“I’m alone. Dude, I’m so tired.” Colin hears the rustle of fabric, Jay swearing as he trips, and the muffled clunk of keys and shoes hitting the rug. The mattress across the room creaks as he collapses on his bed. He moans something and rolls onto his stomach.

Jay’s breathing evens out, and Colin opens an eye, trying to see the clock next to the bed. It’s four in the morning, somehow both too early and too late to easily guess where Jay’s been.

“Where were you?” he asks. Jay doesn’t answer and he asks again, louder, reaching with his good arm and throwing an empty water bottle toward Jay’s side of the room.

Jay startles, lifting his head slightly before dropping it down again. “I’m sleeping, man.”

“Shelby?” Colin asks.

“Nah, she’s such a scene queen. Not to mention insane.”

Colin rolls his eyes and adds a snort so Jay hears his scorn even if he can’t see it. All the girls Jay dates are insane.

“How’s Joe?”

“His leg’s pretty cut up,” Colin says, scrubbing his face. “But otherwise he seemed okay when I left.”

“He’s, like, seven thousand years old,” Jay says. “And nothing keeps Joe down. Not even his whole fucking porch collapsing with him on it.”

“He’s seventy-two,” Colin grumbles. “And he’s lucky. Half an inch to the left and he could have bled to death.”

Jay answers this with the appropriate weight of silence. Sometimes, when the planets align, even he realizes when a smart-ass comment is unnecessary.

“Oh,” he says with more enthusiasm. “I saw your girl.”

“What?”

“Lucy. I saw her on my way here. She was sitting in front of Ethan Hall. I asked her if she needed help, but she said no.”

“First of all, she’s not my girl—”

Jay groans into his pillow.

“Trust me,” Colin counters, opening his eyes to stare at the ceiling, wide-awake now. Scattered above him are glowin-the-dark stars and a model of the solar system. His dad made it for him before he died, and it’s followed Colin to every bedroom he’s ever had. He sighs, rubbing his hands over his face again and wondering who this strange girl is and why in the hell she was sitting outside alone at four in the morning. “She told me to leave her alone.”

“Christ.” Jay groans. “It’s like you know nothing about women. They all say shit like that, Col. They have to. It’s, like, hardwired into their brains or something. They say that stuff to feel less guilty about wanting us to jump their bones. I thought everybody knew that.”

“That’s the kind of reasoning that will earn you a cell mate ironically named Tiny,” Colin says.

“If I’m wrong, then why did I get laid last night and you were here with a pile of laundry and your hand?”

“I think that has less to do with me and more to do with the poor choices being made by the female students at Saint O’s.”

“Ah, right,” Jay says thickly, already half asleep. He falls silent, and eventually his breaths even out. Inside, Colin is a tornado, unable to stop thinking about Lucy and why she might be sitting outside in the cold.

On that first day, she said she was here for him, and although he doesn’t understand what that means . . . maybe part of him does. Clearly she looks different to Colin than she does to Jay, and it’s hard to pretend that doesn’t mean something. In fact, he’s trying his best to ignore the caveman-asshole feeling he gets when he thinks that she’s somehow his, but she’s the one who put it out there, planting the idea like a tiny dark seed inside him.

And now he can’t sleep. Great. Careful not to wake Jay, he grabs two hoodies and slips out of the room.

Lucy is exactly where Jay said she was, sitting on a bench in front of Ethan Hall with her back to Colin, facing the pond. In the low light, the water looks strangely inviting, smooth and dark and calm enough to make the moon and thousands of stars come see their reflections. Mist curls along the edges, like fingers luring its victims into the frigid blackness.

With a deep breath, he closes the distance between them. “Hey,” she says, without turning to see him.

“Hey.”

Finally, she peeks at him out of the corner of her eye.

“What are you doing up?” she asks. Her voice is always so raspy, like she doesn’t use it much. “Couldn’t sleep. What about you?” As expected, she doesn’t answer, so he places the sweatshirt on the bench next to her. “Jay said he saw you out here. I thought you might be cold.” She’s still wearing the plain blue oxford, and no way is it warm enough.

“Is that why you came out here?”

“Maybe.” He rubs his hands together, blowing into them, and glances over at her.

“How is Mr. Velasquez?”

Colin wants to burst out in song he’s so happy she’s speaking to him. “He’s going to be okay. By the time I left, he was back to his old self, insisting he could work from bed if Maggie would let him. I’m pretty sure Dot will be in the infirmary forcing food on him every twenty minutes.”

Lucy stares at the pond for several beats, and Colin wonders if they’ve gone back to the silent game until she says, “Dot is your boss, right? You seem close to her.”

“She is my boss.” He smiles at her tentative efforts at making conversation. “But she’s always been kind of like a grandmother to me.”

“So, your kind-of-grandmother runs the kitchen and the headmaster is your godfather?”