I’d always been envious of Mel’s amazing metabolism. She could sit down, eat an entire pizza with a side of ice cream, and wake up the next morning, weighing a pound less. But then again, she was also the one running five miles or more every morning while I was stuffing down a bagel and considering my three-block walk to the subway a workout. But it was that get-up-and-go attitude that always kept her motivated and pushing forward, and because of that, I knew she’d someday make an incredible doctor.

Whether she currently believed it or not.

“So, tell me more about the hot boss,” she requested after we’d finished scarfing down the pizza and moved on to dessert, which consisted of basically every single kind of candy I could find.

“Would you stop calling him that?”

“Why? Because it offends you? Or because you agree?” she asked.

She dug into the bag of M&M’s. They were her favorite, especially the kind with peanut butter. I didn’t know how many times we’d sat around, talking about boys, homework, or God knew what else, while I watched her squash a bright little morsel in between her thumb and pointer finger before popping it into her mouth.

“Your silence is answer enough,” she said with a smirk. After a moment, she added, “And I happily agree.”

Shaking my head, I replied, “How would you even know? You haven’t met him.”

“I have a computer. And hello? Google! You think I didn’t look up the guy after hearing the way you talked about him over the last few weeks?”

“I haven’t talked about him that much, have I?”

“Remember when I first started dating Jeremy our sophomore year, and I couldn’t stop talking about his hair and the way it looked in the morning—”

“And after he ran,” I added.

“Exactly. I swear, I had a love affair with that boy’s hair alone. I could have written sonnets about it in that first month. I was obsessed.”

“It really was disgusting. But you were in love. That’s what we do when we’re in love. But I’m not,” I said, thinking back to those first few months with Tyler and comparing them to now. I might not have been obsessed with Tyler’s hair, but I’d had an affinity for his smile.

I still did.

Or at least, until last night, I had.

“You might not be sonnet-worthy yet, but if you were me and you had a chance to hear yourself, you’d see it.”

“See what?” I asked.