There are chicks who dress the way Caroline is dressed all the time, but she’s not one of them. On the first day of history class, she wore jeans and a bright-blue sweater even though it was still ninety degrees outside. She lined her pen and her highlighter up perpendicular to her binder, the textbook and the syllabus all out in front of her.

There’s something about her that’s totally pulled together, even when she’s just wearing jeans and a shirt. Not the way she looks, I mean. Something inside her. Like she’s got it all figured out, knows what she wants, knows she deserves to get it.

I can still see how her face looked when she was sticking her nose inside my car, checking out all my stuff, asking me, “Don’t you worry about botulism?”

Tonight—lately—she’s all wrong. She isn’t fine. Not anymore.

And I can’t let it be.

“How come everybody lies when you ask them that?”

“What, how they are?”

“Yeah. You say, Hey, how’s it going? and everybody says, Oh, fine. Their hair could be on fire, and they’d still say, Fine, fine. Nobody ever says, You look like shit, or I don’t have enough money to make rent, or I just picked up a prescription for a really bad case of hemorrhoids.”

“People don’t like talking about hemorrhoids. It makes them uncomfortable.”

“But who decided it was the end of the fucking world to be uncomfortable? That’s what I want to know.”

She shrugs again. “I think it’s supposed to be like lubrication for society.”

“Lubrication?”

“Grease.”

I frown at her and toss a loaf down the counter. It’s filling up. I have to throw them down to her end. This one lands with a little pouf of flour that gets her black sweats messy, but she doesn’t brush the flour off.

I know what lubrication is. I just don’t get why we need it.

We didn’t need it at the library, when I was so fucked in the head from hitting Nate that I forgot I was supposed to even try to be polite.

It felt good punching that jackass.

It felt fucking great backing her up against the stacks, smelling her, getting my nose full of Caroline and my leg right up between hers, getting the taste of her on my tongue.

“It’s something my dad says,” she tells me. “Being polite is a form of social lubrication.”

“I thought that was booze.”

“What was?”

“I thought booze was for social lubrication.”

She smiles a little. “That, too.”

“I’m not sure you and me need lubricating.”

That earns me Caroline’s I’m-so-offended look. Those big ol’ brown eyes narrowed to slits.

I’d like to see her make that face at me when I have my tongue between her legs.

And that is not even a little bit what I’m supposed to be thinking about.

It’s impossible, though, to stop thinking about friction and lubrication, tongues and fingers and mouths, when she goes all red like that. When I know I’m getting her good and rattled. She pinked up that way once when I walked back to my room from the shower in a towel. Stared and stared at me with her neck flushing and her eyes huge.

I had a hard-on for a week.

“Why’d you come tonight?”

“You asked me to.”

“Before that. Why do you keep driving here, parking out front? What do you want?”

I throw the last piece of dough down the table, and it skids across the floured surface, stopping right in front of her.

“I don’t want anything.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She stares at me, nostrils flared, chin up. Starting to get pissed that I’m pressing.

Good. Let her be pissed. When she’s pissed, she talks.

“How’s it going, Caroline?”

This time, I lean into the words the way I might lean into the bread dough, pressing down hard with the heel of my hand. I want a real answer, because it’s the middle of the night and we can lie to each other in the daytime, on campus, in the library.

We do it already. Every time I pass her in the hallway and don’t grab her and push her up against a wall, kiss her stupid—every time it’s a lie.

I’m sick of it. I took this job expecting to be left alone, working when nobody was awake, not having to be polite or to say words I don’t mean, to act like I’m somebody I not. I need the job to give me that because I don’t get it otherwise, and it fucks it up when Krishna shows up and we have to pussyfoot around the fact that he drinks too much and hates himself. It fucks it up to have Caroline sitting outside in her car, not coming in. And now that she’s in, it’s fucking it up that she’s telling me she’s fine.

“It’s going,” she says.

“Yeah? Enjoying the fall weather? Classes treating you well?”

She pinches the bridge of her nose instead, high up, and closes her eyes. “You were right. Is that what you want me to say?”

“I want you to say whatever the truth is.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think you ever tell anybody the truth. You’re awake at two in the morning. You look like shit. You’re exhausted. When I invite you in here, when I ask you how it’s going, you think I’m going to fucking buy it that you’re fine? You think that’s what I want you to say?”

“That’s what everybody says.”

“Yeah. It is. And if you’re going to get out of bed and come here and talk to me, the bare minimum you can do is assume I’m not everybody. When I ask you, I actually want to know how you are.”

“What if I don’t feel like telling you?”

“Then say that. How’s it going, Caroline? None of your fucking business, West. See how that works? It’s easy.”

For a minute she’s quiet, and I have a chance to appreciate what an asshole I am. I’ve got no right to be this way with her. I don’t know why I always want to be—to push at her, peel her apart, find out what’s underneath—but I do.

That’s the thing about Caroline. I want to strip her naked, and then I want to keep going. I want to learn what makes her tick. Not even want—I need to.

I need something from her, and that’s what I have to guard against. The most dangerous thing about her. Because if I need her, she’ll hurt me, distract me, maybe even break me into pieces and grind them under her heel. I’ve seen it happen with my mom.

And it’s not like I’m so dumb that I think love does that to everyone. Bo, Mom’s boyfriend now, he loves her, but he doesn’t love her that way—like a typhoon, a fucking tsunami knocking his feet out from under him. I know there’s love in the world that’s take-it-or-leave it, easygoing, slow and steady.

But that’s not what I feel around Caroline.

She could knock me on my ass so hard.

It’s not what I’m in Iowa for.

She exhales, a long whoosh of air. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.” And then, after another pause, “Ask me again.”

“How’s it going?”

“Terrible.” She looks at the floor. “Every day,” she whispers. “Every single day is the worst day of my life.”

I flour the table in front of me, preparing to shape the loaves.

Bread practically makes itself, if you do it right. You just have to quit fighting it.

Caroline watches my hands. The way my fingers shape and pinch, set the bread on a tray to rise—I have a way of making not fighting it look like fighting it. I guess I’ve been digging my heels in so long, it’s hard to remember there’s another way to do things.

I don’t think I was ever like Caroline, though. Never privileged like her, confident of my place in the world, thinking the future was some gilded egg I could pluck out of the nest and take home. I’ve always known the world isn’t fine, that it’s broken, that it fails you when you least expect it to.

When you know that, it’s easier to take the blows. Automatic to fight back.

“I can’t make it go away,” she says softly. “Not by myself. Not without …”

“Not without what?”

Her nose wrinkles. “Telling my dad.”