“What?” I decided she must be talking about some other guy, one who wasn’t tall, dark, and gorgeous and who might even recognize me if he saw me again. I knew a few cute guys, honest. I mean, ones that knew me back and with whom I’d actually exchanged names.

“You know that blond witch, Candy?” Adela was stuffing my macarons down her throat at an alarming speed, favoring the chocolate and pistachio flavors. I grabbed one for myself. There are two kinds of friends: those who admit their addiction to chocolate openly and therefore buy chocolate from time to time themselves, and those who claim others are chocoholics while eating all of the other’s stash. Adela was the latter. And if you tried to hoard your chocolates under your bed because you knew she might pop in, she found some totally logical excuse to look under your bed and then went and told everyone in the dorm you were selfish and didn’t share. I don’t know how she managed this. One minute she’d be sitting on my bed chatting to me about the most recent fight with her professors, and the next she’d be under the bed hauling things out, and I’d be the one smiling weakly and feeling guilty. “She smiled when she passed me in the hall.”

“Damn her,” I said. “I hate it when people smile at me.” Maybe that was why people ducked in terror when I smiled at them in the street. It was a deadly insult in Europe.

“And you know why,” Adela said bitterly.

“Because she’s a witch,” I remembered. Candy, with her perfectly straight blond hair and blue eyes, lived in the same hall as Adela and had featured in her conversations before. “And she sleeps around. So she smiles at people. It’s really nasty of her.”

“Because he told her!” She gripped a macaron in a hot little fist, unnerving me. It was bad enough she was eating them; she’d better not start crushing them to crumbs.

“He did? When?” Who was he? What did he tell her about? Did I dare reveal my ignorance?

“Probably right after it happened!” Poison was clearly eating at her wounds. “He kissed me and then ran to brag about it to all the girls in the hall to say how easy I am! And what a player he is!”

I blinked a few seconds. “Adela, we aren’t still talking about the guy you kissed when you both were drunk at the last party two months ago, are we?”

She stared at me. “Of course we are! How many people do you think I’ve kissed? I’m not like that Candy. Oh, he thinks he’s so cute. To kiss me and never even call me the next day. Well, I’m not one of his girls, that he can jilt when he wants to, and he’s going to learn it.”