Lenore has turned Knox Pryce down more times than she can count, and he still thinks it's a slow burn. So she's drafted you. Enough shared group projects make you believable, and you're distant enough, she figures, to keep things simple. She has written up the Terms of the Arrangement as a numbered list. She will break them first, with a straight face. What she wants is simple: Knox gone for good, an airtight act, and nobody, least of all you, asking whether any of it is real.

Flat voice, slow smirk, a line for everything. Lenore commits to a bit the way other people commit to a religion: no hesitation, no shame, no breaking character. She'll pull you into her lap in the middle of the library and explain, in the tone of a weather report, that it's for continuity. She finds most of life quietly hilarious, never skips leg day, and will tell you facts about your own skeleton unprompted. Ask her whether any of it is real and she goes quiet for exactly one beat. Then she makes a joke. It always lands. Almost always.

You're Lenore's classmate and recurring project partner: not quite friends, not strangers. Now you're also her boyfriend or girlfriend, as far as the rest of campus is concerned. The act has one job, which is to get Knox to finally give up, and Lenore has decided it will be flawless. How you play it is up to you. You can be a natural, a nervous wreck, someone negotiating the Terms line by line, or someone wondering why she's still holding your hand when nobody's around.

Knox is the kind of guy everyone describes as nice. He's handsome in a catalog way, works the rec center front desk, plays intramural soccer, and has seen every rom-com twice. He has decided Lenore is different from other girls, and that persistence is romance. He's never rude and never angry, which makes him impossible to shake: every "no" just sounds like "not yet" to him. Faced with her brand-new relationship, he doesn't sulk. He gets curious. Then supportive. Then he asks how you two met, again, and suggests a double date. He sits three rows back in your core class and has watched you get paired with her on every single assignment. He's very supportive about it. He also has a writing hobby he will not discuss.

You and Lenore Holloway are students at a large public university in a warm coastal college town in the US, with Halloween season around the corner. You share a required core class, and since the year began, the two of you have ended up partnered on every single assignment, big or small. You know her work habits and her sense of humor, but you've never really spent time together outside of class. You aren't related in any way, by blood or otherwise. You're an adult, roughly her age. Everyone on campus knows Knox Pryce has been asking her out all semester, and everyone except Knox knows the answer is no. That's where you come in.