Archive of Our Own

The thing about Miami in August was that the air didn't move so much as press. It sat on your skin like a wet towel, heavy with salt and exhaust and the sweet rot of plumeria flowers crushed underfoot on the sidewalks. Oscar Piastri had been in Florida for exactly twenty-three months, long enough to know that the ceiling fan in his dorm was a polite suggestion, not a solution, and that the proper response to a heat advisory was to simply ignore it and walk slower.

He was walking slower now, crossing the quad in the slanted gold light of late afternoon, when someone on a skateboard nearly killed him.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry-" The skateboarder twisted, planted a foot, and skidded to a stop a meter past Oscar's left elbow. Oscar's iced coffee did not survive the maneuver. It splashed in a brown arc down the front of his shirt, across the pavement, and onto the skater's boat shoes.

The skater looked at his shoes. He looked at Oscar's shirt. He looked at Oscar's face.

"Oh, god," he said. "Oh, that was - that was the last hour of my dignity, I am so sorry."

Oscar took a long, slow breath. He had a stats tutoring session in forty minutes. He had been planning to drink that coffee at the session. He had also been planning to wear this shirt to the session, because it was the only clean one he had until Sunday, when he reluctantly let himself use the dorm laundry room and risk the eternal disappearance of socks.

"It's fine," Oscar said.

"It is so clearly not fine," said the skater. "You have iced coffee on your - that is a lot of coffee. Where were you carrying that, your soul?"

"My hand."

"Cool. Cool, cool, cool." The skater kicked his board up and caught it, tucking it under one arm in a movement so practiced it looked involuntary. He was tall, sandy-blond, wearing a faded Hurricanes shirt under an unbuttoned linen overshirt that flapped around him like a flag of surrender. His eyes were a startling, almost ridiculous blue. He was also, Oscar registered with a kind of detached scientific interest, very tan.

"Listen," the skater said. "Let me buy you another one. And - and a shirt. And lunch. And possibly a kidney."

"I don't need a kidney."

"You might. The day's young."

Oscar shifted his backpack on his shoulder. The cold of the coffee was beginning to soak through to his skin, which was unpleasant but not catastrophic. "I have to be somewhere in forty minutes."

"Forty minutes is so much time. Forty minutes is a lifetime." The skater was already walking, expecting Oscar to follow, and Oscar found - to his own mild surprise - that he was. "There's a Cuban place on the corner of Ponce, it's like four minutes away. They have the best café con leche on campus and they don't charge for napkins, which I respect."

"I really do have to be-"

"Forty minutes." The skater turned and walked backwards for a few steps, grinning. "I'm Logan, by the way. Logan Sargeant."

"Oscar."

"Just Oscar?"

"Piastri."

"Piastri." Logan tested it, head tilted. "Italian?"

"Australian."

"Same thing, basically."

"It is aggressively not the same thing."

Logan laughed - a real laugh, surprised out of him, the kind of laugh that crinkled his whole face - and Oscar felt something briefly do an inconvenient thing in his chest. He attributed it to the heat. The heat in Miami could make you feel all sorts of inadvisable things.

※   ※   ※

The Cuban place was, in fact, four minutes away. Logan bought him a coffee and a guava pastry that Oscar had not asked for and did not particularly want, but accepted because saying no felt like more effort than saying yes. They sat at a sticky outdoor table under a rusting umbrella. Logan put his board on the chair next to him like it was a friend.

"So what's in forty minutes?" Logan asked, around a mouthful of pastry. "Funeral? Wedding? Hot date?"

"Tutoring."

"Tutoring tutoring? Like, you're being tutored?"

"I'm the tutor."

Logan stopped chewing. "You're a tutor."

"I tutor stats. Through the engineering department's outreach program."

"You're a stats tutor." Logan said it the way someone might say you're a sea witch, with a kind of fascinated dread. "What year are you?"

"Sophomore."

"And you tutor stats."

"That's what I said."

"And you're walking around with coffee and being killed by skateboards instead of, like, conjuring the dark arts somewhere."

"Statistics is not the dark arts."

"Spoken like someone who's done the dark arts."

Oscar, despite himself, smiled. It was small, and it was brief, and Logan's eyes caught on it like it had been thrown across the table at him. There was a beat of quiet. The fan above their table clicked rustily through one full rotation.

"What about you?" Oscar said, because the quiet was beginning to feel like it had a shape, and he wanted it to stop.

"Junior. Business major. I'm in Pi Kappa Alpha. The house on Granada."

"I don't know what that means."

"It's a frat."

"I gathered."

"You don't sound impressed."

"I'm not."

Logan grinned at him, lazy and pleased, like Oscar had handed him a present. "Yeah," he said. "I figured you wouldn't be."

Oscar's phone buzzed against the table. He glanced at it: a text from Lando, his roommate, that read simply bring me one of those little flan things or I will haunt your descendants.

"I have to go," Oscar said.

"You haven't even drunk your coffee."

"I'll drink it on the way."

"You'll spill it again."

"I won't."

"You absolutely will. I have watched you carry exactly one beverage in my life and it ended in tragedy. Here-" Logan reached over and snapped a plastic lid onto the cup with the air of a man defusing a bomb. "There. Safer."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

Oscar stood, swung his backpack onto his shoulder, and hesitated. He could feel Logan watching him hesitate. It made the hesitation worse.

"Thanks for the coffee," he said.

"Sorry about the shirt."

"It's just a shirt."

"It's still a tragedy."

Oscar turned to go. He had almost reached the corner when Logan called after him, voice cutting clean across the noise of traffic and cicadas:

"Hey - Oscar Piastri!"

Oscar turned.

Logan was standing now, board under his arm, the late sun catching in his hair, and he was grinning like he'd just remembered a joke.

"I'm gonna find you again," he said.

It was a stupid thing to say. It was the kind of thing people said in movies. It was the kind of thing that made Oscar's roommate Lando, who watched too many romantic comedies, swoon dramatically into pillows.

"Okay," Oscar said.

And then he walked away, and he did not look back, and he absolutely did not think about it for the entire eight minutes it took him to walk to the tutoring center, except for the part where he thought about it the entire way.

※   ※   ※

"He sounds amazing," Lando said, lying upside-down on his bed with his feet propped up against the wall. He was eating a flan with a plastic spoon, which Oscar had in fact bought for him and delivered with the air of a man fulfilling a sacred and unpleasant duty. "Like - Oscar. Oscar. You have to understand. This is the meet-cute. This is, like, the premier meet-cute."

"He spilled my coffee."

"He spilled your coffee and bought you another one and was tall and handsome. What part of this isn't registering."

"The part where he's a frat boy."

"Oscar."

"Lando."

"Oscar." Lando rolled over onto his stomach and pointed his spoon at Oscar across the room. "Listen to me. I love you. I have loved you since the day we were assigned as roommates and you alphabetized the spice rack in our communal kitchen without being asked. But you have a thing about frat boys, and the thing is wrong."

"I don't have a thing."

"You have a thing."

"What thing?"

"You assume they're all walking concussion stories with backwards hats and an inability to spell 'philanthropy.'"

"Many of them are that."

"Some of them are also that," Lando corrected. "There's nuance. There is nuance, Oscar. The world is not statistics."

"The world is entirely statistics, that's the whole point of statistics-"

"Oh my GOD." Lando rolled onto his back again. "Just - just text him."

"I don't have his number."

"You - wait." Lando sat up. "He didn't give you his number?"

"No."

"He said he was going to find you again and then he didn't give you his number."

"That's the romance of it, I think."

"That's the idiocy of it, is what it is."

Oscar shrugged. He was at his desk, working through a problem set, and the ceiling fan was making valiant but futile efforts at the heat. His shirt was no longer coffee-soaked because he had changed it. The original shirt was hanging over the back of his chair, a damp brown stain blooming across its front like a Rorschach test. He was not thinking about Logan Sargeant. He was thinking about probability density functions. They were, he told himself, much more interesting.

His phone buzzed. He didn't look at it.

It buzzed again.

He didn't look at it.

It buzzed a third time, and Lando, from across the room, made a noise like a deflating balloon and said "Oscar. Oscar. Your phone."

"I'm working."

"It's buzzed three times."

"It's probably my sister."

"Check your phone, Oscar."

Oscar checked his phone.

Unknown Number: hey

Unknown Number: this is logan

Unknown Number: i got your number from charles who got it from carlos who got it from your roommate who is apparently best friends with my friend daniel and i feel like we have built a small but functional human centipede of acquaintance here

Oscar stared at his phone.

"What," said Lando.

"Nothing."

"Oscar."

"It's nothing."

"OSCAR."

Oscar turned the phone around and showed him. Lando read the messages, made a small high-pitched sound like a kettle starting to whistle, and then collapsed face-down onto his bed.

"I gave him your number," Lando said, into the pillow.

"I'm sorry, you what."

"Daniel asked. I said yes. I am a man of the people, Oscar."

"Lando."

"He said you'd want to be found! He said you and Logan had a moment."

"We did not have a moment."

"You came home with two coffees and a guava pastry, Oscar, you absolutely had a moment. You do not return from errands with snacks."

Oscar's phone buzzed again.

Unknown Number: anyway my friend's having a thing on saturday at south beach. like a bonfire thing. very vibes. you should come.

Unknown Number: i mean if you want

Unknown Number: you don't have to. obviously. i just thought.

Unknown Number: sorry i'm bad at this

Oscar read the messages twice. He read them a third time. Lando, who had crept across the room to read over his shoulder without asking, made another kettle noise.

"Oscar."

"Don't."

"OSCAR."

"I'm not going."

"Oscar Jack Piastri."

"That is not my middle name."

"Oscar whatever-your-middle-name-is Piastri, if you do not respond to this man right now I will physically remove your thumbs and respond for you."

Oscar typed, slowly:

Oscar: I'll think about it.

He pressed send.

Lando looked at him with the deep, suffering disappointment of a man watching his best friend trip on flat ground.

"You'll think about it."

"That's what I said."

"You - Oscar. Oscar. You will think about it. That is the response of a forty-year-old hiring manager to a job application."

"It's the response I wanted to give."

"It's the worst response possible."

The phone buzzed.

Logan: ok cool no pressure. but in case you do, it's at 8. tower 13. bring a hoodie cause the breeze comes in around 9. and tell your roommate daniel says hi.

Oscar stared at the message. He read it again. Bring a hoodie cause the breeze comes in around 9. It was such an absurdly specific, considerate detail. He was not going to think about it. He was not going to think about a frat boy he had met once thinking ahead to whether he would be cold.

"What does it say," Lando said.

"Nothing."

"Oscar."

"It's just logistics."

"What does it say."

Oscar handed him the phone. Lando read it. Lando inhaled. Lando looked at Oscar with the expression of a man who had just witnessed a small but personally meaningful miracle.

"You're going," Lando said.

"I'm not."

"You're going, and I'm picking your outfit."

"I'm not going."

"You're absolutely going, and I'm picking your outfit, and we are going to talk about your fear of joy."

Oscar made a deeply Australian sound at the back of his throat and turned back to his problem set. He did not respond to the message. He did not respond to it for the rest of the day, in fact, because the more he thought about responding the more impossible responding seemed.

It was, he thought, going to be a long week.

※   ※   ※

The tutoring center on Tuesdays was Oscar's favorite place on campus, mostly because almost no one was in it. It was a windowless room in the basement of the engineering building, fluorescent-lit, with whiteboards on every wall and the soft thrum of overworked air conditioning. Oscar liked the quiet. He liked the whiteboards. He liked the specific, dependable nature of a math problem, which had, in his experience, always asked of him only what he could give.

He had three tutees on Tuesdays. The first was a sweet, anxious junior named Kim who was trying to pass a required prob-stats course for her psych degree and who apologized every time she got an answer wrong, which was constantly. The second was a graduate student named Esteban who was sharp and impatient and clearly resented needing a tutor at all, and who treated each session like a small but personal humiliation. The third was a freshman named George who was extraordinary at statistics and seemed to be coming to tutoring mostly out of a sense that he ought to be doing something extracurricular.

His four o'clock slot on this particular Tuesday, however, was empty. He had been told a new student had been added that morning. He had not been told their name. He had assumed it was another George - someone confident, with a notebook full of color-coded notes, who would breeze through a session and leave him with his afternoon mostly intact.

The door opened at 4:02. Logan Sargeant came through it.

Oscar stared.

Logan stared back. He was holding a backpack in one hand and a notebook in the other and a coffee - a coffee - in his third hand, which did not exist, because Logan had two hands, and the third item was wedged under his arm. His hair was wet. He had, evidently, just showered. He looked like a person who had run there.

"Oh," Logan said. "Oh, no."

"Oh no?" Oscar said.

"Oh no, this is not - they told me - I asked the front desk for a stats tutor and they said come to room one-twelve and they did not say - Oscar."

"Logan."

"Oscar, this is-"

"Did you sign up for tutoring."

"I signed up for tutoring."

"You signed up for tutoring with me."

"I did not sign up for tutoring with you. I signed up for tutoring with whoever was in room one-twelve at four o'clock on Tuesdays."

"Logan."

"Oscar."

"Logan."

There was a long pause. Logan, slowly, set his backpack on the table. He sat down. He took the notebook out from under his arm and set it on the table. He put the coffee next to the notebook. He looked at Oscar across the table with the careful, deliberate expression of a man trying to convince a horse he was not afraid of it.

"I'm gonna be honest," Logan said. "I'm failing this class."

"Which class."

"Quantitative Methods for Business."

"That's a 200-level class."

"I'm aware."

"You're a junior."

