Chapter 11 Ten Weeks

• I read the attached program details four times before the words actually landed.
• The Spring Intensive Practicum wasn't a semester of extra classes tacked onto my normal schedule, the way I'd half-imagined it in my daydreams. It was a full relocation — ten weeks at the culinary institute's partner program in Lyon, hands-on training under pastry chefs who'd built the kind of careers I'd been quietly, privately dreaming about since I was twelve years old, baking with my grandmother in a kitchen that smelled like her whole life. Ten weeks starting in three weeks, which meant leaving in the middle of the semester, which meant leaving the exact moment everything on this campus had finally started going right.
• I sat on my bed with my laptop open to the acceptance letter and didn't move for a long time.