“Yeah, but—Adela. You were both drunk, and you only kissed. He might not even remember it or think anything about it.” Adela stared at me with pure venom in her eyes, and I backed down. “The scumbag.” Well, I still needed her to go with me to a certain restaurant occasionally.

“So what we’re going to do,” Adela said firmly, to keep me on track, “is this. Our next dorm party is coming up. We all have two invitations we can give out. You haven’t given one of yours out yet, have you?” she checked sharply for insubordination.

“No.” Pretty much everyone I knew already lived there, except Valérie and Giulia, who wouldn’t want to come.

“So you have two. I have two. And I can get more. Not everyone uses theirs, there are people in this dorm who spend their time studying.” She said this on a note of incredulity. The only time Adela studied was when she wanted to get out of doing something, and then she didn’t really study; she called me on the phone and told me how so-and-so’s light was still on across the dorm courtyard but he wasn’t answering his phone when she called him, what did I think that meant? “So what we’re going to do is: I’m going to invite Eva and Pilar and all my prettiest friends.”

“Check,” I said, wondering where we were going with this. Was it a scheme to show the jilting heartthrob that we were all lesbians and so Adela couldn’t care less about that kiss? Wow, my friends never talked me into doing this kind of stuff back home.

“And they will use the extra invitations I come up with to invite all their cutest guy friends. And there we will be, all these beautiful girls and all these beautiful guys. And that will show him.”

“Right,” I said. The scary thing was, she explained this with such conviction that it almost made sense. It’s the same way she kept ending up with my chocolates, which is not that easy to do.

“And the person who knows the cutest guy here is you.”

“What? Who?”

“The guy at the restaurant!” Adela exclaimed, out of all patience. “The one you keep dragging me back to see every week!”

I cleared my throat. “I think ‘know’ might be considerably exaggerated in this context.” I wouldn’t say the waiter actually broke into a smile, but his eyes crinkled up and warmed when I walked into the restaurant, and he seemed to enjoy helping me choose things on the menu. This brazen flirtation was as far as I’d got.