“No! Don’t worry. It was—a cheap thing, it doesn’t matter.” Her father knitted it as a good luck present for her new start. Thora thinks of how they parted: the angry words they threw at each other after he couldn’t resist criticizing her choices one last time. She straightens her shoulders. She didn’t want the scarf anyway. Better to think of it as her flag, planted at the top of the city she’s claiming for her own.

“You sure?”

“Sure.”

“Okay.” He looks over his shoulder. “You walking back to Lindenthal?”

Thora weighs up her options before she answers. She doesn’t want this conversation to end. But on the long walk home, there are so many ways it could go wrong: she might insult him again, or he might expect her to kiss him goodbye. Better to walk away while something’s still perfect. “No, I—left my friend Lily in the club,” she improvises. “I should go and check on her. See if she’s okay.”

“All right.” He hesitates. “Can I get your number?”

“Sure.”

He watches for her missed call on his screen. Then he steps back, like he doesn’t know how to end this. “Well. Good night.”

“Good night,” she says.

They walk away in opposite directions. Thora doesn’t look back.

She puts off calling him. She’s worried he’ll think she wants something romantic, and she’s almost sure she’s not interested in him that way. She has a crush on Jules, a girl in her dormitory, and is starting to think it might be reciprocated. The last thing she needs is a misunderstanding with a boy as intense and unpredictable as Santi. Still, she looks up at the glowing lights on her ceiling and thinks about the snap of magnets, the mutual orbit of binary stars. She wishes ardently that there was a way in this world for a girl to tell a boy she wants to be his best friend. She would take any form—a boy his age, an old woman, a brain in a vat—anything to guarantee that he would get past the surface and engage with the truth of her.

Weeks later, she’s mulling it over when she walks past a noticeboard in the dormitory and sees his face, surrounded by flowers.

She stops short. Three words on the wall, stark as graffiti. REST IN PEACE. The picture and the words are two incompatible languages shoved into a sentence.

Jules stops next to her. “Did you hear? It’s awful. They found him under the clock tower in the old town. People are saying he jumped.”