Rocking the Pink Read Online Free Page A

pool. But our boisterousness apparently alerted the cops, and soon Officer Bob was shining his flashlight into our stunned faces. When he yelled, “Freeze!” (wasn’t that overkill?), time stood still for a nanosecond . . . until we hopped out of the pool and scattered like cockroaches after a kitchen light has been turned on.
    I saw Naimah run into the dark, grassy field just west of the pool, and I followed her like a drunk driver tracking taillights. Clad in only our dripping-wet bikinis, Naimah and I played an enthusiastic game of follow-the-leader: She scaled a tall chain-link fence, and I followed. She jumped down to the sidewalk on the other side of the fence, and so did I. She ran for about a mile, straight to our dorm building, up the stairs, down the hall, and into our room. And I shadowed her.
    Finally, Naimah and I were standing inside our dorm room,
leaning against the door, breathless, panting, and sweating through our soaking-wet bikinis. Only then did Naimah’s eyes lock onto me—it was as if she were seeing me for the first time.
    â€œLaura!” Naimah exclaimed in total surprise. “I had no idea that was you back there. I didn’t know you had it in you.” She was laughing. “Girl, you’re all right.”
    I was beaming.
    I didn’t mention to Naimah that my lawlessness had been a singular fluke, or that, despite appearances, I really didn’t have “it” in me at all. Wasn’t college the perfect opportunity to reinvent myself?
    I was now officially a badass.
    Kelly and Erica, we later found out, had not run like fugitives from the law, like the rest of the group. Like proper law-abiding citizens, they had stood still when Officer Bob commanded them to “freeze!” But even though he had questioned them at the scene for almost half an hour, the girls had not ratted us out, much to our relief. Thankfully, Officer Bob had shown them mercy and let them go with a stern warning to relay a message to the rest of us to turn ourselves in. We all laughed and laughed about that one.
    â€œLet me just go get my pants so I can run down to the police station,” Naimah joked.
    â€œWait for me,” I added. “I want to put on some makeup for the mug shot.”
    I sounded cavalier, but in actuality, I was scared to death that Officer Bob had tracked Kelly and Erica back to the dorms and would, at any given moment, burst into the room with a SWAT team. Welcome to UCLA!

    The next day, I walked down the main artery on campus, enthralled by the thousands and thousands of diverse students swarming past me—black, white, Asian, and Latino!—and I felt like a country mouse in the big city. After having attended a small school with a graduating class of sixty-one—only one of whom was black—I found it electrifying to be a part of something so big. So global.
    I was also proud to be at a big school with a storied sports program. Coach Wooden! Bill Walton! Jackie Robinson! Arthur Ashe! They were my people now.
    One day, as I strolled through campus, I saw our Bruins quarterback, Troy Aikman (who went on to win three Super Bowls for the Dallas Cowboys), leisurely eating a cup of frozen yogurt, which looked like a thimble in his big hands. I walked past him without saying a word, but I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, “This is UCLA, folks!”
    I took general education classes all over campus, like Detective Fiction (a class well attended by the football team, I noticed) and Women’s Studies (which prompted me to curse Brad’s invidious attempts to “muzzle” me). But mostly I took classes for my theater major in a separate, “artsy” part of campus known as North Campus, where students lay on the grass in the sculpture garden, reading scripts, or lounged on benches, commiserating about upcoming auditions. I felt bohemian just being around them. And again, I was proud to be part of something with an