But this time, I had misbehaved at home. And with Sam. Jojo’s eyes were exactly the same as his, I noticed now—hazel, the pupil encircled by a ribbon of yellow. I’d been ravenous for as long as I could remember, but I had always managed, somehow, a bit of space between that life and the one I presented to those I knew. I’d fuck you in your home, not mine. I’d fuck you in a library, where only strangers could see us, or in a bathroom at a bar. I had never before slept with someone in my parents’ house. I had never before slept with a roommate’s brother. Never again, I’d sworn to myself as soon as he’d left, as I always did. Tomorrow I’ll start over. But I would probably have to see him again, and what would happen then? I could move to a different apartment. Sam could decide to move to California, London, Australia. He could get hit by a truck—I hope he does, I thought, before I could stop myself.

“I mean, we made out a little,” I blurted, then bit my tongue with my incisors.

“Well!” she said, in a way that made me afraid. Her tone pretended at lightness, but there was an undercurrent of censure. Or was it panic? Her facial expression was inscrutable. I played her exclamation over as I averted my eyes—Well! There was a world in which she was just happy, wasn’t there, in which she detected nothing, in which she was even excited about the prospect of her brother and her roommate…

“He’s great,” I said.

“He is,” she said, like a warning.

I wished I could rewind time, excise the experience, lay my head in Jojo’s lap instead, curl my knees into my chest, have her pet my head, her piano-player fingers running through my hair. Did she know about me? Disgusting, for sleeping with Sam and for pushing him away, which I knew I would now do. Had to do.

My phone pinged on the table. I peered over at it. A text from my mother:

So?

Langham.

“What is it?” Jojo asked.

“Something from my mom,” I said.

“Read it to me,” she said. She came from a raucous midwestern family and found the dynamics of my own baffling and amusing. When she’d lost her first tooth, her brothers had paraded her around the house while her mother played a recorder and her dad clapped along. I tried to imagine my mother playing the recorder I’d brought home from school. I pictured her lifting it up off the living room table, holding it at arm’s length, and peering at it with suspicion.

“I’ll read it later,” I said.

“Come on.” Jojo jostled me with her knee. Read the email aloud? Reveal to Jojo what I’d done and, worse, my mother’s disapproval? But, I realized, I could edit as I read, depending on how explicit my mother was—a possibility that gave me a shot of pleasure, electrifying as sex in a public park. And it would mean we’d stop talking about Sam. I reached for the phone and slid the screen open.