Mags glanced around the room until she found Noel again—standing on the couch. He was already looking at her. He stepped onto the coffee table in Mags’s direction and grinned, wolfishly. All of Noel’s grins were a little bit wolfish; he had way too many teeth. Mags took a breath that shook on the way out. (Noel was her person.)

“Eight!” the room shouted.

Noel beckoned her with his hand.

Mags raised an eyebrow.

He waved at her again and made a face that said, Come on, Mags.

“Four!”

Then Frankie stepped onto the coffee table with Noel and slung an arm around his shoulders.

“Three!”

Noel turned to Frankie and grinned.

“Two!”

Frankie raised her eyebrows.

“One!”

Frankie leaned up into Noel. And Noel leaned down into Frankie.

And they kissed.

December 31, 2014, about nine P.M.

Mags hadn’t seen Noel yet this winter break. His family had gone to Walt Disney World for Christmas.

“It’s 80 degrees,” he’d texted her, “and I’ve been wearing mouse ears for 72 hours straight.”

Mags hadn’t seen Noel since August, when she went over to his house early one morning to say good-bye before his dad drove him to Notre Dame.

Noel didn’t come home for Thanksgiving; plane tickets were too expensive.

She’d seen photos he’d posted online of other people. (People from his residence hall. People at parties. Girls.) And she and Noel had texted. They’d texted a lot. But Mags hadn’t seen him since August—she hadn’t heard his voice since then.

Honestly, she couldn’t remember it. She couldn’t remember ever thinking about Noel’s voice before. Whether it was deep and rumbling. Or high and smooth. She couldn’t remember what Noel sounded like—or what he looked like, not in motion. She could only see his face in the dozens of photos she still had saved on her phone.

“You’re going to Alicia’s, yeah?” he’d texted her yesterday. He was in an airport, on his way home.

“Where else would I go?” Mags texted back.

“Cool.”

Mags got to Alicia’s early and helped her clean out the basement, then helped Alicia’s mom frost the brownies. Alicia was home from college in South Dakota; she had a tattoo on her back now of a meadowlark.

Mags didn’t have any new tattoos. She hadn’t changed at all. She hadn’t even left Omaha—she’d gotten a scholarship to study industrial design at one of the schools in town. A full scholarship. It would have been stupid for Mags to leave.

Nobody showed up for the party on time, but everybody showed up. “Is Noel coming?” Alicia asked, when the doorbell had stopped ringing.