The funny thing, or rather one of the many funny things in this haha-hilarious story, was that nobody noticed. Nobody noticed that she had less and less to say to James, or that with three weeks to go before the holiday concert she lost first chair in the oboe section of the wolfishly competitive Manhattan Conservatory Extension School Youth Orchestra, thereby forfeiting the juicy solo in Peter and the Wolf (the duck’s theme) to the demonstrably inferior Evelyn Oh, whose rendition of it did, appropriately enough, sound like a quacking fucking duck, as did everything that came out of Evelyn Oh’s quacking fucking Oh-boe.

The second Julia just wasn’t that interested in James, or in playing the oboe, or in school. So uninterested in school was she that she did something really stupid, which was to pretend she’d applied to college when really she hadn’t. She blew off every single one of her applications. Nobody noticed that either. But they’d notice in April, when brilliant overachieving Julia got into zero colleges. Second Julia had planted a ticking time bomb that was going to blow up first Julia’s life.

That was December. By March she and James were hanging by a thread. She’d dyed her hair black and painted her nails black, in order to more accurately resemble the second Julia. James initially found this sexy and goth, and he stepped up his efforts in the sex department, which wasn’t exactly a welcome side effect, but it made a break from talking to him, which was getting harder and harder. They’d never been as good a couple as they looked—he wasn’t a real bona fide nerd, just nerd-friendly, nerd-compatible, and you could only explain your Gödel, Escher, Bach references so many times before it starts to be a problem. Pretty soon he was going to figure out that she wasn’t role-playing a sexy depressed goth chick, she had actually become a sexy depressed goth chick.

And she was enjoying it. She was dipping a toe in the pool of bad behavior and finding the temperature was just right. It was fun being a problem. Julia had been very very good for a very long time, and the funny thing about that was, if you’re too good too much of the time, people start to forget about you. You’re not a problem, so people can strike you off their list of things to worry about. Nobody makes a fuss over you. They make a fuss over the bad girls. In her quiet way Second Julia was causing a bit of a fuss, for once in her life, and it felt good.

Then Quentin came to visit. The question of where Quentin had gone to after first semester was one she had an inordinate amount of trouble focusing her mind on, but the mist surrounding it was a familiar mist. She’d seen it before: it was the same mist that surrounded her lost afternoon. His cover story, that he’d left high school early to matriculate at some super-exclusive experimental college, smelled like First Julia stuff to her. Made-up stuff.