“Shari,” I say, “I can’t do that. I can’t just leave.”

“Like fuck you can’t,” Shari says. I hear another voice in the background. Then Shari is saying to someone else, “It’s Lizzie. That fucker Andrew works all day and all night and is fucking making her stay at his parents’ and eat tomatoes. And he said she was fat.”

“Shari,” I say, feeling a twinge of guilt, “I don’t know that he said that. And he’s not-who are you telling this to, anyway?”

“Chaz says get your far-from-fat ass on a train in the morning. He will personally pick you up at the train station tomorrow night.”

“I can’t go to France,” I say, horrified. “My return ticket home is from Heathrow. It’s nonreturnable and nontransferable and non-everything.”

“So? You can go back to England at the end of the month and fly home from there. Come on, Lizzie. We’ll have SO MUCH fun.”

“Shari, I can’t go to France,” I say miserably. “I don’t want to go to France. I love Andrew. You don’t understand. That night outside McCracken Hall…it was magical, Shar. He saw into my soul, and I saw into his.”

“How could you?” Shari demands. “It was dark.”

“No it wasn’t. We had the glow of the flames from that girl’s room to see by.”

“Well, then maybe you just saw what you wanted to see. Or maybe you just felt what you wanted to feel.”

She’s talking, I know, about Andrew’s stiffy. I stare blindly down at the water splashing into the tub.

The thing is, I am generally a very happy person. I even laughed after Alistair said that thing at the table, about me being a fatty. Because what else are you supposed to do when you find out your boyfriend’s been going around telling people you’re fat?

Especially since the last time Andrew saw me, I had been fat. Or at least thirty pounds heavier than I am now.

I had to laugh, because I didn’t want the Marshalls to think I’m some kind of oversensitive freak.

I think I succeeded, too, because all Mrs. Marshall did was shoot her son an outraged look…Then, since I guess I didn’t appear to be offended, she seemed to forget about it. So did everyone else.

And Alistair turned out to be quite nice, offering to let me use his computer in order to start my thesis, which I then worked on for the rest of the day, until breaking for a “curry supper” from the “takeaway” shop on the corner with the two elder Marshalls, the boys having gone out. We ate while watching a British mystery show, during which I only understood approximately one word out of every seven, due to the actors’ accents.

The thing is, I was determined not to let the fat thing get me down. Because despite what my sisters might think-and they were always more than happy to let their feelings on the matter be known to me, growing up-weight doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. I mean, it does if you’re a model or whatever.

But in general being a few pounds overweight hasn’t ever kept me from doing what I wanted to. Sure, there were all those times I was the last one picked for volleyball in gym class.

And the occasional mortification of having to appear in front of a guy I had a crush on in a bathing suit at the lake or whatever.

And then there were the dumb frat guys who wouldn’t look twice at me because I was heavier than the kind of girls they preferred.

But who wants to hang around frat guys? I want to be with guys who have more on their minds than where the next keg party is. I want to be with guys who care about making this world a better place-the way Andrew does. I want to be with guys who know that what’s important isn’t the size of a girl’s waistband but the size of her heart-like Andrew. I want to be with guys who are able to see past a girl’s outward appearance, and into her soul-like Andrew.

It’s just that…well, based on Alistair’s remark, it seems like maybe Andrew didn’t see into my soul that night outside McCracken Hall.

The tomato thing, too. I TOLD Andrew-or wrote to him, actually-that I hate tomatoes. I told him it’s the one single food I totally can’t stand. I even went on, at great length, about how horrible it was, growing up in a household that was half Italian, hating tomatoes. Mom was always brewing up huge batches of tomato sauce to use in her pastas and lasagnas. She had a huge tomato garden in the backyard that I was in charge of weeding, since I wouldn’t touch the ugly red things and so was no help in the picking or cleaning department.

I told Andrew all this, not just in my reply to his question about what foods I liked, but that night we spent together as well, three months ago, me in my towel and him in his Aerosmith T-shirt-it must have been laundry day-and R.A. badge, under the stars and smoke.

And he didn’t listen. He hadn’t paid a bit of attention to a word I’d said.

But he had managed to let his family know I was a-what was it again? Oh yes-“fatty.”

Is it possible I’ve made a mistake? Is it possible-as Shari once suggested-that the reason I love Andrew is not because of who he actually is, but because I’ve projected onto him the personality I want him to have?

