“That was last week. This week’s theme is feminine hygiene. If you want to join us, we’re making tampon garlands later.”

“No one ever said you weren’t quick, Katz.”

Lucy’s eyes flitted from Gavin’s to below his waist and back again. “Unfortunately same holds true for you.”

“You never complained.”

“You never listened.”

“No need. Always another customer waiting to be served.”

That Gavin was arrogant didn’t mean he was wrong. Gavin’s father was one of the first VCs with a history of betting big and right. With Gavin’s Mercedes convertible, partying prowess, and, yes, dammit, those floppy curls, he did have a line of girls waiting outside his bedroom door.

She’d never been one of them.

Until the night her ride to the after-after-homecoming-game party drank too many seltzer wine coolers and accidentally flushed her car keys down the toilet. Lucy had called AAA and sat on the curb to wait, once again regretting the last fender bender (was that her seventh or eighth?) that had put her car in the shop. That’s when she’d heard Gavin talking behind a tree at the side of the house.

“I know my times were slower than the last meet, Dad, but we still won. By a—”

Silence.

“I’m not making an excuse, it’s just—”

Silence.

“I know.”

Silence.

“Yes, I remember. Pissing in a tin can. Got it.”

Gavin hung up, reared his arm back, and hurled his phone across the front lawn. Right into Lucy’s tote. She cried out in surprise before exploding in laughter. When Gavin peered around the tree and she pulled his phone out of her bag, his eyes narrowed before he began laughing too.

“Now if only someone had recorded that and shown my dad,” he said with a sheepish grin, knowing she must have heard the conversation.

Gavin walked to Lucy, and she handed him his phone, never expecting him to take it and sit down beside her. They were in a couple of classes together, went to most of the same parties, but they weren’t really friends. But, honestly, in their ultra-competitive high school, was anyone truly just “a friend”? See and be seen, give a little, get as much as you could, everyone equally as good to party with as to use to your advantage—the best being when both could happen at once.

That night had been different.

From beneath her bunk bed, Lucy grabbed the dustpan she’d “borrowed” from the janitorial closet and swept up after Gavin. “Why are you here?”

“Can’t a friend stop by?’

“Yes, a friend can.”

“Oh, come off it, Lucy, there was never anything real between us. You know that.”

Lucy knew it.

She knew who Gavin was.

But somehow she’d let him in. For weeks—the longest relationship either of them had ever had. Which happened to include the night before her Stanford interview.