In the end, I tried to listen to Corinne and talk without going over every word in my head, looking for smiles and nods of the acknowledgments from the interviewer. Henri Haltiwanger Uncensored. God help us all. I rambled about designers I admire like Tinker Hatfield and Raf Simons, and the interviewer nodded along, jotting notes down. And in my defense, he had asked for the link to that website.

“He did say I would love their new design lab, which felt like, I don’t know . . .”

More conditional tense than future tense, maybe.

I look out the stairwell’s glass window and onto the McGill campus below hectic with midday activity and dark bundles of coats and backpacks leaving steps in the trodden snow behind them. “How insane would it be? For me to go to another country for freaking design school?”

“Nothing about it doesn’t make sense,” Ming states confidently. “Wait, why is Corinne there with you, again?”

“What do you mean? I’m crashing at her aunt’s.”

“Your sleeping on a couch doesn’t require her to be there.”

“I’m not following,” I say.

He sighs, exasperated. “I’m late for class. I’ll talk to you when you get back from traveling to a foreign country with a girl you’ve been hanging out with nonstop and who is deeply invested in your success but that you’re not dating.”

I roll my eyes at him.

“Thank God you’re pretty, dude.” Ming sighs. “Because really.”

“Okay, I’m sick of people saying th—”

The connection cuts off, and I picture Ming back at FATE cackling, very happy with himself right now. Smug bastard.

I meet Corinne back down at the McGill gates, where she’s waiting for me, wearing a bright turquoise coat I don’t recognize and heeled leather boots that are definitely from the Terry Bien-Aimée collection. The more time I spend with her outside of FATE’s uniform, the more I’ve come to realize that Corinne very much has her own sense of style. It’s a little eclectic and thrown together, but it often all lines up into effortlessly trendy like today.

Before I can decide on the best words to use to formulate the compliment without innuendo, she spots me and stutter-steps across the icy sidewalk, which ends with her tumbling into me instead, and the whole thing turns into a kiss right next to my lips and another quick one on my other cheek.

“Sorry!” she sputters, visibly embarrassed.

“It’s okay.”

Her laughter is weird and nervous. Not unlike the Cori days of crashing parties together under duress. “La bise! In Canada, we kiss on both sides, Haltiwanger! So, um, how was the interview?”

“It was good.” I smile because it’s increasingly becoming harder not to when Corinne is around. I go through the entire thing from Steve to Ming, to the life story of Raf Simons and his design aesthetic.