It was a picture of a dude wearing the same university sweatshirt that everyone who didn’t know how to dress could fall back on. I swiped on his profile and saw a picture of a modestly built torso taken in a bathroom with the flash on.

“Is this Grindr?”

“Yeah. I just downloaded it on a whim. This is the first guy who tapped me.”

I realized at that point that, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, I had sort of been assuming you were a lesbian, like me. Jonesie couldn’t convince me otherwise, but this could. This wasn’t an idea that you were trying to talk yourself into, you were actually considering the guy in the sweatshirt. I let myself feel slightly superior to you for a moment.

“I’m the wrong person to ask,” I said, handing the phone back.

January 25

Even so, when you told me about James I thought it was a joke.

“Is he from Grindr?” I asked.

“No, he’s someone I knew from when I was ten years old.”

“Does he know that?”

“Be serious.”

Elena and I both wanted to meet your new boyfriend, and what you suggested was, for some odd reason, going to the arboretum after a huge snowstorm at the end of January. James showed up in full skiing regalia — snow pants, a hat with ear flaps, the works — and Elena and I were wearing, like, jeans.

I immediately liked him. Obviously, I thought you were superior to him in every way. He was confident and in shape but not beautiful, and you could talk circles around him, and frequently interrupted him. He seemed to admire you in a dopey sort of way, and only once or twice did it cross my mind that you and him had been teenage boys together.

You tried to convince us to walk across the frozen river. I got too scared to get far from the shore, so Elena and I hung back while you and James shuffled out there.

“C’mon over!” you shouted from the opposite riverbank.

“Fuck off!” Elena yelled back, grinning.

“I weigh, like, twice as much as either of you,” James shouted.

“They’re like faggot high school sweethearts,” Elena said to me while we were finding another way to cross the river. “They’re either going to kill each other or get married.”

At the one show that your band played, I hung around while you socialized with the other musicians and a few of James’s friends, and I was surprised at how well you did with them. I never did very well in open-ended conversations with straight engineering students from Grosse Pointe, but you were hitting all the beats, feigning interest in things. I stood in that circle saying nothing and then retreated to the back with Elena and Kira while you went to set up.