Could she be right that I’ve stubbornly refused all along to see him for what he really is, because making out with him had been so much fun (and I’d been so flattered by his full stiffy) I don’t want to admit my attraction to him is merely physical?

I hadn’t spoken to Shari for nearly two hours after she said this, it had made me so mad, and she’d finally apologized.

But what if she’s right? Because the Andrew I knew-or felt like I knew-wouldn’t have told his brother I’m fat. The Andrew I know wouldn’t even have noticed I was fat.

“Lizzie?” Shari’s voice crackles over the phone I’m pressing to my cheek. “Did you die?”

“No, I’m here,” I say. I can still hear rock music booming in the background. Shari, it’s clear, isn’t a bit jet-lagged. Shari’s boyfriend isn’t at work. Or, rather, he is. But they’re working together. “I just…Look, I gotta go. I’ll call you later.”

“Wait,” Shari says. “Does this mean you’ll be coming to New York with me in the fall after all?”

I hang up. It’s not that I’m mad at her, exactly. I’m just…

So tired.

I don’t even remember bathing or changing into my pajamas and dragging myself into bed. All I know is, it seems like it’s about a million o’clock when Andrew gently shakes me awake. But it’s really only midnight-at least according to the watchface he shows me when I groggily ask what time it is.

I never realized he wears a glow-in-the-dark digital watch. That’s kind of…not sexy.

But maybe he needs it. For telling time when he’s slaving away in that dark, candlelit restaurant…

“Sorry to wake you,” he says. He is standing beside my loft bed, which is just high enough off the ground that he doesn’t even have to stoop to whisper to me. “But I wanted to make sure you were all right. You don’t need anything?”

I squint at him in the semidarkness. The only light is the moonlight that streams through the laundry room’s single narrow window. Andrew, I can see, is wearing black jeans and a white shirt-a waiter’s uniform.

I don’t know what makes me do it. Maybe because I’ve been so lonely and depressed all evening. Maybe because I’m still half asleep.

Or maybe because I truly do love him. But the next thing I know, I’m sitting up and, my fingers entwined in his shirtfront, I’m whispering, “Oh, Andrew, everything’s so awful! Your brother Alistair-he said something today about your having said I was a fatty. That’s not true, is it?”

“What?” Andrew is laughing into my hair as he nuzzles my neck. He is quite a neck nuzzler, I’m finding out. “What are you talking about?”

“Your brother, Alistair. He acted all shocked when he met me, because he said you’d told him I was fat.”

Andrew stops nuzzling my neck and peers down at me in the moonlight.

“Wait,” he says. “He said that? Are you taking the mickey?”

“I don’t know anything about Mickey,” I say. “But, yes, he really did say he’d been expecting me to be fat. ‘A fatty’ were his exact words.”

I realize, a little belatedly, that Andrew might possibly become a little ticked off with his brother for having said this-especially if it’s not true. Which it can’t be. Right? Andrew would never say something like that…

“Oh, Andrew, I’m sorry,” I say, wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing him tenderly. “I can’t believe I even brought it up. Forget I said anything. Alistair was obviously pulling my leg. And I fell for it. Let’s just forget the whole thing, all right?”

But Andrew doesn’t seem willing to forget it. His arms tighten around me, and he uses some very choice adjectives to describe his brother, which he whispers against my lips. Then he says, “I think you look fucking fantastic. I always have. Sure, when we first met, you were a bit plumper than you are now. When I first saw you coming out of Customs at the airport in that little Chinese dress, I didn’t even recognize you. I couldn’t stop staring. I kept wondering who the lucky bloke was who was meeting such a hot little number.”

I can only blink at him. Somehow his words are not as encouraging as I think he means them to be.

Maybe it’s because of his seeming inability to pronounce his th’s as anything but f’s, so his thinks come out as finks.

“Then, when I got the page, and I came over and saw you were-well, you-I realized I was the lucky bloke,” Andrew goes on. “I’m sorry everything has been such a cock-up so far-my mate’s flat falling through, and your not having a proper bed, and my arse-hole of a brother, and my fucking work schedule. But you have to know”-here he snakes an arm around my waist-“I’m over the moon that you’re finally here.” This is where he leans down and kisses my neck some more.