He looks momentarily chastised.

“You know exactly what it’s been like for me.” Staring down at the mac and cheese, I lose what little appetite I had.

“It’s not exactly been easy for me!” he says, and I scoff. “It hasn’t. You don’t know what it’s like, having the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

“Right, the weight of the world. What would we do without you?” I ask, rolling my eyes. “The whole world would just implode.”

“That’s what it feels like sometimes,” he admits, surprising me. “You don’t know how many times I wished I were you. You don’t know how many times I wished Mom would stop treating me like I was her greatest accomplishment and leave me alone. You weren’t there when I had to tell her I didn’t get into Princeton. She acted like going to Brown was the same as going to a state school.”

“No, she talks about it all the time, how she’s so proud of you, how you’re carrying on the family’s Ivy tradition, because it sure as hell won’t be me.”

“Well, of course she acts like she’s proud of me. She’s not going to go around telling people how Brown’s barely an Ivy.”

“Did she really say that?” I ask, a little stunned.

“Only when I was applying. She didn’t even want me to apply, said I’d almost certainly get into Princeton. Said she knew all the alums in the area and would get me a good interviewer,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Yeah, whatever.”

It never seemed weird to me before, that we were always on opposing teams. It never seemed odd that we had teams. But now I realize we were all supposed to be on one team together.

Maybe this is what he thinks too. Maybe this is why he knocked on my door. I end up scooping all of the pasta he made into the trash, but I take a leap of faith and ask him something.

“What happened between you and Elise?”

His eyes widen. “What’d she tell you?”

“She said you told her you were breaking up with Vanessa and that you’d kissed her one night.”

For a moment, he just stares at me, speechless. “First of all, she kissed me. And I didn’t tell her we were breaking up! I just told her we were having a hard time deciding what to do when we went to college.”

Something had always seemed off about the night she came back from her anti-anti-prom party and I could never quite figure it out until now.

“What happened the night of prom?” I don’t want any more half-truths, only the whole truth now. “She said you showed up to her party.”

“I didn’t even know that was her party,” he says. “I just heard from a few of Vanessa’s friends that there was an after-party on the football field. We ended up going because we didn’t have anything else to do.” He sighed, frustrated. “What did she say I did?”