“Next week, then,” he says. “Tuesday you will learn the secrets of the glaze.”

I smile. I think he likes teaching me stuff nearly as much as he liked learning it in the first place. He’s almost insatiably curious. No matter what homework I’m doing, he’ll end up asking me fifty questions about it.

“Sounds good. Are you on at the restaurant this weekend?”

“Yeah. What about you, you got plans?”

I want to hang out with you. Come over Sunday, and we’ll watch bad TV.

Let’s go to the bar.

Let’s go out to dinner in Iowa City.

Sometimes I invent a life in which my being more than not-friends with West is a possibility. A life where we get to hang out somewhere other than a kitchen at midnight.

Then I mentally pinch myself, because, no, I want less scandal, not more.

“Bridget is trying to get me to go to that party tomorrow night.”

“Where’s that?”

“A bunch of the soccer players.”

“Oh, at Bourbon House?”

“Yeah, are you going?”

“I’ll be at work.”

“After you get off?”

He smiles. “Nah. You should go, though.”

When Bridget suggested it, the idea filled me with panic. A crush of bodies, all those faces I would have to study for signs of judgment, pity, disgust. I can’t have fun when I’m so busy monitoring my behavior, choosing the right clothes, plastering a just-so smile on my face and watching, watching, while the men in my head tell me I look like a whore and I should pick somebody already. Take him upstairs and let him suck my tits, because that’s all a slut like me is good for.

Bridget thinks I need to get out more, pick my life back up where I left it. Otherwise, Nate wins.

I see her point. But I can’t make myself want to.

I look at the corrugated soles of West’s boots, swinging a few feet from my face. At the way his knuckles look, folded around the edge of the table. The seam at his elbows.

If West were going to the party, I would want to.

“I might.”

“Do you some good,” he says. “Get shit-faced, dance a little. Maybe you’d even meet somebody worth keeping you busy nights so you’re not hanging around here harassing me all the time.”

He grins when he says it. Just kidding, Caro, that grin says. We both know you’re too fucked in the head to be hooking up with anybody.

Before I’ve even caught my breath, he’s hopped down and moved toward the sink, where he fills a bucket with soapy water so he can wipe down his countertops.

I look at my Latin book, which really is verbs, and I blink away the sting in my eyes.

Video, videre, vidi, visus. To see.

Cognosco, cognoscere, cognovi, cognotus. To understand.

Maneo, manere, mansi, mansurus. To remain.

I see what he’s doing. Every now and then, West throws some half-teasing comment out to remind me I’m not his girlfriend. He smiles as he tells me something that means, You’re not important to me. We’re not friends.

He pulls me closer with one hand and smashes an imaginary fist into my face with the other.

I know why he does it. He doesn’t want me to get close.

I don’t know why.

But I see. I understand.

I remain.

We’re a mess, West and me.

He cleans the tables off, his movements abrupt and jerky. Agitated. When he switches to dishes, he’s slamming the pans around instead of stacking them. He’s so caught up with the noise he’s making that when a figure appears at the back door, West doesn’t notice.

I do, though. I look up and see Josh there. He used to be my friend, before. Now I see him around with Nate. I think he’s going out with Sierra. He’s standing with his wallet in his hand, looking awkward.

“Hey, Caroline,” he says.

“Hey.”

West turns toward me, follows my eyes to the doorway. He frowns deeply and stalks toward the door. Josh lifts the wallet, and West kind of shoves it down and aside as he moves out into the alley, forcing Josh to step back. “Put your fucking money away,” I hear him say as the door swings closed. “Jesus Christ.”

Then the kitchen is empty—just me and the white noise of the mixer, the water running in the sink.

When he comes back in, he’s alone, his hand pushing something down deep in his pocket. “You didn’t see that,” he says.

Which is dumb.

I guess he thinks he’s protecting me. If I can’t see him dealing, I’m not an accessory. I’m the oblivious girl in the corner, unable to put two and two together and get four.

“Yes, I did.”

He levels this look at me. Don’t push it.

I haven’t seen that look since the library. It makes me dump my book on the floor and stand up, and when I’m standing I can feel it more—how my chest is still aching from the hurt of what he said a few minutes ago. How my heart pounds, because he hurt me on purpose, and I’m angry about it.

I’m angry.

He turns his back on me and starts to wash a bowl.

“What kind of profit do you make, anyway?” I ask. “On a sale like that, is it even worth it? Because I looked it up—it’s a felony to sell. You’d do jail time if you got arrested. There’s a mandatory minimum five-year sentence.”

He keeps cleaning the bowl, but his shoulders are tight. The tension in the room is thick as smoke, and I don’t know why I’m baiting him when I’m close to choking on it.

He’s right to try to protect me. My dad would have kittens if he found out I was here, with West dealing out the back door, selling weed with the muffins. He would ask me if I’d lost my mind, and what would I say to him? It’s only weed? I don’t think West even smokes it?

Excuses. My dad hates excuses.

The truth is that I don’t make any excuses for it. I turn myself into an accessory every time I come here and sit on the floor by West, and I don’t care. I really don’t. I used to. Last year I was scandalized by the pot.

Now I’m too busy being fascinated by West.

And then there’s the money. I think about the money. I wonder how much he has. I know his tuition is paid, because he told me, and that he caddies at a golf course in the summer, because I asked why he had such stark tan lines.

