“Me too. Anyway. She came up to me right after you walked away and wanted to know what happened. She wanted to know why there was a look of horror on my face when I saw you.”

“Okay . . .”

“And I was confused because I didn’t know why my face would show horror when I wasn’t horrified. I was shocked, but not horrified.”

“You did look a little horrified to see me, Eliot.”

“Well, I thought about it more and I realized that maybe there was something like horror there, but not because you were you. But because you were you.”

“Oh. Got it. That completely clears everything up.”

“Let me explain! Okay, at that point I was pretty much thinking of JD as the coolest person I’d ever met. She was so calm and interesting in this unexpected way. She always knew what to say and always seemed interested in what I had to say. She was down to be silly with me and never made me feel stupid. To be perfectly honest . . . I had a major crush on JD. Like, a major one.”

“Eliot.”

“But, of course, there was a major roadblock.”

“The fact that you didn’t know who JD was.”

“Exactly. But I liked JD so much that that was starting to seem kind of, I don’t know, irrelevant? And then I saw you on the street and put the pieces together.”

“And you were horrified.”

“Yes and no. I was horrified because, here’s the thing—I also happened to think that you were pretty freaking cool. Jessie the superintendent, I mean. You might remember from our phone calls, but I actually mentioned you a few times.”

“Of course I remember. You were talking about me to me without knowing who I was.”

“Right, well, hopefully it didn’t pass your notice that I thought my super was competent and badass and—”

“Someone you were always making a fool of yourself in front of.”

“Exactly. Jessie, when you have a crush on someone, you don’t want to be a fool. You want to be, at the very least, able to screw a light bulb in properly. But I was so much less than that. I was the guy who couldn’t even defend his own home. I was the guy who’d cried on your couch in his underwear. Like five minutes after I’d first met you. Just the other day, you saw my friend do the limbo under my legs while I did the splits and nearly fell over.”

“Yeah, now that was special. That was the closest I came to telling you who I was. I just wanted to laugh with you so badly.”