It’s still ridiculously early, and I head straight to Katherine and Nevaeh’s room. Nevaeh is sitting up in her bunk, a textbook open across her knees, but as soon as she sees me, she tosses it aside.

“What is it, baby?” she says, holding out her arms. “Come here.”

Relief floods me, after so much anxiety, and second-guessing myself, and hurt. It hurt, so much, when he left. The sadness is there, behind everything else.

I kick off my boots and drop my coat and clamber up, huddle in. She strokes my hair and I hold her hand, and it’s hard to describe that feeling of solid safety. How it has become so much a part of me.

“So I’m feeling like there’s a reason you’re back so soon,” she says.

“I almost made a terrible mistake,” I tell her, starting with the easy part. She laughs at that.

“Oh no, Addie.”

“Oh yes. You know how Gavin is always waltzing around saying the most ridiculous things to me about how beautiful I am?”

“He’s not wrong, but he’s still a jerk.”

“Well,” I say.

“But why was Gavin the Jerk on your date?”

I start to tell her everything. When we get to the part where I’m kneeling on Jack’s bed, my shirt off, his wide eyes, that look on his face and the way he rolled off the mattress and out of the room, we start to giggle at the image until we are collapsed on the bed, shoulder to shoulder. It feels good to laugh at how absurd it was. It helps to tell Nevaeh how much it hurt. She doesn’t try to excuse him or tell me he might have a good reason. She agrees that he’s an ass. And she doesn’t push it when I say no, I don’t want to talk to him. Not yet.

And then there’s Gavin. And that need for validation that’s so hard to resist.

“Why is it so tied up like that, the sex and the self-doubt and our bodies?” Nevaeh says.

We agree that we’re still waiting for the epiphany. That permanent transformation, where confidence isn’t just a bulletproof shell. Where you’ve transformed into someone who has cut loose everyone else’s opinion and can never be hurt again.

A place where the microaggressions that build up turn to ash instead of turning inside, Nevaeh tells me.

“It’s like a million tiny cuts that never scar, because the cuts keep coming,” she says. “They’re reminders that I’m living in a world that doesn’t love me, that is actively built to reject me, remind me that I’m not white and that is the ugliest thing about me. Next ugliest is being a Black woman who knows she’s beautiful.”

She trusts me enough to tell me this, and I know that’s an honor.