“REASONABLE? I’m twenty-one. I can’t legally rent a car.”

Jenna took off her backpack and ran down the library steps, into the snow-covered quad. Lara picked up Jenna’s backpack and followed her. The streetlights cast puddles of orange glow in between the bare trees.

“WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?” Jenna yelled from thirty feet away.

Without really thinking about it, Lara reached down and packed a snowball with her bare hands and lobbed it at Jenna. It fell short. Jenna laughed and threw one back. It hit a tree nowhere near either of them. Lara walked toward her, already feeling her socks getting wet through her boots.

“God, I feel insane,” Jenna said when Lara was closer.

“I bet,” Lara said.

Jenna sat down in the snow, her legs spread wide apart, her unzipped parka billowing around her knees.

“Are you drunk?” Lara asked.

“No. Yes. A little. In my defense, I’ve been working on this paper for two days straight and now I have this to worry about.”

“That’s fair.”

Lara sat down next to her. Jenna lay down and they looked up at the low, dense winter clouds.

“You know what the paper is about? Jenna said. The ‘couple form.’ It’s like my life is some farce designed to make me crazy.”

“What are you saying about it?”

“Oh, that it’s — I don’t know, if I had to say it without academic jargon I wouldn’t be able to believe it.”

“What do you believe?” Lara said.

“I BELIEVE — ” Jenna yelled up at the sky. She cut herself off. “I believe that I have a perfectly good boyfriend who I am in love with, and that I’m not going to marry him.”

“When does he want an answer?”

“I’m not giving him an answer. I’m not going to tell him no. I’m rejecting the question as out of bounds.”

“Can you do that?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Why not? He can’t just choose to make me decide like that.”

“That sounds like it means no.”

“Maybe. No, yeah, I don’t know,” Jenna said.

They lay there, in the snow, watching the low clouds billowing above them.

“It’s the best I can do,” Jenna finally said. “It’s the best I can do.”

“Sure,” Lara said.

♒

“Don’t you ever think about changing some of your mom’s decorations?” Lara said to Aaron a few days later, back at that dining room table.

“No.” He looked around at the heavy curtains and the dusty old furniture. “They suit me just fine.”

“Weird, but okay,” Lara said. “I have another question for you,” she continued. “How do you have the money to see me this often? Is your inheritance really netting you that much?”

He explained he had some online stock trading thing. He did it every day until he made one hundred dollars and then stopped. Then he’d make himself dinner.

“Have you ever lost money?” Lara said.

“Sure,” he said. “I usually make it back.”