Read Online Tap & Gown by Diana Peterfreund - Free Book Online Page A

exotic mixture of Cuban, Polish, and Hawaiian—tall, big-boned, with huge dark eyes she kept ringed with kohl, and pouty pink lips. Her hair was pulled back in a tight, ballerina-style pony-tail, and she was dressed in a cream-colored skirt suit with a taupe shell that only made her golden skin seem more luminous.
    I looked down at my yellow Converse All Stars. Yeah, we had so much in common.
    “Kalani, right?” I asked. She looked up from her book and I caught a peek at the title. War and Peace .
    Bingo. “I think we’ve got the Russian Novel class together. I’m Amy Haskel.”
    “Hi,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ve seen you there.”
    Probably because I took the class last spring. Aced my final, too, thanks to Rose & Grave’s backlog of exam questions. “It’s a big lecture.” I invited myself into the seat beside her. “I guess almost everyone takes it at one time or another.”
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    “I really wanted the Nabokov seminar,” she said, “but it was full again this year.”
    “I’m in that, too,” I said. “I love it. Definitely try again next year.” Maybe this would work out. We both loved to read, we were taking a lot of the same classes (or wanted to). “Are you a Lit major?” I asked.
    “History and Music,” she replied. “I know, you think it’s strange. Like I should be a Lit major just because I work for the paper.”
    “You work for the paper?” I asked innocently, eyes wide, and she laughed.
    “God, I sound awful,” she looked down in her coffee.
    And obligingly forthcoming. I smiled. “Nah. I know who you are.” And it wasn’t that awful. Everyone in school read the EDN We knew who was in charge. “Tell me about Music and History.”
    “I think History, especially modern history, might even be better for me if I want to be with a newspaper after graduation.”
    “Do you want to be with a paper after graduation?”
    “Yes and no.” She eyed me. “You’re a Lit major?”
    “Yes.”
    “But you didn’t work for any of the campus publications.”
    “I was the editor of the Lit Mag,” I replied.
    “Oh.” Her face said she’d meant real publications. There’s a reason hardly any magazine publishes short fiction anymore. “Well, what I mean is that in the old days, if you wanted to be a reporter, you worked a beat at some small local paper, moved up, moved to a bigger paper, moved up, et cetera. Now it’s all about getting your MFA and then interning at the New York Times.”
    She sounded as conflicted as I did, which, ironically was better and better for my purposes. “Which would you rather?”
    “Well, the beat reporter gig is cheaper,” she said with a laugh.
    “But the New York Times is nice.” I sipped at my coffee.
    Kalani stared into hers. “I think what I’d really like to do is write books.”
    At that, I froze. I’d made an attempt at a novel, back in the day. Rose & Grave had found it on my computer and waved a copy of its pathetic pages in my face. “Fiction?” I croaked out, cool as the coffee in my fist.
    “Oh, no!” She made a face. “Nonfiction. High-concept. My literary agent is shopping around a few proposals right now.”
    Her. Literary. Agent. “Oh.” Probably the one for whom I’d be making photocopies next year. I pictured taking Kalani’s calls and confirming her booking on the Today show.
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    “It’s social history type of stuff. I’ve written a few ‘this is how our generation feels about XYZ’ pieces for Marie Claire and Salon , so it’s sort of an expansion of that.” She hunched her shoulders. “Boring, right? Tell me more about the Nabokov class. Promise me I’ll like it better than War and Peace.”
    So I couldn’t hate her. I could be jealous through the whole conversation and all the way back to my dorm room and as I pounded away at my thesis and as I waited for the phone to ring about any of my applications or future plans, but I couldn’t actually dislike her for any of it. She had worked