Claudia laughed and Trevor’s chest warmed. They went back to studying and a few hours later, Trevor ran out to pick up dinner. They watched an episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel while they ate and Claudia pointed out her former babysitter in one of the scenes. Around nine, Claudia said she was tired, and went back to her room. That was how they spent the rest of the week. Eating and studying and watching TV. It was hard to square the girl he’d found online with the girl he got to know over those quiet days. The girl still wearing his borrowed sunglasses and picking the cilantro out of the burrito bowls he brought up from Chipotle. He was attracted to her in a way he couldn’t articulate, and in a way that transcended the particulars of her objective beauty. She sat differently than girls he knew, reached for a fork differently, gathered her hair into a ponytail differently. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She was so much more beautiful than the person in the makeup and dresses on the Internet. He wondered how many other people knew this Claudia Castro. He let himself feel special that she showed him this part of her; he let himself think that it meant something.

They never talked about whatever happened the night before they bumped into each other, and as the physical evidence faded, so did the topic as an obvious point of conversation. Trevor wondered if, once she looked normal again, she would drop him. He had no claim on her. They’d never so much as held hands. Never even hugged. There was a certain energy when they were together, but Trevor knew what he felt was his own, and that while to him it might feel big enough to fill a room, that didn’t mean it existed inside her at all. He’d never been in this position before. He didn’t like it, but he wasn’t going to ruin it. He’d seen peers push a “friend” to something more and have it blow up in their faces. Trevor would wait. And hope.

EDIE

Lydia was thirty-six hours old when Claudia finally called. Edie hadn’t slept since giving birth and when the phone rang, its trill muffled beneath a pile of jackets and tote bags, she didn’t hear it—or if she did, she mistook the noise for one of the constantly beeping machines in her hospital room. Various nurses had spent much of the day instructing her on how to squeeze her breast to “express” her milk—but so far, Edie’s body emitted nothing more than a trickle of a snot-like substance that the nurse called colostrum.