I didn’t visit Ainsley’s room nearly as often as she made the trip to mine, and I had a good reason for it. Where my bedroom was relatively organized, decorations where they should be, bed made, clothes hung up, Ainsley’s was organized chaos. Her green and pink candy-striped walls were barely visible through the posters and paintings and photos she’d stuck up haphazardly (the only photo that’d been placed with any care was the large, framed picture of the Queer and Questioning Club, taken at the end of her senior year). Her queen-sized bed was unmade—not that you could tell, with the four or five layers of clothes she’d thrown on top of it—and at the foot of the bed, a trunk she kept stuffed full of fabrics and buttons and bits and bobs she was sure she’d find a use for one day sat open, its contents spilling out onto the plush cream carpet.

As soon as I got through the door, I was olfactorily assaulted by the thick caramel-vanilla aroma of Ainsley’s favorite candle, which she always lit when she was planning a new YouTube video. She claimed it helped her concentrate, but my muse didn’t come in the form of a scent-induced migraine, so I could not relate.

Ainsley pulled her door shut. I threw myself onto the bundle of clothes on her bed, gagging as dramatically as I could. “What’s up?” she asked, opening the window a crack to let in some sweet oxygen.

I crawled closer to the window and sucked in a breath. “I was caught, Ains.”

She didn’t ask what I was caught doing. She didn’t have to. As the one and only confidante in the world who knew about my locker business, she knew very well what I did immediately after school every day.

She sat heavy on the edge of the bed. “By who?”

“Finn Park’s friend. Alexander Brougham.”

“Him?” She gave me a wicked smile. “He’s a snack. He looks like Bill Skarsgård!”

I chose to ignore the fact that she’d compared Brougham to a horror movie clown as a compliment. “How, because he has puffy eyes? Not my thing.”

“Because he’s a guy, or because he’s not Brooke?”

“Because he’s not my type. Why would it be because he’s a guy?”

“I dunno, just you usually go for girls.”

Okay, just because I’d happened to like a few girls in a row now did not mean I couldn’t like a guy. But I did not have the energy to go down that rabbit hole right now, so I switched back to the topic at hand. “Anyway, he snuck up behind me today. Said he wanted to figure out who was in charge of the locker, so he could pay me to be his dating coach.”