Naturally, Mateo turned her down. He rattled off a list of all the different ways he was already booked up. His volunteer gig with the community center. His part-time job with a professor in the chemistry department, researching something about isotopes. For the weekend he was hiking the Appalachian Trail with his new boyfriend and some of the other guys in the Undergraduate BGLTQIA Association. Then he and that Acheron girl he was friends with, Felicia, were talking online all night, the way they did every weekend.

He’d thanked Delilah for the invitation anyway and given her a half smile. That was the closest to happy she’d seen him look since before her accident.

The Mateo she remembered from those days was always smiling.

The wind picked up as Delilah crossed the lawn. She wrapped the poncho tighter around her and turned to look back at the rotunda. She’d always loved the view from here.

College hadn’t been what she’d expected. Mostly because she wasn’t what she’d expected anymore.

She’d gotten into Princeton, but she’d decided to come to the University of Virginia instead. She wanted to stay closer to home.

Before the accident, she’d thought college would be the same as high school, just with smarter people. It was, a little, but it was different, too. There was less lying. Less cattiness. When people were nice to you here, it wasn’t always because they wanted something from you.

Plus, Delilah wasn’t sitting up every night recalculating her GPA the way she had at Acheron. She wasn’t strategizing new ways to beat everyone else at everything there was. There were simply too many things here. She couldn’t ever be the best at all of them.

She couldn’t believe how much energy she’d put into all that in high school. Faking everyone out so she’d have a clear path to the senior class presidency. Counting down the percentage points to coming in valedictorian. Obsessing over the Kingsley Prize.

Did any of it really matter in the end?

When she woke up that morning in the hospital, she wasn’t thinking about her GPA. She was thinking about how much she wanted to see her family and her friends.

But three of her friends weren’t there for her to see.

Delilah was almost at the track now. She spotted Mateo in his bright-orange practice shirt right away. He’d never been on the track team at Acheron, but he’d made the UVA team as a freshman. Delilah suspected he was trying to keep busy. He was a better athlete now than he’d ever been. He ran down that track like something was chasing him.