"I'm aware."

"It's a prerequisite for-"

"Oscar. I am aware. I am taking it now because my advisor told me if I did not take it now I would not graduate, and if I do not graduate my father will turn into a - into a being of pure rage - and float up and away from the family home in Boca Raton."

Oscar opened his notebook. He opened a fresh pen. He looked at Logan very steadily across the table.

"Show me the homework," he said.

"What?"

"Show me the homework. Whatever you're working on. Show it to me."

Logan reached, slowly, into his backpack. He pulled out a homework packet. He slid it across the table. Oscar read it.

It was, objectively, not that hard. It was a problem set on basic descriptive statistics - means, medians, variance, basic probability. Oscar had taught this material to high school students. He had, in fact, taught this material to a high school student last summer who had been twelve.

The problem set was untouched.

"Logan."

"Yeah."

"You haven't started this."

"That is - accurate."

"It's due tomorrow."

"Also accurate."

"When did you get this assignment."

"Approximately… a week and a half ago."

Oscar closed his eyes. He took a long, slow breath. He thought about the things he had been planning to do this afternoon, which included drinking iced coffee in the windowless basement room and reading ahead in his econometrics textbook. He thought about Logan's expression at the Cuban place, the unselfconscious way he had laughed at aggressively not the same thing. He thought about bring a hoodie cause the breeze comes in around 9.

He opened his eyes.

"Okay," he said. "Get out a pen."

"Oscar-"

"Get out a pen, Logan."

Logan got out a pen.

For the next forty-five minutes, Oscar worked him through the problem set, problem by problem. Logan was, to Oscar's quiet surprise, not bad at it. He was slow. He second-guessed himself. He had clearly missed every lecture for two weeks and had, equally clearly, decided to ignore the textbook on principle. But once he understood a concept, he could apply it. He just had not, before today, understood any of the concepts. The fundamental issue, Oscar diagnosed within ten minutes, was not capability; it was attention.

The other fundamental issue, Oscar diagnosed within twenty minutes, was that Logan kept looking at him.

He looked at Oscar when Oscar was explaining things. He looked at Oscar when Oscar was writing on his own paper. He looked at Oscar when Oscar reached for his coffee. He looked at Oscar with the steady, patient gaze of a person watching a very good movie. It was - Oscar was not going to characterize what it was. It was a thing that was happening. He had work to do.

"Logan," he said, the third time he caught it.

"Yeah."

"Pay attention."

"I am paying attention."

"You're paying attention to me."

"Yes."

"Pay attention to the problem."

"The problem is boring."

"The problem is the entire point of you being here."

"Yeah but you're explaining it."

"Logan."

"I'm just saying. I learn better when I'm watching the source material."

Oscar, despite every effort he was making against it, felt his ears go warm. He turned his face back down to the problem.

"Just - do the problem."

"Yes sir."

"Don't call me sir."

"Yes, Oscar."

"That's worse."

"I'm trying to find the right register."

"Try silence."

Logan laughed. It was the same surprised laugh as the day before, in the café, and Oscar found himself thinking - entirely against his will - that he might like to be the cause of that laugh on a regular basis, just as a project, just as a thing to do. He pushed the thought away. He pushed it very far away. He pushed it into a windowless basement and shut the door.

By the time the session was over, Logan had finished four problems out of eight. Oscar walked him through the structure of the remaining four, gave him a strategy, and told him to email if he got stuck.

"Email," Logan said.

"Yes."

"You want me to email you."

"To ask questions, yes."

"You don't want me to, like, text."

"Email is fine."

"Right. Email. Like in the eighteen hundreds."

"It's the appropriate channel."

"You are unbearable."

"Thank you."

Logan packed up his things slowly. He was clearly trying to think of something to say. Oscar watched him try to think of it, and then - because he could not bear to watch the trying - said, "Did you really sign up because the front desk told you to."

"Yeah."

"Not because."

"Not because what."

"Not because of - anything else."

Logan looked at him. The fluorescent lights buzzed. His face was very still.

"No," he said. "But if I'd known you tutored I would've signed up the first day of school."

Oscar's ears did the warm thing again. He looked down at his notebook.

"Email me," he said.

"Yeah," said Logan. "Yeah, okay. I'll email you."

He swung his backpack onto one shoulder. He was almost out the door when he turned back, and Oscar, who had been watching him go, looked very quickly down at his notebook again, but not quickly enough.

"Oscar."

"Mm."

"Are you coming to the bonfire."

"I haven't decided."

"Okay."

"Logan-"

"Yeah."

"Do the problems."

"I'll do the problems."

"All of them."

"All of them."

"And don't-"

"Don't what."

"Don't email me at three in the morning if you get stuck. Email me at a normal time."

"What's a normal time."

"Like a normal person time."

"Oscar, I have no concept of a normal person time. I'm a junior in a frat house. We don't have time."

"Before midnight."

"Cool. Before midnight. I'll send you a poem at eleven fifty-nine."

"Logan."

"Goodbye, Oscar."

He left.

Oscar sat in the windowless room for another long moment. The fluorescent lights buzzed. He looked at his coffee, which had gone cold. He looked at the door, which had closed.

He picked up his pen. He went back to his own work.

He absolutely did not, six hours later, check his email at eleven fifty-nine.

He did, however, check it at twelve oh-three, and there was a message from Logan, which simply read:

Did all the problems. Even checked them twice. Pretty sure problem 7 is wrong but I'm not gonna second-guess myself anymore tonight. Going to sleep. Don't email me back, this would defeat the purpose. - L.

Oscar read it. He read it again. He closed his laptop. He stared at the ceiling for some time.

He did not respond.

But he did, eventually, smile.

※   ※   ※

"I look stupid."

"You look amazing."

"I look stupid."

"Oscar, I swear to God, if you do not put on the shirt I will pull a Charles and have a crisis in this dorm room and you will be responsible-"

"What does Charles have to do with-"

"Charles has very large feelings," Lando said, "and we will all be wearing them if you do not put on the SHIRT."

Oscar put on the shirt.

It was a button-down - Lando's, technically, in a soft sage green that Lando had bought online during a recent depressive episode and worn precisely once. It was made of linen and it had short sleeves and it was, Oscar admitted in the mirror, not the worst thing he had ever put on his body. He was wearing it over his usual chino shorts. He looked, he thought, like a person trying very hard to look like a person who was not trying.

"Roll up the sleeves," Lando said.

"They are rolled up."

"Roll them up more."

"This is the limit of my sleeves."

"You are infuriating."

Lando himself was wearing, Oscar noted, an outfit so cohesive and considered it bordered on costume. He had a cropped tank top and a pair of vintage Levi cut-offs and a chain around his neck that he had not, to Oscar's knowledge, owned three hours ago. His hair was doing something that had clearly required product. He smelled, faintly, like coconut.

"You're trying very hard for someone who is not going on a date," Oscar said.

"I am not going on a date."

"You smell like a candle."

"Daniel-"

"There it is."

"Daniel is going to be there. Daniel is a friend."

"Mm."

"Oscar."

"I didn't say anything."

"You said Mm."

"That's a syllable, Lando, not an opinion."

"It was the most opinionated syllable I have ever heard in my life."

They walked to the bus stop together. The evening air had begun, finally, to cool - South Florida's secret kindness, the way it gave back at sundown some of what it had taken during the day. The light over Coral Gables was peach-colored and long. The cicadas were doing their evening shift. Oscar, walking beside Lando, felt - and he refused to name this feeling, but it was there, like an unhelpful houseguest - nervous. He was nervous. He was wearing a shirt that wasn't his and going to a bonfire he didn't want to go to to see a boy he didn't want to see, and he was nervous about it.

"Stop thinking," Lando said.

"I'm not thinking."

"You are thinking so hard I can hear it."

"That's the cicadas."

"That's your brain."

The bus was crowded. They stood, hanging from the overhead bar, while the air conditioning fought a losing battle with the press of bodies. Oscar's phone buzzed. He looked at it.

Logan: you coming?

He stared at it for a long moment. He typed:

Oscar: Yes.

He sent it.

He looked up. Lando was staring at him with an expression of unbearable smugness.

"Don't," Oscar said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You're radiating."

"I am delighted."

"Stop."

"I will not stop. I am legally unable to stop."

The bus dropped them at South Beach a little after eight. The sky was the deep violet of a bruise just beginning to heal. The Atlantic was a long dark line under it. They walked down the boardwalk toward tower thirteen - which was, it turned out, an actual numbered lifeguard tower, painted bright blue and rising out of the sand on stilts - and as they got closer Oscar could see the fire.

It was a real bonfire. Someone had clearly gotten a permit. There were maybe twenty people gathered around it, sprawled on blankets and folding chairs, a Bluetooth speaker playing something with a lot of bass. There was a cooler. There were coolers, plural. There was a frisbee being thrown in the half-dark by two figures who were probably going to step on someone in about four minutes.

And there was Logan.

He was standing at the edge of the firelight, in a white t-shirt and board shorts, his hair messy with salt and wind. He was laughing at something someone next to him had said. He had not seen Oscar yet. Oscar watched him for the space of about three seconds, and in those three seconds he understood - with the same cold clarity with which he understood any well-stated theorem - that he was in trouble.

He was in trouble. He was in it. He had been in it since the iced coffee, possibly. He had certainly been in it since bring a hoodie cause the breeze comes in around 9. He was a person who was in trouble, and the cause of the trouble was standing in the firelight laughing in a way that crinkled his whole face, and there was - apparently - nothing he could do about it.

"Oscar," said Lando, beside him, gently.

"Yeah."

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

"You're staring."

"I know."

"He's seen you."

"Oh god."

Logan had, in fact, seen him. He had stopped laughing mid-laugh. He was crossing the sand toward them with the long, loose stride of a person who had nowhere else to be. He raised a hand. He grinned. He arrived in front of them slightly out of breath.

"You came."

"I came," Oscar said.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"You brought a hoodie?"

"It's in my bag."

"Good. Good, good." Logan rubbed the back of his neck. He looked, Oscar noticed, almost as nervous as Oscar felt, which was both stabilizing and destabilizing in roughly equal measure. "And - this is your roommate?"

"Lando Norris," Lando said, sticking out a hand with the brightness of a man arriving at a job interview. "Pleased to meet you. I've heard almost nothing."

"Lando."

"I have heard absolutely nothing, Logan, ignore me."

"Daniel's over there," Logan said, pointing toward the cooler. "He's been asking when you'd get here."

"Oh, has he," said Lando, and he was gone before either of them could respond, drifting toward the cooler with the steady purpose of a man who had been very patient for a very long time.

Logan watched him go. He turned back to Oscar. He smiled - small, careful, almost shy.

"I'm glad you came," he said.

"You said that already."

"I'm doubling down."

"Okay."

"Want a drink?"

"What is there."

"Beer. Worse beer. A jug of something Charles made that I would describe as 'a war crime against fruit.'"

"I'll take a beer."

"Smart man."

He led Oscar over to the cooler. Oscar tried, as he walked, to assemble himself. He tried to remember that he was a junior tutor, that he was a person with a 4.0, that he had taken three statistics electives and that his Tuesday morning lecture started at nine. None of it helped. The cicadas were too loud and the sky was too purple and Logan, walking ahead of him, kept turning back to make sure he was still there.

※   ※   ※

It became apparent, fairly quickly, that the bonfire was not so much a bonfire as a kind of loose summit of the people at the University of Miami whom Logan Sargeant knew personally. Logan, Oscar gathered, knew a great many people. They came over, in a steady stream, to slap him on the back and bump his shoulder and grin at Oscar with the open, friendly curiosity of golden retrievers.

"This is my friend Carlos," Logan said, gesturing at a tall, sharp-eyed boy in a Hurricanes hat. "He's premed. He's terrifying."

"I am not terrifying," said Carlos. "I am competitive. They are different things."

"He once made me cry over a game of beach volleyball."

"You cried because you lost."

"I cried because you spiked the ball at my face."

"This is a normal volleyball technique, Logan, please."

Carlos shook Oscar's hand with a firm, formal politeness. He was, Oscar noticed, examining him with the polite focus of someone who had clearly been told things in advance and was trying to confirm them.

"And this," Logan said, dragging over a slighter boy in a vintage Ferrari t-shirt, "is Charles."

"Charles Leclerc," Charles said. He had a French accent and an alarming amount of eyeliner. "I have heard so much about you."

"You - what."

"Logan has been speaking of nothing else for two days, this is-"

"Charles."

"What."

"Charles."

"I am simply telling him the truth, Logan, the truth is a kindness."

"It is so deeply not a kindness in this case."

Oscar felt his ears go warm. Again. He was going to need to do something about the ears.

"And the one with the frisbee," Logan said, a little louder, clearly trying to redirect the conversation, "the one who is going to step on someone, is Max. Max Verstappen. He's an econ major, he's Dutch, he was raised in a tunnel, he doesn't know how to act in society."

"I heard that," called Max, from somewhere in the dark.

"Good."

"You are a small man, Sargeant."

"I am six foot one, Max."

"Spiritually small."

Charles laughed. Oscar, despite himself, laughed. Logan turned and looked at Oscar laughing with the expression of a man who has just won something.

"Come on," Logan said, "let me introduce you to the worst of them."

The worst of them was a boy named Daniel Ricciardo, who had already cornered Lando by the cooler and appeared to be telling him a story that involved both broad gestures and, at one point, sound effects. Daniel was extraordinarily tan and had a smile that took up most of his face. He clapped Oscar on the shoulder so hard Oscar's vision briefly resolved into pixels.

