“Damn it, I'm late I'm late..."

She muttered to herself as she jumped in the shower. She went through the motions mechanically, washing her hair, putting on her make-up, getting dressed. She knew she was going to be late to class, but that wasn’t out of the ordinary — she was always late to class. But this time she hoped it would be different, she wanted to make a good first impression. She looked herself over in the mirror quickly before running out the door and into the streets of Paris.

The metro was late, which didn’t help her time crunch. Impatiently, she taped her foot as she stood at the door of the subway car, ready to run out the door. She had overslept, her alarm beeping for minutes before she actually heard it and got out of bed. She couldn’t believe it, she had worked so hard for this not to happen. Her alarm was loud and annoying and she was sure it had managed to wake up her host mother by the time she had turned it off.

"It doesn’t matter, I'll be ok." She told herself as she ran out of the subway station and into the university. She sprinted to her classroom, checking the post-it note in her agenda once before figuring out where she had to go. Before stepping in, she stopped by the door, wiped the trickle of sweat that had began running down her cheek and smoothed her hair.

"Puis-je vous aider?" asked a rotten faced girl on the front row. "Um, c'est la clase d'anthropologie, non?" she asked, in what to her sounded like perfect French. The ratty girl snorted, "professeur cancelled classes, you can go now." And turned her attention back to her friends.

With that she became invisible, sweaty and disappointed, worried about a class that wasn’t going to happen but nonetheless amazed at the life that awaited her.