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adjustment needed, though it was a close thing.
    For the past year, I’d been giving lessons to local students—all of them boys—each of them some version of smug and impertinent until they heard me play.

    Jacqueline,
    Upright bass? Interesting.
    I’m busy in the evenings this week, and most weekends as well. I don’t want you to lose time on this, so I’ll send you the project information later tonight, and we can discuss it over email until we can sync our schedules. Will that work for you?
    LM
    PS – I’ll keep you in mind if I buy a large appliance or need to move.

    Landon,
    Thank you, yes—that would be great. (Re: sending the project information, I mean, not your brazen resolution to use me for my truck’s hauling capacity. You’re no better than my friends! They dodge U-Haul rentals and delivery fees, and I get paid in beer.)
    JW

    Jacqueline,
    I’ll send the project specifics when I get home, and we can discuss.
    The barter system is just primitive economics at work, you know. (And are you old enough for beer?)
    LM

    Landon,
    Far be it from me to knock an effective use of prehistoric economics. And I suppose friends who pay in beer are better than friends who don’t pay at all. (Re: my age—I don’t believe the job description of Economics Tutor makes you privy to that sort of personal information.)
    JW

    Jacqueline,
    Touché. I’ll just have to trust you not to get me arrested for supplying alcohol to minors.
    You’re right—impoverished, auto-lacking college students like myself should respect tried-and-true methods of transport negotiations.
    LM

    I smiled at his candid admission of being carless, my face falling when I contrasted it with the sense of self-importance Kennedy got from his car. Right before we graduated, his parents gave his two-year-old Mustang to his sixteen-year-old brother, who’d wrecked his Jeep the weekend before. As an early graduation gift, they replaced Kennedy’s Mustang with the brand new BMW—sleek and black, with every available upgrade, including plush leather seats and a stereo system I could hear from a block away.
    Dammit . I had to stop linking every single thing that happened to me with Kennedy. Realization dawned then, that he was still my default. Over the past three years, we’d become each other’s habit. And though he’d broken his habit of me when he walked away, I’d not broken my habit of him. I was still tethering him to my present, to my future. The truth was, he now belonged only to my past, and it was time I began to accept it, as much as it hurt to do so.

    ***
    As soon as we hit campus freshman year, Kennedy had pledged his father’s fraternity. Despite my boyfriend’s need for cliquish affiliation, I’d never shared that aspiration. He didn’t seem to mind when I said I preferred not to rush any sororities, as long as I supported his future-politician need for brotherhood. He told me once he sort of liked that I was a GDI girlfriend.
    “A GDI? What’s that?”
    He’d laughed and said, “It means you’re goddamned independent.”
    When he walked out of my room almost three weeks ago, it hadn’t occurred to me that he was taking my carefully cultivated social circle with him. Minus my relationship with Kennedy, I had no automatic invitation to Greek parties or events, though Chaz and Erin could invite me to some stuff since I fell under the heading of acceptable things to bring to any party: alcohol and girls.
    Awesome. I’d gone from an independent girlfriend to party paraphernalia.
    Running into clusters of my former friends was uncomfortable at best. Just outside the main library, tables of frat boys sold coffee, juice and pastries every morning for a week to raise money for leadership training. Armed with portable grills, Tri-Delts camped out in tents on their lawn to showcase the plight of the homeless. (I suggested to Erin that most homeless people are unlikely to own portable Coleman grills and REI camping gear, and she