“They want to meet him,” she tells me as we fold a sheet together, and I laugh. I wish I could see her dad’s face when he sees Adam’s black nail polish.

“Of course they want to meet him.”

We bring the edges of the four-hundred-thread-count sheet together and Rowan gives me a flat stare as she takes over the folding. “You don’t have to sound so happy about it.” When I just smile at her, she says, “He’s going to drive the moving van for us on Sunday and stay the night at my house.”

“They’re going to make him sleep on the couch,” I warn, and Rowan nods.

“I just hope he stays there.”

I laugh and ask, “Are you going to make him dress up?” Adam could be considered “dressed up” if he just wore jeans without rips, took off some of his bracelets, and wore a shirt with buttons.

Rowan shakes her head. “No. I love him the way he is, so they should too.”

I smile, pretending her words don’t sting the open wound in my chest. I wonder if Joel loved me like that—just the way I am—and if he did, how he could stop doing it so quickly. He was the first boy I ever loved, the first boy I ever let inside me with nothing between us, the first boy I ever wanted to really be with, and it took him approximately two seconds after fucking me against a bathroom wall to haul some other girl out of Mayhem and probably fuck her the same way.

I broke his heart first, but he broke mine last.

“Do you know what I love?” I ask, ignoring memories of Joel, pretending to feel normal. Pretending to be myself. I flop onto the couch and watch Rowan fold. She tucks a long-edged seam under her chin and works her magic.

“What?” she asks once her chin is free.

“This new you. Adam has been really good for you. You don’t take shit anymore.”

“I took enough shit from Brady to last me a lifetime,” she says, and I toast a half-empty margarita glass into the air. I’m sucking at its salted rim when Leti knocks on the front door. He pushes it open without invitation and strolls inside with Kit on his heels. I’ve seen her a few times since she joined the band, and if I were sticking around, I think we might’ve even become friends.

“Help has arrived!” Leti says with both arms thrown in the air.

Rowan, the genius that she is, insisted on throwing me a packing party disguised as a girls’ day, and I figured it was a brilliant way to secure some cheap labor. Tomorrow, she’s throwing me a birthday-slash-going-away party, for which everyone is required to bring a present and help us load the moving van. We’re having the party in my empty apartment, and then I’m going to Rowan’s to spend the night at her place. By then I will have said all my goodbyes, and on Sunday morning, I’ll leave this life behind.

“You’re not packing up the fort, are you?” Leti asks with an exaggerated amount of alarm, keeping me in the present instead of a future that feels just as lonely.

“Yes?” Rowan says.

“But I brought my jammies!” He lifts a backpack in the air, and I manage a chuckle.

“I was promised a fort,” Kit says, and Rowan shrugs before shaking the blanket back out.

With Kit’s help, we pack up most of my things and build a fort even better than the one we had before. Mismatched bedsheets—some lavender, some pink polka-dot—are hung over couches and lamps and packed cardboard boxes, and the entire fort is full of comforters and pillows. Two tiny lamps illuminate the inside, and we camp out within the dryer-sheet-scented walls.

Kit credits her fort-building skills to her older brothers, who I suspect can also be credited with her willingness to cram herself into a tiny space with Rowan, Leti, and me. Even though we’ve only hung out a handful of times since her audition a couple months ago, I like her, and as long as she continues lacking any interest in Joel, I’ll keep liking her. She’s pretty and she knows it—but in a tough, impenetrable kind of way. She’s not sweet like Rowan or girly like me, but she’s got a sort of playfulness about her that is as feminine as it is tomboyish.

“I feel like I’ve been a horrible friend,” I say to Leti while he finally lets me paint his fingernails. He said it would be his birthday present to me, and I was twisting off the cap of the sparkliest, purpliest nail polish I own before he even finished his sentence. “What ever happened with that Mark guy?”

“Who?” Leti asks, not looking at all comfortable to be on the receiving end of what I insist is the most fabulous manicure he’ll ever get. He furrows his brows at the polish like it might make his fingers fall off, and he only half seems to hear what I’m saying.

“Mark. The fireman.” Leti raises his eyebrow and I say, “You met him at Mayhem a few weeks ago . . . dated for a while . . . We joked about him being hot enough to be Mr. February in the firemen’s calendar . . .”

“Oh!” Leti chuckles. “Mark, right. You know he wasn’t an actual fireman, right?”

Now it’s my turn to raise my eyebrow. Leti’s smirk sinks even deeper.

“I just nicknamed him that.”

“Why?” Rowan asks, and a mischievous spark glints in Leti’s eye.

“Because he put out a fire in your pants?” I ask, and Leti grins while shaking his head.

“Because he had a really big hose.”

“Oh my God,” Rowan says, and she and I break into a fit of giggles.

We’re still giggling when Kit, staring at a random polka dot on the wall of our fort, says, “I slept with Shawn.”