“Go away, Ezra!” she said.

I opened the door and walked inside.

Willow’s bedroom was covered in pop-punk bands, Ryan Reynolds, and a wealth of nerd culture—anime, video game characters, obscure comic book superheroes who had yet to be milked by the Hollywood machine. Willow loved a lot of things, and she wore that love on her sleeves. She was rather shameless about it.

Willow herself was sprawled facedown on her bed, willing herself to disintegrate.

“Hey,” I said.

She leaned up on her forearms and looked at me. Her eyes were red, swollen, and seeping with sadness.

“Whoa, are you… okay?” I said.

The word “okay” sounded feeble and useless coming out of my mouth. She clearly wasn’t. Willow responded to it like she did to Jayden’s “I thought you liked cars” comment. She bolted up from her bed, marched straight at me, and started shoving me out of her room.

“Get out,” she said.

“What happened?” I said. “Why was Jayden here? Did he do something to you?”

“Why don’t you ask Jayden, since you two are such great friends, and I’m such a bitch.”

“What? No. Willow, we’re not friends. I’ve never even talked to the guy.”

“He knew your name.”

“I mean… sometimes I let him cheat off my science homework.”

Willow went back to shoving me out of her room. “Get out, get out, get out!”

“Hey, it’s not like I want him to cheat off my homework. It’s just easier than…”

I hesitated.

“Easier than what?” said Willow.

I had just stepped outside the confines of her room, but she stopped. Folded her arms. Waited patiently for a response.

My mouth gaped.

It’s not that I had nothing to say. It’s just that in every possible response I could think of—every possible scenario—I hated myself.

Willow shook her head, disappointed. “God, Ezra. You’re such a pussy.”

She took a step back and slammed the door in my face. My nose was half an inch from the poster on the door and the anthropomorphic purple blob character known in the Adventure Time canon as Lumpy Space Princess.

“It’s easier than getting my ass kicked,” I mumbled.

I had a secret, and no one knew about it. Not even Holden.

You see, I lied when I said that my greatest strength was math. Math was merely my least embarrassing strength.

Yeah. I wasn’t lying about accepting my inevitable life of celibacy.

If you were to go on YouTube, you would discover a channel under the username EzwardSlevinhands. This channel had upward of ten thousand subscribers and consisted entirely of Johnny Depp character impersonations (in full makeup, of course—the makeup was important). They were all performed by a single enigmatic teenage boy, and I’m obviously biased, but he was kind of good.

He was also me.