“What can he do that you can’t?”

“Lots of things, potentially. But mainly there’s this company you can hire to scrub your name online. Push the bad results down in the search engines. But it’s expensive.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“That sucks.”

“It does.”

“So what else is new?”

She blinks at me, obviously not expecting the change of subject. “Not much,” she says.

“Huh.” I push some dough in her direction. “You want to try this?”

“No, thanks.”

“C’mon, I’ll show you how.”

“Thank you, but no. I think my talents lie elsewhere.”

She sounds so much like the old Caroline that I almost smile. “No problem.”

She starts to wander around the room again.

“Have you thought about anything at all besides naked pictures since they first popped up … when, early last month?”

“August twenty-fourth.” She tilts her head, considering. “Yes.”

“What else have you been thinking about?”

Caroline peers into the clean mixer. When she puts her finger inside the bowl and traces the curve of it—the curve I polished until it was shiny enough to attract her attention—I don’t tell her to stop, even though I’ll have to clean it again after she goes.

She can touch whatever she wants.

“My constitutional law class. Latin homework. My sister’s wedding coming up. Whether my dad is eating okay now that I’m not at home to nag him. How to cover up the circles under my eyes. Rape. Evil. Whether law school admissions committees routinely Google applicants or just in special circumstances.”

She glances at me. “If I should get the space between my teeth fixed. The usual.”

“Sure you don’t want to pile on a few more things? Global warming, maybe? Declining newspaper circulations?”

She almost smiles. “What do you think about?”

I guess I’m supposed to make a list, too, but fuck that.

I’ve got three years of undergrad before I can start med school, followed by four years to become a doctor, another four or five to become an anesthesiologist, and then years of hard work to build a practice. I’ve got three jobs, Frankie to think about, Mom to take care of.

Maybe what I can have of Caroline is this little slice of space and light in the darkest hours of the night. I can give her permission to not be fine. Let her talk about what’s bugging her. Distract her from her problems.

If she wants to come here, I’ll do all that, but I won’t make her problems into mine, and I’m not going to bare my fucking soul to her.

“My ears, mostly,” I say. “You really think they’re too small?”

I touch them with my flour-covered hands, trying to look self-conscious. It works—she smiles.

That gap between her teeth kills me. I need to measure it with my tongue.

“Are you sure they’re full-grown?” she asks. “Because my dentist told me that it might be a few years before my wisdom teeth finish coming in. Maybe it’s the same with your ears.”

“You’re saying I might hit a growth spurt. Grow some manlier ears.”

“It’s possible.”

“You know what they say, though. Small ears, big equipment.”

“That is so not what they say.”

“No? Maybe it’s only in Oregon they say that.”

She laughs, a husky sound. I don’t like how it slips over me. I don’t like how I can just about feel myself filing it away in the stroke book for later—Caroline laughing as I unhook her bra. Still smiling when I take off those shapeless sweatpants and see what she’s got on underneath. What she looks like naked.

You already know what she looks like naked.

Everybody does.

I shake off the whole train of thought. Doesn’t matter, and it’s not happening between her and me, anyway.

“Here’s my point, though,” I say. “There’s all this other shit you could be worrying about, and you’re wasting too much worry on something you can’t fix.”

“Like what? Worrying over the size of your ears isn’t going to fill much of my time. I’ll still have, like, twenty-three and a half hours a day to worry in.”

“What are you saying, you only care about my ears half an hour’s worth?”

“Maybe not even that. I have to be honest with you.”

“Please. Be honest.”

“Okay. The thing is, if I never have to see another guy’s ears so long as I live? I’ll be a happy girl.”

“Now you’re starting to sound bitter.”

“Maybe I am bitter. Maybe I’ve just seen waaaay too many close-ups of ears lately.”

“Red, swollen ears?”

She leans in, like she’s telling me a big secret. “Veiny, horrible, giant, disgusting, dripping ears.”

That cracks me up.

“What is it with you guys taking pictures of your ears?” She’s all indignant now. “It’s like you’re so proud of them.”

“If you could make stuff shoot out of your ears, you’d be proud, too.”

She’s biting her lip, looking away toward the mixer like it’s going to rescue her from the fact that we just had a conversation about dicks, and she wants to laugh but she won’t let herself. “I think we need a new topic.”

“Something more polite?”

“Yes.” Then she glances up at me from under her eyelashes, and, for one hot second, she’s wicked. “Something a little less lubricated.”

I have to look away from her. Take a breath.

I point at a lump of dough. “Wash your hands, and I’ll let you knead that.”

“Will you, now?”

“I will. I’m going to teach you to make the best sourdough loaf in Putnam County.”

“Is anybody else in Putnam County making sourdough loaves?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

She makes a face at the bread, but she’s pulling her sweatshirt over her head. “All right. I’m game.”

The shirt she’s got on underneath—it’s got to be her pajama shirt. She’s not wearing a bra.

I get four more loaves ready while she’s washing her hands at the sink. It takes two before I’ve managed to push the surprise away.

I do another one with my eyes closed, willing the soft bounce of her breasts from my head.

When she comes back from the sink, her face is serious. “Listen. I’m … I’m just going to say this. I meant what I told you at the library.”

“Which thing you told me?”

She’s picking at her thumb with her fingernail. “I can’t be your friend. Or—or anything else.”

I get it.

Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, a little, to hear it again, but I really do get it.

For all that I had my reasons for not talking to her last year, she’s got her own reasons, too. There was Nate. There was her dad, who hated my guts even before I set about deliberately lighting his fuse. But underneath all that, there was this other thing.

Caroline’s not the kind of girl who gets mixed up with a guy who’s dealing. She’s the type who plays it safe, does what she’s supposed to, follows all the rules.

Maybe if I were who I’m pretending to be when I’m at Putnam, me and Caroline would be possible, but I’m not. We don’t make sense together.

It’s fine.

“Tell you what,” I say. “Tonight I’m going to show you how to make a decent loaf and bake it. If you come back tomorrow, I’ll teach you something else. We don’t need to be friends. We can just do this … you know, this nighttime thing. If you want to.”

“Can we?”

“When Bob’s not here, it’s my bakery. I can do whatever I want as long as I get the bread made.”

“And you won’t …”

When she looks right at me, my hands twitch.

You won’t, West.

You fucking won’t.

“We’ll make bread and be not-friends. You don’t have to come within ten feet of my ears. I don’t want that from you, anyway.”

What’s one more lie on top of all the others?

She pokes experimentally at the dough in front of her. “All right. Show me how you do this thing, then.”

I show her, and then I show her the rest of it. She stays until her loaf comes out of the oven. By then she’s yawning.

I send her home to bed with warm bread tucked under her arm. I make her text me when she’s back at the dorm, safe behind a locked door.