Aunt Magnolia had made Jane promise never to turn down an invitation to Kiran’s family estate.

“Hey,” Kiran had said that day, stopping at the desk. “Janie. It’s you.” She’d glanced at Jane’s arm, where tattooed jellyfish tentacles peeked out from under her shirtsleeve.

“Kiran,” said Jane, instinctively touching her arm. The tattoo was new. “Hi.”

“Do you go to school here now?”

“No,” Jane said. “I dropped out. I’m taking some time. I work here. In the bookstore,” she added, which was obvious, and not something she wanted to talk about. But she’d learned to chat, to fill the silence with false enthusiasm, and to offer her failures as conversational bait, because sometimes it enabled her to head off the very next question Kiran asked.

“How’s your aunt?”

It was like muscle memory now, this steeling herself. “She died.”

“Oh,” Kiran said, narrowing her eyes. “No wonder you dropped out.”

It was less friendly, but easier to bear up against, than the usual reaction, because it brought a flare of annoyance into Jane’s throat. “I might have dropped out anyway. I hated it. The other students were snobs and I was failing biology.”

“Professor Greenhut?” Kiran asked, ignoring the dig about snobs.

“Yeah.”

“Known school-wide as a pretentious douche,” said Kiran.

Against her better instincts, Jane smiled. Greenhut assumed his students already knew a lot about biology, and maybe the assumption was just, because no one else in the class had seemed to struggle like Jane had. Aunt Magnolia, who’d been an adjunct marine biology teacher, had spluttered over the syllabus. “Greenhut’s a superior, self-righteous donkey,” she’d said in disgust, then added, “No offense to Eeyore. Greenhut is trying to weed out students who didn’t go to fancy high schools.”

“It’s working,” Jane had said.

“Maybe you’ll go to school somewhere else,” Kiran said. “Somewhere far away. It’s healthy to get away from home.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Jane had always lived in that small, upstate university town, surrounded by students whenever she’d stepped outside. Tuition was free for faculty kids. But maybe Kiran was right, maybe Jane should have chosen a different school. A state school, where the other students wouldn’t have made her feel so . . . provincial. These students came from all over the world and they had so much money. Jane’s roommate had spent her summer in the French countryside and, once she’d learned that Jane had taken high school French, wanted to have conversations in French about towns Jane had never heard of and cheeses she’d never eaten.

How disorienting it had been to attend the classes she’d watched enviously through the windows her whole life, and wind up miserable. In the end, she’d spent most nights with Aunt Magnolia instead of in her dorm room, feeling like she was living a parallel version of her own life, one that didn’t fit her skin. Like she was a puzzle piece from the wrong puzzle.

“You could be an art major somewhere,” Kiran said then. “Didn’t you used to make cool umbrellas?”