Chapter 5

Dammit! How could Catherine let things get so far!?

She had remained talking like a valley girl for a few hours after leaving Chad’s place. In that time, she had taken at least 10 selfies for Instagram, judged the appearance of everyone she passed, and had bought a few new outfits for her to wear for Rush week. She had thought it was weird that Sai was calling her “Catherine”, but that wasn’t what ultimately snapped her out of it. It was when she sat down to do her homework, having apparently forgotten that she had already done her homework yesterday before attempting her physics test.

Catherine thought back to her time with Chad. She found it hard to regret anything. In the previous reality, she had never even kissed a boy. Now, she had seen what she was missing out on, and she wasn’t eager to go back. Still, her mind was important to her. There was no reason she needed to leave behind all of her knowledge.

She looked at her partially completed practice test, and was worried. She could almost follow the logic of the five questions she had done the night before, but she didn’t even know where to start on the fifteen she hadn’t started. Not good.

She looked at the clock. It was 10 o’clock. If she was serious about keeping her mind, she would need to focus and finish. No distractions like yesterday. She’d probably also need to find someone to study with tomorrow, since there was no way to be sure about where her memories would be in one more day.

She reviewed the first five problems a few times until she was pretty sure she understood what she was doing, and then she set to work on the unfinished problems. She had to watch a few tutorials on Youtube, but she was slowly able to see what she needed to do. At least in theory. She got several wrong answers working the problems, but she kept reworking them until she got the right one.

Several times, she had to force herself not to take a break or get distracted by the latest news from her Facebook or Twitter feeds. It was 2 AM when she finally finished. She wanted to just go to sleep, but she forced herself to stay awake for one more hour, making a few contingencies to keep her in her Catherine mindset.

Kat’s alarm went off at 11 AM. It was muffled by her headphones, but she still managed to hear it. She hit snooze, and tried to go back to sleep, but she scrunched her face in confusion at the mp3 her phone was playing, apparently on repeat.

“You are Catherine. You hate going by Kat. You’re a physics student. You don’t speak like a valley girl. You are Catherine...”

Kat kept listening to it. It was in her voice, but why would she record something like that?

However, the more she listened the more the words seemed to ring true. Right. The wish. Her minor in physics. By the time her alarm went off again, she remembered exactly why she had recorded that message, and was happy that it had actually worked.

Today was Sunday. Her physics placement test was on Friday. If she she studied all day today, and was good about reviewing the rest of the week, she was pretty sure she could test out of at least one or two physics classes. She might not be able to get into “Principles of Electricity and Magnetism” like she wanted, but she had 25 credits left if she wanted to minor anyways so she could afford being a class or two behind her ideal.

She called up Jenny. “Hey, Jenny. This is Catherine. This is going to sound a bit strange, but would you be willing to study physics with me?”

Jenny seemed excited at the prospect of spending more time with someone as cool as Catherine.

They spent the entire day studying (save for one break that Jenny insisted on). Catherine had a few close calls where she found herself peppering her speech with “like”s, or wondering why she was giving an ugly girl like Jenny the time of day, but she managed to power through. When they finally finished Catherine collapsed into bed, feeling like she was only a little behind where she had been on Friday. She just had to keep it up five more days.

Catherine was happy that Chad’s schedule kept them separate on Monday-Wednesday-Friday, since he seemed to be a particular weakness of hers, and she was happy for anything that improved her odds of her keeping herself together until Friday.

She had half a mind to skip History of Western Fashion, since she was going to drop it anyways, but she decided between Prof. Baker’s “you must attend the first three classes” ultimatum, and her desire to report any more abuses that occurred when she finally dropped the class - that it was probably better if she just sucked it up and went.

Prof. Baker looked out at the class, which was a few students short of last time. Apparently she had managed to scare a few off with her actions. “Hello, class! Today we’re going to talk about the connection between fashion and philosophy. It was Aristotle who said that every virtue exists as the mean between two extremes. This model works very well for a spectrum like coward-brave-rash, but it notably fails when describing how beauty works in our society. It’s more like a horseshoe - skinny and curveless is attractive. Skinny and curvy dreadful. Fat with or without curves attractive again. Does anyone want to speculate as to why that might be the case?”

A few hands went up in the air. Prof. Baker didn’t call on anyone. “Those of you raising your hands are thinking about the wrong question. Does a peacock care why his tail is so beautiful? No, that question is one for scientists,” she hissed the word, “to ponder in their ivory towers. I’m sure they’ll come up with some evolutionary explanation to try and illuminate their sexless, boring lives. Don’t be like these people. Focus on the right questions. Be the peacock, beautiful and happy, not the inchworm, forever trying to find different ways to cut up and label reality.”

Prof. Baker began to talk about historical fashion trends in France, and Catherine found herself enraptured. It seemed that even in this world, Prof. Baker brought her passion into her teaching. Catherine was happy that no matter how much the world changed, some things seemed to stay the same. Maybe some of the side effects of her wish weren’t really so bad?

Catherine breezed through the rest of the day, and only had one slip up. During her Human Communication Theory class, she got a text from Chad a few minutes before class started and couldn’t pay attention the entire class. Instead she texted back and forth with Chad, thought about getting her nails done and wondered when this dumb class was going to be over. She only recovered an hour later when she saw one of the many phone reminders she had set up Saturday night. ‘Catherine! You’re a scientist, this is embarrassing.’

After her classes finished up, the first Rush week activities began. Rush week was a fairly competitive five night process at Catherine’s school. On the first night the potential new members (or PNMs) would attend parties at up to nine sororities of their choice. The second night onward were by invitation only, and would narrow their options down to seven sororities, then five, then two after which they either got into a sorority or not. It was possible for a girl not to get a bid from any sorority, but it was far more common for a girl to voluntarily drop out of the process when she didn’t see her first or second choice on her party list for the next night.