Some are saying seventeen inches, some twenty-four. Either way, it’s a lot of snow. The subway is running because it’s easier, apparently, to keep it going than to shut it off and restart it. We can go anywhere we want, except it’s the middle of the night and we’re in Hell’s Kitchen and there’s nowhere to go.

Smoke leaks out from under Ted’s door.

The ceiling squeaks like it’s going to come down. Rob pounds on it with a broom and says, Fucking newlyweds. Then he shakes his head and laughs at the double meaning of his own joke.

We hang out in the living room. I try to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Blue. Red. Yellow. Nope, the green and white are wrong. Start again.

James sits on the floor, leaning against the wall, legs folded insect-like, smoking the thin cigarettes he rolls himself.

James is a collection of straight lines. His concave cheekbones and his too-straight nose, the cut of his cream-colored hair, the lapels on his jacket decorated with ever-changing pins of silver crowns, ringed hands, tiny bells.

My edges are round. My hair curls violently when it’s wet. James’s waist-cinched jackets are too restrictive for me to dance in. And mostly that’s okay. But there are nights when I watch James, and his straight lines, and his straight fingers around a straight cigarette, and I wish I were more like him.

Rob likes to flirt.

And he likes to flirt with me, although we both know it’s a joke.

But James isn’t the only one in the apartment who seems subdued tonight. Everyone is kind of glancing at the couch and then looking away without saying anything.

Rob is stretched out perpendicular to me, his long legs on top of mine, back on the floor, eyes on the smoke that rises toward the ceiling.

Oh, Michael, Michael, Michael, he says, dramatically breaking the silence. Why don’t you have a boyfriend?

All of James’s roommates are dramatic. And I don’t know them well enough to tell what’s real and what’s theater, or to know whether I should even care.

Maybe I have a boyfriend and I just haven’t told you, I tease back.

As if.

I stare at the laces on Rob’s shoes. They’re blue. Faded.

And easier to look at than James’s face when I’m lying about having a boyfriend.

MTV is blaring in one of the bedrooms. I Want My MTV, a variety of rock stars chant.

I kind of wish I could see it, because watching MTV at home around my dad is risking a lecture on morality and, of all things, fashion.

As if either of those were things my dad knew anything about.

I assumed I’d sleep on Steven’s vacated couch, but am not about to put up a fight when James suggests the beanbag chair in his room instead.

Do you think Steven will be okay? I ask, Is he coming back?

James shrugs a sad I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it shrug. I don’t know what he’s hiding or whether I’d want to hear it, but I’m not going to press.