"Project Perfect" Chapter 1

There was just something about the first day of college that always got Cathy pumped up. Even thinking about it just made her stomach flitter. Although she was a loner by nature, that did not make her any less of a human- she still craved human interaction-and college was her drug. Somehow, she got what she needed from it, even though she shyly avoided all contact with the other students in the school.
SUNY Brockport was by no means a large campus, however, after attending a high school with a graduating class of less than two hundred, followed by a three building community college, Brockport seemed the size of a small city. In fact, even in her second year there, she had yet to set foot on probably more than half of the campus grounds. Hell, she even still got lost in the places that she had been before.
Because of her lack of knowledge concerning direction, Cathy found it incredibly helpful to show up on campus the day before classes started in order to map out the easiest routes concerning her schedule. There was almost nothing more embarrassing to her than showing up late to class because she had gotten lost.
This is what she was doing when she first noticed the girl. There was nothing about her that should have caught Cathy's eye, but she noticed her nonetheless. Really, nothing on the girl even stood out. She had chocolate brown skin and very short, natural jet black hair. Her skirt was made of denim and fell to her feet, resting on top of her clean, pure white sneakers. The skirt, being so plain and long, eliminated any feminine shape she may have had. Her shirt, unremarkable, was a plain short sleeve tee. Clearly visable were several brown bobby pins holding stray strands of hair away from the girl's face. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to why the pins were placed as they did not hold all of her hair back, thus making her hair look even more wild in its natural style.
There was just something so completely normal about the girl that it made her seem abnormal. Cathy decided that that is why she caught her eye. As she headed towards the computer building, she watched the girl sit down on a bench outside the door and begin to unpack her cute pink shoulder bag. Cathy went in to print out her schedule.
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Later when she came out, Cathy noticed the girl still sitting at the bench. She noticed that the girl was leaning intensely over something on the table in front of her and then vigerously writing in a notebook in her lap. As Cathy walked by she noticed that the object on the table was a class catalog and assumed that the girl was making a semester schedule.
"Strange," Cathy thought. "It's a bit late to make a schedule."
She shrugged it off, thinking that really, there could be a million reasons someone would make a schedule at the last minute. People did it all the time. She had even seen new students come into a class a few days into the semester. She walked by and continued her mapping without another thought of the girl.
But the girl was to become a pivotal player in Cathy's life. Little did Cathy know that she had just met for the first time the most life changing person that she would ever meet during her college career.