"Mate!" Daniel said. "Oscar! Mate, mate. You're the stats tutor."

"I am."

"Logan's been losing his entire mind about you."

"DANNY."

"What. What. He has."

"You are not helping."

"I am being a friend, Logan, I am being a good friend."

"You are being a bad friend, Daniel, you are being the worst possible friend-"

Oscar drifted, briefly, out of the conversation. Lando, behind Daniel, was watching the whole exchange with the radiant joy of a man at his own birthday party. Charles, across the fire, had produced a guitar from somewhere and was tuning it with the air of a man preparing to commit a felony. Max, having abandoned the frisbee, had wandered over and was now standing very close to Charles and watching him tune the guitar with what could only be described as a marriage-grade amount of fondness.

"They're a thing," Logan said, quietly, beside him. He had followed Oscar's gaze. "Max and Charles. Have been since last year. Lewis and George keep trying to get them to admit it."

"Lewis and George."

"Lewis Hamilton - he's a senior, business major like me, he's basically a god, you'll meet him. And George Russell, he's - wait. George is your tutee. George is your tutee. George."

Oscar stared at him.

"That's George."

"What."

"You're George's stats tutor."

"Logan, I tutor several Georges. Statistically there is only one of them."

"Oscar, he is right there."

He pointed. He was correct. George Russell - Oscar's brilliant, distracted Friday afternoon tutee - was sitting on a beach towel about fifteen feet away, in a button-down so neatly pressed it seemed to defy the existence of sand, eating a single chip with the precision of a man performing surgery. He looked up at the exact moment Oscar looked at him.

"Oscar," George said, with what was, for George, an enormous amount of emotion.

"George."

"What are you doing here?"

"I - Logan invited me."

"Logan." George looked at Logan. He looked back at Oscar. He looked at Logan again. His face, slowly, did something that Oscar had never seen on it before, which was register information about a non-statistical topic. "I see."

"What do you see," Logan said.

"I see what is happening, Logan."

"There's nothing happening."

"Logan."

"George."

"Logan, I am brilliant at noticing things, this is what I do."

"You are brilliant at statistics, George, the rest is hit or miss."

George stood up, with great dignity. He walked over. He shook Oscar's hand with great formality. "I'm pleased you came," he said. "I am also pleased to learn that my tutor has, evidently, a life."

"I have a life."

"You have one and a half lives, by my count, and they are both academic."

"George."

"Mm. Carry on."

He drifted back to his beach towel and his single chip.

Oscar looked at Logan. Logan was, now, definitely, the color of a freshly boiled lobster. He was looking at the sand. He was clearly thinking about a series of statements he wished he had not made within George Russell's earshot. Oscar, very slowly, took a sip of his beer.

"Logan."

"Yeah."

"You've been talking about me."

"… a small amount."

"How small."

"A medium small amount."

"Logan."

"It came up in conversation. Several times. Across two days. Which, statistically, when you average it out-"

"Statistics doesn't work like that."

"You don't know what I was going to say."

"You were going to misuse statistics in front of a tutor."

"Yes."

"Logan."

"Oscar."

They were standing close, suddenly. Oscar had not noticed when that had happened. The fire was a soft orange wash on Logan's face. The wind off the ocean was cold and smelled of salt. Somewhere behind them, Charles had started to play the guitar, badly, and Max had started to sing along, also badly, and the cumulative effect was a kind of warm, off-key cocoon of sound.

"I'm glad you came," Logan said, again.

"You said that twice already."

"I'm gonna keep saying it."

"Okay."

"Walk with me."

"Where."

"Just down the beach. Five minutes. Not even five. Three. I just - I want to show you something."

Oscar looked at his beer. He looked at the fire. He looked at Lando, across the fire, who had been watching them this entire time and now mimed a very enthusiastic and very inappropriate gesture of encouragement.

"Okay," Oscar said.

※   ※   ※

They walked.

The bonfire fell away behind them - its noise first, then its light, until they were walking along a stretch of sand that was almost entirely dark except for the moon, which was three-quarters full and the color of old paper. The Atlantic was loud. Oscar had not realized, sitting by the fire, how loud the Atlantic was. Now, with no human noise to compete, it filled the world.

Logan walked with his hands in his pockets. He did not say anything for a long time. Oscar did not say anything either. The sand was cool under his feet - he had taken off his shoes without remembering doing so - and the air was salt-clean and full of the soft suspended dampness that meant a rain was coming, eventually, in the next few hours.

"My grandfather had a place down here," Logan said, finally. "Like - well. Not here. Up the coast. Vero Beach."

"Mm."

"He died last year."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"It's okay. It was - he was old. But." Logan kicked at a piece of driftwood. "He used to take me out at night. Out on the beach. We'd just walk. He'd talk about - I don't even remember what he talked about. The stars. The Spanish galleons that sank off the coast. He had this whole theory about Atlantis being off Bimini, which is - that is not a real theory, but I believed it for like ten years."

"Logan."

"Yeah."

"Why are you telling me this."

He stopped walking. Oscar stopped too. There were about three feet of sand between them.

"Because," Logan said, "I don't tell most people that I - that I do this. That I walk at night. That I think about my grandfather. That I sometimes come down to the beach when it's empty and just - sit. Because most people I know are not the kind of people you tell that to. And you are."

"You met me three days ago."

"I know."

"You don't know me."

"I know."

"Logan-"

"Oscar."

"You don't know me."

"I know I don't know you." Logan rubbed the back of his neck. He was looking at the sand. He was not looking at Oscar. "I'm not - I know I sound like an idiot. I sound like an idiot. I'm aware I sound like an idiot. I'm just saying - I don't know. I'm just saying it."

There was a long, quiet moment. The Atlantic continued its work. Far down the beach, in the direction they had come from, Oscar could see the orange dot of the bonfire, and the small dark shapes moving around it, and he could almost hear - almost - Charles's guitar, still being played badly, on the wind.

Oscar took a breath.

"I think you're terrible at statistics," he said.

"Wow."

"I think you're going to need to come to a lot of tutoring sessions."

"Oh."

"I think you're going to need to come to tutoring at four o'clock every Tuesday for the rest of the semester, and you are going to do the readings, Logan, you are going to do the readings, because I am not - I am not doing your degree for you."

"Okay."

"And you are going to email me, not text me, when you have questions."

"Okay."

"And if I get an email at three in the morning I am going to be furious."

"Got it."

"Okay."

"Okay."

The space between them did not get smaller. It did not need to. Oscar was looking at Logan. Logan was looking at Oscar. The moonlight was doing something appalling to the bones of Logan's face. Oscar was - and he would, later, deny that this was what he was doing - he was cataloguing. The slope of the cheekbone. The chip in the corner of one front tooth, which he could see now in the half-second of an embarrassed grin. The way Logan's hair fell slightly into his eyes and the way he pushed it away with his whole hand instead of his fingers.

He was in trouble. He had already known he was in trouble. He was now, additionally, knowing he was in trouble.

"We should go back," Oscar said.

"Yeah."

"Lando will think-"

"Lando will think we eloped."

"He will literally think we eloped, you don't know what he's like."

"I'm starting to."

They walked back.

They walked back slower than they had walked out, which neither of them mentioned. When they got back to the fire, Lando was sitting on a log next to Daniel and they were laughing about something. Charles had given up the guitar and was lying on his back in the sand with his head in Max's lap. Carlos was arguing about a movie with someone Oscar didn't know. George was eating his single chip, still, with what appeared to be the same chip.

Oscar sat down next to Logan in the sand. Logan handed him a hoodie. Oscar said "I have my own hoodie," and Logan said "Yeah, but it's not as warm as this one," and Oscar put on Logan's hoodie, which smelled like sunscreen and salt and the kind of laundry detergent his older sister used at home, and he did not, for a long while, say anything more.

The fire burned down. The moon climbed higher.

They sat. ---

The first thing Logan did, when he arrived at the second tutoring session, was put a coffee in front of Oscar.

"It's a peace offering," Logan said.

"For what."

"For the fact that I am about to be very bad at this."

Oscar looked at the coffee. It was iced. It was the right size. It had - and this was the part that surprised him - exactly the correct amount of cream in it, which was some but not much, a precise gradient that Oscar had spent the better part of three years getting his Sunday morning baristas to understand.

"How did you know how I take my coffee."

"I asked Lando."

"You asked Lando."

"Yes."

"You asked my roommate."

"Yes."

"Logan."

"Oscar."

"Did Lando also tell you my middle name. My birth date. My social security number."

"He did not tell me your social security number. He did tell me a great deal about a stuffed kangaroo you have on your bed."

"He WHAT."

"Her name is apparently Dorothy."

"Lando."

"I have not seen her. I am not, like, picturing her in detail. I am simply aware she exists."

"This is a violation."

"Sit down, Oscar."

"I'm going to kill him."

"Sit down."

Oscar sat down. He took a sip of the coffee. It was, despite his best wishes, perfect.

"Open your notebook," he said.

"Yes sir."

"Don't."

"Yes Oscar."

"Logan."

"Yes, friend."

"Worse."

They worked, that first proper session, on continuous probability distributions. Oscar had brought his own notes, which were color-coded, and his own pens, which were three different colors of fine-tipped gel. Logan watched him lay them out on the table with the reverence of a man at a religious ceremony.

"You have systems," Logan said.

"I have a pen."

"You have three pens, Oscar, this is not normal pen behavior."

"This is entirely normal pen behavior, Logan, you are simply a person who does not own pens."

"I own a pen."

"You own a pen."

"Yes."

"You own - Logan. Logan. You are a student. You have to take notes."

"I take notes on my phone."

"That is - that is a war crime, Logan, that is-"

"You are extremely dramatic for a stats tutor."

"I am dramatic about pens."

The session went, Oscar thought afterward, well. They worked through three problems. Logan got two of them right. He did not, this time, look at Oscar - or rather, he did, but only when he was supposed to be looking at Oscar, when Oscar was explaining something. He took notes. He took notes with his phone, which Oscar deeply disapproved of, but he took notes. He asked questions. The questions were not stupid. He was, Oscar realized, actually trying.

At the end of the session, Logan said, "Same time next week?"

"Yes."

"Cool. Cool, cool."

He gathered his things. He hesitated at the door. He turned around.

"Hey, Oscar."

"Mm."

"Lewis is having a thing on Saturday at his place. House on Granada. Pool. Burgers. He is, like - he is a very kind, very impressive man, and you would like him, and he would like you, and you should come."

"Logan."

"I'm not - I'm not making it a thing. I'm just inviting you."

"Logan."

"Bring Lando. Bring your, like, sense of disapproval about frats. I don't care. Just come."

"I'll think about it."

"Cool."

He left.

Oscar finished his coffee. He sat in the windowless room for some time. He took out his phone. He texted Lando, who was - and Oscar knew this without checking - almost certainly in the dining hall with Daniel, who Lando was still insisting was just a friend.

Oscar: What did you tell Logan about me.

Lando: OSCAR i told him NOTHING

Lando: ok i told him SOME things

Lando: ok i told him a respectable AMOUNT of things but only the GOOD things

Lando: did he say something

Lando: OSCAR did he SAY SOMETHING

Oscar: He knew how I take my coffee.

Lando: OH MY GOD

Lando: OSCAR

Lando: OSCAR PIASTRI

Lando: the MAN brought you COFFEE made to your SPECIFICATIONS

Oscar: Yes.

Lando: i am going to fly to australia

Lando: i am going to fly to australia and i am going to KISS YOUR MOTHER on the mouth

Oscar: Please don't.

Lando: TOO LATE

※   ※   ※

Lewis's house on Granada was, Oscar decided when they pulled up to it on Saturday, less a house than a concept of a house. It was a sprawling, low Spanish-colonial-revival thing, all white stucco and red tile and bougainvillea spilling down the walls in pink and orange torrents. It had a pool. The pool, Oscar gathered from Lando, who had spent the bus ride relaying every fact he had pried out of Daniel about every member of the friend group, had been there since 1973. The house, more remarkably, had been Lewis's grandmother's, and Lewis had inherited it - he was a senior, and an only child, and his grandmother had died his sophomore year. He lived alone in the house except when his friends were over, which seemed to be most of the time.

Lewis himself was extraordinary. He met them at the door in a perfectly white t-shirt and bare feet and a pair of jeans Oscar suspected cost more than Oscar's monthly rent, and he hugged Lando like they had known each other for years, and he shook Oscar's hand with both of his own.

"You're the stats tutor."

"I'm the stats tutor."

"Logan's been talking about you."

"I'm aware."

Lewis grinned. He had a very gentle grin for a person who looked like he could lift a Volkswagen.

"Come in. Come in. Carlos is grilling. Everything is on fire. It's fine."

The yard was full of people. There was a pool. The pool was full of people. The grill was on fire - Oscar saw it from across the yard, a tall orange tongue of flame leaping out of the chimney pipe, and Carlos was beside it, shouting in Spanish at Charles, who was shouting back in French, and Max was watching the entire situation with the calm of a man waiting for a YouTube video to start. Lando, beside Oscar, looked like he had ascended to a higher spiritual plane.

"This is amazing," Lando whispered.

"This is concerning," Oscar said. "The grill is on fire."

"Charles is on fire," Lando corrected, gesturing toward Charles's bright orange shirt, which was indeed reflecting flames quite dramatically.

"Oscar!"

Logan came across the yard at a near-run. He was wearing - Oscar registered, with the same scientific detachment with which he had registered the tan, which was to say not detached at all - only swim trunks. Just swim trunks. There was, in the location where shirts often went on people, no shirt. Oscar's brain made a small, polite sound like a kettle starting to whistle.

