By the next afternoon, my thoughts about Peter were stuck in an obsessive loop: wondering where he was, who he was with and what he was thinking and feeling. Annika was at the kitchen sink, rinsing out a long line of jars she was planning to use for jam. I grabbed another overripe strawberry from a gigantic pile on the table and sliced off its top.
“How’s it going over there?” she asked.
“Fine.” Like everything Annika wanted my help with, making jam was boring and took forever. Now that I knew she didn’t really want to be friends with me, I was feeling more annoyed each time we hung out, although I was careful to never lose my temper. I didn’t want to end up like the girl who had been at the squat before me, the one whose bed I was sleeping in, and who had apparently “not fit in.”
“A
