“Spencer’s friend is very cute,” Lola said, carefully rubbing her toes clean with one of her special wipes. “I don’t think I’ll mind if he does this play if he keeps bringing home friends like that.”

As soon as she thought of Eric, Scarlett was nauseous again. She beat her heels into the dresser handles, then let herself down heavily. She opened up her computer. Several e-mails had come in from her friends. Chloe met a guy she liked. Tabitha had been bitten by a weird spider and her eye was all puffy. Josh sent a single, very drunken line: I KAN SING IN WELSH!

Scarlett didn’t have the energy to reply to anyone, so she tried to write for a bit. She ignored her disjointed notes from the night before and started with a clean page.

Write what comes into your head, she told herself.

What came into her head was a pair of eyes—that stunning marbled blue.

Eric. He was a subject she could get into. She described every part of him she could think of. The soft, low voice. The slight shadow of sandy stubble that framed an angled face. Thumbs casually hooked into pockets. A graceful shuffle from foot to foot as he spoke, his focus up and all around him…

She was absorbed in the task when there was a single knock, the door flew open, and Spencer strode in. Scarlett snapped the computer closed quickly.

“Well,” he said, “it’s done.”

“Done,” Scarlett said, “as in…”

“As in I told them, and they said they would think it over tonight and tell me tomorrow. So I have a whole night of it hanging over my head. Hooray!”

He collapsed to the floor in a dramatic heap. Lola leaned down and looked him in the face.

“What exactly did you say?” she asked.

“I may have said that it was an invitational audition for Juilliard,” he said. “That may have come out of my mouth at some point. I also may have made something up about a possible scholarship to NYU. It’s not that these things are true…but we don’t know that they’re not true, right?”

“If you say so,” Lola said mildly.

Something odd passed between Lola and Spencer, a long moment of silence and staring—Lola from her high ground on the bed, and Spencer from his fainting pose on the floor. His face had become very serious.

“If you have a problem with me, you should just come out and say it.”

“I still think you should consider the scholarship,” Lola said. “But whatever you decide…”

“Thank you.”

“Maybe you can let me make my own decisions, too,” Lola added.

“I always do.”

There was some unknown argument between Lola and Spencer that had hummed along in the background for as long as Scarlett could remember, some residual vibration from their own personal Big Bang. It was never clear what it was about, and it never came to any kind of a head. It simply surfaced now and again as static, unexplained and transient.