Senior year began with a strange, layered sense of both continuity and transformation — Kingsley's hallways familiar in their rhythms, but Ivy herself arriving to them as someone considerably different from the overwhelmed scholarship kid who'd first walked through the school's front doors just over a year earlier.
"Senior year," Priya announced at their usual lunch table, spreading out a stack of college application materials with characteristic organizational intensity. "The final countdown. Please tell me you've actually started your applications, and this isn't going to be one of those situations where you're finishing personal essays the night before deadlines because you were too busy exposing international corruption."
"I've started. Mostly." Ivy managed a guilty smile. "Between t
