Chapter 1

Ring... Ring... Ring... "Hello?"

"Hi mom! How's it going?"

"Aha! My long lost daughter returns. It's been a full week! You never called, you never wrote, you never e-mailed. Three weeks away at college, and already you're starting to forget your poor mother?"

"Ha! I love you too mom. It has been seven days since I called you last Friday, hasn't it? This week has really flown by."

"Is everything okay?"

"Everything is great! The Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins is everything I dreamed it would be, and last Friday I met a really wonderful boy at a mixer and we've been spending quite a bit of time together. I've become very good friends with my roommate Susan and my other suitemates at Wolman, and I've even gotten used to the traffic on St. Paul and North Charles. I love my classes! The premed program has really turned into quite a challenge and I love it. No one is teasing me anymore about studying too hard or calling me nicknames like The Brain. I just feel surrounded by really smart people, people with the same thirst for knowledge that I have. I feel like I've found a home."

"Rebecca, are you trying to torture me? Tell me more about this boy you're spending all this time with."

"Oh. Well, we met just a week ago. He's majoring in Applied Math, taking a lot of advanced classes. Spends a lot of time in Kreiger, that's in the center of the campus by the upper quad. He's a wonderfully gentle and talented person, super smart. He plays the guitar. We've talked a bit about teaming up with my violin and jamming together. He has a mixed East European ancestry, just like me. Let see, what else? Oh, he's a fabulous chef, international hotel quality, no fooling. You should taste what he can do with a fresh salmon or chicken, something to die for. And he's an alchemist with duck liver, turns it into pure gold. He's been cooking me dinners in his apartment for most of this week. I'm up here now waiting for him. He's out getting groceries."

"What? You're alone in his apartment? How did you get in?"

"Oh, he gave me a copy of his key a few days ago."

"What!? Rebecca, this does not sound good. Is he an older man? And you haven't even told me his name!"

"He and I are almost exactly the same age, we both turned 18 two months ago. His name is Robert."

"Robert? Is he Jewish?"

"Well, no. Christian. But he does worship, just like me. We've talked about our faiths with each other. We're actually very close to each other in spiritual beliefs..."

"Rebecca my daughter... Wouldn't you be better off waiting to meet some nice Jewish boy, someone like Seth?"

"Oh mom... Seth was never interested in me. He was just looking for a female body to get sexy with while he was between girlfriends. My senior prom night was a disaster. I've never felt so embarrassed..."

"Rebecca, what I'm trying to say is that you have almost no experience with dating, and within a week of meeting some strange man, you're living in his apartment! If this man is only 18, how come he's not living on campus? Are his parents rich?"

"Mother, I am not living in his apartment! And Robert doesn't have any parents. Both his parents were killed in a car crash when he was an infant."

"Oh, I am sorry. But then I mean his adopted parents."

"He was never adopted, I don't think. Or if he was, it didn't last. He's opened up a little bit about this with me, but we probably have a whole lot more to talk about. He was bounced around in dozens of different foster homes growing up, spent the last two years in independent living before finally aging out of the system in July."

"Yikes, worse and worse!"

"Mom, Robert is a wonderful human being and I really, really like him. It's too bad dad isn't still alive, I'm sure they would have gotten along great... I'd love for you to meet him some time. You'll see how nice he is."

"So I can listen to him play rock guitar?"

"Oh mother, please stop! And I never said rock guitar, though he does have a banjo and plays a little bluegrass. He's mostly into Spanish guitar. Yesterday when I came here he was in the middle of Sor's Allegro from Sonata, Opus 22, just playing it from memory. For the next five minutes, I was in heaven."