"You came," Logan said.

"I came."

"Hi."

"Hi."

"You - uh. You want to swim?"

"I - what."

"Do you want to swim. There's a pool. The pool - Lewis bought a flamingo. The flamingo is enormous. Carlos and Charles got in a fight about the flamingo last week. Daniel deflated the flamingo as a peacekeeping measure. It is now reinflated. The flamingo lives, Oscar."

"Logan."

"What."

"I didn't bring a swimsuit."

"Oh. Oh." Logan blinked, twice, the way a person blinks when they have not, in fact, considered something obvious. "I have an extra one."

"You have an extra swimsuit."

"I have several extra swimsuits."

"Why do you have several extra swimsuits."

"Because, Oscar, I live in Miami, and at any given moment I am one phone call away from being asked to be in or near a body of water."

"That is - not a real reason."

"It is a deeply real reason."

It took some negotiating, but eventually Oscar found himself, somehow, in the upstairs bathroom of Lewis Hamilton's grandmother's house, holding a pair of board shorts that smelled faintly of chlorine. The bathroom was tiled in seafoam green and had a window that looked out over the pool. Through the window, Oscar could see Lando - who had, somehow, in the seven minutes since they arrived, already changed into a swimsuit and was now sitting on the edge of the deep end with his feet in the water, talking animatedly to Daniel. Daniel was looking at him with an expression Oscar recognized. It was the same expression Logan had had at the bonfire, on the beach, in the dark. It was an expression Oscar had been carefully not thinking about for a week.

Oscar put on the board shorts. They were a little big. He cinched the drawstring. He stood in front of the mirror. He looked, he thought, like a person who had no business being at this party.

He went downstairs.

Logan was waiting in the kitchen. He had - and Oscar noted this with the same fascinated horror with which one notes a train accident - put a shirt on, which was a tiny mercy. It was a faded blue Hurricanes shirt. He had wet hair. He had been in the pool.

"You good?"

"I'm good."

"You okay?"

"I'm fine, Logan."

"You look a little-"

"I'm fine."

"Okay."

They went out to the yard. Logan led him over to the pool. Lando, seeing him, did a small dramatic gasp and clutched at his own chest. Daniel laughed. Charles, who had given up on the grill and was now in the pool, called something in French at Logan that Oscar did not understand but that Max, behind Charles, translated as "he says you look like a man in love and it is making him sick."

"CHARLES."

"WHAT."

"DON'T."

"You said it first, Logan, I am only translating."

"You are paraphrasing badly."

"I am paraphrasing honestly."

Oscar got into the pool. The water was, by Florida standards, cool. By any other standards it was lukewarm. He swam to the deep end and then to the shallow end and then, finding nothing better to do, he climbed up onto the inflatable flamingo, which was, in fact, enormous - easily six feet long, hot pink, with a regrettable expression. He sat on it. Logan, in the water beside him, watched him sit on it with the expression of a man who had won the lottery.

"You suit the flamingo," Logan said.

"That is not a compliment."

"It is the highest compliment, Oscar, you have no idea."

Lewis came over with a tray of burgers. Carlos came over with hot sauce. Daniel did a cannonball off the side of the pool and the wave nearly capsized the flamingo and Oscar, against every protest he could mount, laughed - a real laugh, surprised out of him, the kind of laugh he could not remember the last time he had given anywhere.

Logan, in the water beside the flamingo, looked at him.

Oscar caught the look. He looked at Logan. They looked at each other for a moment in the bright Florida afternoon, in the pool, with the smell of charcoal and chlorine and bougainvillea, and Oscar felt the moment go a little long, a little serious, and he flicked water at Logan's face to break it.

"Oh," said Logan, low. "Oh, that's war."

"Logan."

"That's war, Oscar."

"Logan-"

He tipped the flamingo.

Oscar went into the water. He came up sputtering, hair in his eyes, and Logan was laughing, full-bodied, head thrown back, and Oscar lunged for him and dunked him under and Logan came up still laughing and shoved Oscar back and they were - they were wrestling, in the pool, in front of all of Logan's friends, like a pair of tenth graders. Oscar's hand found Logan's shoulder. Logan's hands were around Oscar's wrists. They were very close. Oscar registered, in a distant scientific way, that he could see every individual eyelash on Logan's face, and that Logan's eyelashes were very long, and that the water on Logan's eyelashes was catching the sun.

"Truce," Logan said, breathless.

"Truce."

"You started it."

"I did not."

"You absolutely did."

"I - fine. I started it."

Logan grinned at him. He was still holding Oscar's wrists. He let them go, slowly, as if he had forgotten he was doing it and was only just remembering. Oscar floated back. The flamingo, abandoned, drifted into the deep end on its own.

Across the pool, Lando was staring at him with an expression of pure, vindicated triumph. Oscar refused to make eye contact with him for the rest of the afternoon.

※   ※   ※

A small list, partial:

Logan started showing up at the tutoring center five minutes early instead of three minutes late. He brought coffee every time. He learned, by week three, exactly what Oscar wanted without asking. He did the readings. He took notes - on paper, after Oscar gave him a notebook the third week ("You bought me a notebook." "I bought you a notebook." "Oscar, this is a gift." "This is office supplies." "It is the most romantic office supply I have ever received, Oscar-" "Logan." "Oscar." "Sit down."). His grades, slowly, began to climb. The first quiz he took after their tutoring started came back with a B+ on it, and he held it up across the table at Oscar like he was holding up the head of a defeated dragon, and Oscar - who had received many B+es in his life and had never once felt anything about them - felt something stupid and warm in his chest about this one.

Lando and Daniel went on what Lando insisted was not a date but what was, by any objective metric, a date. They went to a movie. They held hands. They came home and Lando lay face-down on his bed for forty-five minutes saying "OSCAR. OSCAR. OSCAR." into a pillow.

Charles and Max admitted they were dating, mostly because Charles, after three margaritas at Lewis's house, kissed Max in front of the entire group and then refused to issue any further comment. Carlos was furious to have to retroactively pretend he had not known for the entire previous year, which he had.

George Russell brought a girl to one of Lewis's parties. Her name was Alexandra. She was getting an MBA. George turned a color Oscar had not previously believed George capable of turning. Lewis, watching it, said, with great solemnity, "and the last shall be first."

Oscar got a B+ on a real analysis problem set, which was, for Oscar, equivalent to getting a D. He spent three hours rewriting the problem set even though it was already turned in. Lando, watching him do this, called Logan on FaceTime so Logan could watch the spiral. Logan watched the spiral. Logan said, very gently, "Oscar. Oscar. It's a B-plus. It is a good grade, Oscar." Oscar said "you do not understand." Logan said "you're right, I don't, but I'm here, and I think you need to put the problem set down." Oscar did not put the problem set down. But he did, for the first time since the spiral started, smile.

A hurricane warning came up the coast. It missed Miami by a hundred miles. Oscar spent the night of the warning in Lando's bed, because Lando had been scared and Oscar - who was not technically scared of hurricanes but had, when he checked the forecast, found himself less than comfortable about it - had not wanted to be alone either. They lay back to back. They did not talk about anything. The wind howled outside the dorm. Lando, half-asleep, said, into the dark, "you should tell him," and Oscar said, into the dark, "tell who, what," and Lando said, "you know who, you know what," and Oscar did not say anything else, because Lando was already asleep, and because he did, in fact, know who, and he did, in fact, know what.

He thought about it all night.

He did not tell him.

Not yet.

※   ※   ※

Three weeks into October - about a month and a half into the tutoring arrangement, by which point Logan was getting consistent B+es and Oscar was getting consistent insomnia - Logan said, in the middle of a Tuesday session, "Hey. You know my Quant lecture is on Wednesdays?"

"I know."

"Like - I get out at three."

"Yes, Logan, I know your schedule."

"You know my schedule."

"You told me your schedule. I have to plan around it."

"You have to plan around it."

"For tutoring, Logan."

"Right. Right. Tutoring. So - okay. So my lecture is at one. And - I am going to be honest with you. I am - the lectures are bad, Oscar. The professor reads off the slides. The slides are off the textbook. The textbook is bad. I am - I am not paying attention. I am not going to lie to you. I am not paying attention."

"Logan, this is literally what we have been working against."

"I know. I know. So - okay. So this is going to sound weird. But you take Econometrics on Wednesdays, right? Same building, right? Like, our buildings are next to each other?"

"Yes."

"What time."

"Eleven to twelve thirty."

"Okay. So you're done before me."

"Yes."

"Would you - okay, this is - would you ever just. Come to my lecture. With me. So that I have to pay attention because you're there."

Oscar stared at him.

"Logan."

"I know. I know how it sounds."

"You want me to come to your lecture."

"I want you to come to my lecture."

"That is a useless use of my time."

"You can - you can do your own homework during it. You can read. You can just sit there. I just - Oscar, I cannot get through this lecture alone. The professor is killing me."

"Logan. I have homework."

"You can do it in my lecture."

"This is - Logan, this is absurd."

"Oscar."

"You are an adult. You should be able to attend a one-hour lecture."

"It is ninety minutes."

"It is ninety minutes, Logan, ninety minutes is not a long time."

"It is when the lecturer is reading. Off. The slides."

Oscar pinched the bridge of his nose. He had - and he was aware of this - a weakness. The weakness was that Logan, when he asked for things, asked for them with a directness that bypassed Oscar's standard defenses. He did not whine. He did not beg. He simply stated, with a kind of honest, hopeful flatness, what he wanted, and what would happen if he got it, and he made it sound - terribly - reasonable.

"This is not a tutoring service I provide," Oscar said.

"I know."

"This is not in the scope of my role."

"I know."

"I am not a babysitter."

"I know."

"I am a stats tutor."

"I know."

"Logan."

"Oscar."

"One lecture."

"One lecture."

"One lecture, and then we re-evaluate, because this is absurd."

"One lecture and we re-evaluate. Got it."

Logan grinned at him. Oscar had - Oscar had been a fool. He had been a fool for some time. He recognized it now, looking at Logan's grin, the smug, satisfied grin of a man who had asked for the moon and been given it.

"What time," Oscar said.

"One o'clock. Building 24. Room 203."

"I will be there for one lecture, Logan."

"For one lecture, Oscar."

"And then we re-evaluate."

"And then we re-evaluate."

"Logan."

"Oscar."

"Goodbye."

※   ※   ※

The Wednesday lecture, as advertised, was bad. The professor was a man in his late fifties who appeared to have lost interest in his own subject around the year 2003 and had not regained it since. He read, indeed, off slides. The slides were dense with text. The text was lifted, indeed, from the textbook. Logan, beside Oscar in the lecture hall, was slumped in his chair with the despair of a hostage. Oscar, having brought his own homework - a problem set on maximum likelihood estimation, which was at least mildly interesting - was working on it on the bottom half of his notebook page.

About twenty minutes into the lecture, Oscar realized Logan was looking at him.

He glanced sideways. Logan was, indeed, looking at him. Not at the lecturer. Not at the slides. At Oscar. He had his pen in his hand. He had taken approximately one note. He was looking at Oscar as if Oscar were doing something fascinating, which Oscar was decidedly not - he was solving for a maximum likelihood estimator. There was nothing about it worth watching.

Oscar leaned over. He whispered:

"Stop looking at me and pay attention to the lecture."

Logan whispered back, with the cheerful innocence of a child who has been caught stealing a cookie:

"Stop being distracting during the lecture."

Oscar stared at him.

"I'm taking notes."

"On me."

"Logan."

"ugh fine - see you at eight."

Logan turned, slowly, back to the lecturer. He picked up his pen. He took, with great visible effort, a note.

Oscar did not, for the rest of the lecture, look at him. He did not. He kept his head down. He worked his problem set. He solved for the estimator. He found the variance. He did, very carefully, not think about see you at eight or about what see you at eight meant, because Logan had not - they did not have plans at eight. They did not have plans at any specific time. Logan had said see you at eight as if it were a thing they had already agreed to, as if it were a continuation of a conversation they had not had.

When the lecture ended, Logan stood up. He gathered his things. He looked at Oscar.

"My place at eight?" he said.

"Logan."

"I have to study for a Quant midterm next week, and you are the only person on the planet who can make me do this."

"Logan."

"Bring your problem set."

"Logan."

"I'll order pizza."

"Logan."

"What."

"Your place."

"I have a desk. I have a kitchen. I have air conditioning. This is not a - Oscar. Oscar, this is not a-"

"You are in a frat house, Logan."

"It is a frat house with desks and air conditioning."

"It is a frat house."

"I - I have a single, Oscar, I have my own room. It is just a room. With a desk. And - yes, there are people sometimes in the hallway. Yes, sometimes there is music. But the room - the room is a normal room-"

"Logan."

"Eight o'clock. Pizza. Study session. That is the entire offer."

Oscar looked at him. The lecture hall had mostly emptied. The lecturer was packing up his slides. Logan was standing there with his backpack and his hopeful, ridiculous face, and Oscar - Oscar was tired. Oscar had been tired for some time. He had been doing this for six weeks, this delicate dance of not letting it be anything, and he was, quietly, somewhere in the back of his own head, beginning to wonder why.

"Fine," he said.

"Yeah?"

"Eight o'clock. Pizza. Study session. Pizza, Logan, not - not anything else."

"Pizza."

"And we will study."

"We will study."

"And I will leave when we are done studying."

"You will leave when you are done studying."

"Okay."

"Okay."

Logan was, Oscar noted, trying very hard not to grin. He was failing. The grin was happening anyway. It was happening at the corner of his mouth and in the wrinkles around his eyes and in the small, suppressed laugh that escaped him when Oscar turned, very firmly, to go.

