The next morning it was time to pick a new set of classes, which meant Yuri had already been in the program for a full week and counting. In some ways, she couldn’t believe that it had been that long, but by and large, she felt like it had been much, much longer.

Yuri planned to wait for Jessica and Kris at the administration building to see if there were any classes they wanted to take together, but when she got there, she saw that Jessica was already moving from the table in the art department area. She gave her a quick wave and then kept going. Yuri felt a pang of rejection, but pushed it down.

“So I might have been out of line last night.”

It was Kris. He grabbed Yuri and pulled her over to the Theoretical Mathematics table.

“Might have been?” Yuri asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I know you’re on her side,” Kris began, “but I swear I’m looking out for both of us. Between you and me, I’ve seen girls like Jess go through this kind of identity meltdown thing before. This whole story about her ‘aunt’ will blow over, you’ll see.”

“That doesn’t exactly sound like an apology,” said Yuri. Anyway, what did Kris even mean, “girls like Jess”?

“Fair enough.” Kris inched forward toward the professor’s table, where the sign-up sheet waited. “Listen, Jess’s great, I love her and everything, and shame on me if this thing with her aunt is for real. I just can’t get wrapped up in a bunch of drama right now. I’m here for math, not la la crazy ghost hunting. I could’ve handled it better, though, that’s for sure. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is I’m sorry I was jerk last night. (Jerk? More of a d*ck thought Yuri) And about the hydra thing: it’s probably like you said, just Baekhyun being an .”

“No harm done,” Yuri replied with a shrug.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“All right, then.” They’d made their way to the front of the line, and Kris signed his name on the clipboard in the tiny scrawl of a true mathematician.

“I’m going to head over and sign up for the Twentieth-Century German Lit,” Yuri said.

Kris stuck his finger in his mouth and made a noise like he was choking, then smiled and went off in the opposite direction.

It wasn’t until the end of the morning, after waiting in one course line after another, that Yuri acknowledged the sad truth: the three of them hadn’t chosen a single class together. Yuri waded among all the students hanging around outside, and she finally found Jessica finishing up a conversation with some people she didn’t know. She waited off to the side until she noticed her, and then with a wave to her other friends, she came up and immediately started talking about all the new classes she was excited to take. Advanced Portraiture, Impressionism, Graphic Novel Illustration. Kris eventually found them, and his list of classes proved similarly alienating—Multivariable Calculus, Real and Complex Analysis . . . Yuri could solve for zero, but this went far beyond a fundamental grasp of numbers. She gazed down her own schedule—history, literature, more history. . . .  none of it matched up.

As they were talking, Yuri noticed that as friendly as their conversation might sound to an outside listener, Jessica ever once looked at Kris, ad Kris kept directing his jokes at Yuri. It was hard to deny now: in the space of a few days—a few hours, really--their whole easygoing dynamic had changed. Is this what it always felt like? Getting close to people?

The new class schedule meant a new routine, so Yuri went from building to building, map in pocket, relearning her daily pattern. She hardly saw Kris or Jessica. They didn’t even share a common lunch hour anymore. True, they still met for dinner every night, but the conversation was now full of inside jokes from their different classes and stories for which the other two “just had to be there.” Kris had said he’d apologized to Jess, and the fact that they could still sit at the same table seemed evidence of that. But she seemed distant, and pointedly avoided any mention of her aunt. Yuri wondered if she still planned to go to the warden’s office. She personally had no desire to go there ever again.

On Friday night, Yuri arrived in the dining hall to find Kris waiting at their usual spot. Three legal pads sat on the table next to his food tray, each one covered in his messy scribbling.

As Yuri moved closer, she saw the scribbles were numbers and equations—the kind of equations that had enough letters to look like sentences. Kris didn’t seem to notice Yuri’s approach but stayed bent over one of the pads, his hand moving at lightning speed across the page.

“Homework?” Yuri asked, taking the seat across from Kris.

She couldn’t remember ever seeing Kris working outside class, let alone on a Friday night.

“You could say that,” Kris scratched the back of his right temple with the dry end of a pen. “One of my teachers mentioned this problem that’s supposed to be unsolvable. So I’m working on either the proof or the solution, whichever comes first. Call it a pet project.”

“Or OCD.” Yuri meant it as a joke, but Kris’s head flew up, his unruly mop of hair springing out in all directions.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” Yuri said quickly.

Kris bent over his paper again.

Then, with a dinner in full swing and Kris favoring numbers over Yuri’s company, Jessica arrived. She hit the salad bar and grabbed a glass of orange juice, but instead of joining them, she took a detour to a nearby table where the art kids congregated. Yuri thought of them as the art kids because they chain-smoked, dressed like Broadway extras, and wore ironic grandma glasses even though maybe one in five of them actually had bad eyesight.

Kris had apparently noticed, too, despite being nose deep in math. “They think they’re it,” he said.

“I didn’t know she hung out with them.” Yuri cringed. She sounded and felt so stupidly high school. Us versus Them. Outcast versus In Crowd.

“Hi,” Jessica said when at last she came over. She sat down, placing a sketchbook on the seat next to her. “I was just showing Donghae and Patches some of my new work.”

“Patches?” Kris said, looking up.

“Yes Patches. Is there a problem with that?”

Mayday, Mayday.

“Nope.” Kris sorted, low enough to sound like a cough. He brought his attention back to the legal pads. “No problem at all.”

Jessica shifted her chair, sitting with