After New Year’s, Carrie and Danny had been (almost literally, physically) inseparable. Nobody really cared where they spent their time. Danny was an orphan. For the first time in her life, Carrie and her dad had a chasm between them. School barely existed. Classes were moved to empty rooms at the community college while the damage at Middleton High was being repaired. Their teachers were in a post-traumatic daze; it was all they could do to put a movie in the VCR in most classes. Nobody took attendance.

She and Danny spent all of that spring mapping out each other’s bodies. They basically lived together in the king-size bed of a guest room in Danny’s empty house, a soft, pillowed refuge from the rest of the world, shades drawn halfway until the afternoon light turned red at sunset.

She remembers she had to teach him how to hug. Nobody did that for him when he was growing up, and he was crap at it.

Then Danny left for Stanford without telling her.

One day, she went to Danny’s house and the shutters were down and he wasn’t there. The security system was activated. It looked abandoned. She called, and his number had been disconnected.

It took her an embarrassingly long time to put the clues together.

The sale of Sharp Industries was announced a week later.

To tell the truth, she never expected it to last between them. It wasn’t like they were going to get married. Who actually meets the love of their life in high school? She got over it. They grew up. They’ve even become friends, with a few awkward visits here and there to prove it.

Still, a goodbye would have been nice.

“I saved your life, and you left me,” Carrie says. “I didn’t drag your ass out of that gym so you could make cat videos for Facebook.”

“Actually, they’re going to use my AI program to make fake friends.”

Curiosity overwhelms her for a moment. “Fake friends?”

“A lot of people get into fights on Facebook with their actual friends and families. They stop talking to each other. So the company is experimenting with a chatbot that’s always there for you; a friend who never disagrees, or gets angry, or argues. They were talking about adding it to appliances, too. Like, a coffeemaker that will greet you in the morning, a speaker that knows what kind of music you like, a mirror that says you look great — ”

Like he’s reading from a product manual. Jesus. “Oh my God, will you shut up? That’s not the point and you know it. You were supposed to do so much more.”

“Like what?”