Caroline starts filling out college applications when she is 13. She makes copies at the library and stores them in brightly colored folders she keeps in a box under her bed. She applies to culinary school and medical school, to community college and to state college, to Stanford and Yale, to most of the colleges in Virginia and more than that outside it.
She fills out the applications in pink and red and purple and sometimes green, bright garish colors that trail across the paper in perfect print. She practices her handwriting—adds an extra flair on her "i's" and crosses her "t" on a slant. Each application is different, but the most important part of every application is under the heading "activities". Caroline has been accumulating extracurriculars since she was six years old and she was the only girl who joined the Girl Scouts without her mom in tow. She has organized food drives, run bake sales, decorated for dances, arranged walks for various cures, babysat, dog walked, trash collected. She has joined committees, served as president of every club possible, and she has been cheerleading since she was three years old. Her resume shows confidence, commitment, and dedication.
She quits cheerleading on Tuesday, three weeks after she dies. The rain has turned the soft grass of the football field into muddy soup, and they are forced into the gym to practice. She lasts 15 minutes before the hunger hits, swift and sudden and consuming. She's out of the gym before she can think, and halfway across the parking before she realizes she's never going back. Caroline Forbes died in that car accident and she just doesn't have it in her to resurrect the girl that she was.
She knows the path to his house by heart, and when she arrives she only has to wait a minute before he answers the door. He looks bemused, and it's only then she realizes that she's in short shorts and a sports bra with perfectly perky pigtails.
"I thought you had cheerleading," is his response when she asks if he wants to go hunting.
"I quit," she tells him grinning. "Anyway, I think hunting could count as a legit extracurricular," and it will as long as they don't ask her with what, because she's pretty sure that no college would accept "my teeth" as an answer.
It's only after he just nods and pulls the door closed behind him as he follows her off the porch that she thinks she finally knows what's most important anyway.