He peers down at his hands and scrapes his thumb along a raw knuckle. “Worst-case-scenario thinking’s my specialty.” There’s a long pause as he studies his palms. “I don’t want to think that. It’s just the most logical explanation.”

“Or they think we’re both too pathetic to find anyone else. We’re like the last two kids in gym class, being paired off.”

He sighs heavily. “I suppose I’d deserve that assessment. But you hardly do.”

“What’s that mean?”

Before he can answer, a car horn blares, startling us both. It draws my eye across the street toward the noise and the lazy flow of midmorning traffic—parents pushing strollers, partners walking hand in hand, the occasional cyclist and runner passing by. And that’s when I spot them.

“Jamie.”

His head inclines my way, washing me in that woodsy, morning-fog scent. He has a lot of nerve, smelling that good.

“What is it?” he says quietly.

I turn my head, nearly brushing noses with him. Neither of us moves away. “Across the street. Don’t look. Just listen, then casually take a peek. Across the street, there are two familiar people wearing very poor disguises.”

Jamie glances down at his hands, his thumb running over a crack at his fingertip. Then, slowly, he peers up from beneath his lashes across the street. A flash of irritation tightens his expression before he sits back and folds his arms. “What is wrong with people?”

“I really wish I knew. I don’t understand them. At all.”

Stealing another glance across the street, I observe Jules and Jean-Claude, arranged in a composition titled Casual Betrayal. Jules wears a ball cap, puffer vest, and leggings with fuzzy boots that she’d never be caught dead wearing otherwise. Jean-Claude’s sporting a hipster flannel that’s far from his usual preppy style and is almost unrecognizable thanks to—

“Did Jean-Claude dye his hair?” Jamie says.

“Spray-in white, like the stuff you use at Halloween.”

“This is disturbing,” he mutters.

“This is unacceptable, is what it is. They played us, Jamie. They played us like well-fucking-tuned instruments.”

It’s been years since Jules did something like this—pulled a stunt to get around my stubbornness. Everything she said at the Edgy Envelope on Monday rattles around my skull, and in some overly sympathetic part of my twinny heart, I want to just laugh this off and let it go, because I know Jules, and I know she thinks she’s doing what she has to in order to help me.

But all I can focus on is the hurt. My sister and my friends, who Jules said were all in favor of this, playing Cupid—it feels like they’re saying I’m undesirable on my own, that I’m helpless and hopeless without them throwing me at someone. I have to be manhandled—no, tricked—into coupledom.