was going to be fine, that there wasn’t going to a speed bump like this, not in your lives.

“I know,” Denis says, “I know, and it is going to be OK. It’s going to be OK. We can still adopt.” And he entertains the both of you by proposing exotic names for the one-day baby to please his frosty old Austrian dad.

You’re lost.

You’re lost because you’re down at the beach, and you know that Annie’s miles away in the hospital with a tube up her nose, and Abigail, whose only just turned four, is twirling around and around in the sand, and it all makes so little sense that you can’t take it.

You don’t know what you’ll do if you lose her. You don’t what you’ll do when you lose her. You have to start thinking that way, you have to be realistic. But while you’re lost, there at the beach, down by the shore, Abigail trots up behind you and says, “Mommy, I made a sand angel!”

And she forces you to smile.