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don’t understand.”
    “Please don’t make me… It’s not important….”
    “Jesus, Rafe! Were you in love with her?”
    “No! No. I never was in love with her. That’s the… Okay, fine. You want to know the whole truth? You want to know the story? You want to know why this is tearing me up inside?”
    “All I’ve ever wanted is honesty.”
    He chuckled at her for a moment, then proceeded.
    “Honesty. People say they want it, but when they get it, they get it all right. You’re heuristic. You always have been. You trust your instincts. I trust my intellect. But with Lynette Robinson…no, I wasn’t in love with her. But she was in love with me. God knows why. She never told me, of course, but she didn’t make a secret of it, either. The way she looked at me in class. The way she smiled at me whenever I got up to make a presentation. Her face would light up, and her eyes—she had these great eyes. Blue like, I don’t know, a calming swell of the ocean. I liked that she was in love with me. I wasn’t especially popular and some days were pretty brutal, but no matter what, she’d be there with that look of love in those blue eyes and that…helped. And I wish I could have loved her back. But I didn’t.”
    “We can’t choose who we love,” said Esme.
    “But why?” He looked at her. “Human society is based on our ability to exert free will over ourselves and in our interactions with others. I’m a sociology professor, for Christ’s sake, and I still don’t know what makes love so exceptional. I know it is exceptional, and I know I love you, very much, but I also know it has very little to do with my brain, and that’s a little scary. So, back in high school, I asked myself, Why can’t I love her back? Why couldn’t I choose to think about her the same way she thought about me? And I followed the course of thought to its logical conclusion and decided that it was because of her weight.”
    “You were a typical, superficial, pigheaded—excuse the expression—teenage boy.”
    “No, I wasn’t. Typical teenage boys don’t score 1600on the PSATs. Typical teenage boys aren’t beaten by their fathers when they score A-’s instead of A’s. But that’s getting off track, because I’d reached what I felt was a logical conclusion and that left me sort of…satisfied. So I went to school the next day determined to speak to Lynette and share with her my realization.”
    “Oh, Rafe, tell me you didn’t.”
    “Oh, I did. I thought I owed it to her. I wanted her to understand that it wasn’t her fault. I wanted her to understand that I was, in fact, superficial, and it was my problem and there was nothing she could do about it. Esme, I thought I was carrying out an errand of mercy. I wanted to stop leading her on.”
    “That poor girl.”
    Again, Rafe chuckled. “You obviously didn’t know her very well. Because I told her this, between home-room and first period, and she didn’t slap me or cry or yell or do any of the things that in retrospect she had every right to do. She just smiled at me with those blue eyes and thanked me and that was that. And nothing changed.”
    “I’ll bet she came home that night and cried herself to sleep.” Esme looked around the room. This was her home. This was her bed. This was where Lynette had retreated that night.
    “The next day, tickets for the senior prom went on sale. I had no one to ask. There were a few girls I had crushes on—don’t give me that look—but they were either unavailable or very much out of my league. But as silly as it sounds, I really wanted to go to the prom. It was a rite of passage. I was a sociologist even then. The senior prom was something I needed to experience. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to go stag.”
    “So you asked Lynette.”
    “Yes. I made it clear to her that we were just going as friends—which must have been just another stab in the gut—but she acted cool about it and asked me the color of my cummerbund