Xander loves to cultivate the sense that he’s a budding Hugh Hefner, so he presides over his parties in silk robes and randomly screams directions like “Down it!” or “Take it all off!” from the second-floor deck. Whenever we come here, I get a propulsive form of déjà vu, the feeling that not only have I been in this same moment before, but also that I will never not be. Which, come to think of it, is how I feel about high school generally. Like I’m in stasis, which is, so far, my favorite SAT word, at least in its secondary definition of a stoppage of flow, because it describes how I feel studying for the test.

Levi and I play beer pong on the patio against Simon and Axl, who are not twins or even brothers but who somehow have always felt interchangeable to me, in much the way that this party feels interchangeable with its previous iterations. This is because Simon and Axl are inseparable, and because they’re both floppy-haired, wiry white boys who golf. I know exactly what they will look like in twenty years, how far their hairlines will recede and their guts will extend, and how soon they’ll molt into Republicans for tax reasons, so the now of them feels temporary. It’s totally unnecessary to tell them apart.

“Cheaters,” Axl yells after he chugs his beer for the billionth time and then raises his arms in victory, even though technically he lost.

“How could we possibly cheat? You saw her throw the ball,” Levi says, and I giggle, and just like that, I’ve morphed into the scantily clad girl at the party talking to Levi, the one who, in parties past, used to make me burn with jealousy and on occasion go home and cry.

“Turns out Chloe over here has impeccable hand-eye coordination when under the influence.”

“I do,” I say. “Maybe I should put that on my college applications? Can’t math, but kills at beer pong.”

“You used math as a verb,” Levi says, and I think, with sudden clarity, We’re both drunk. The college counselor is coming tomorrow morning, but it’s too late to undrink that beer.

“Sure did,” I say, and Levi high-fives me. “We should turn more nouns into verbs. Like we’re beer ponging.”

“You’re verbing.”

“And we’re bantering,” I say, and then realize I’ve said the quiet part out loud. I’ve always wanted to banter like they do in rom-coms, and now that I’m actually doing it, I’m hyperaware that it’s as much fun as it looks.

“Banter is already a noun and a verb,” he says.