“Oh. Um.” He was sitting at Dad’s piano, Dad nowhere in sight. The toilet flushed down the hall. Oscar looked at me. “I didn’t know there was a tonight to come to.”

“Well, you should. If you want.” I turned to Jules. “Same place?”

She shrugged a yes.

I pivoted back to Oscar. “Yeah, so this club . . . it’s meh, it’s fine, and the music’s really bad, but if you want to come, you should?”

“Sounds amazing,” Oscar said, grinning. He played a lightning-quick arpeggio. Show-off. “Gotta work, though.”

“Right.”

“The symphony’s in the performance calendar, no going back, so I’ve got to . . . yeah.” Oscar looked woozy.

“If you change your mind, text Ruby!” Jules linked elbows with me to drag us both down the steps, whispering, “Jesus, nerd love, spare me. I can see why you’re into him, though. He’s intense.”

I trailed her out to the sidewalk. “Intense?”

Maybe she meant it in the sense of, like, intense sunshine, but the word out of context sounded like a synonym for tortured.

Jules stood in the middle of the road, apparently trying to hail a taxi by forcing it not to hit her. “Those eyes. He looks at you like he’s staring deep into your soul.”

I scrunched my nose, wondering frantically whether she meant he looked at me that way, or more of a general “you.” In which case I’d been misreading him; I’d been acting the way everybody probably acted around Oscar Bell.

I was at the very least determined to distract myself for one night while hanging out with my brand-new social circle in our super-lame-but-didn’t-card clubhouse.

“Hey!” Joey said, jumping up from a conversation with Sam to wave at me. “Figured out your future yet?”

“Not yet,” I said, flopping down on my own banquette.

It wasn’t a lie. The best thing about the Met event had been the part when I was hiding from it. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for that particular brand of socialization. Or maybe I just needed more time with Nora . . .

“I’ll pick your future!” Sam clapped, pulling herself up from a slouch. “Mmm . . . zoologist!”

I laughed. “Okay, I get that, but I don’t think I could deal with the poop.”

Her eyes filled with horror. “Oh God, I never even thought of that.”

Tyler appeared from nowhere to hand me some sort of red drink on the rocks with two tiny straws sticking out of it. I thanked him and sipped. It tasted like cough syrup. When nobody was looking, I left it on a bar table as I walked with them to the dance floor.

My phone buzzed with an incoming call. I ducked to the side of the already crowded room and took a peek. Unfamiliar number . . . Maryland area code?

Then a text came in. Your dad gave me your number so we could meet up.