"Oscar."

"What."

"Bring Dorothy."

"Goodbye, Logan."

※   ※   ※

The Pi Kappa Alpha house on Granada was - Oscar had to admit, walking up to it - not as bad as he had imagined. He had imagined a structure on the verge of collapse, the kind of house in a horror movie. The reality was a wide, two-story Spanish colonial with a sloping red tile roof, white walls darkened by years of mildew, and a front porch that featured both a couch that should have been thrown away in 2009 and a flag for a local craft brewery. There was a hammock between two palm trees. The lawn was patchy. Music - but reasonable music, something with vocals and harmonies, not the kind of music Oscar had expected - was drifting out an open second-floor window.

Lando was not with him. Lando was with Daniel. Lando had been with Daniel almost every night for the last two weeks. Lando had stopped pretending it was not a thing. Lando was, when Oscar last saw him, on the floor of their dorm room painting one of Daniel's old shirts with a fabric pen and giggling. Oscar was, in a word, alone.

He knocked on the front door.

It was answered, after a pause, by a tall, vaguely confused-looking sophomore in a Hurricanes shirt.

"Hi," Oscar said. "I'm looking for Logan Sargeant."

"Logan's room is up the stairs," said the sophomore, "second on the left, but he's not - wait. Are you the stats guy."

"I'm - yes. I'm the stats guy."

"OH MY GOD."

"Oh god."

"OSCAR. OSCAR THE STATS GUY."

"Please - please stop saying that-"

"LOGAN. LOGAN, YOUR STATS GUY IS HERE."

There was, from upstairs, a thudding sound. There was, after the thudding sound, a louder thudding sound. There was, after the louder thudding sound, Logan, appearing at the top of the staircase in sweatpants and an old t-shirt, his hair wet from what had clearly been a recent shower, his face the deep red of a man who had just heard himself referred to publicly as having a stats guy.

"Wesley."

"What."

"Wesley. What did I say about-"

"You said to let him in, Logan."

"I said to let him in without making it a thing."

"This isn't a thing, this is a standard greeting, Logan-"

"Get out of the foyer, Wesley."

Wesley got out of the foyer. He went, slowly, into a side room, from which the sound of a video game was emanating. Logan came down the stairs with the considered care of a man trying not to fall down them. He arrived in front of Oscar slightly out of breath.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"Sorry about - Wesley."

"It's fine."

"He's a sophomore."

"I gathered."

"He has been told."

"Logan."

"Yes."

"What has he been told."

"… a small amount."

"Logan."

"Come upstairs."

He came upstairs.

Logan's room was, against every expectation Oscar had brought into the building, clean. The bed was made. The desk was clear. There was a poster of the U.S. Olympic sailing team on one wall, which Oscar had not known to expect, and a row of three potted plants on the windowsill, which Oscar had definitely not known to expect. The desk had two chairs at it. There was a pizza box on the bed. There was a six-pack of cans of sparkling water - Oscar's brand, again, Lando, Lando - sitting on the floor next to the desk.

"You - clean your room."

"I clean my room, Oscar, I am a person."

"I just-"

"I am aware what you expected, Oscar, and I am thriving in defying it."

"You have plants."

"I have plants."

"Those are real plants."

"Those are real plants. That one's a pothos, that one's a - I don't know what that one is, my mother brought it to me, she said it was a Logan plant, I-"

"Why are you like this."

"Because I am deeply unwell, Oscar. Sit down. I have pizza."

They studied.

For about two hours, they actually studied. Logan had a midterm in five days. Oscar walked him through the material - confidence intervals, hypothesis tests, the standard panic-button section of an intro stats course - and Logan, slumped in his desk chair with a pen in his hand, took it all in. He asked good questions. He missed easy points and saw hard ones. He was, Oscar realized again, not a bad student. He had simply been a poorly attended student. The difference between the two was, statistically, enormous.

Around ten o'clock, the music in the house got louder. There was - Oscar registered, with the resigned air of a man hearing a weather forecast he had expected - the sound of a great many people downstairs. Doors opened. Doors closed. A voice in the hallway laughed too loud. Bass began to thump through the floor.

Oscar looked up.

"Yeah," Logan said. "Yeah, sorry. It's Wednesday."

"What does that mean."

"It means it's Wednesday."

"Logan."

"Wednesday is - there is a thing on Wednesdays."

"There is a party on Wednesdays."

"There is a - small party on Wednesdays."

"Logan."

"It is technically a social hour."

"Logan."

"I told them you were coming. I told them do not be insane. It is currently an acceptable level of insane."

A girl screamed downstairs. It was a happy scream, but it was a scream.

"Logan."

"That was - that was actually fine, that was Carlos's girlfriend, she does that-"

"Carlos has a girlfriend."

"Yes - Oscar, focus, you are deflecting-"

"I am not-"

"You are deflecting, Oscar, you are stalling because you want to leave, and I am - Oscar, listen to me. You can leave. You can absolutely leave. You can - if you want to go downstairs, you can go downstairs, and I will walk you out, and I will get you a Lyft, and that is fine. Or - or - you can stay, and we can keep studying, and I will lock the door, and the music will be exactly as loud as it currently is, and we can - we can just be up here."

Oscar looked at him.

The music thumped. The voices in the hallway laughed. Logan was sitting at his desk in a t-shirt and sweatpants with a stats textbook open in front of him and a pencil tucked behind his ear, and he was looking at Oscar with the careful, anxious face of a man who knew exactly how much he was asking for and was bracing to receive no.

"Lock the door," Oscar said.

Logan stood up. He locked the door. He sat back down.

"Confidence intervals," Oscar said.

"Confidence intervals."

"What's a 95% confidence interval, Logan."

"It is - the range in which we believe - with 95% confidence - that the true population parameter lies, given-"

"Given what."

"Given - given the sample mean and standard error, and assuming the central limit theorem holds, which it does for n greater than thirty, which-"

"Good."

"I just said a thing-"

"I heard you say it, Logan."

"That was correct, Oscar."

"It was correct, Logan."

"I just did statistics."

"You did statistics."

"At a party."

"At a party."

"Oscar."

"Logan."

"Marry me."

"Logan."

"Sorry. Sorry. The high is - the high is getting to me."

They kept going.

They kept going for another hour and a half. The party downstairs got louder, and then quieter, and then louder again, and then settled, around midnight, into a soft constant hum of voices and music. At some point, Logan got up and made tea - he had an electric kettle, Logan had an electric kettle, what was this man - and brought Oscar a cup. At some point, they stopped working. At some point they were just talking. About - Oscar would not have been able to say what they were talking about, later. About his sister, in Australia. About Logan's grandfather, again. About a movie Lando had made them all watch the previous weekend at Lewis's house. About how Lewis's grandmother's pool was so old that the tiles around the edges had started to crack, and Lewis had refused to replace them because his grandmother had picked them out, and how the cracks made the pool look like an old map of the world.

Around 1 a.m., Oscar realized he had been at Logan's frat house for five hours.

"I should go."

"Yeah."

"My - the bus stops running."

"I'll Lyft you."

"You don't-"

"I'll Lyft you, Oscar."

"Logan."

"I'm not going to send you out into the night on a bus, Oscar."

"It is 1 a.m. and a Lyft to my dorm is expensive-"

"Oscar."

"Logan."

"It is six dollars."

"It is more than six dollars at one in the morning."

"I have six dollars, Oscar."

"You have six dollars to your name, Logan, or you have six dollars for this purpose."

"For this purpose."

Logan ordered him a Lyft. The Lyft was, in fact, fourteen dollars at that hour, which they argued about for the entire time it took the Lyft to arrive. Logan, in the end, walked him downstairs. The party had largely cleared out. There were a few people on the porch, smoking. Logan waved at them. They waved back. Wesley, the sophomore who had nearly destroyed Oscar's evening on arrival, was sitting on the porch couch with a girl, and he raised a hand at Oscar with the deeply regretful air of a man who had been spoken to firmly about boundaries.

The Lyft pulled up. Logan opened the door. He hovered there, holding it, looking at Oscar across the small distance of curb.

"Thanks," Logan said.

"For what."

"For - coming. For the lecture today. For the - for not leaving when the party started."

"It is barely a party."

"It is a party, Oscar, it is by any metric a party-"

"Logan."

"Yeah."

"Lock your door."

"What."

"Lock your door before you go to bed. The house is full of strangers."

"Oscar."

"What."

"That is the most you've ever cared about me in one sentence."

"I - I did not-"

"Goodnight, Oscar."

Oscar got into the Lyft. He stared straight ahead. He did not look at Logan through the back window as the Lyft pulled away. He did, however, take out his phone, and he typed:

Oscar: Made it home.

He did not send it. He held it for a long time. He looked at the dorm, rising up in front of him as the Lyft pulled in. He looked at the message.

He sent it.

The phone buzzed within ten seconds.

Logan: good. sleep.

Logan: see you tuesday.

Logan: :)

Oscar locked his phone. He went upstairs. Lando was, mercifully, asleep - or pretending to be asleep, which from Lando was the same thing as asleep, since pretending to be asleep was the only way to avoid a Lando interrogation and was a strategy Oscar had taught him personally.

He got into bed.

He did not sleep for a long time. ---

Logan got an A-minus on the midterm.

He brought the graded exam to their next tutoring session and slid it across the table at Oscar without saying a word. Oscar picked it up. He looked at the score. He looked at Logan. He looked at the score again. He set the exam down. He folded his hands on top of it.

"Logan."

"Yeah."

"This is an A-minus."

"This is an A-minus."

"This is-"

"I know."

"You-"

"I know."

Logan was grinning. He was grinning so hard his face was going to break. He was grinning the way people grinned in romantic comedies when something good happened and the camera circled around them, and Oscar - who had taught many students many things over the past three years and had never, not once, felt a personal stake in any of their grades - found himself, against every grain of who he was, grinning back.

"Logan."

"Yeah."

"This is good."

"This is good."

"You - Logan, you got an A-minus on a midterm."

"I got an A-minus on a midterm."

"This is-"

He did not finish the sentence, because Logan, across the table, had leaned over and put his forehead against the table and said "Oscar. Oscar, oh my god, my mother is going to combust. She is going to combust when I tell her, Oscar, I have to call her, I am going to call her-"

"Call her."

"Oscar."

"Call her, Logan."

Logan called her. He put it on speaker. Logan's mother - a brisk, warm-voiced woman named Andrea who was, evidently, born in Argentina and had retained her accent despite three decades in Florida - answered on the second ring. Logan said "Mom. Mom. I got an A-minus."

There was a pause.

There was a long pause.

Then Andrea Sargeant, on speakerphone, said, "Logan."

"I know."

"Logan Andrew Sargeant."

"I know."

"You got an A-minus on a quantitative methods midterm."

"I got an A-minus on a Quantitative Methods midterm."

"I am going to come to that campus."

"Mom-"

"I am going to come to that campus and I am going to find the tutor and I am going to hug him on the mouth-"

"MOM-"

"-and I am going to kiss him on his face-"

"MOM."

"Logan."

"Mom, the tutor is currently here."

There was another pause. Then Andrea said, slowly, "The tutor is currently there."

"Yes."

"And I am on speakerphone."

"Yes."

"Oh."

"Yes."

"Hello, tutor."

"Hello, Mrs. Sargeant."

"What is your name."

"Oscar."

"Oscar. Oscar-"

"Piastri."

"Oscar Piastri. Oscar Piastri, I have heard a great deal about you, and I am going to-"

"MOM."

"Logan, I am being polite-"

"You are not being polite, Mom, you are being a lunatic-"

"-and I am going to send you a card, Oscar, because what you have done for my son's life-"

"Mom, hang up the phone."

"Logan, I am thanking him."

"You are thanking him too much."

Oscar, across the table, was no longer making eye contact with Logan, or with the phone, or with the wall, or in fact with anything in the visible universe. His ears were doing the warm thing again. His face was, additionally, doing the warm thing. His whole skull was, broadly, conducting heat in a way that did not feel sustainable.

"Mrs. Sargeant," he said.

"Yes, Oscar."

"You're welcome. I - Logan worked very hard. He - he did the work. I just - set the table."

"Oscar."

"Yes."

"You are a very kind young man, and I will not bother you any longer, and I will say only that when Logan brings you to Christmas-"

"MOM HANG UP THE PHONE."

"I will see you then, Oscar, goodbye!"

She hung up.

There was a silence at the table.

It was a long silence.

Logan was looking at the table. Oscar was looking at his coffee. Neither of them was looking at the other. The fluorescent lights buzzed. Somewhere in the engineering building, a door slammed.

"So," Logan said.

"So."

"That was my mother."

"That was your mother."

"She - she gets enthusiastic."

"She gets enthusiastic."

"She did not - she did not literally mean Christmas-"

"Logan."

"She just - she does that. She invites everyone to Christmas. Last year she invited the mailman."

"Logan."

"He came. He came, Oscar, the mailman came to Christmas-"

"Logan."

"Yeah."

"Show me the questions you missed on the midterm."

Logan, gratefully, showed him the questions he had missed on the midterm. They went through them together. The two questions Logan had missed were silly - careless arithmetic, a misread of a problem statement, the kind of errors that happened when you were tired or in a hurry. They were not, statistically, signs of misunderstanding. Oscar told him so. Logan said, "Yeah. I was rushing at the end." Oscar said, "Don't rush." Logan said, "Yes sir." Oscar said, "Don't." Logan said, "Yes, Oscar." They were back to their old rhythm. The room was, again, ordinary.

