Chapter 9: Senior Year – Crossroads and Commitments

Senior year opened like a gale-force wind whipping through their lives—hair and papers torn loose, the drop beneath them hidden by swirling fog. Every morning felt like teetering on the brink of something enormous and terrifying.

Their two-bedroom apartment had mutated into a command center. Neon highlighter streaks carved up every wall: Jordan’s MCAT calendar, each practice exam circled in purple or green, stared down from a corkboard beside Nawana’s foam-core panels blossoming with charcoal sketches, translucent color swatches pinned over digital storyboards for her capstone exhibit. The bookshelves groaned beneath the weight of MCAT prep tomes—Kaplan Biochemistry, Princeton Review Physics—and binders so thick they threatened to buckle the shelves. On the red velvet couch—its center cushion sunken like a crater—laptops teetered on knees, takeout trays and empty energy-drink cans lay in haphazard barricades. Fairy lights mingled with dangling Edison bulbs overhead, their soft glow refusing to surrender to the encroaching dusk or the heaviness pressing in around every deadline.

Jordan’s world had contracted to a pinpoint of anxiety: MCAT passages, med-school essays, the future balanced on one tiny score. She left the apartment at 6 a.m. each day, backpack slung over one shoulder, coffee-stained handouts tucked under her arm. At the review center, her pen scratched furiously across pages of chemical equations, her knuckles white whenever a tutor lobbed a trick question. Mock interviews in a glass-walled seminar room left her voice quavering, smile pinned too tightly, hands shaking as they veered around a wooden table. Nights found her hunched over the kitchen island, red pen in hand, erasing and reworking her personal statement until the words blurred into indecipherable loops. She laughed less often; when they kissed, her mind flickered ahead to cadaver labs and white-coated attendings.

Across the hallway, Nawana poured herself into Roots Reimagined, her senior capstone. She crouched under bright studio lamps, brush in one hand, stylus in the other—fingers smudged with oil paint and ink. She programmed interactive projections, watched animations loop on a cracked monitor, and tested motion sensors that triggered Cherokee stories she’d recorded in her grandmother’s living room. Professors stopped by to hover over her spread of printouts and clay reliefs, whispering praise; a gallery curator’s card rested on her drafting table, edges dog-eared from hopeful fingers. Every late-night breakthrough—when a shadow puppet danced just right or a color gradient glowed true—sent a thrill through her chest.