We slide down under the covers, our heads tilted together, and I hold her hand, and there aren’t any words left. It has been such a long night.

Katherine arrives after finishing a late rehearsal. Once she climbs up on the bunk, she hesitates, looking at me, and then doesn’t ask how the date went. I’m okay with not thinking about it for a while. We make a blanket fort, which can be the place where we’re safe for a little while. Tonight.

Nevaeh applies a different expensive, sponsored soothing sheet mask on each of us, and we take selfies and watch endless videos of soothingly peaceful, calm capybaras that have other animals standing calmly on their backs, and everyone involved is very happy about the whole situation. It is capibara in Italian. I know because they’re my favorite animal, and I looked it up.

When it’s clear that we’re all exhausted and ready for bed, I make my way down the hall and let myself look at my phone, both hoping I’ve heard from Jack and hoping I haven’t. My thumb hovers over the notification—a text from him.

I don’t know how to have this conversation. I’m not ready to hear about why he ran away from me, or sure I want to know. But maybe it’s not me; maybe it’s his own thing. Maybe it’s something we can talk about when I feel less like I’m sunburned when I remember how he froze, how he fled. All the validation in the world, and the recognition that I don’t need it, can’t blow that picture away. Not yet, anyway. I go to bed without opening the text. When I wake up, I’m still not sure I can read it or want to hear what he says. Somehow I go all day, through fine-tuning all the bends and twists and arcs of our showcase. Defying gravity over and over again. Lunch and classes, dinner and rehearsal and bedtime, avoiding his text until it feels ridiculous.

I want to apologize, he says in the first one. Can we talk? The second is another apology, an offer to meet up for coffee. In the third one, he tells me it’s complicated. In the fourth, he says he has to explain in person. In the fifth, he apologizes again and says he’ll wait until I’m ready to talk.

I’m not ready. But I’ll see him in history tomorrow.

I chicken out and skip class.

“He’s asking me if I know why you won’t talk to him,” Katherine says gently at dinner. Nevaeh has filled her in, with my blessing.

Why won’t I talk to him? I’m afraid that I do care what he thinks. I don’t want to hear what he thought when he looked at me. What a terrible feeling.