Frankie felt Ezra watching her now. He remembered the sweater, just as she had, and blood rose to her cheeks.

“Stop staring at me,” she said.

She ran her palms over her now-blond hair, flattening the overnight flyaways. She wondered if she looked different to him or if he were thinking she was the same, just older. She had never gone blond in college, and she liked to think that she’d grown more comfortable in her skin since then. But her eyeliner was surely smudged, and she wore much more of it anyway, and she was certain she had dark circles under her eyes—she always had them these days because she was never in the same time zone long enough for her circadian rhythm to settle.

“I’m not staring.” Ezra sighed. “I’m just surprised that you still have that sweater. I figured you dumped everything that had to do with back then.”

“Not everything,” Frankie said. “Just the dead weight.”

Ezra rolled his eyes at her overt pettiness, and Frankie wanted to regret it, to be less petty, but she found that she could not. And since she had come to accept herself for exactly who she was, nothing more, nothing less, she jutted her chin and said not another word.

Ezra spun around and in two steps, he was at the window, which had steamed up along the bottom corner from the radiator heat below. These dorm room heaters were shit, Frankie remembered. Always too scalding or not working at all. A relic from the 1950s. Middleton prided itself on its traditions, on its two-hundred-year history, and on campus, everything old was new again: radiators, stodgy library books, ancient professors, and evidently, previous lovers too.

At the window, Ezra raised the drawn shade.

“It’s snowing.”

Frankie pressed her palms into the mattress and straightened up to catch a glimpse out the window, as if he were lying to her. Ezra saw this too.

“We can agree on the basic facts of the weather, ok? It’s snowing.” Then he cocked his head and really assessed the situation. He loped ten paces to the door, opened it, twisted his head right and left out the front, then walked the ten paces back to the window.

“Holy shit,” he said. “That’s what I thought. This is my freshman-year dorm room.”

“I didn’t know you then,” Frankie replied, as if this were a way to prove him wrong. She felt so desperate to prove him wrong about something. Snow, the sweater, that they’d slept together. It didn’t matter. Anything!

“Well, it is. I used to count my paces back and forth whenever I needed to calm down.” He paused, then quieted. “It was my mom’s idea.”