Justine had gone to boarding school because her bereaved and distracted father, when she was in tenth grade, suddenly realized that her public school had no arts program, and limited science. At boarding school, she quickly caught up on all she hadn’t learned in her small rural high school about hard drugs and sex. She got to affect a whole new identity. She was “Tiny,” the rough-edged girl from public school who smoked unfiltered cigarettes and rarely spoke. She met Hal when she was fifteen and he was seventeen. He was her first love. After a year, Hal graduated and went to college. One day that fall, her scofflaw roommate Kelsey, irritated by Justine’s virginity, arranged for Hal to sneak into Justine’s dorm room and sleep there overnight. It all worked according to plan, but right after the awkward act, which felt to Justine like trying to mount a baseball bat, there was a bang on her door, and they were busted. Justine was suspended and placed on final warning (Hal just took the train back to college). She remained faithful to Hal all senior year, becoming in fact a famous cocktease, but the night before graduation she got tipsy and had a big flirt with Kelsey’s younger brother, whom she had only met that night. She went on a family dinner with Kelsey’s wealthy family, was somehow served a great deal of wine at the restaurant, and ended up with her foot in the brother’s crotch under the table. After the dinner, as Kelsey’s father drove them all back to the dorm, Justine, sandwiched between Kelsey and Kelsey’s cousin, Didi, who was also in their class, kissed the brother sloppily in the back of the car, and happened to be sitting on his lap in the common room when Hal walked into her dorm, smiling and windswept, having hitchhiked all the way from Amherst—or maybe she was making up the hitchhiking—but definitely having made a big effort to see her graduate. And there she was on this kid’s lap. Hal looked so shocked when he saw her. She had been bad and traitorous and bad and she didn’t know why. The next morning, she dragged herself over to the boys’ dorm where Hal was staying, feeling nauseous, and pleaded with him to forgive her. He didn’t seem angry, but he wasn’t friendly, either; he was scarily neutral. Justine really hated herself for having made such a stupid mistake and hurting Hal, and she just hated herself, but she still had to put on the pretty linen graduation dress her father had found her, with a sailor’s collar on it trimmed in blue and a big blue bow on the back. She looked so innocent in the dress, yet she felt like an absolute monster. After that, Hal didn’t trust her anymore, and although she came to visit him a few times in New York City where he was working over the summer, things were not the same between them; one day at a diner, Hal launched into a very long, awkward sentence that Justine began to realize was going to end with a breakup, so she stood up, stricken, walked out the door, and began a season of heartsickness that lasted through her first semester of college.