“No.” She looked at me, misery written clearly across her face. “Everything I’m doing, I’m doing of my own free will. I can’t even pretend you’re somehow compelling me, because I know I would do it even if you didn’t care. Even if you had another way. I love you and I want you to be safe and happy.”

I blinked slowly. “I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t, you jerk. You’ve never been good at friendship.” Mandy tried to smile. The expression died before it fully formed. “When I met you, I thought, ‘Wow, this is someone who’s excited about spending her whole life alone.’ If Graham hadn’t been so happy about having a girlfriend, I probably wouldn’t have given you a second look. You were almost violently antisocial. Don’t you remember?”

I remembered Mandy coming around with fast food and cans of soda, anime DVDs burned from streaming services and platitudes about how it wasn’t really piracy, not when they refused to sell it to her. I remembered her knocking on my dorm-room door for a year, until she didn’t have to knock anymore—until I’d given her a key more out of self-defense than anything else—and then somehow, when the next rooming lottery had come up, the two of us had been rooming together while my original roommate raced triumphantly toward her own friends, free of my lurking, gloomy presence at last.

What I couldn’t remember was the moment when we had decided to be friends, rather than people who kept crossing paths for some inexplicable reason. Graham and I had met through Carlos, who had been my friend mostly in self-defense: he and I had been partnered in our math labs, and if we hadn’t been able to get along, we would both have failed. So Carlos led to Graham, and Graham came as a package deal with Mandy, and Mandy had been dedicated enough to break through my shell of standoffishness and sarcasm.

Mandy looked at my frown and broke out laughing. It was the most sincerely amused sound I’d heard her make in almost a week. “I wish you could see your face right now,” she said. “What, do you not like hearing that you’re lousy at friendship?”

“I thought I was a pretty good friend,” I mumbled.

“Oh, you are. Once somebody convinces you to care, you’re an amazing friend. But sweetie, most people—human or not—don’t have a social circle they can count on the fingers of one hand. Most people go looking for folks they want to have in their lives.”

“I have more friends than that.”

“Now you do. Have you noticed you’re more tolerant with the green people? I can’t decide whether that’s because you feel trapped, or because you recognize your own kind.”