As she pushed open the red-painted door that read GRRRLS, she felt bile rise up in her throat. Not because she was ill, rather because she remembered. She tripped her way toward the sink and gripped the porcelain edges and told herself not to vomit.

The memory from twelve years ago was fuzzy, then came more clearly into focus. She and Ezra had been friends for months by then, spinning closer to each other once he ended things with Bethany. She herself had left a series of paramours by the wayside her first two years at college: she’d graduated from LaGuardia a virgin, though there had been some pretty decent grinding on the dance floor of Studio 54 her senior year once she’d quit music and was attempting to make herself over into someone new. By the time she got to Middleton, Frankie was reborn and had resolved to make up for a lack of sexual experience by having a lot of it. She didn’t have many male friends—men weren’t of particular interest to her unless solely for her pleasure—and yet she and Ezra, after their serendipitous meeting, built a quixotic, consuming friendship.

They’d spent that summer between their sophomore and junior years apart. She was back in Manhattan at her parents’ apartment for the break; her dad was at their Hamptons’ house, and her mom had been so happy to be relieved of him that she agreed to stay put in the city. Ezra had returned to Lower Merion for an internship at a friend’s dad’s law firm. Frankie remembered this now: how he’d always known what he wanted, how it was just a straight shot for him, from A to B, and maybe that’s part of what tugged her toward him. How what she was innately brilliant at and what she thought she wanted for herself were two wildly opposing things. Instead, that summer, she found herself working at Tower Records in the Village on 4th and Broadway, which drove her mom through the beamed ceiling of their Park Avenue apartment. But she didn’t want a stuffy internship at some corporate gig, and she had no other idea what to do with her life, and she knew the manager at Tower because she’d been in there so often in high school.

“I think it’s absurd that you’re working for minimum wage selling other people’s music,” her mom had said one morning in her bright blue leotard and neon-pink headband after her ritual of a doubleheader of two Jane Fonda workouts. Her mother had just turned forty, and the unspoken agreement between them was that they would not discuss her basically confirmed affair with Fred, Frankie’s old music teacher. Her mom was in the best shape of her life.

Frankie had recounted this to Ezra on the phone one summer night. How her mom was standing there in her ritzy apartment in her royal-blue spandex and her scrunchy socks and her too-white Reeboks and pretending that she wasn’t cheating on Frankie’s dad with her childhood piano teacher, with no career to speak of herself, and somehow judging her for being directionless.