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What’s so weird about that? It’s so normal. Practically boring. I know, like, five other people who go by French Watermelon Nineteen on the internet. Are you French?”
    “Nope.” I feel sheepish. I try to make my face look sheepish.
    He raises his eyebrows.
    I drop my gaze to his shoes. “I’m … a big fan of French toast.”
    He answers immediately. “Oh, me too. Who isn’t?”
    I look up again, and he’s closer. How did he get closer? I think I’mshaking. Anxiety springs up through my legs. I’m all unsteady, like I could be blown over by the next gust of wind. I’m not sure what happens now. Eye contact game is strong. My words come out quiet. “Also I love watermelons and the number nineteen,and so, I did what any rational human would have done—smashed them together into a weird blob of a word that would follow me around for the rest of my life.”
    He nods. “So, French Watermelon.”
    Is he closer?
    “Nineteen,” I finish.
    What’s happening? Is the sidewalk moving?
    “I think it’s a fantastic name.”
    We’re standing so close. His eyes are inches away. I’m holding on to the grocery bag fordear life. Freight train has replaced heart.
    And then my eyes swing down to look at a crack in the super-clean London sidewalk. When I raise them a moment later, Pilot’s three feet away again. He’s turned towards the Karlston.
    “Look at that. We made it back.” He looks back at me. “Ready to round up the flatmates and get the bonding rolling?”
    I stare at him. “Um, yeah, of course. I’ve been awakefor thirty-four hours now, what’s a few more … I have some icebreaker games loaded on my iPod that’ll be perfect.”
    He grins and jogs up the front steps to the door. I expel the giant breath I’ve been very aware of holding for the past thirty seconds.
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    It’s so dark in our room. Sahra’s asleep, but I’ve caught a second wind. Up in the bunk, I turn on my laptop for light, grab a pen, and throwopen a fresh page in the new Horcrux.
1/11/11 1:03 a.m.
    I just added all my new flatmates as friends on Facebook (Babe Lozenge, Sahra Merhi, Atticus Kwon, Pilot Penn), and finished off a short email to the parents letting them know everything went well today. I haven’t figured out the best way to actually speak to them yet since I only have a certain amount of allotted minutes on my burnerphone. The lights are off, so I’m scribbling via the light of Sawyer’s screen. It works.
    After grocery shopping with Pilot, all of us (minus Babe, who left earlier after orientation to visit a friend she has upstairs) met in the kitchen and sat tentatively around the table. Which, by the way, has terrible chairs. Atticus chatted easily for a few minutes about how excited he is to immerse himselfinto the London theater scene while the rest of us listened, politely inserting a word or two, but not really furthering the conversation. I was about to descend into a cone of social anxiety, but Pilot broke the silence by pulling out the ciders he bought. And then I broke out the Taboo. Well, the version of Taboo I have on my iPod Touch called Word Kinish. Nothing breaks the ice like a goodgame of Word Kinish. (In the interest of being outgoing, I obviously prepped my iPod full of group activities).
    I got a little competitive, but I think we all had fun. We kept switching up the teams. My team always won because I’m a professional Taboo/Word Kinish player. The cousins and I used to play this all the time during summers back in our early teens.
    Sahra was the worst of us at WordKinish. She was easily flustered when she couldn’t think of ways to describe the word she needed to make her team guess without using the illegal buzz words. Instead of talking it through, she would make angry noises until time ran out. I’m not sure what to think of Sahra. She’s kind of nice, but she also seems kind of cold. She doesn’t smile when she talks to me, and she always speaks in short,chopped sentences. I