It’s better here. I like it.

I like it too much. So much that I spend the longest possible span of time I can get away with savoring the heat of him, the weight of his hand on the back of my neck, the way his boot looks stuck between my flats. But then I have to ask. I have to.

“West?”

He makes a noise like hunh.

“Do you have a lot of money?”

I lift my forehead to ask him, which puts me in startlingly close range of his face. I’m close enough to see the frown begin at the downturned tips of his eyebrows and spread across his forehead.

Close enough to see his eyes go baffled. Then angry. Then blank.

His hand drops away from my neck. “Why are you asking me that?”

It’s too late not to say, but the butterflies in my stomach have turned to lead ingots, and I know this is all wrong. I know it is. But I don’t know why or how to get out of it. “I, uh … I need a loan.”

He steps back. “What for?”

“Remember when I told you about that company that can clean up my reputation online?”

“You said it was expensive, so you’d have to tell your dad.”

“Yeah.”

I wait a beat.

“You didn’t tell your dad.”

“I can’t, West. I thought about it, but I … What if he sees?”

It could happen any time. My dad could be sitting at his desk and type my name into a search engine, just because. Or somebody he works with could point him in that direction. A friend. One of my sisters. Anybody.

I close my eyes, because the humiliation of it, the shame of asking West to help me fix this thing—I can’t.

I can’t look at him at all.

“How much do you need?”

“Fifteen hundred dollars. I heard you … I heard sometimes you do that.”

He sighs. “You have any income at all?”

“I get an allowance.”

I open my eyes, but I can’t lift them above my shoes. My black flats are dusted with flour. It’s worked its way down into the buckle, and I doubt I would be able to clean it out, even if I wanted to.

“How long would it take you to pay me back?”

“I could pay you a hundred fifty a month.” If I never buy anything or eat outside the dining hall.

West kicks my toe with his boot. Waits for me to look up. His eyes are still dead.

“I’m charging you interest.”

“I would expect you to.”

“I’ll have it on Tuesday.”

And then there’s nothing left to say. He’s gone, empty, and I’m too full—like there aren’t any edges to me. It’s just pain and disappointment, all the way through.

“Thanks,” I say. “I’m … I’m going to head out. I have to write that paper.”

He just grunts at me and weighs out dough. A thousand miles away.


I don’t see West on Friday, because he’s working at the restaurant, and we’re not friends.

I don’t go to the soccer party. Bridget just about breaks something trying to sell me on the idea, but I can’t. I tell her I have to study, and then I hide in the library and replay my conversation with West over and over again. I should never have asked him for the money. I don’t know who I should have asked, but not him. The look on his face … I can’t stop thinking about it.

I don’t see West on Saturday, because he’s working at the restaurant, and we’re not friends.

The next week is more of the same thing. On Tuesday he gives me the money, and he teaches me how to make lemon glaze for the muffins. Everything’s like normal, but there’s this thin coating of awkwardness ladled over our conversations, and when I’m not around him, it hardens and turns opaque.

I convert West’s cash into a money order and send it off to the Internet-reputation people, but I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d never opened my mouth.

The next weekend I eat dinner with Bridget, and we walk to the Dairy Queen in town afterward, leaves crunching under our feet. I eat a hot-fudge brownie sundae so big that I have to lie down on the red lacquered bench afterward and unbutton the top of my jeans. Upside down, I look out the front window and down the street. I can just make out the chalkboard easel outside the Gilded Pear.

Nate took me to dinner there last year before the spring formal. West was our waiter. Every time he came to the table, it was more awkward than the last. By the time he brought the check, his conversation with Nate was so thickly laced with irony that I felt like they were performing a scene in a play.

The kind of play with sword fighting.

I didn’t break up with Nate because of West. Honestly.

But I probably broke up with Nate because of the possibility of someone like West.

“Did you finish your paper last night?” Bridget asks, and because I’m distracted by the memory of West in his waiter uniform—black slacks and a white dress shirt—I say, “Mmm-hmm.”

“And your reading for Con Law?”

“Yeah.”

He had his sleeves rolled up. His deep tan against crisp white cotton.

“So you have no excuse not to go to the Alliance party with me.”

“What? No.”

I sit up. Bridget is smiling her worst, most evil smile. “Yes.”

“I really don’t want to.”

“You really have no choice. You don’t need to study, it’s time for you to get back out there, and this is the easiest, best party, because at least half the people there will be gay. Possibly two-thirds, if you count the bis and the people who are ‘experimenting.’” She does the air quotes with her fingers. “Plus, we had so much fun last year. Please.”

Two hours later, I’ve got a beer in one hand and Bridget tugging at the elbow of my other arm, pulling me toward the dance floor.

The Queer Alliance party is in the Minnehan Center, which is the campus building designated for large-scale fun. It’s got the movie theater and this room, which is a huge, high-ceilinged hall with a stage, a disco ball, and a little cubby on one wall where the party’s hosts push an endless parade of Solo cups across the counter to the crowd of students.

You can’t get in to parties at the Minnehan Center without a student ID, but once you’re in, there’s no such thing as getting carded. The student worker who hands out wristbands performs a cursory ID check that miraculously results in everyone at the party being legal.

The beer is always free. The music is always loud.