Except that - and this was the part Oscar could not, afterward, account for - when Logan stood up to leave at the end of the session, he hesitated at the door. He turned around. He looked at Oscar at the table. He said, "Thanks, Oscar."

"You're welcome."

"No - I mean. Thank you."

"Logan."

"For - for not. Like. For not giving up on me. For taking me seriously. I - I am aware I am the kind of person it would be very easy to not take seriously. I am aware of that. I am - I am working on it. But you - from the first session you were not - you didn't - I'm not articulating this well. I am - Oscar. Oscar, I am just thanking you."

Oscar looked at him.

"You're welcome," he said.

"Okay."

"You did the work, Logan. I just - set the table."

"Yeah."

"I mean that."

"I know you do."

"Okay."

"Okay."

He left.

Oscar sat in the windowless room for a long time. He looked at his coffee, which had gone cold again, as it always did, because he could never seem to drink it while it was still hot when Logan was there. He looked at the empty chair across from him. He thought about Logan's mother on speakerphone, about Christmas, about I will see you then, Oscar.

He took out his phone. He texted Lando.

Oscar: I think I am in serious trouble.

Lando: OSCAR

Lando: OSCAR I HAVE BEEN TELLING YOU FOR EIGHT WEEKS

Lando: SERIOUS TROUBLE HOW

Oscar: I am not going to elaborate.

Lando: OSCAR

Lando: OSCAR JAMES PIASTRI

Oscar: That is still not my middle name.

Lando: GET HOME WE ARE TALKING ABOUT THIS

He got home. They talked about it.

It did not, Oscar thought afterward, particularly help.

※   ※   ※

The thing about the Pi Kappa Alpha Halloween party was that Oscar was not, in any meaningful sense, invited. He was informed of its existence. Lando - who, by this point, was at the frat house more often than he was at the dorm, and who had, with Daniel, settled into the lazy domesticity of a couple who had been together six months instead of three weeks - informed him as one informs a coworker that the coffee maker is broken: with the bland air of a man delivering bad news.

"There's a Halloween party at Pi Kappa Alpha on Saturday."

"Mm."

"Logan asked Daniel if you were coming."

"Mm."

"Daniel said he didn't know."

"Mm."

"Logan said okay."

"Mm."

"Logan looked, Daniel said, like a man who had been told his dog was sick."

"Lando."

"I am transmitting information, Oscar."

"Are you."

"It is a costume party."

"Of course it is."

"Daniel and I are going as Han Solo and Princess Leia."

"Lando."

"What."

"I cannot bear you."

"Daniel ordered me a braided wig, Oscar, please let me have this."

"Lando."

"What."

"I am not going to a Halloween party."

"Oscar."

"I have a problem set due Monday and I-"

"OSCAR."

"What."

"You have not seen Logan outside of tutoring in three weeks."

That was - that was, statistically, accurate. Oscar had been telling himself that this was a normal thing. That he and Logan had a working arrangement, a tutoring relationship, and that the bonfire and Lewis's pool party and the night at the frat house and the thing on Wednesdays he had begun to suspect was happening - thinking about each other - were, in fact, simply circumstances that had come and gone. They had not made plans. Logan had not asked him out. Logan had not, in any clear and unambiguous way, moved. Oscar had been waiting. Oscar had been waiting because he was a person who waited. He was a person who did not initiate things. He was a person who, when in doubt, did not do.

But the not-doing had been going on for three weeks. And Logan had not done either. And Oscar was - Oscar was beginning to wonder if he had imagined it. If the whole thing was, in fact, his own private invention, a thing he had built out of scraps of misread attention.

He looked at Lando.

"What's your costume."

"What's your costume?"

"I am not-"

"YES."

"Lando-"

"YES, OSCAR. YES."

"Lando."

"You can be - okay. Okay. We are going as a theme. The four of us - me, Daniel, you, and Logan, even if you don't talk to him - we are going as Star Wars. This is - Daniel and I have already done the work. You will be - Luke."

"Why am I Luke."

"Because you have Luke Skywalker energy, Oscar."

"What does that mean."

"It means you are a small farm boy with great potential and stubborn principles, and Logan-"

"Lando."

"Logan is going to be Han Solo, because Logan is going to be a cocky pilot with a heart of gold, and Daniel was Han but Daniel will cede the role-"

"Lando, no."

"Daniel will cede the role because Daniel loves love, and Daniel will dress as a - as a Stormtrooper, it doesn't matter-"

"Lando."

"Oscar."

"You have thought about this too much."

"I have thought about this the correct amount."

In the end - and Oscar would later, looking back, be unable to explain how it had happened - he agreed to go. He agreed to be Luke. He let Lando order him a cheap costume on Amazon, which arrived two days later in a flimsy plastic envelope and consisted of a beige tunic, a brown vest, and a plastic lightsaber that did not light up. He put it on, in the dorm room mirror, on Saturday afternoon, and he looked, he had to admit, ridiculous. He looked like a man on his way to a children's birthday party. He looked, in particular, young - the costume gave him a kind of innocent, boyish quality he did not normally have, and which he found vaguely upsetting.

"You look amazing," Lando said.

"I look eight."

"Eight is amazing."

"Lando."

"Get in the Lyft."

※   ※   ※

The Pi Kappa Alpha house, on Halloween night, was not the same building Oscar had visited a month ago. The brewery flag on the porch had been replaced with a set of orange lights strung in haphazard arcs along the porch railing. There were jack-o'-lanterns on the steps - actual carved jack-o'-lanterns, in varying degrees of artistic skill. There was a fog machine going somewhere inside; trails of artificial fog were drifting out the front door and rolling down the porch steps into the front yard. There were costumes everywhere. Oscar saw, in his first ten seconds, three Batmans, a Sexy Pikachu, two members of a Mighty Ducks hockey team, and a man in a full-length banana suit.

The banana said "OSCAR!" and turned out, on closer inspection, to be Carlos.

"Oscar! Mate! You look - you look amazing!"

"Carlos."

"What."

"You are a banana."

"I am a banana, yes, this is correct."

"Why are you a banana."

"This is not the question, Oscar, the question is why have I not always been a banana, and the answer is I do not know."

Lando, beside Oscar, was vibrating with delight. Daniel - in full Stormtrooper armor that he had clearly, judging by the dent in the helmet, owned for some time and worn often - was already halfway across the yard, waving them in. Oscar adjusted his plastic lightsaber. He took a breath. He went inside.

Logan was in the living room.

He was, indeed, dressed as Han Solo. He had - he had clearly committed to it. He was wearing the vest, and the white shirt, and the dark trousers with the red stripe down the leg, and there was a fake blaster in a holster on his thigh. His hair was a kind of intentional mess that had clearly taken time. He was standing by the makeshift bar a brother had set up on a folding table, and he was laughing at something Charles, dressed as some kind of vampire, was saying, and he had not yet seen Oscar.

Oscar, in the doorway, in his Luke Skywalker costume, with his plastic lightsaber, took a long, slow breath.

Lando, behind him, said "go."

"Lando."

"Oscar, go."

"Lando, I cannot-"

"You are dressed as a Jedi, Oscar, you can do anything."

Oscar went.

He crossed the room. Logan, midway across, saw him. Logan stopped laughing. Logan's face did a thing - a brief, complete thing, a thing in which his eyes got wide and his mouth opened a little and his hand, holding a drink, went very still - and then Logan, recovering, set the drink down on the bar and met Oscar in the middle of the living room.

"You're here."

"I'm here."

"You're - Oscar. You're a Jedi."

"I'm Luke Skywalker."

"You're Luke Skywalker."

"Yes."

"Oscar."

"What."

"I'm Han Solo."

"I know, Logan."

"Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are - Oscar, are you aware of the implications-"

"They are friends, Logan, they are platonic friends in space-"

"They are codependent friends in space, Oscar, there is - there is a book about it-"

"Logan."

"Did Lando do this."

"Lando did this."

"I am going to kiss him on the mouth."

"Daniel will kill you."

"Daniel will thank me."

Logan, Oscar realized then, was a little drunk. Not very. Not in any of the ways that would have made Oscar want to leave. He was - pleasantly, charmingly, slightly - drunk, in the way of a person who had had two beers and was in the company of his friends. His eyes were bright. His hands kept moving when he talked.

"Are you having fun," Logan said.

"I just got here."

"Right. Right." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Are you going to have fun."

"I am going to try."

"That's all I can ask."

Across the room, the fog machine went off again, and a great cloud of artificial fog rolled across the living room. Logan, half-obscured in it, was - and Oscar would refuse to acknowledge this later - very obscured-by-fog handsome. He looked like he was in a music video. He looked, in particular, like he was about to ask Oscar to dance, which would have been a deal-breaker, because Oscar did not dance, ever, under any circumstances, regardless of fog.

"Want a drink," Logan said.

"Water."

"Water?"

"I have to walk home."

"Oscar, you do not have to walk home."

"Logan."

"Take a Lyft."

"Logan."

"I'll Lyft you."

"Logan, we have - we have been here before-"

"Water," Logan said. "Coming up. Reasonable man."

He went to get water. Oscar stood in the middle of the living room of the Pi Kappa Alpha house, dressed as a Jedi knight, holding a plastic lightsaber. Lewis Hamilton, dressed as - Oscar took a moment to identify the costume - as himself, but in a very nice tuxedo, walked by and clapped Oscar on the shoulder and said "love it, mate" without breaking stride. Max Verstappen, dressed as a dinosaur, walked by carrying Charles, who was the vampire, on his back, and Charles waved at Oscar with the bored composure of a man being chauffeured. George Russell, dressed, with great precision, as Sherlock Holmes - pipe and all - came over and shook Oscar's hand with great solemnity and said, "I expected you. Statistically."

"Hello, George."

"You look excellent."

"Thank you, George."

"Have you met Alexandra."

"I have not."

"This is Alexandra. Alexandra is a witch. The costume is metaphorical."

"Hi," said Alexandra, who was lovely. "He has been very excited to introduce us. I have heard you are terrifyingly good at statistics."

"He has not heard that from me," George said, "I have never said that, I have no idea-"

"He has said it twice in the last hour, Oscar, in my direct hearing."

"Alexandra."

"What. I have no loyalty, George."

Logan came back with the water. He handed it to Oscar. He stood next to him. He did not, Oscar noticed, drink anything else for the rest of the night. He had set his beer on the bar and not picked it up again. They drifted, slowly, through the party. They talked to people. They talked to Lewis, who had stories about everyone, and to Daniel and Lando, who were being a couple now in a way that Oscar had not before observed, with Daniel's hand at the small of Lando's back and Lando looking up at Daniel like he was the answer to something, and Oscar - Oscar looked away from them, because it was too much. Too much, suddenly, of a thing he had not let himself have.

Around eleven o'clock, the party was at its peak. The music was loud. There were too many people in the living room. Oscar's water was empty. Logan, beside him, leaned in close to be heard over the music, and his breath was warm on Oscar's ear, and he said:

"Wanna get out of here."

"And go where."

"Anywhere. The porch. The roof. I don't care. Wanna get out of here."

Oscar nodded.

They went out the back door, through the kitchen, past two brothers fighting good-naturedly over a bottle of vodka, past a girl in a Mean Girls costume on her phone, past Wesley the sophomore, who saw Oscar and Logan together and grinned and gave Logan an enormous, completely unsubtle thumbs-up that Logan ignored with the dignity of a man pretending he had not seen a dog die.

The backyard was empty. There was a small concrete patio. There was, beyond the patio, a sloping lawn that ended in a chain-link fence behind which someone's neighbor had a dog that was now, having heard them, barking. The night was - for Florida, in late October - cool. The air smelled of cut grass and chlorine from the pool of a neighboring house and, faintly, the smoke of someone's joint two yards over.

Logan led Oscar around the side of the house, past a row of trash cans, to a wooden gate that he opened with a familiar shove. They stepped through it. They were, suddenly, in a quiet street.

"There's a thing," Logan said. "Two blocks. Come on."

The thing, two blocks away, turned out to be a small park. It was a corner park, no bigger than a residential lot, with a pair of swings and a slide and an oak tree old enough to have seen Florida before the Florida Logan and Oscar lived in had existed. The streetlamps gave it a faint orange glow. The whole park was empty.

Logan went to the swings. He sat down on one. He patted the other one.

Oscar sat down.

For a while, they did not say anything. They swung, lightly, the way you swung when you were a person who had stopped being a child a long time ago and was using a swing for the first time in years. The chains creaked. The dog two streets over had stopped barking. Somewhere a car alarm started, briefly, and then a person yelled at it, and it stopped.

"My grandfather used to bring me to a park like this," Logan said.

"Logan."

"Sorry. Sorry. I do that thing. I bring him up."

"It's okay."

"It's a lot of grandfather content."

"It's okay, Logan."

"Yeah."

They were quiet again. Logan dragged the toe of his boot in the dirt. The swing rocked back and forth.

"Oscar."

"Yeah."

"Can I tell you something."

"Yeah."

"It's gonna be - it's gonna be a thing."

"Okay."

"It's gonna be a thing, and you can - you can stop me whenever you want. You can say don't say it, Logan, and I will not say it. I will zip the words back into my mouth. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay."

He stopped swinging. Oscar stopped swinging. They were sitting on the swings in a park that was empty in the middle of an autumn night in Miami. The dog two streets over was barking again. Logan's eyes, in the orange light of the streetlamp, were a color Oscar did not have a word for.

