“Like, shouldn’t she look in the mirror? A little self-reflection before she starts talking to me about my choices?” Frankie was out on the balcony of her bedroom smoking a cigarette.

Ezra started laughing, which hadn’t been Frankie’s intent, but she dragged on her Marlboro and joined him. Soon, she was curled up in a ball on a lounger barely able to catch her breath. Her mom. Spandex. Jane Fonda. Fred. She hadn’t realized how absurd it was.

“It sounds like a plotline from Dynasty,” Ezra said, and Frankie could feel his grin through the line. “Aerobics instructor seduces her child’s tennis instructor.”

“If it were my tennis instructor, at least I’d understand,” Frankie had howled. “You’ve never seen Fred!”

They laughed until Ezra’s mom needed him—she was in remission now but only just, and relied on Ezra when her energy was low, and he said, “Hey, I gotta go, but you know, I just realized that I didn’t even know you played piano.”

“Oh,” Frankie said. “Yeah. Just one of those things that all kids outgrow, you know? It’s not really part of my deal anymore.”

“Same time tomorrow?” Ezra asked before hanging up, and Frankie, staring into darkened apartment windows in the building across the street—the whole of Park Avenue fled town for the summer—responded simply, “Yes.”

Frankie didn’t know what to expect, come fall. Over the summer, she had relied on Laila for relationship advice. Laila was back home in Atlanta working at Orange Julius during the day (You don’t even want to see my uniform, she’d whined) and babysitting at night, so once she put her charges to sleep, she would call Frankie collect, and they would dig into every detail, every sentence, every nuance. Laila was more experienced in the ways of love; she’d had a high school boyfriend and also dated someone for most of her freshman year before she dumped him after he got so drunk that he streaked naked as part of a fraternity pledge prank. So whenever Frankie worried she was wildly misreading Ezra’s intentions, Laila would soothe her like she knew everything, and Frankie, uncharacteristically, believed her.

Back on campus that fall, Frankie, Laila, and April unpacked their bags and boxes and met in the mail room of the dorm for their first night out. She hadn’t seen Ezra, and she didn’t know his phone number on campus, and she felt too vulnerable to just show up and knock. So the three of them had headed to Lemonhead. The night was warm and star speckled, and as they made their way through campus, the optimism of a new year and new possibilities hung in the air. Everyone felt it. Even Frankie.

“This is going to be our year!” Laila had screamed into the open sky.

“Fuck yeah!” a lacrosse bro screamed back from across Middie Walk.

April had turned and curtseyed just as Frankie was flipping him off. They laughed about it all the way to the bar.

Frankie was three beers deep when her bladder pressed against the waist of her Levi’s. Laila was on the dance floor, and April was flirting with a boy a year behind them who she’d made out with a few times last spring. The AC had broken, so everyone was sticky and shiny, but none of it mattered: there was a joy at being back together, a joy at the possibility the new school year held. Frankie squeezed through the crowd to the bathroom. A new song came on, one that would empty the dance floor or push bodies closer together, depending on how drunk or how frisky any of them were. Frankie heard Bono wail I can’t live, with or without you.