“My mom’s office,” he said slowly, and I could see him, in a matter of seconds, coming around. He worked last summer as a receptionist at his mom’s orthodontist practice, making sure the wicker elephant was stocked with toothbrushes and taking photos for the Wall of Smiles, which he claimed had started giving him nightmares.

“I mean, I’d love not to stare at teeth all summer. You spend enough time looking at them and you start to feel your soul being sucked from your body.”

The idea was halfway built—I could feel it tingling in the soles of my feet. It was called Lovesick Falls, for God’s sake—with a name like that, who knew what sorts of things were possible? We had to go there. “Ros? What about you?”

Throughout this conversation, Ros had been lightly carving words into the lunch table with my (actually kind of nice) pen I’d lent them. They’d gotten as far as fuck the pat. I knew they didn’t have summer plans. On the contrary: Ros had quit everything in the past six months, first swim team, which we did together, then lit mag, then writing poetry, then choir, then smiling, until Touch and I were the only two things remaining from their life before their dad had left.

It was kind of impressive, actually, this quitting. I’d quit exactly one thing in my life: tennis, in ninth grade. After one especially bad practice, my mom came home and found my tennis racket in the trash can. That was the end of that.

But Ros—who, really, could blame them for the quitting? At the end of our sophomore year, right around the time my feelings for Ros started to change, their dad had split, taken off for Delaware with his physical therapist, smack-dab in the middle of our exam period. I still blamed him both for destroying my best friend’s life and for the B I got on my history final. One day he was there, and then he was just gone, this man who’d cooked pancakes on Saturday mornings and who’d once lent me a pair of socks when my feet got wet. I still had them, balled in the back of my drawer. I didn’t know what to do with them. The socks, I mean. It seemed rude to throw them out, but what was I going to do, ask Ros for his address? I wasn’t even sure if they knew it.

On top of all of this, everyone—our teachers, our parents, even this random woman my mom made us stop and talk to when we were walking the dogs—kept telling us that junior year was when everything started to count. Personally, I found this infuriating. What had my life been up until this point: rehearsal for the real thing?

“No plans,” Ros said. They kept their—my—pen moving.