By the second month, Dustin had begun to find his time spent with Steven amusing, even though he would never admit it to his mother. On more than one weekend, Dustin found himself looking forward to their Monday study session, when Steven would no doubt regale him with some outlandish story from his “lit AF” weekend. The two boys had polar opposite high school student experiences: Steven’s were all drugs, nightclubs, and hot girls while Dustin’s were mostly coffee shops, study groups, and smart girls who always, always “friend-zoned” him.

By the end of the fall semester Dustin had whipped Steven into fighting academic shape, witnessed Steven ace his finals (without cheating), and found himself prouder of Steven’s 3.3 GPA than his own 4.0 (though with APs his GPA was actually higher). The two boys celebrated their shared victory over a massive steak dinner at Peter Luger in Brooklyn, and when Steven toasted Dustin for achieving the impossible—Steven’s father told him he was proud of him for the first time ever—it dawned on Dustin that he was going to miss Steven during the monthlong winter break. The fact that he had been proven so wrong about his old friend didn’t annoy Dustin, but instead filled him with joy. Feeling superior to his peers often made him lonely, and that night over a feast fit for a king, he felt a profound sense of connection to someone his own age, and he liked it very much.

This was when Steven invited him to his annual New Year’s Eve party, which, though he didn’t know it at the time, would forever change the course of Dustin’s life. It was never Dustin’s soul that was at stake upon reuniting with Steven, it was his heart. The reason for this was that Steven’s girlfriend, Lolly, had a little sister, Kimmie, who was to become Dustin’s newest infatuation and perhaps his greatest love.

III

Unlike Steven, Dustin had always been an intense, bookish kid, which meant he didn’t have many friends, but this never bothered him because he had no time to be social. He put all his time and effort into his schoolwork, the debate team, and worrying about global warming and the rising sea levels. However, he did have one source of real joy: movies. Sitting in a dark theater, he could momentarily stop worrying about his extensive AP course load and just breathe. Because of this escapism, he had seen an impressive number of films, with his favorite guilty pleasures being the high school comedies of the eighties and nineties. It was these very movies that ignited the flame of his one super-secret, shameful fantasy that he had never admitted to anyone in his entire life, not even his therapist.