Friends like these: Janet had accepted my companionship easily, but it was clear that Laurel still had her reservations. She treated me like a small but irritating nuisance: the flatulent cat your neighbors leave with you for a month while they’re in Bermuda, the baby screaming upstairs, the weird lump on your leg that you can’t identify and won’t go to the doctor about, which might be cancer or a colony of spiders or nothing. I noticed she didn’t like being alone with me; it was only when the choice was between that and solitude that she’d sometimes settle for my company.

She had a point, of course. What right did I have, entering their perfect trinity? The square is infinitely weaker: all those parallel lines warp and bend under too much weight.

And there were still some secrets that weren’t shared with me. Sometimes I would wake in the night, and either Janet or Laurel would be gone from her bed, and when asked about it in the morning they’d look at me blankly, or suggest I’d been mistaken, or simply change the subject. Once, I came into the dormitory to find Laurel red-eyed and furious and Janet sitting straight as a poker on her top bunk, staring at the ceiling.

“I don’t care what you do,” Laurel said, before she’d noticed me.

“You obviously do care,” Janet said.

When I asked them what had happened, they both ignored me. They’d clearly been fighting for some time; we all went to dinner and they refused to speak a word to me or to each other, even when a Tiger came and sat beside us and began to tell us all about her band, Death Plum, which featured no instruments, its members preferring to use whatever was around to create their songs. “We call it world music,” she said, drumming her hands on the table, pinging her fork against her water glass. Something about the texture of her leather jacket made it impossible to forget that it had once been another creature’s skin. Janet stared at a beam above her head. Laurel bit all the lipstick off her lips. But neither of them said anything, and so I asked her to play us a song, because I could, to punish them.

Harriet and Nisha, sitting at the other end of the table and listening, laughed silently into their soup. When Janet and Laurel were looking the other direction, they flashed me a thumbs-up each. I smiled back, feeling traitorous to the core.

That night, there were no taps. But I heard Janet get up, slip on her shoes, and leave. An hour later, I heard Laurel leave too. I knew without being told that they were headed in opposite directions.