It was in the rearranged living room of one of the co-ops, and you were performing in the kitchen. Someone turned off all the lights but the overhead in the kitchen, and then, when people still wouldn’t shut up, you just started playing. I had heard you play this riff much slower in my bedroom, and just like in my bedroom, you stared down at your guitar while you played. Even though you barely looked up from the fretboard, I could tell from your tight-lipped grin that you were having a great time, loved all the attention you were getting.

Elena and I both agreed later that it was impossible to tell what you were singing, except for the covers. The sound balance was completely wrong, and the guitars and drums drowned out your voice almost completely. After the show James gave you flowers, and, yes, I felt a little jealous of him, but not very much at that point. Elena saw me watching you standing with him in the doorway and elbowed me hard in the side.

February 20

By then Elena had coupled up with Kira. One night in Elena’s bedroom after a party I was talking to you and the drummer in your band, and across the room the two of them began shamelessly making out on Elena’s bed. The drummer kept talking about Thomas Pynchon as if nothing was happening.

“Finally,” you mouthed at me.

Sometime in February Kira and Elena invited you, James, and I to a house Kira’s parents owned in Muskegon, right on Lake Michigan, for spring break.

“I hope you won’t feel like a perpetual third wheel,” you said offhandedly a week beforehand. I hadn’t even considered it. Being a third wheel felt like one of those fake emotional states left over from high school.

But when I got there, and unpacked everything in the wood-paneled bedroom on the first floor, I did start to feel a little lonely. Enough clothes for the week and a big stack of books, all in a pile on an old blue quilt. On the wall there was a painting of a sailing ship and an embroidery piece with a Bible verse on it. A mirror above the dresser. I adjusted my hair in it.

I didn’t want a lover, I wanted someone I could talk to, and I had that in you. But the bed with the blue quilt looked forbiddingly cold.