A half hour later, there was a knock at her door. Summer had Tori Amos on repeat.

Benji was standing outside her door.

She opened it, daring him with her whole face to mention the music. She wouldn’t turn the volume down at gunpoint.

“Do you want to take a walk?” Benji asked.

He was wearing his weight-lifting gloves.

“Don’t you have to work out?”

“I can go later.”

Summer looked at him for a second. Then went and turned off her stereo. She grabbed a jacket.

She and Benji took the elevator without talking. They walked out onto Sixteenth Street, toward the heart of campus.

It made her think of Charlie.

“I’m sorry about the CDs,” Benji said.

Summer didn’t say anything.

“I meant them as a peace offering,” he said. “I could hear you crying up there—I’d never heard you cry before, so I thought you must really be crying, and I felt like shit about it. I wanted to make up for it.”

“I like the CDs,” she said.

“I like that we’re friends now,” Benji said.

Summer looked up at him. Were they friends now? She was still getting used to his name.

“But I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to fuck with your grieving. You were in the middle of something, and I shouldn’t have introduced new variables.”

“I like the CDs,” Summer said again.

“I like being your friend,” Benji said again.

They were probably friends . . . They ate dinner together almost every night.

Summer looked over at him. Up at him. He’d pulled a sweatshirt on over his tank top. It was a relief.

“Why do you wear weight-lifting gloves to dinner?”

He lowered an eyebrow, like that was a stupid question. “So that I don’t lose them.”

She stared at him, like that was a stupid answer.

“I don’t have pockets,” he said. (Benji wore baggy striped pants that only gym-rat meatheads wore.)

“So you’re not just trying to tell everybody that you lift weights?”

He tucked his chin into his neck. “I don’t need to tell people that I lift weights.”

That made Summer laugh.

She supposed they were friends. What a revolting development.

“I don’t think there was anything special about Charlie . . .” Summer said.

Benji let her talk.

“And I don’t think there’s anything special about me. There was nothing special about us falling in love and being wrong about it. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world, and I think that’s the worst part of all this—knowing how unremarkable our relationship was.”

Benji was watching the sidewalk, listening.

“The most magical thing that’s ever going to happen to me wasn’t magical at all,” she said. “It was cardboard, you know? I’m crying over cardboard.”