A man in jeans and a T-shirt steps into the hall and asks if I’m Jonah, and I say yeah and follow him into a room that basically looks the exact same as my advisor’s office—except my advisor only knows how to schedule classes, not how to handle answers to questions like How was your summer? when the answer is, Pretty fucking tragic. For that, she only knows how to pick up her phone and schedule an appointment with this guy, Angus (who is way too chill to be a counselor or therapist or whatever, despite his meat name), but campus policy requires her to blah-blah-blah, so here we are. Me and Angus. He thanks me for coming and asks if I’ve done this before, and I say yeah, once or twice a long time ago, so he explains some stuff and I sign some stuff, then it’s on to small talk, the worst. He asks, “How was your summer?”

“Pretty fucking tragic,” I answer for the second time today, which cracks me up, because this guy is probably the opposite of my advisor. Angus probably lives for this shit.

He only sort-of smiles, though, when he says, “I’m fucking sorry to hear that.”

Even if I wanted to spill my guts, I never can. I made promises—to Dad, to Elizabeth, to Nick. With Kayla. Promises we made together: superpromises. “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

Angus shakes his head and says, all somber, “None of us do.” Then again, but quieter, “None of us do,” and I realize he means, like, in an existential way, and with pretty solid delivery, too, so we both laugh now. Hey, he’s got a sense of humor at least. If I told him about the roof—about Nick and our fight, and how Nick swore me to secrecy about Dad diagnosing him—or Kayla and Elizabeth and the shit we did and didn’t do, or Dad’s lies, or the lies we told together (superlies?), Angus would probably assume I’m joking. He’d leave work today with stories about the hilarious client referred to him by a dud advisor. But, well, superpromises. Only, I’ve been wondering something. “What do you think of a person who goes back on a pact with himself? Like, let’s say he promised himself he’d keep a secret, but then he tells?”

Angus mulls it over. “I think, as long as he asks for and grants himself permission to tell, then the contract is dissolved, so he’s not going back on a promise at all.”

Of course he’d say that. I change it up and ask, “Do you know who Colette is?”

“The French writer?” he asks, and I mean, okay, I wasn’t expecting that, but I nod, and he says, “Sure.”