The Alliance party has a soundtrack that brings out the inner ABBA in everybody—and also a lot of exhibitionist streaks. As far as I can tell, I’m the only person in the room in jeans and a T-shirt. Bridget’s got on a gold sequined tube top and tight black pants that flare out over platform shoes. She’s a disco queen.

She picks a spot at the edge of the dance floor just as “It’s Raining Men” comes on. Arms raised, jumping up and down, she hoots along with a hundred other people. “Dance with me!” she shouts.

I shake my head.

Then I drink the beer, downing it quickly so I can get away from her disappointment and grab another.

By the time we’ve cycled through half the soundtrack to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and all the good Gaga, the dance floor is roiling, and I’m relaxed enough to join in, bumping hips and slapping hands with Bridget. I smile to see Krishna come up behind her. He grinds on her, and she rolls her eyes, but she likes it. He pulls us into the group he’s dancing with—some people I don’t know, although I’m pretty sure one of the girls is named Quinn.

I recognize her because she hung out in Krishna and West’s room last year. She’s blond and big—a good four or five inches taller than me, with broad hips and a generous chest and a smile that seems to include a lot more teeth than it ought to. She keeps grabbing my hand to spin me, and I get sweaty and a little dizzy. Krishna fetches us another round of beers, and we drink them quick, licking the foam off our lips. He pulls out his phone. The screen lights up his face in the dark room, making him look mischievous and almost enchanted. He glances at me, grins, and types something.

“What are you doing?”

“Texting West.” He lifts the phone, and before I can stop him, he takes my picture.

I grab his arm, blinded by the flash and by my panic. “Don’t send that.” The sudden brightness sent me reeling back to my memory of that night with Nate. The surprise of the flash. His hand on my head, dick in my mouth, choking me so I had to concentrate to keep from gagging. “Krish, don’t.”

But he’s not listening. He’s grinning, jabbing at the screen, and I’m trying to wrest the phone out of his hand when I hear a little whoosh that means it’s sent.

“Damn it!” I punch him in the shoulder, frustrated and upset, frustrated with myself for being upset. It’s just a picture. It doesn’t matter.

Except that I’m crying.

“What’d I do?”

Quinn reaches out for me, but I’m already gone. I rush toward the door, pushing through bodies, the music and the lights pounding too loud. I had more to drink than I should have. I let my guard down, feeling safe, feeling okay, but there’s nothing okay about me.

Frozen on the screen of Krishna’s phone with my hair falling all around my face, my T-shirt scooped too low, askew, sweat shining on all that exposed skin—I look like a mistake waiting to happen.

Then I see Nate, and I remember I’m a mistake that’s already happened.

He’s between me and the door. By the time I realize it, he’s looking at me, and there’s nowhere to escape to. I can’t dance now. I have to get out. So I keep going, chin up, hoping my mascara isn’t streaky and pretending the men in my head aren’t shouting at full volume.

Let’s see that dirty pussy, baby. I want to eat it out. I’m going to rail the living fuck out of you.

“Caroline!” Nate props his hand in the doorway so I can’t get past. He smiles his drunk smile. “Didn’t think I’d see you here.”

I think of West, leaning in the doorway at the bakery as he walked me out. Telling me to text him when I was home safe.

I look at Nate, blocking my exit. His eyes crawling down my shirt.

Was he always this way?

He’s got a beer in his other hand, and his sandy-brown hair is a little long, curling around his ears. He wears a polo that brings out the blue of his eyes over these horrible navy pants with tiny green whales on them that he loves to put on for parties. He insists he wears them ironically, but I always used to tell him it’s not possible to wear pants with irony. You put on whale pants, you’re wearing whale pants.

Douche, West says in my head.

“Why shouldn’t I be here?”

“You haven’t been around much.”

“I’ve been busy.” I try to look like West when he’s gone blank. Like I could give a fuck about Nate.

“Josh said he saw you with that sketchy guy from across the hall last year. The dealer.”

“So?”

“So I’m worried about you, Caroline. First those pictures, and now you’re hanging out with him. … What’s going on with you?”

I’m speechless. I mean, literally, I can’t make words. There are so many, they jam up at the back of my tongue, and I don’t know which ones I’d say even if I could shake them loose.

The nerve of him. The nerve.

He hitches his arm up higher and takes a sip of his beer, as though we’re going to be here awhile, shooting the breeze. “We’re still friends,” he says. “We’ll always be friends, you know that. I just don’t want to see you getting hurt.”

That’s the thing that unlocks my throat. We’re still friends.

He betrayed me. He broke my life, then pretended I was the one who did it. He lied, because he’s a douchebag, and douchebags lie. And now he’s standing here, blocking my exit, telling me we’re still friends.

“You know what, Nate? Fuck you.”

I duck underneath his arm, half expecting him to hip-check me and pin me in place. Half certain that he really hates me enough, wants to hurt me enough, that he’d do that.

He doesn’t, though. I get past him, run down the hall to the bathroom, lock myself in a stall, and climb up on the lid of one of the toilets, feet on the seat so I can drop my head down between my knees.

I keep it there until I can breathe.

I keep it there until I figure out that the low humming sound I hear isn’t inside my head. It’s my phone. In my pocket.

When I pull it out, there’s a message from West. Are you ok?

I’m not okay. Not at all. But seeing West’s name on my phone—seeing that he’s asking, when he’s never texted me before except to type out one- or two-word replies to my home-safe messages—it helps.