I told her I didn’t think that was how it worked. I told her, “At the risk of saying ‘not all men,’ I don’t think that’s even most men.” I told her if she went into it with that attitude she’d end up with someone who treated her like shit. There was a boyfriend for a little while. He was fine. I think he broke up with her. I think it was before we started having sex again, in the last weeks of classes pre-summer. Harry making flash cards on my bed, wearing just her underwear, leaving smears of brightly colored ink all over her bare legs and my sheets. But she vanished on a backpacking trip for the first half of that summer, and we didn’t keep the habit up. And it wasn’t like I waited in the wings. I dated, and decided I was too busy to date, and hooked up with people who weren’t her, and dated again.

That semester I met Harry was spring 2017, and the inauguration had happened a month or so before. There were protests every few weeks. Our school sent out emails promising that the administration would do its best to protect undocumented students, but it didn’t say what its best meant. One of my classes got derailed into debating whether a nuclear missile could reach us from North Korea. “I heard they can reach New York,” a boy on the other side of the room kept saying. “If they can reach New York, they can reach us.” This led to the realization that a lot of us didn’t know where North Korea was. When I visited my mother, she sent me home with iodine tablets she’d bought online, meant to mitigate radiation poisoning, and I kept them in the bottom drawer of my desk. And Harry was there, and we had a lot of sex. These things didn’t really have anything to do with each other, except that it always felt like something was on fire in the next room.

We pulled over at a rest stop and Harry leaned into the backseat to poke her finger between the bars of Emily Dickinson’s cage. “How are you doing, baby?” she cooed. “You sweet little thing. How are you doing?” Emily Dickinson was a ball of white fur, with long orange teeth and rheumy pink eyes. I sometimes thought about killing that hamster. Harry craned her neck to look at my phone. The girl whose profile I was looking at was blond, ruddy-cheeked, smiling. She was nineteen. She had a face that made you want to take someone dancing. “You kind of have a thing for girls with small tits, huh?” Harry said.

I clicked the app closed. “Come on.”

“I’m just, like, saying you have a type. I’m your type. It’s not an insult.”