But when she saw Chad at school on the Monday after the movies, she knew it wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t want to kiss him. In fact, the idea made her feel a little bit sick. Instead of meeting him before biology at her locker, she dawdled in the bathroom, then avoided eye contact by sneaking in just as the bell rang. After class, she bolted back to the bathroom. They usually saw each other again at lunch, sitting with one of their rotating groups on the benches in the school courtyard, or across the street at the deli. But Claudia left the building out a side door and when he texted if she wanted to meet up later, she didn’t text back. Should she have just had the awkward conversation with him? Yes, obviously. And, obviously, she shouldn’t have been surprised when he started a rumor that he’d seen her give a blow job to a junior from another school at a party. Or, after that, when the friends they shared shunned her. But she was, a little. It seemed like asymmetrical punishment. The furthest she’d gone with a guy was getting felt up in the back of an Uber, and now her classmates were tagging her on Snapchat stories of “famous sluts.” Cleopatra; Angelina Jolie; Kim Kardashian; Claudia Castro. Fine. She endured, and that summer Chad went to California to stay with his mom; he finished the rest of high school in L.A. His friends were still assholes to her, but by the middle of junior year she was with Ben, so she didn’t care.

She and Chad had un-followed each other on social media by the time he left New York, so it was a legitimate shock that August when, almost three years later, he plopped down on the couch next to her at the dorm orientation. He’d come back to the city for college. He smiled at her, and she let it all go. Claudia was done with Ben and his polyamory pretext; she was ready to start college looking forward, not back. She wasn’t the person she’d been when she’d embarrassed Chad. She’d changed, and maybe Chad had, too. Maybe he was ready to forgive her. If Chad Drake could be her friend again, she figured, anything was possible.

“You ready for all this?” Chad asked, as the counselors droned on about academic integrity and coping with stress.

“All this?”

He gestured to the room. “Living in a dorm. Hanging out with people from, like, Ohio.”

“Are you?”

“I’m ready to leave all that shit from high school behind. I’m diving in.”

“Me, too.”

He said he was thinking about studying business, or maybe political science. His dad, of course, wanted him to go to law school.

“Did either of your parents get remarried?” Claudia asked.

“My mom’s got a boyfriend.”

“What about your dad?”