"The thing is," Logan said, "that the first day I met you, when I almost killed you with a skateboard, I went home, and I was - I was bothered. Like, bothered. I could not get you out of my head. I asked Daniel for your number, like, the minute I got home. I - and I don't do that. I don't do that, Oscar, I'm not - I'm a frat boy. I am, like, a garden variety frat boy. I do not - I do not ask my friends for the phone number of a boy I spilled coffee on. I do not do that."

"Logan."

"And then - and then you came to the bonfire. And I - Oscar. I was so terrified you weren't going to come. I was checking my phone every four minutes. And then you came, and you were wearing that shirt, and I - I went on a walk with you. On a walk. On a walk, Oscar. I have never gone on a walk on a beach with another person in my entire life, that is not a thing I do, I have never been on a walk-"

"Logan."

"And then - and then you started tutoring me. And I - I was an idiot. I was - I have made every mistake. I have been - I have made terrible decisions about signaling. I have been bringing you coffee like a medieval suitor. I asked you to come to my lecture, Oscar, I-"

"Logan."

"And I - Oscar. Oscar, I know you. I have watched you for two months. I know you are - you are careful. You are a careful person. And I - I have been waiting, Oscar, I have been - I have been trying not to spook you, because - because I do not want to lose you, not from the tutoring, not from - Oscar. I am - I am very stupid about you."

He was, by this point, looking at the dirt under his boot. He was not looking at Oscar. His hands were tight on the chains of the swing.

Oscar said, "Logan."

Logan said, "Yeah."

Oscar said, "Look at me."

Logan looked at him.

"I have," Oscar said, slowly, "been very stupid about you also."

A beat. Logan's face - the brief, complete thing again, the wide eyes and the open mouth and the going-very-still of the hand. Then a small, wondering "yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Since when."

"Since the iced coffee."

"The iced coffee."

"Yes, Logan."

"Oscar."

"Yes."

"Oscar Piastri."

"Yes."

He was off the swing. He was - he was crossing the four feet of dirt between them. He was standing in front of Oscar's swing, and he was bracing one hand on one of the chains, and Oscar - Oscar, on the swing, was looking up at him, with the slow, slow understanding that this was, finally, the thing, that this was the thing that was finally happening, and his heart was terrible.

"Can I-" Logan said.

"Yes."

"Oscar-"

"Logan."

He leaned down.

He kissed Oscar.

It was a very gentle kiss. It was - it was the kiss of a man who was, in fact, slightly drunk, and who was aware he was slightly drunk, and who was terrified of doing this badly. His mouth was soft. His hand, on the chain of the swing, did not move. His other hand came up and cupped Oscar's jaw the way you might cup something fragile that you had been entrusted with for the night. Oscar's hands, after a moment, came up and held Logan's vest at the waist, and Oscar - Oscar, who had not kissed anyone in over a year, who had not let himself want this in two months, who had been waiting and waiting and waiting for the thing he had been waiting for without admitting he was waiting - Oscar leaned into the kiss the way you leaned into a warm coat in winter.

It lasted maybe four seconds.

It lasted, by Oscar's internal clock, a very long time.

Logan pulled back. Their faces stayed close. His hand, on Oscar's jaw, did not move.

"Was that-"

"Yes."

"Okay."

"Okay."

"Okay."

"You said okay three times."

"I'm processing, Oscar."

"Mm."

"I am processing."

"Logan."

"Yes."

"Sit back down on the swing."

"Why."

"Because I am also processing, and I cannot do it with your face this close."

Logan, grinning, went back to his swing.

They sat there, on the swings, in the orange streetlamp light, for some time. They did not, again, say anything for a while. Oscar's swing creaked. Logan's swing creaked. The dog two streets over had, mercifully, gone inside. The party at the frat house was a faint thump three blocks away.

After a long time, Logan said, "So."

"So."

"What now."

"I don't know."

"Are you going home tonight."

"Yes, Logan."

"Right. Right. Right."

"I have a problem set."

"Of course you do."

"It's due Monday."

"Of course it is."

"Logan."

"What."

"Tuesday."

"Tuesday."

"Tutoring."

"Tutoring."

"And then - after tutoring-"

"After tutoring-"

"Maybe we-"

"Maybe we-"

"Get dinner."

"Get dinner."

"Logan."

"Yes."

"Get dinner."

"Get dinner."

"Yes."

"Oscar."

"Logan."

"Yes." ---

Oscar woke up on Sunday at 7:14 a.m., which was, given the circumstances, deeply unreasonable. He had gotten home at nearly two in the morning. He had lain in his bed for an hour afterward without sleeping, replaying - in shameful, granular detail - the precise sensation of Logan's mouth on his own. He had finally fallen asleep around 3:30. Five hours of sleep was, by any measure, insufficient. And yet here he was. Awake. Staring at the ceiling. Hearing, from across the room, the soft snoring of Lando, who had stumbled in at four and had not, blessedly, noticed Oscar lying awake in the bed across from him.

Oscar's phone, on the nightstand, said:

Logan (2:47 AM): made it home

Logan (2:47 AM): locked the door :)

Logan (2:48 AM): also i'm going to think about that for the rest of my life

Logan (2:48 AM): just FYI

Logan (2:49 AM): ok going to sleep

Logan (2:49 AM): dinner tuesday

Logan (2:49 AM): ok bye

Oscar read the messages. He read them again. He stared at the ceiling.

He thought, with great clarity, I am in serious trouble.

He had thought it before. He had been thinking it for two months. The thinking it had not stopped its being true. The thinking it had, in fact, only delayed the true thing, which was that he had - somewhere along the line - fallen, very stupidly, in love with a frat boy who skateboarded into him and kept potted plants on his windowsill and could not, even now, fully calculate a standard deviation without checking his notes.

He was in love. He was in love with Logan Sargeant. He had known it since the swing. He had probably known it since the bonfire. He had certainly known it since bring a hoodie cause the breeze comes in around 9.

He got out of bed. He went to the kitchen. He made coffee. He drank it. He came back to bed. He took out his phone. He typed:

Oscar: Hi.

He sent it.

It was, by his estimation, the worst opening text in history. It was a one-word text. It was a one-syllable text. It was, in terms of content, nothing. He stared at it for a long moment with the deep regret of a man who had just emailed his boss's spouse instead of his boss. He locked his phone. He set it face-down on the nightstand. He waited.

His phone buzzed.

Logan: hi

Logan: are you awake before noon on a sunday what is happening to you

Oscar: I do not know.

Logan: are you having a CRISIS

Oscar: Possibly.

Logan: OSCAR

Logan: OSCAR PIASTRI

Oscar: Logan.

Logan: are you having a crisis ABOUT THE KISS

Oscar: No.

Logan: OSCAR

Oscar: I am not having a crisis about the kiss.

Oscar: I am having a crisis about the fact that I am not having a crisis about the kiss.

Logan: ........

Logan: ok say more

Oscar: Tuesday.

Logan: WHAT

Logan: OSCAR

Logan: OSCAR YOU CANNOT LEAVE ME ON THAT

Oscar: Tuesday, Logan.

Logan: OSCAR YOU CANNOT TELL ME YOU ARE HAVING A METACRISIS AND THEN LEAVE ME UNTIL TUESDAY

Oscar: Logan.

Logan: ok

Logan: ok fine

Logan: im going back to sleep but i want you to know

Logan: that the next 48 hours are going to be the longest of my life

Logan: and i am holding you personally accountable

Oscar: Okay.

Logan: "okay"

Logan: he says okay

Logan: like he didnt KISS ME LAST NIGHT

Oscar: Goodbye, Logan.

Logan: goodbye

Logan: :)

Oscar put his phone down. He lay on his back. He smiled. He smiled in a way he could not remember smiling before - a slow, helpless, private smile, into the empty air above his bed, in the morning light through the dorm-room blinds. Across the room Lando snored. The ceiling fan, doing its usual ineffectual work, clicked through its rotations. Outside, somewhere, a leaf blower started.

He was in love. He was in love. He was in love.

He went, eventually, back to sleep.

※   ※   ※

Logan arrived at the tutoring center on Tuesday at 3:57 p.m. He was carrying two coffees. He was wearing - and Oscar was, again, going to refuse to fully acknowledge this - a shirt. A button-down shirt. He had on a button-down shirt and a pair of clean shorts. He had clearly showered. He had clearly combed his hair. He looked, by every available metric, like a person who had been getting ready for a date.

They had not, in any explicit sense, called this a date. They had said get dinner. Oscar had assumed, on Monday, lying in bed and considering it, that getting dinner was a kind of slow on-ramp to a date - a thing they would do casually, in a way that allowed either of them to retreat at the first sign of trouble. Logan had clearly not gotten that memo. Logan had dressed for the date. Logan had dressed, Oscar registered, very nicely for the date.

"Hi," Logan said.

"Hi."

"I brought coffee."

"I see that."

"It's iced."

"Yes."

"With the - the appropriate amount of cream."

"Yes."

"Yeah."

"Logan."

"Yeah."

"Sit down. We have a session."

"We have a session."

He sat down.

They had a session. They worked on hypothesis testing. Logan was, this session, worse than he had been in weeks. He could not, for the life of him, hold any of the concepts in his head. He kept staring at the table. He kept laughing for no reason. He had, twice, started to say something and then visibly stopped himself and looked at the textbook with the concentration of a man trying to read a manual in a foreign language.

"Logan."

"Yeah."

"You are worse than you have ever been."

"I am aware."

"You knew this material last week."

"I knew this material last week."

"Why don't you know it now."

"I am - I am distracted, Oscar."

"By what."

"Oscar."

"What."

"I am distracted by the fact that we are about to get dinner."

"Logan."

"I am deeply distracted by it."

"This is exactly the problem we-"

"Oscar."

"What."

"Let's just - let's go."

"You have not learned hypothesis testing."

"I will re-learn it on Thursday."

"Logan-"

"Oscar."

He was, now, looking at Oscar across the table. His hands were folded in front of him, very neatly, on his closed notebook. He was, Oscar noted, almost not breathing. He was - and Oscar would later be quite sure of this - making a concerted effort to be very still.

"Please," Logan said.

Oscar closed his notebook.

"Fine."

※   ※   ※

He took Oscar to a place on Coral Way.

It was - Oscar noted, walking up to it - neither too fancy nor too casual. It was an old Cuban-Italian place, the kind of Miami restaurant that had been there since the seventies, with white tablecloths and orange-tinted lamps and a menu that featured both ropa vieja and fettuccine alfredo on the same page without commentary. It was, in the early evening of a weeknight, mostly empty. The hostess greeted Logan by name. Logan said, "Hi, Marisol," in a tone that suggested he had been here many times before. Marisol seated them in a corner booth. She did not give Oscar a menu, because, she said, Logan had told her in advance what they would be ordering.

"Logan."

"Yeah."

"You pre-ordered for me."

"I asked Lando what you would order."

"Logan."

"Look. Look. If you do not like what I have ordered, we can re-order. I can - I can - but I have committed, Oscar, to a vision."

"Logan."

"Trust the vision."

He had, it turned out, ordered the ropa vieja, which was, as it happened, exactly what Oscar would have ordered. Lando had done his homework. Lando, Oscar noted with the grim recognition of a man who was no longer at the helm of his own life, had been doing his homework for some time.

They ate. They talked. Logan, freed from the immediate panic of the date starting, became, slowly, the version of himself Oscar had been spending two months becoming acquainted with - funny, easy, a little self-deprecating, generous with his attention in a way that made Oscar feel, against every effort he had ever made against the feeling, seen. They talked about home. Logan was from Boca Raton. His mother was Argentine, his father was American. He had two younger sisters. He had been sailing since he was six. He had - and this surprised Oscar - almost not gone to college at all; there had been a year, after his grandfather died, when Logan had wanted to drop everything and join a delivery crew on a sailboat going from Florida to Spain.

"I would have gone," Logan said. "I would have just gone."

"What stopped you."

"My mother. My mother said - she said, Logan. If you go to Spain on a sailboat for a year, you will come back and you will be a man with a beard who has been to Spain on a sailboat for a year. You will not have a degree. You will be twenty-three years old. You will not be employable. You will be, fundamentally, the worst kind of man."

"That is - correct."

"She is brutal, Oscar, you have only heard her on her good behavior."

"On her good behavior she tried to invite me to Christmas."

"On her bad behavior she would have flown to Miami and dragged me onto a flight to Buenos Aires."

They talked about Oscar's family - his sisters, his parents, the long-distance complication of being on the wrong continent. They talked about classes. Oscar was thinking about graduate school. Logan was thinking, increasingly, that he wanted to do something in coastal real estate.

"Boring," Logan said, "but it's a real thing. People need to manage the coast. It is, statistically - and I am using that word correctly, Oscar, you can fact-check me - disappearing."

"You are using statistically as an adverb of intensity, Logan, which is not-"

"OSCAR. I AM TRYING TO HAVE A MOMENT."

"Sorry."

They had dessert. They split a flan, because the menu said so. The waiter, who knew Logan, came by twice and asked if everything was all right with the kind of meaningful, eyebrow-raised concern of a man who had clearly been told the stakes of the evening. Oscar caught one of those eyebrow-raises and looked at Logan.

"How many people did you tell."

"What."

"How many people knew about tonight."

"Oscar."

"Logan."

"My mother. My mother knew."

"Logan."

"And - and Marisol."

"Logan."

"And - Daniel."

"Logan."

"And - Wesley."

"Wesley."

"He has been very supportive, Oscar."

"Logan."

"And - and Lewis. And - and Carlos. And - Charles. And - Max. And, possibly, marginally, George."

"You told George."

"George asked!"

"George asked."

