“I know.” She frowned. “Tell me again why you asked a Frenchman out? It doesn’t seem like a very smart thing to do. I thought you were going to come back to Spain next year and meet some of my cousins.” We were in Adela’s room, where suitcases lay open on the floor. She had started packing, her school year over except for her exams. It gave me a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach to see things disappearing off her wall into her suitcases. There were the lion masks Adela had insisted we make out of orange construction paper for some Dutch house party where we were supposed to wear orange in honor of the Dutch holiday called Queen’s Day. All the other students there had just put on a bit of amber jewelry or an orange scarf or ignored the rule entirely. Disgusted, Adela had given them all a lion glare. “The Dutch,” she had said. “We should have known they couldn’t have any fun.” Then she’d handed me her mask and pretended dressing as lions had been my idea.

“That’s not what I’m talking about! The French! They have a whole kiss named after them! They’re internationally legendary lovers! I’m not exposing myself to that kind of inferiority complex.”

She squinted at me, as if she were trying to peer through my skull bones to find the missing cog. “You are so weird.”

I am not weird. Why do people say that all the time about me? “So, Adela, if you had only a couple months with someone, would you, um . . . ?” I tried to waggle my eyebrows and Adela handed me a Kleenex.

“Go ahead and sneeze,” she said. “It’s the packing. It’s stirring up a lot of dust.”

I’d never been very good with my eyebrows. Sébastien’s, on the other hand, were beautifully expressive. Darn it, every single comparison between us was revealing. “So . . . you know,” I said, in lieu of eyebrow-messaging. I didn’t want to come right out and say it, in case we were just talking about a kiss. “Would you?”

Wait, I told myself, you’re asking advice from a woman who eats luxury displays and makes you dress up as a lion for a student party. Even you can’t be that insecure!

“Of course not!” Adela said indignantly. “My father’s daughter? But you’re an American.” She shrugged dismissively and handed me one of the lion masks to keep as a souvenir.

“So have you . . . ?” Philippe waggled his eyebrows. He had finer, more aristocratic eyebrows than Adela, so this made for a much less frightening leer. Philippe was packing, too, his Québec fleurde-lys flag behind him, filling the wall over his bed.