But I have no right to be imagining that, so I promptly stop and get changed. It’s a slow process to take off my jacket and my snowsuit and my long johns, all the way down to my bra and underwear. I slide off my bra but leave the underwear on. Mrs. Singh’s sweatpants cut me halfway across the calves and the sweatshirt has a distinct crop-top vibe, but there’s a pair of wool socks to keep my feet warm, and I already feel a thousand times better.

Jack waits until I say, “Ready,” before turning around. She looks equally hilarious, at least, in her cropped gray sweats and her midriff-bearing sweatshirt. Jack’s eyes slip down my body and get noticeably stuck around my cleavage, which is on display in these too-tight clothes.

I am not blessed with the kind of figure that enables me to go casually braless, as I learned from watching my busty mother go tits-wild in her Cleveland Browns jersey at all of my middle school sleepovers. “Sorry, but my bra was wet,” I grumble.

“Yeah, of course.” Jack’s voice is husky, and she clears her throat. “Cool.”

Cool. Nothing about this turn of events is cool. We’ve reverted back to standing awkwardly in front of each other. I’m trying not to stare at that patch of stomach revealed above the low-slung waistband of her borrowed gray sweatpants.

I am doing an unbelievably bad job at trying not to stare at that patch of stomach.

“Are you hungry?” Jack asks, pulling my eyes back up to her mouth. In truth, that’s not much better. I can’t stop thinking about all the places that mouth has been on my body.

It’s only another ten feet from the “bedroom” to the “kitchen,” and the refrigerator is predictably empty. The cupboards are a different story, stocked full of dry goods, and we pull down any food we find to take inventory of our options. Without running water, we make do with a can of chicken noodle soup, a packet of saltines, and some semi-stale Fig Newtons for dessert. “I would expect more refined palates from Cornell graduates.”

“I think they just have different priorities,” Jack says as she pulls down a brown bottle from a high cupboard. “Do you know what this is?”

“Alcohol?” I venture.

“Expensive alcohol.” The bottle is covered in a thin layer of dust, which she rubs against the stomach of her sweatshirt. “This is a twenty-five-year-old Macallan scotch whisky. Three hundred dollars a bottle.”

I nod absentmindedly as I take out a pan from a bottom cupboard and put it on the stove top for our soup.

“We should probably drink some.”

“We absolutely should not,” I correct her, but she’s already popping the top as I peel back the lids on the can of soup.

“Why not?”