Next to me, I sense a movement in Isabel’s hands, and realize she’s digging her nails into her palms. A quick glance at her face confirms she’s trying not to laugh.

“Of course, Izzy here insists she’s never had a Matt phase either.” Priya’s voice and smile are both sugar-sweet, a lovely pairing with her candy-floss sweater and matching dagger-sharp nails, but the waggling of her enviably thick eyebrows suggests she doesn’t believe it. To me, Matt and Isabel give off a brother-sister vibe, but then, what I don’t know about sex could fill the Beast, so.

“So?” Ashleigh asks. “Are you into Matt?”

Talking to these girls is dizzying, and I’m having trouble keeping track of the impressions I’m trying to be giving. If I want to be a cool girl, a hot girl, a badass girl—these are the girls I need to impress, which means my answers need to be right.

“I’m still scouting my options,” I say in a breezy voice I don’t think I’ve ever used in my entire life.

I’m convinced they’ll be able to see right through me, but thankfully, Priya claps. “My kind of girl. Now let me think who’s got potential…”

“Ooh, what about Nick?” Ashleigh offers.

“Ontiveros or Brenner?” Isabel asks.

“Ontiveros, obviously,” Jenna says, at exactly the same time Priya says, “Brenner, definitely.”

I glance back and forth between them, and get the feeling I’m being caught in a very weird standoff. “Two options sounds good to me,” I say cheerfully, hoping to defuse some of the tension I still don’t really understand.

“Like I said.” Priya smiles smugly. “My kind of girl.”

“And what are you up to today, Evie?” Jenna asks, swirling a spoon through a bowl of berry-studded yogurt.

They all turn their eyes on me, and I have no idea what exciting things I could possibly pretend I have lined up. “Not sure yet,” I say slowly, trying to remember the suggested options for Saturday afternoons. Most of them are nature-y—rafting and hiking and climbing—the kinds of things my parents would drag me and Sierra to on weekends in the Before Times that I’m not ready to revisit. The rest are sort of blurring at the moment.

“Good,” says Isabel, booping my nose like I’m a child. “You’re coming shopping with us.”

Shopping? With the four most perfect-looking humans to grace the entirety of the Camden campus? I am so, so out of my league here.

And yet, there’s only one possible response, despite the fact that I definitely cannot afford to shop wherever these girls do: “When do we leave?”

It’s hard to say what’s the most surreal about what follows from there.