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“You fainted,” I tell her. “This happens to a lot of people, don’t worry. Drink this.” I hand her the water someone’s already passing down the bench, because pre-meds are nothing if not efficient in a crisis. She drinks.

“Hey.” I catch her attention. “It’s fine. This happens to surgeons in their first year. The ones who stay learn the trick.”

She swallows. “I need some air.”

“Want me to come with?”

“No, no. It’s fine.” She’s flustered. She packs up her things and leaves in a hurry.

She’s left her pencil case behind. It’s got cartoon body parts on. I pick it up for her.

* * *

“Okay,” Gianna says, spreading her notebook across the table like she’s about to present a business case, “the issue is the cake.”

CC’s is its usual afternoon chaos—every table full, the espresso machine going constantly, someone’s lecture notes blowing off the table by the door every time it opens. We’ve claimed the window table, Gianna has an oat latte, and I have a black coffee and a croissant, because the line was long and I have a policy about suffering through a long line without caloric reward.

“The cake isn’t an issue,” I say. “The cake is the easy part. Throw some candles on there, boom.”

“The cake is not the easy part, Bea, because Sydney wants it to be pink but also lemon flavored and also three tiers⁠—”

“Who does she think she is?”

“—and also shaped like a freakin unicorn or something.”

I look up from my coffee. “She said that?”

“She said, and I’m quoting directly, something iconic.”

“A unicorn isn’t—” I stop. “Actually, for Sydney, a unicorn is exactly iconic.” I pull the notebook toward me. “Okay. Three-tier lemon sponge, pink icing, iconic shape. We can do that.”

Gianna takes the notebook back. She has been coordinating this since Sydney sat us both down three weeks ago, held our hands, and with great solemnity asked us to throw her a surprise party—for herself, that she was aware of, with a guest list she’d provided and detailed instructions on what she wanted there.

Gianna had pointed out that this was not technically how surprise parties worked. Sydney had said she knew, but she wanted the feeling of a surprise party, and she trusted us to make it magic. So what we are throwing, technically, is a scheduled ambush that the victim planned, catered, and RSVP’d to.

That is how I ended up with a list of sixty-three names, a Pinterest board titled Sydney’s Birthday, and a notebook full of Gianna’s handwriting dividing the labor into sections.

“Did you text Ashley to see if she wanted to help?” I ask.

Gianna picks up her phone. “Doing it now.”

She types. We both look at the screen. The reply comes back in under thirty seconds.

Ashley

no

I’ll come though if there is alcohol

We look at each other.

“That’s actually progress,” I say.

“That’s genuinely the most engaged she’s been with any house event since September.” Gianna puts a hand on her heart.

The thing about Ashley is that nobody quite knows what to do with her. When the four of us landed in the Hive House in September—the Spencer’s outreach program, cheaper rent in exchange for not trashing the place and being a female enrolled in a STEM major—Gianna, Sydney, and I had realized we got on within about forty-eight hours and fallen into the easy rhythm of people who happen to want the same things from a shared living situation. We were all happy to be good friends, but not too much in each other’s business. Ashley had been polite and pleasant on moving day. She had then retreated into her room.

We’d tried. Knocked on her door for movie nights, saved her a spot at the table, included her in the house group chat with diminishing returns. She wasn’t always unfriendly. Like she was on a slightly different frequency to the rest of us and nobody had found the tuner yet.