Chapter 14
Winter had settled in the Bay Area, leaving the air damp and chilly, but I had a spring in my step anyway, and for the life of me, I could not stop whistling. I loved the first day of a new semester. Fresh starts, fresh faces, nobody had yet to disappoint me with pedantic analyses or pathetic excuses about why they couldn’t get their papers in on time. Anything could happen on a first day, and the two classes I’d had that morning held more promise than any I’d had since I’d started working at Stanford.
Though some of them were strangers, I smiled and nodded at the people I passed, in too exuberant a mood to contain it. Some of them actually smiled back. Perhaps everybody was feeling it in the air today, that sense of anything is possible, that you could do no wrong, no matter
