I was spending my days with Jahan. I’d found my own apartment in Testaccio, two blocks away from this park where he and his friends liked to drink prosecco during the day. I was also spending more time at Tiberino—the restaurant on Tiber Island—editing Wikipedia pages to make money.

I was a little nervous about money. I had finished the edits for that crypto start-up three days ago, and they still hadn’t sent the money to my PayPal account.

But it was worth it. Late nights at Rigatteria, afternoons spent in Piazza Testaccio. Movies with Jahan and his friends in his living room, eighties music videos and clips from RuPaul’s Drag Race.

I took one more breath and marched back over to Jahan and his friends on the bench. I liked this life. A lot.

• • •

Before I could even sit down, Rocco asked me, “What is the weirdest place where you have hooked up?”

“We’re playing a game,” Jahan explained, handing me a new plastic cup with prosecco. “Where we go around and each say the weirdest place where we’ve done the dirty deed. Or, at least, some deed.”

I was still frazzled after that call with my parents. I took a sip of prosecco.

“Can you skip me?” I asked.

Rocco rolled his eyes. He was lying flat on the bench with his face toward the sky. Jahan, who was kneeling next to him with the prosecco bottle, opened his mouth to say something, but I interrupted.

“I guess a lot of times in the car,” I said, sitting down next to Rocco’s feet. “With this one guy, specifically. He went to my school.”

“That is so American. And so high school,” Rocco said. “I always forget you were in high school, like, yesterday.”

“Was he your boyfriend?” Neil asked gently, his eyebrows raised.

I laughed. “Not really. I wasn’t out, obviously, and neither was he, so we mostly just snuck around and hooked up.”

Then I started smiling. “There was this one time, though. Jackson—that was his name—he and I decided to see a movie together. That was big for us. We didn’t go to a movie theater in our town—we went to one in Springfield, this other town that was a little farther away, where we knew no one from our school would see us. It was a weeknight, and we were seeing Jumanji, the new one that came out at Christmastime. It had been out for a while, so we didn’t think there would be a lot of people in the theater. But we were still nervous.”

Jahan leaned forward, his elbows on the bench just inches from my waist. Rocco squinted his beady brown eyes. Neil smiled.

“The theater was practically empty, just like we expected. We sat in the back row, and after, I don’t know, maybe fifteen minutes, we felt safe enough to hold hands. God, that might have even been our first real date, now that I think of it? But that’s not the point. The point is, we were kissing and feeling each other up and stuff. I was so paranoid. It was my idea, because I just—I wanted to do something with Jackson that didn’t involve a vehicle—but I was just freaking out the whole time.”