“And here . . .” He ran back to his desk and picked up the book. “I’ll even autograph it for you,” he said, signing it with a flurry. “But don’t tell anyone else, or they’ll all be wanting autographs.” He laughed at that and then gave it to me. “Read it. Learn from it. Take it all in. And remember, everything you ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” He dazzled me with a blinding smile. So big and bright, just like everyone else around here. Just like my mother’s Cheshire poster smile. Everyone here seemed to radiate positivity like sunbeams—throw them lemons, and you’d be sure to get lemonade. Maybe even pink lemonade. But I knew that my mother’s poster smile was fake, and I wondered if his was too? I walked out of his office and closed the door behind me. I stood there in a contemplative, confused silence for a while, trying to absorb all this BWH strangeness.

“Lori.” Jake walked toward me, catching me off guard. “I see you met Xander.” He pointed at the book.

“I did indeed.”

“Did he autograph it?”

I flipped it open and showed him.

“He spelled your name wrong.” I looked down at my name spelled L-o-r-r-y, and for some reason felt flattered that Jake had noticed this.

“I suppose he told you about the shark?”

“Yup,” I said as we both started walking down the corridor together. “And how he almost lost his liver. Wait, is that why he’s so orange? Isn’t that a liver thing?”

“It’s just bad self-tan. You should see his Tinder profile pic, Vuyo showed it to me.”

“Oh?”

“Let’s just say, if you think he looks orange in real life . . .”

I laughed at this. It was hard to imagine anything being more orange. A tangerine maybe.

“So, what are you doing tomorrow evening? Around five?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Cool, because it’s Lisa’s birthday tomorrow. We don’t make a big deal of it. She gets really stressed about it.”

“Zac too.” I thought back to his disastrous birthday party of a few years ago.

“We don’t have parties for her. She gets too—”

“Overwhelmed.” I cut him off. “I know. We don’t do parties for Zac either.”

We both stopped walking and looked at each other. I could see he was feeling the same thing I was, so I voiced it. “It sucks for them that they can’t enjoy those kinds of things.”

“It does.”

We looked at each other for a moment. And then we both smiled. I don’t know why he was smiling, exactly. But I knew why I was.

Because you luurve him. You wanna have babies with him, the voice in my head sang at me mockingly. God, I was getting sick of her. I quickly broke eye contact and carried on walking.