“My Jeremy is coming to visit this weekend,” Maddy whispered to me one night while we were out for a friend’s birthday.

“Your what?” I asked. I thought I had misheard her.

“My Jeremy,” she repeated. “I’ve told you about him. His name’s Will. We grew up together in Washington. He’s visiting from school. My Jeremy.”

And just like that, a name — one I referred to often — became an archetype, a trope, an all-purpose noun used by my college friends to talk about “that guy,” the one who remains for us in some netherworld between friend and boyfriend, often for years.

I met mine, the original Jeremy, at summer camp in the Poconos at 14, playing pickup basketball by day and talking in the mess hall late into the night. Back home we lived only 30 minutes apart, but I didn’t see him again until 11th grade, when we ran into each other at a Halloween party in a Lower Manhattan warehouse.