The remaining nine hours of train ride are long and eventless, which only adds to the length. I have enough time to get through Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for World Lit class and all my calculus problem sets. Corinne clearing her throat in a very unsubtle way when I get one wrong is surprisingly helpful.

Penn Station is exactly how we left it, indifferent to homecomings and buzzing with energy. Somehow that’s where it hits. I came back with all my homework done, a Tupperware of sugar cream pie, and . . . a girlfriend.

“If you’re changing your mind, you have to tell me now, okay?” Corinne says on the escalator up. I can’t tell how long she’s been watching me like that.

“I’m not changing my mind,” I say, wondering if she can actually hear my thoughts.

Our Montreal date had stretched from the afternoon into the pitch-black evening, which had been made purple by all the lights and bright white blankets of snow. There was this kind of quiet magnetic pull about the whole thing. It’s like she rips me out of my own head and back to earth with her. It’s like everything that is normally worrying becomes vaguely inconsequential in the backdrop of this little spark that dances between us when we talk and turns into a static shock the moment our hands touch. So, yeah, the question was certainly rattling around my head; it was just a matter of finding the right words. And the balls needed to actually voice said words.

Want to just . . . do the thing? was my initial phrasing.

The thing?

You know, I said, wrist flailing between us. The official whatever . . . The thing!

She blinked, smiled, blinked again, and looked away in that exact order before finally speaking.

“I mean, I think I know,” she said. “But I am not going to say yes to a shrug, Halti.”

I groan in spite of myself. Around FATE people simply announced they were boyfriend and girlfriend on Monday morning. It was something that traveled through the grapevine. No transcript was ever released after the fact, so how did you go about doing the actual asking?

Any chance you have a stack of flash cards for me on this?

Nope. She grinned.

Corinne, you awesome human being, will you please be my girlfriend?

She smiled and an eleven-letter word came tumbling out.

Sureyesfine.

By the time we’d made it back to Terry’s that evening, Corinne and I were boyfriend and girlfriend. In celebration of the news, Terry had an audio recording of Angels in America blaring across the apartment until all the lights were turned off and every ass was, as Terry said, “in its own corner, thinking of Jesus.”

We kiss again, for the first time on American soil.

Unlike anyone else I’ve ever met, this girl could so very easily make my heart her complete bitch.