“What if there is no out of it?” I flopped backward on the bed to stare at the ceiling. “You know where I didn’t feel it? On the edge of a tidal island, with no phone reception. I started to think maybe it was okay to get up in the morning and sustain myself and go to bed at night. But the second I come back here . . .”

“Well, it’s plain old senior year in a couple of weeks, right? You won’t have to keep thinking about Amberley.” Jules made spooky fingers. “How he got in, you didn’t. That’s got to be a kick in the teeth, for starters—”

“I did get into Amberley.”

Admitting it felt like a hatchet hitting the emergency box.

Jules looked as lost as me now.

I pulled myself upright. “I tried out for the summer program in April. It was a blind audition, there was—it’s a screen.” I mimed pulling a screen down. “An audition screen—between me and the judges, and I was . . .” I let out a hysterical laugh. “I was so terrible. It was a disaster. And I still got in. Got my letter in the mail.”

Jules watched me, understanding now. “But you turned it down.”

“I mean, of course, right?” I pulled a pillow into my lap. “And they begged me to reconsider—my dad, my godmother. Even the piano chair wrote me a fucking email. I’m sure they’d made him do it. ‘Think about what it’ll mean for Amberley to have another Chertok in our ranks.’”

Jules smiled wryly. “They want to put you in another ad campaign.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. God, the whole thing is so embarrassing and I was hoping to get clear of it and that has obviously not happened this summer. At all.”

Laying it all out like this, finally voicing it in actual words, made it lose some of its power. It was something that happened to me. Not everything.

“Okay, confession time?” Jules said, scooting closer on crossed legs. “You’re the one I’ve mainly been jealous of.”

“There are so many people in this city . . .”

“And I covet most of their lives too.” Jules glared out the window in demonstration. “I think it probably started with that photo shoot, a million years ago. I remember tagging along to Lincoln Center and watching you and all the other kid models get styled, and I totally fell in love with it. But it seems like it was a few weeks later that we kind of . . . drifted. And I always pictured you in that world and me stuck in mine and—”

“You’re not stuck anywhere.” I grabbed her hand, but my mind was spinning.