I couldn’t go. I tried to get dressed and fumbled things and called my best friend, Philippe, to tell me how to dress. Super tall and thin, with the bluest eyes in the world and a nerdy charm that had slain the entire female population of the Maison du Canada, Philippe had told me he was gay a couple of days after we met at the start of the school year but sworn me to secrecy. We had spent the first four months at the house letting everyone there assume we were seeing each other, something that worked well for both of us. It upped my rep no end, since he was one of the cutest guys there, and cut out some of the more careless hook-up attempts. Meanwhile, no one thought to wonder about his orientation. A couple of months ago, he had finally relaxed and let the secret out. “And you know what,” he had told me, stunned, “even Jack,” a dorm resident who cracked homophobic jokes regularly, “only shrugged and said, ‘That’s cool.’ ”

“I told you,” I answered. “Jack’s not the problem. He’s homophobic, misogynistic, and occasionally misanthropic, but basically he’s a nice guy. Adela’s the problem. She’s still mad at me for not telling her.”

He had just laughed. Clearly he didn’t realize how dangerous it could be to have Adela mad at me. Probably the whole setup at the restaurant, asking Sébastien out, was Adela’s diabolic revenge.

“So what’s wrong?” he asked now. “You know, someone made a poem about torrides fesses on your door.” Torrid tushes.

I glanced at it. A niece had sent me one of those magnet poetry games in French, and I’d tried to weed out any words that could be used for pornography before I put it on a magnet board on my dorm door. Every couple of days I had to weed out a few more words. It was just amazing the combinations people could come up with. I began to suspect there was another set of words in the house and people were adding them when I wasn’t around. “You wrote that, didn’t you?”

“Well, I might have.” He smirked and pushed back his rectangular glasses. “I’m a natural poet.”

“Come in and tell me what to wear.”

“You are such a stereotyper,” he grinned. “You know, just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I have a better fashion sense than you. Why don’t you ask Adela?”

“Because your favorite color is blue, too, so you might let me wear it.” He was wearing blue now, in fact, a deep blue pressed cotton shirt that matched his eyes almost exactly and made him look even cuter. It had been a lot of fun letting everyone assume we were together. Fun and safe.