“Yes, of course,” I say, forcing my mouth to curve upward. Too bad I’m not an actress like my mother, who’d be able to turn the energy of the moment and blind Levi with her high-wattage smile. “I can’t wait to go to prom with you.”

Levi steps forward and drops the poster. He leans in for a kiss, soft and slow, and it all plays out exactly like I hoped it would before I opened that file. The ask, the yes, the kiss, as if I scripted it, or as if the fall version of me—who wanted nothing more than to be Levi’s girlfriend—made this reality manifest with my own, different vision board.

“Yum. Orange Tic Tacs. My favorite,” he says.

—

Once Levi leaves, my parents head out grim-faced for what they call an “important meeting”—maybe the reboot is in trouble?—and Isla ensconces herself in her room, no doubt reading more Dostoyevsky for fun. I put on my SCC sweatshirt, the cozy version, and stand in front of my full-length mirror. I look at my reflection and imagine myself in college: the real Chloe Wynn Berringer, not the one on my application. I imagine doing all the stuff that frightens me: Buying books and keeping up with my classes. Drinking beer at fraternity parties with people I don’t know. The comfort of having my parents only twenty minutes away should I need a hand.

I think through my options. What good would alerting the admissions office do? If they can rescind your acceptance because of a slip in grades, surely they can rescind it for something like this, even if I wasn’t the one who did the Photoshopping.

What’s done is done, I tell myself, if anything was actually done in the first place.

After all, there are a lot of reasonable explanations for that file. It’s entirely possible that that application was never submitted, that I’m telling myself a story that isn’t true. That I’m making something out of nothing.

I look in the mirror again, examine my decidedly non-pole-vaulting body. I will let this go. Even if my admission is some sort of cosmic mistake or even, worst-case scenario, the result of a rogue college admissions consultant’s lies, I’ll make myself worthy of SCC. I’ll rise to the occasion and earn my place retroactively. I’ll study hard and graduate with honors. Make sure to have a full, well-rounded college experience.

I decide I didn’t really see anything in my dad’s drawer after all. That was a potential application or a prank, not my application.

Shola: Levi asked finally?!?!?

Me: He did!

Shola: Yay.

Me: So what’s your position on teal eyeshadow?

Shola: DO IT