“Did he hurt you?” Scott undergoes a Hulk-like transformation, which looks peculiar on his strung-out ex-rocker body.

“Yes!”

Scott’s body completes the Hulk transformation.

“No.” I sob hysterically. “Emotionally.”

Scott shrinks back into his natural form. Sabine exchanges a look with him. “Of course you can stay,” she says.

“Will you call my parents? I don’t want to have to explain. Not tonight.”

She leads me to Kurt’s bedroom. “I’ll call your maman right now.” She hugs me, and the comforting familiarity of her violet perfume keeps me in her arms, crying.

Kurt opens his door. “What’s going— Oh. What happened?”

Sabine releases me into his care. I flop onto his unmade bed, and he closes the door behind me. “It’s…it’s over!” I say.

Kurt places a solid hand on my back as I emit huge, gut-wrenching sobs. “Josh broke up with you?”

“No. I broke up with him.”

He’s quiet for nearly a minute. “I don’t get it,” he finally says.

I tell him the story to the best of my current ability, and when I’m done, he scratches his head. “So you broke up with Josh before he could break up with you.”

“No.” My head is swimming. “It wasn’t like that. Or… it was more than that. I don’t know.”

“You’ve never been able to believe that he could like you as much as you like him. You were afraid he’d dump you. So you picked those fights to get a conversation going in which you could dump him first.”

“No,” I say again. But something awful and truth-y stings inside of me.

Still. That doesn’t mean it was wrong to break up with him. I do believe that Josh would have left me, most likely before college even began. But maybe he wouldn’t have until after we were already in New England, already living together. Which would’ve been even worse. My heart couldn’t take it – moving someplace new and strange and then losing the person who’d brought me there. Because eventually, no matter what the circumstances, he would see the real me. Josh is a beautiful, messy, passionate work of art, and I’m…a blank canvas.

There’s nothing here to love.

“You told him that you’re a placeholder in his life,” Kurt says. “So does that make me or Josh the placeholder in yours?”

My attention jerks back to him. “Huh?”

“Now that Josh is gone, you came straight to me. In his place.”

The word gone is a sucker punch, but what he’s suggesting is even worse. “That’s not the same thing. Not at all. You guys don’t…share the same space. You don’t” – I struggle to put it in terms he’d understand – “perform the same function in my life.”

“Because you and I aren’t romantically involved?”

“Exactly.”

“Josh and I don’t perform the same function,” Kurt agrees, “but we do take up the same amount of your time. And you gave him the time that you used to give to me.”

The guilt. I can’t deal with it on top of everything else. A shrill ring from inside the jewelled clutch saves me from having to reply. We sit up, alert. My phone rings again. Kurt pulls it out and examines the screen. “It’s a Manhattan number. Do you want me to answer it?”

I shake my head.

“It’s probably Josh.”

“I know.”

“He’s probably using Brian’s phone.”

“I know.”

“You told me that I should always answer it if I think it might be Josh.”

“That’s not valid any more.”

“Okay.”

The phone stops ringing. A minute later, it blips with a voicemail. I turn off the volume, but I see the Manhattan number call me again. And then again. Kurt throws my phone underneath his bed to curb my temptation to answer it.

“I’m tired,” he says. “Go brush your teeth.”

I brush them with his toothpaste and an index finger, and I wash off my make-up with his liquid hand-soap. My face is a blotchy mess. I ditch my dress and replace it with one of the worn T-shirts from the pile on his bathroom floor. When I return to his room, he’s asleep. I tuck myself up against him, and – all night long – I lie awake and watch the green light of my phone flashing out from underneath his bed.

Forty-two missed calls. Three voicemails.

Merry Christmas Eve.

I listen to the voicemails on my walk home. Josh is angry and sad. He begs me to call him back. He begs me to reconsider. He says he doesn’t understand what happened. It was all a mistake, a misunderstanding. Something we can fix.

He says it over and over and over again.

This is Brian’s phone. I’ll have access to it for the rest of the night. Please call me. Don’t do this to us. I think you’re afraid. I don’t know why – I don’t know what I could’ve said or done to make you distrust me – but for once in your life, Isla, take a risk. Take a f**king risk. If you keep playing it safe, you’ll never know who you are. I know who you are, and I love who you are. Why don’t you trust me?

His voice fills my heart with pain. His words rip it apart.

I believe Josh – that he thinks he loves me. But I also still believe he’s missing the point. Between his expulsion from school and the pressures from his family, he’s too distracted to see that he’s repeating the same mistake with me that he made with Rashmi. He stayed with her for so long because he liked the idea of being in love. He has an empty well in his heart that needs to be filled by someone. Anyone. But that’s not enough for me, and it won’t be enough for him either once he finally realizes the truth.

Brian must have taken pity on him, because a few hours later – after what I estimate to be three hours of sleep on Josh’s behalf – the calls begin again. I don’t know what to do, so I don’t do anything. My fear is paralysing. I turn my phone on silent and hide it in my sock drawer. I hate myself for this.

Josh refuses to be silent. He comes to our house in the evening, and my parents turn him away. A minute later, there’s a knock on my door. It’s Maman. She hands me a small tube. “He wanted you to have this.”

I stare at it.

“What’s inside?” she asks.

“My Christmas present.”

“Was it a nice one?”