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“Nothing.”

“Margo.”

“It’s not nothing, it’s a thing, but I don’t want to be weird about it.”

“You’re being weird about it right now by not saying it.”

She sets her fork down. “Okay. I heard about the party. About Evan grabbing your arm.” Her eyes flick to my arm, where there is, in fact, a faint bruise coming up that I have been very deliberately wearing long sleeves to avoid discussing. “And I heard that Beau Sorensen stepped in.”

And there it is.

I should have known. There’s no such thing as a private scene at a Whitmore party — the place runs on information the way the power grid runs on coal, and a thing like that, the captain stepping in for a girl nobody could place, would have made the rounds before I’d finished walking home. Margo is plugged directly into the source. She probably knew before I’d taken my boots off the first time.

The thing is, now that she’s said his name, I realize I have an opportunity I didn’t plan for.

Because I’ve been carrying the proposal around all afternoon like a stone in my pocket, turning it over, and there is exactly one person in my life I can lay it in front of and trust to look at it clearly. June would worry. Wren would have an opinion delivered in four words and no follow-up. But Margo — Margo will take it apart with me, piece by piece, with full investment and zero judgment, and she’ll do it while we eat lemon-herb chicken, which is the only conditions under which I want to think about any of this.

“There’s more,” I say.

Margo goes very still, in the way of a person who can tell the good part is coming. “More?”

“He found me today. Beau. Outside Hartwell, after class. With a coffee.”

“He what?”

“He had a proposal.”

Margo makes a sound that is not quite a word, and all but scrambles off the couch.

“Not that kind.” I point my fork at her before she can launch. “Sit back down. It’s not that kind.”

“I’m sitting. I’m extremely sitting. What kind, then?”

So I tell her.

I tell her the whole thing — the chai that turned out to be my exact order because Margaret apparently catalogues my coffee the way she catalogues first editions, the walk down Main, the part where I blurted out that I wasn’t sleeping with him and he laughed and said if he wanted to sleep with me I’d know, which makes Margo cackle so hard she nearly upends her plate. I tell her about Bella, and Evan, and the architecture of the thing — his problem and mine, shaped the same, a solution that runs in both directions.

I tell her the words fake dating and watch them land.

Margo sets her plate on the coffee table. This is serious. Margo does not abandon a plate of her own cooking for anything trivial.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay. Walk me through it. Pros and cons. We’re doing this properly.”

“There’s nothing to do properly. It’s a bad idea.”

“It’s not obviously a bad idea, which is different, and which is why we’re doing pros and cons.” She tucks her feet up and turns to face me fully, the show forgotten, glasses pushed up her nose. “Pro. Evan. You said it yourself — he’s running on the assumption that you’ve got no one and you’ll fold. What happens to that assumption if you’re visibly, publicly attached to the captain of the hockey team?”

“It evaporates,” I admit. “He can’t tell himself the story anymore. And he’s not someone who likes losing in public, so he’d have to back off, because pushing would mean pushing in front of Beau, in front of everyone, and that costs him more than I’m worth to him.” I hear myself and amend it. “More than the version of me he’s decided he wants back is worth to him. Which isn’t actually me. It’s the not-losing.”

“Right. So that’s a big pro. Arguably the biggest.” She holds up a second finger. “Pro two. It gets people off your back generally. You’d be — and I say this with love — visible in a way you have never once chosen to be. Nobody questions a girl who’s dating Beau Sorensen. You’d have cover. For Yale season, for the audition stretch, for all of it — no drama, no Evan, no speculation, just a boring, settled, everyone-stop-looking-at-me relationship.”

“A fake one.”

“A functionally real-looking fake one.” She waves a hand. “The function is what matters. Con.”

“Con,” I say. “Everyone will be looking at me more, not less. You’re describing it like a privacy screen. It’s a spotlight. The second I’m seen with him, every person on this campus has an opinion, and most of those opinions are going to be some version of what is he doing with her, and I do not have the —” I stop, because I can feel the sentence getting away from me, getting longer than it needs to be, which means I’m closer to something true than I want to be. I start over, shorter. “I don’t want to be a question people are asking.”

Margo’s face softens. She heard the long sentence too. She knows what my long sentences mean.