I imagine he’s paying his own rent, paying for his food, but as far as I can tell he doesn’t have any hobbies or vices. I can’t figure out why he works so many jobs and deals pot, too, if he doesn’t need all that money just to get by. And he must not, right? He must have more than he needs if he’s buying weed in large quantities and making loans.

“Drop it,” West says.

I can’t drop it. Not tonight. Not when the pain in my chest has turned to this burning, angry insistence. I’m too pissed at him, and at myself. “I’ll have to ask Josh,” I muse. “Or Krish. I bet he would tell me. I bet when people show up at your apartment, you don’t turn your back on Krish and make him sit alone while you deal outside on the fire escape.”

I’ve never been to his apartment. I only know about the fire escape because I drove by.

I’m possibly a little bit stalking him.

West drops the bowl in the sink and rounds on me. “What are you in a snit about? You want me to deal in front of you?”

Do I?

For a moment I’m not sure. I look down at the floor, at the spill of flour by the row of mixing bowls.

I remember the first night I came in here and the first thing that’s happened every night since.

How’s it going, Caroline?

“It’s bullshit,” I say.

His eyes narrow.

“It’s bullshit for you to pretend not to be dealing drugs out the back door, like you’re going to protect me from knowing the truth about you. It’s not fair that I’m supposed to come in here and bare my soul to you, and you don’t even want me to touch your stupid cell phone.”

West crosses his arms. His jaw has gone hard.

“You’re a drug dealer.” It’s the first time I’ve ever said it out loud. The first time I’ve ever even mentally put it in those words. “So what? You have some dried-up plants in a plastic bag in your pocket, and you give them to people for money. Whoop-de-do.”

He stares at me. Not for just a moment, which would be normal.

He stares at me for ages.

For the entire span of my life, he looks right in my eyes, and I suck in shallow breaths through my mouth, my chest full of pressure, my ears ringing as the mixer grinds and grinds and grinds around.

Then the corner of his mouth tips up a fraction. “Whoop-de-do?”

“Shut up.” I’m not in the mood to be teased.

“You could’ve at least thrown a fuck in there. Whoop-de-fucking-do.”

“I don’t need your advice on how to swear.”

“You sure? I’m a fuck of a lot better at it than you.”

I turn away and pick up my bag and my Latin book off the floor. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to be around him if he’s going to hurt me, bullshit me, and tease me. That’s not what I come here for, and I hate how the pressure from the way he stared at me has built up in my face, prickling behind the bridge of my nose, sticking in my throat.

“Caro,” he says.

“Leave me alone.”

“Caro, I made forty bucks. Okay? That’s what you want me to say?”

I stop packing my bag and just stand there, looking at it.

He made forty bucks.

“How much did you charge?”

“Sixty-five.”

“For how much?”

“An eighth of an ounce.”

I turn around. “Is that a lot?”

“A lot of money, or a lot of weed?”

“Um, either.”

He smiles for real now and shakes his head. “It’s a little more than anybody else is charging, but the weed is better. It’s the smallest amount I’ll bother to sell. Why are we talking about this?”

And that’s when I lose my nerve. I shrug. I look past his left ear.

I don’t want to ask him.

Before this year, I never gave money a lot of thought. My dad is pretty well off. I grew up in a nice house in a safe neighborhood in Ankeny, outside Des Moines, and even though Putnam isn’t cheap, I didn’t have to worry about tuition. I always knew my dad would pay it, whatever it was.

But that was before the pictures, and it was before I figured out that, no matter what I do, I can’t make them go away. Not by myself.

I need fifteen hundred dollars—maybe more—to hire the company that will push my name down in the search rankings and scrub my reputation online. The guy I talked to when I called said that cases like mine can be more involved, which means a higher fee.

I don’t have a job. I had one in high school, but Dad says I’m better off concentrating on my schoolwork now. I have a hundred thousand dollars in a savings account—my share of the life-insurance settlement when my mom died from cancer when I was a baby—but until I’m twenty-one, I can’t touch it.

With no income and no credit history, I can’t get fifteen hundred dollars on a credit card without my dad cosigning on the application. I tried.

“Caroline?” West asks.

“What?”

He steps closer. “What’s this really about?”

And I blurt out the stupidest thing. “You don’t have to protect me.”

Because I’m sick of it. Of being protected. Of needing to be.

“I’m not.”

His eyes, though. When I meet his eyes, they’re blazing with the truth.

He is. He wants to.

“You know what the worst thing is?” I ask. “It’s knowing I was always stupid and sheltered and just … just useless. Everyone telling me I’m smart, like that’s so great and important. Going to a good college—oh, Caroline, how fantastic. But one bad thing happens to me, and I can’t even …”

I trail off, because I think I’m going to cry, and I’m too angry to give in to it.

West takes another step closer, and then he’s rubbing my arm. The flat of his palm lands against the back of my neck, over my hair, and he’s tipping me forward until my forehead rests against his chest.

“You’re not useless.”

“No, seriously, I can’t—I need you to hear this, okay? Because the thing is—”

“Caroline, shut up.”

The way he says it, though—it’s definitely the nicest anyone’s ever shut me up. And his rubbing hand comes around my back and presses me into him, and that’s nice, too. I can feel him breathing. I can smell his skin, feel my hair catching on the stubble underneath his chin.