From the critically acclaimed author of Oliver Loving and The Story of Forgetting is a short story about friendship, loss and growing up. ______________________ Life lesson: the most soothing salve available to the man who has recently torched his own face is a regular application of wickedness with a pretty girl. The choices we make can follow us, and when half of your face is torched you can't escape the past. As a freshman in college he meets friends and attends parties, red cup in tow. His face is a Rorschach test to his friends, though he'll never tell them what really happened. In his group of friends there is Ava- sardonic, infatuating and alarmingly beautiful Ava. But he's too burnt up to be considered as anything more than a 'bestie' to a girl like her...