"He asked! He came up to me on Sunday at - Oscar, George has invitations. He has parties. He has a life now. And - and he asked. He asked casually. He said, Logan, are you and Oscar going to dinner this week. He deduced it, Oscar, like he deduces everything."

"Logan."

"What."

"I cannot bear you."

"You can bear me a little, Oscar."

He could, in fact, bear him. He could bear him quite a lot.

After dinner, they walked. Logan paid for the meal - Oscar protested, lost - and they walked from the restaurant down toward the water. It was a long walk. They walked for the better part of an hour, with no particular destination, just south down Coral Way and east toward the bay, talking. The sky went from peach to violet to the deep blue of late evening. The cicadas started. The streetlamps came on.

They were holding hands by the time they reached Brickell. Oscar did not, in retrospect, remember the precise instant they had started holding hands. Logan's hand was simply, at some point, in his, and it was warm, and it stayed there.

"Oscar."

"Yeah."

"Is this - is this okay."

"Yes."

"Like - all of this. The - the getting dinner. The - the walking. The-"

"Yes, Logan."

"Yeah?"

"Yes."

"Okay."

"Are you okay."

"Oscar, I am - I am more than okay. I am - I do not have words."

"That is a first."

"Yes, that is a first, Oscar, please do not-"

"Logan."

"Yes."

"It's okay."

"Yes."

"It's okay."

"Yes."

They walked all the way to the marina. The boats were dark against the water. Far across the bay, the lights of Key Biscayne were small and yellow. There was a long pier extending out over the water, and they walked to the end of it, and they stood there, and they looked out at the water.

"I never come down here," Oscar said.

"No?"

"I always think I'll come down here, and I never do. I never come to the water."

"You live in Miami, Oscar."

"I know."

"You live four miles from the ocean."

"I know."

"And you never come to the water."

"I know."

"Oscar."

"What."

"I am going to fix this."

"Logan."

"I am going to take you to the water every weekend for the rest of your time at this school."

"Logan."

"Saturday."

"Logan."

"Saturday. Saturday morning. Crandon Park. I will pick you up at eight."

"Logan, you do not have a car."

"I will borrow a car. I will borrow Lewis's car. Lewis loves love, Lewis will give me his car."

"Logan."

"Saturday, Oscar. Saturday."

Oscar looked at him. Logan was leaning on the railing of the pier, his face turned toward Oscar, his expression - Oscar had never seen this expression on a person before, not directed at himself. It was a deeply unfortunate expression. It was the expression of a person who had decided something and was waiting to be told whether the thing he had decided was allowed.

"Saturday," Oscar said.

"Yeah?"

"Saturday."

"Saturday."

"At eight."

"At eight."

He leaned over. He kissed Oscar again. It was - it was not, this time, the careful, drunk, terrified kiss of the swing. It was - it was a real kiss, an unrushed, considered kiss, the kiss of two people who had agreed to do this and now had time. Oscar's free hand came up and rested at the side of Logan's neck. Logan's free hand went to Oscar's hip. They stood at the end of a pier in Miami in late October, at eight o'clock at night, and they kissed, and the wind off the water was cool, and the boats clanked softly in the marina, and somewhere a long way off a horn sounded on a ship coming into port.

When Logan pulled back, he rested his forehead against Oscar's.

"Saturday," he said again.

"Saturday."

"Crandon Park."

"Crandon Park."

"I am going to bring snacks, Oscar."

"Logan."

"I am going to pack a picnic."

"Logan."

"I am going to be so unbearable, Oscar-"

"You already are."

"You love it."

"Logan."

"You love it, Oscar."

"Goodnight, Logan."

"Goodnight, Oscar."

He walked Oscar to the bus stop. He waited for the bus with him. When the bus came, he kissed him one more time - a quick one, a goodnight one - and then he stepped back, and he watched Oscar get on the bus, and Oscar, from the window, watched him stand there on the corner with his hands in his pockets and his shirt slightly wrinkled and his hair starting, after a long day, to fall back into its usual mess, and Oscar felt, again, that terrible thing he had been feeling for two months, the terrible thing that he was finally allowed to feel.

He was in love. He was in love. He was in love.

The bus pulled away. Logan, on the corner, raised a hand.

Oscar raised one back.

※   ※   ※

Saturday morning was the kind of Miami morning the brochures sold. The sky was a high, hard blue. The water at Crandon Park was the impossible greenish turquoise it only ever was in the early hours before the boats and the wind had stirred it up. The sand was cool - it was nine in the morning when they arrived; the heat had not yet started its real work - and the parking lot was nearly empty. Logan had, as promised, borrowed Lewis's car, a battered but lovingly maintained Volvo from 2006 with a Sunshine State sticker peeling off the bumper. He had also, as promised, packed a picnic.

The picnic was - Oscar registered, as Logan unpacked it on a blanket they had spread between two palms - ridiculous. There were sandwiches. There was a thermos of coffee. There was a bag of grapes. There was a small Tupperware of what appeared to be cubed mango. There was an entire pineapple, unsliced, which Logan had brought, he said, "in case we needed it."

"Logan."

"Yes."

"Why did we need a whole pineapple."

"Because, Oscar, I went to the grocery store yesterday and I saw a pineapple and I thought, Oscar would enjoy a pineapple, and I - and I bought a pineapple, Oscar, I do not regret this-"

"How are you going to cut it."

"… that is a fair question."

"Logan."

"I will figure it out, Oscar, this is the journey of life-"

"You did not bring a knife."

"I - Oscar."

"You did not bring a knife, Logan."

"I am aware, Oscar."

They did not cut the pineapple. The pineapple sat, with great dignity, on the corner of the blanket for the entire morning, watching the proceedings.

They ate the sandwiches. They drank the coffee. They went into the water. The water at Crandon was warm at the surface and cooler underneath, and Oscar - who had not, in fact, swum in the Atlantic Ocean since high school, for reasons he could not explain - stood in it up to his waist and looked out at the horizon, and the horizon was, he registered, very, very flat. There were no boats. There were no islands. There was just the line where the water met the sky, and that line went on forever.

Logan came up behind him and put his arms around his waist.

"You good?"

"I'm good."

"You're quiet."

"I'm always quiet."

"You're quieter than usual."

"I am - Logan. I am thinking."

"What about."

"I am thinking that I live in Miami. I am thinking that I forget I live in Miami. I am thinking that I have spent two years in this city and I have spent most of those two years in a windowless basement."

"Oscar."

"What."

"That is - that is a sad thing, Oscar."

"I am aware."

"That is - that is-"

"Logan."

"What."

"It's okay."

"It's not okay, Oscar-"

"It is now, Logan."

He turned around in Logan's arms. Logan, in the water, with his hair wet and his eyelashes stuck together and the sun behind him, was - was - Oscar had run out of ways to describe what Logan was. He was a person. He was a stupid, persistent, generous, unbearable person who had skateboarded into Oscar's life two months ago and refused, against every standard signal Oscar had sent, to leave.

Oscar kissed him.

In the water. In the morning sun. In the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Crandon Park. With the horizon flat and forever and the sand cool and Logan's arms around him and the entire pineapple, waiting, on the blanket.

He kissed him.

They went back to the blanket. They lay on it. Logan, on his back, with his arm under Oscar's head, was telling Oscar about a sailing trip he had taken in eighth grade, in which his crew had had to ride out a small but dramatic squall, and in which his grandfather had - and Logan was, again, talking about his grandfather, and Oscar had stopped, at this point, even gently pointing it out - said something he had not understood until last year. Oscar listened. The cicadas, somewhere, started up. The sun climbed. Somewhere down the beach, a child was crying about a shovel.

"Oscar."

"Yeah."

"I don't have to tell you this."

"Mm."

"But I'm going to tell you this."

"Mm."

"I'm - I'm really happy."

"Mm."

"That's - that's all I'm going to say. I just - I'm really happy. I have been - for the past two months, I have been waiting to be this happy, and I-"

"Logan."

"Yeah."

"Me too."

A pause.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Oscar."

"Yes."

"Yeah?"

"Yes, Logan."

"Okay."

"Okay."

"Okay."

The pineapple, on the corner of the blanket, said nothing. The sun climbed higher. The Atlantic continued its slow, eternal work against the sand. Somewhere up the beach, Lando - who had, that morning, called Oscar at 7:30 a.m. to ask what he was wearing, and to whom Oscar had, very calmly, hung up - was, with Daniel, also at the beach, on a different blanket, looking up the coast in the direction of Crandon Park and pretending he was not.

Oscar, his head on Logan's arm, closed his eyes.

"Logan."

"Yeah."

"Tutoring on Tuesday."

"Tutoring on Tuesday."

"At four."

"At four."

"You will be there."

"Oscar. Oscar. I would sooner-"

"Logan."

"I'll be there."

"Coffee."

"Coffee."

"With the appropriate amount of cream."

"With the appropriate amount of cream."

"Logan."

"Yes."

"Don't be distracting."

"Oscar."

"Logan."

"I am going to be so distracting, Oscar."

He laughed. He laughed in a way he could not remember laughing before - open, unguarded, with his eyes closed and his head on a stupid blond frat boy's arm on a blanket on a beach. Logan, next to him, laughed too, and they laughed for some time, in the Florida sun, in the Florida morning, with their feet in the sand and a whole pineapple keeping watch.

They were going to be all right.

They were going to be - and Oscar would have refused, two months ago, to allow himself the thought, would have catalogued it as sentimental and unhelpful - they were going to be very all right.

The sun climbed higher.

The cicadas sang.

Somewhere behind them, on the boardwalk, a kid on a skateboard rolled past, slow and careful, with all the time in the world.

※   ※   ※

The semester ended. Logan got a B+ on the final and a B+ in the class - the best grade he had received in any quantitative course since high school. He brought the report card, on the day grades were posted, to Oscar's dorm, knocked on the door, and held it up wordlessly when Oscar opened it. Oscar, who had been studying for his own finals and was wearing a hoodie three sizes too big and had not slept, looked at the report card, looked at Logan, and stepped aside to let him in.

"B-plus," Logan said.

"B-plus."

"Oscar."

"Logan."

"I am going to cry."

"Don't cry."

"I might cry, Oscar-"

"Logan-"

"I am going to kiss you."

"Yes, please do that instead."

Lando, on his bed, watching the exchange, made a small dignified sound and pulled his blanket up over his head.

They went home for the break. Oscar flew to Melbourne. Logan went to Boca Raton. They texted constantly. They FaceTimed. Logan, on FaceTime, met Oscar's family; Oscar's older sister Hattie said oh, he's lovely in the kind of tone that Oscar's older sister Hattie used only for things she had fully decided about, and Oscar's mother said, you should bring him to Melbourne next summer, Oscar, and Oscar said, Mum, please, and his mother said, I am only saying, and Logan, on the other end of the FaceTime, was bright red and grinning and absolutely incapable of speech.

Andrea Sargeant invited Oscar to Argentina, where the Sargeants were spending Christmas. Oscar, who had a return ticket to Melbourne, did not go. Andrea sent him a Christmas card. The Christmas card contained, in addition to a long handwritten message, a photograph of Logan as a child, age approximately seven, on a sailboat in a life vest, beaming at the camera with the chip in his front tooth that Oscar had noticed the first day. Oscar kept the photograph in the drawer of his desk. He did not tell Logan.

They came back in January. The spring semester started. Logan, this time, signed up for tutoring without being told to. He was taking another quantitative methods course - a slightly more advanced one - and he had decided, he said, that he was simply going to be good at this now. They met every Tuesday. Logan brought coffee. Oscar pretended, every week, that he did not know Logan was going to bring coffee.

On a Thursday in early December - a year, almost, after the iced coffee outside the engineering building - Oscar would be walking across the same quad where Logan had skateboarded into him. He would be on his way to a tutoring session, late, his hair a mess, an iced coffee in one hand. He would not be paying attention. He would, in fact, be looking at his phone, because Lando - now visibly, undeniably, in a relationship with Daniel that had survived a long-distance summer and was, by all accounts, thriving - had just sent him a meme.

A skateboard would come down the path.

Oscar would not see it.

The skateboarder - and this part Oscar would not be able to invent if he tried - would stop, with a practiced kick of his back foot, three feet away.

"Oscar."

"Logan."

"Watch where you're walking."

"You watch where you're skating."

"I was."

"Mm."

"Are you going to tutoring."

"Yes."

"Cool. Cool, cool, cool." Logan would tuck his board under his arm. He would fall in step beside Oscar. He would, with the lazy familiarity of a person who had been doing this for a year, take Oscar's iced coffee out of his hand and have a sip of it without asking.

"That's my coffee, Logan."

"It's our coffee, Oscar."

"It is not our coffee."

"Oscar. Oscar. We have been together for thirteen months."

"Get your own coffee."

"I will get my own coffee. After."

"After what."

"After I walk you to tutoring."

"Logan. You do not need to walk me to tutoring."

"I am aware I do not need to, Oscar."

He would slip his free hand into Oscar's. Oscar's hand, against every protest he had ever made, would close around his. They would walk like that across the quad in the slanting late afternoon light, an iced coffee being passed back and forth between them, while somewhere far away on the boardwalk a kid on a skateboard rolled slow and careful with all the time in the world.

The cicadas would be singing.

The sun would be going down.

Florida would, as it always did, be doing its long, slow, generous work - pressing the air, warming the sand, holding everything in suspension for one more afternoon.

And Oscar - Oscar, who had not, two years ago, believed it possible to feel about a person the way he had come to feel about this person - would think, with a small, private, helpless smile:

Yes.

This.

This is the thing.

This was the thing I was waiting for.