Page 6 of Fortuity

I clutched the envelope to my chest. “Nah! Maybe we’d better leave thatpartout.”

“Since you accepted that so well, I might as well give you this now too,” she mumbled, leaning down again to pull another envelope out of her bag and holding it out to me. “This should cover theapplicationfees.”

Taking it from her, I peered inside and found a prepaid debit card. “You shouldn’t have done that. Can’t you get in trouble or something since you’re mycaseworker?”

“It’s not from me.” She jerked her chin towards the closed door. “You have a lot of people around here who are rootingforyou.”

Accepting money from Sarah would have been bad enough, but taking it from the people who’d saved my life? No way. “Icouldn’t—”

“You can, and you will,” she insisted. “I might have been able to get the application fees waived, but with the super tight timeline I’m not sure we have enough time to make it happen. All it took was one brief mention of that concern to your doctor when I asked him if you’d be healthy enough to enroll for the Fall term a few days ago, and one of the nurses handed me that debit card when I got here today. With a huge smile on herface,too.”

“Crap,” I mumbled. “I’m going to have to accept it,aren’tI?”

“That depends on two things.” She sat back, crossed her arms over her chest, and stretched her legs out. “Would it bother you to disappoint everyone who threw in to give you that card? And how badly do you want to go tocollege?”

The answer to the second question was easy. “Now that I’ve got a new kidney, a college degree is at the top of the list of things I want.” The first question was a little trickier. I’d grown accustomed to not letting other people’s feelings matter much to me because mine didn’t seem to factor into anyone’s decisions but my own. But the nurses and doctors had taken good care of me while I’d been in the hospital. They’d done everything they could to save my life. And they’d been kind to me—even before they’d pulled the money together for me to be able to apply to college. Throwing their generosity back into their faces felt wrong, and I’d made myself a promise a week ago to not let my second chance go to waste. Part of that was doing the right thing whenever possible. “And no, I don’t want todisappointthem.”

She beamed a smile my way. “Well, then I guess you have some work to do before they come to transport you to the rehabfacility.”

“I guessIdo.”

She got up and walked to the door, turning towards me before she opened it. “If you run into any problems, give me a call. I’ve helped my fair share of kids fill those things out, so I’m a bit of anexpert.”

“Willdo.”

It wasn’t long before I discovered that filling out college applications was a major pain in the ass. I took Sarah up on her offer and called a few times over the next two weeks. She helped, just like she’d said she would. And she also got me back into the same foster home when I was discharged from the rehab facility. Things were good there, and then they got evenbetter.

My conversation with Sarah that day changed my life—to the point that I almost couldn’t believe it was the one I was living. All that studying I had done when I thought I was going to die really paid off when I got accepted into two different state schools. One was in my hometown; the other about three hundred miles away. Since Sarah and the transplant center were in town, I opted to go to the school closertohome.

Sarah was able to line up the tuition waiver and stipend for me, and the days flew by as I marked item after item off my list of things to do. Before I knew it, I was walking across campus for my first day of classes and the excitement was almost overwhelming. I never thought in a million years that I would be able to go to college. Not back when my mom was alive, or when I was living in foster care, and certainly not when I was in the hospital. Yet there I was, a college freshman. Not only had I been given a second chance at life, I’d been handed an amazing opportunity. One that I would do my best tohonor.

Luckily, I was used to living with a bunch of strangers, so I was expecting the transition to dorm life to be easier for me than most of the other students. I even sort of had a small support system since there were nine other kids from the foster system enrolled as incoming freshmen. Sarah had even talked the school into pairing me up with one of the other girls as my roommate. As I watched groups of girls giggle and hug while I trudged to the dorm with the textbooks I’d just grabbed at the campus bookstore, I was doubly glad to be matched with someone closer to my own background because I knew I wouldn’t ever be able to be as carefree as they were. I just needed to remember that I was happier now than I ever had been before inmylife.

My gaze drifted away from the nearest group of girls while I was giving myself a pep talk and landed on a bunch of boys playing football in the quad, the grassy area surrounded by dorms on all sides. I wished I didn’t have to walk across it to get to the academic side of campus, but it was what it was I guessed. The guys had divided into two teams, half of them kept their shirts on and the others had gone without. I faltered a bit in my step as my eyes landed on a guy I really wished had been picked to goshirtless.

He ran across the grass to join his team in a huddle. My gaze trailed up his body to take in the dark brown hair which needed a trim, laughing brown eyes, and dimple showing in his cheek. If I had to guess, I’d say he hadn’t shaved in a couple days, and the look really worked for him. When he leaned into the huddle, my eyes landed on his ass and I almost groaned out loud. He really was the epitome of tall, dark, andhandsome.

Even though I wasn’t in the market for a boyfriend, I was tempted to stop and watch them play. Then I heard the group of girls I’d noticed earlier as they whispered about the boys, and I realized it wouldn’t matter anyway. My long, dark hair was pulled up in a ponytail, and I didn’t even have any mascara on the lashes of my brown eyes. Glancing down at my tattered jeans, flip-flops, and T-shirt, I knew I didn’t compare favorably to the rest of the girls who were dressed in short skirts or shorts and tight shirts that showed off a lot of tanned skin and toned muscle. There wasn’t a chance in hell I’d be caught dead in anything that showed my legs right now because I still needed to gain back a lot of the weight I’d lost, and I needed to stay out of the sun so there was no tanningforme.

I regretfully tore my gaze away from the football hottie and continued on my way to my dorm, redirecting my focus to what was truly important for me right now—school. I didn’t want to worry about the things I didn’t have. Instead, I wanted to focus on what I could do with this chance. There was a family out there who suffered a terrible loss from which I benefited. I refused to let them down—not for anything oranyone.

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