I had. Galadriel also happened to be one of Chidi’s investors, which had been a source of some debate in our home.

“So. Yeah,” she said. “I’ve figured out I don’t want to help robotic white men build robots, but that doesn’t mean I know what comes next. You’re lucky. I thought you were unfocused as a kid, but you actually just had likes and dislikes.”

“You were too good at everything,” I said. “I was lucky to only be good at a few things, and no one will pay me for them, which significantly lowers the chance I’m accidentally evil.”

She handed me the piece again. “I told you all my shit last time. You go now. Who’d you lose your virginity to?”

“Erm.” I took a pull. “Wendi Zhao.”

Anita doubled over in hysterics, her legs curved into her stomach. She rolled her forehead on her knees. “Jeez,” she said. “I called that, didn’t I?”

“You get me.” That seemed to tighten her. I worried that I’d transgressed, moving too quickly to close the nine years that still lay between us. “Got me,” I amended.

Anita took a hit. “Don’t give me too much credit,” she said, with the smoke still caught in her throat. Exhale. “Any idiot could look at a tape of us back then and tell who liked who. It was all so obvious. You especially. You have no poker face.”

“You always knew?” I said softly. “About me?”

“Of course I did. Why do you think I was so skittish with you? You had this way of looking at me that was very intense, Neil. Like you were stripping me naked, and not just sexually. Like, existentially. It was a lot for a fifteen-year-old.”

“That’s embarrassing,” I said. I groped for the piece on the coffee table. Was the indignity of your teenage self always so close at hand, long after you thought you’d escaped?

She sucked in, held her puff, and then breathed out a slender rope of smoke. “Some girls, all they ever want is someone to look at them that way, you know? And I just ignored you.”

“Because you weren’t one of those girls.” I waved my hand, refusing another puff. “I drove. I should stop. If I want to drive back.”