Several minutes passed without anything happening. Brandon yawned again. He should really be studying for the physics quiz tomorrow, but it had been so long since Maria had wanted to hang out with him alone. Well, alone plus Lily.

Brandon had always liked Lily. Or tried to, anyway, for Maria’s sake, once he found out the two of them had taken the whole roommate thing to the next level. Lily was pretty. She was smart, too, and she was nice enough, if you were talking to her about things like homework or teachers or what she was going to major in, which were the only kinds of things Brandon ever talked to her about.

But there was something strange about Lily. Something he’d never been able to put his finger on. Something that made him want to avoid getting stuck alone in a room with her.

Lily put up with him, but only for Maria’s sake. So did most everyone in that crowd. Being best friends with Maria had lots of benefits. She was the second-most-popular girl in school. After Delilah, obviously.

Though to Brandon’s surprise, in the past couple of weeks since he’d started hooking up with Mateo, things had been looking up for him on the popularity front. He’d been excited to finally have a boyfriend, of course—it still made him grin to think about it—but he hadn’t realized it would make the others treat him differently, too. Brandon had always lived on the periphery of the popular crowd, but Mateo had set up a permanent residence right in the middle of it years ago.

But then, that was Acheron’s social universe. When you were fat and gay and on financial aid and you spent your free nights alone in your room watching old Battlestar Galactica videos, most of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Old South plantation owners’ great-great-great-great-great-grandkids didn’t have much reason to bother with you. Unless you were hooking up with one of their own.

Of course, Brandon was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Old South plantation owner’s great-great-great-great-great-grandkid, too. He’d just had the misfortune of being born several generations after the family money had withered away.

Meanwhile, Maria and Mateo both had the Spanish names, dark eyes, and brown skin that would’ve kept them off those Old South plantations—unless they’d come with a price tag.

The irony had never been lost on Brandon. But sometimes he actually found it preferable to think the reason he didn’t fit in at Acheron was that he was poor, or that he was gay, or that he was fat. It was better than thinking the problem was the fact that he was . . . him.

Anyway, he liked hanging out with his friends. Some of the straight guys he’d gotten to know through his work-study job in the athletics office were cool to him, and as long as he had Maria, he could deal with the rest.