“If you like it, tell Carly?” Bodie grinds pepper over my bowl. “I want her to make it a special.”

“Sure,” I say, and the way he looks in my eyes makes me think we could be having a moment. But then he says, “Is Kelsye here?” and the turn in his voice is so obvious.

“She’s busy,” I tell him, and take my mac and cheese out front so I don’t have to talk about Kelsye anymore.

Adam is reading, newspaper folded to the exact column so he can hold it with one hand and eat his sandwich with the other. He doesn’t look up when I get closer.

I felt so sure about the plan. I didn’t ask Carly or Bodie. I didn’t look for slips of paper on the bulletin board.

“Can I sit here?” I ask, and wonder if he can hear my heartbeat.

Adam looks up, staring for a minute before he grins. “Of course.”

I pull his key from the waistband of my skirt and slip it across the table. “Thank you,” I say, and I want to say more, but I don’t have the right words.

“Everything work okay for you?” Adam asks. I nod and he smiles. I wait for him to offer for me to stay again, but he just says, “Good!”

I can’t make myself ask. It’s already a lot that he’s done for me.

Adam eyes my dinner. “I didn’t know they had mac and cheese!”

“It’s a Bodie experiment,” I say. “Want some?”

I dump a spoonful on the side of Adam’s sandwich plate and we try it together, like it’s a dare. The mac is warm and gooey and the cheese makes strings. It tastes a million times better than the stuff that comes in a box.

“Bodie’s that blond guy, right?” Adam says.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know why I expected it to be bad.”

I laugh. “I know. Me too.”

“It’s awesome.”

“You can have more if you want.” I push my bowl toward him.

“I don’t want to take your food.”

“It’s fine,” I say. “Really.” I’m eager to give him something. Anything.

“You eat it,” he says, smiling.

He tells me about the article he’s reading on a new museum in Barcelona. How interesting he thinks it must be to design a space to show off art you haven’t even seen.

I don’t want him to know that I’m not exactly sure where Barcelona is, if it’s in Italy or Spain, or it’s like Luxembourg. Maybe Barcelona is in Barcelona, and maybe if I’m nineteen I should know that. So I focus on what he said about the building. “You mean like someday paintings that haven’t even been painted yet will hang there?”