My initial assessment was correct—Boo and Jazza were not exactly the best match. Both of them were nice, and both of them tried, but they were simply too different. There were no fights, but they didn’t say much to each other, which was out of character for both of them. And Boo was always around. Always. If I went to study, she went to study. If I went to the bathroom, she needed to “do her teeth” or sit on the radiator and talk and file her nails. And her stuff . . . Her stuff was everywhere. Bras, shirts, papers, cords . . . There was a path of stuff from Boo’s bed to the closet to the door. We had to make our beds and keep things generally kind of tidy. Charlotte could enforce this. Before Boo came, Charlotte never bothered to check our room, because it was always fine. But now she was stopping by once, sometimes twice a day to get Boo to pick her crap up off the floor. This did not breed warm feelings between the two of them.

Also, Boo carried two phones with her at all times. Two. She tried to hide this fact at first, but I’d see her with them both. One was a very new, very shiny phone. The other was older, with actual buttons instead of on-screen ones. I finally asked her why, and she said that she reserved one phone for guys she’d just met. “So they don’t have your regular number, yeah? They have to earn the regular number, once I make sure they’re not creepers.”

And though she dutifully sat with us in our room and in the library or the common room, and she carried around books and opened them, Boo did absolutely no work whatsoever. In fact, she had the power to diminish the concentration of anyone sitting near her. You’d realize that she was humming under her breath or tapping her long nails on the table, or you’d hear the sound of a soap opera or reality show leaking from her headphones, and your own attention would dissipate.

Jazza quickly became obsessed with observing all Boo’s study habits and reporting them to me. The days got shorter. The air got colder and crisper, and my knowledge of Boo Chodhari’s every study habit grew exponentially.

“Has she even started on that essay you have for English literature?” Jazza asked me over breakfast on the three-week anniversary of Boo’s arrival. Boo generally didn’t make it to breakfast. That was the only time I didn’t see her.

“I have no idea,” I said, drinking my lukewarm juice. “I haven’t started it yet.”

“I just don’t understand her,” Jazza said. “She didn’t even bring any books with her. She does literally no work. Literally. She missed a month of school. And why does she always carry those two phones? Who carries two phones?”