How ‘Sex Lives of College Girls’ handled Reneé Rapp’s exit

Warning: This post contains spoilers from The Sex Lives of College Girls season 3, episode 2, “Lila by Lila.”

Leighton has officially said goodbye to Essex College.

Going into the third season of The Sex Lives of College Girls, fans knew that Reneé Rapp’s character would be exiting at some point, but how exactly the show would handle it was unclear… until now.

In the second episode, Leighton makes the difficult choice to transfer to MIT. Since arriving at Essex in season 1, she’s learned a lot about who she is and who she wants to be, and it turns out, she’s really freaking good at math. And as she tells Bela (Amrit Kaur), Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet), and Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott), “MIT has a math program that Essex just can’t match.”

Yes, her girlfriend, Alicia (Midori Francis), is in Boston, so that makes things easier, but she assures her besties that Alicia is not why she’s made this decision. “I don’t wanna go,” she tells her friends. “I can’t imagine not having you guys with me. It is terrifying. But I think this is what I have to do if I care about my future.”

They all support her — and assure her that she will never lose them as friends — and then they decide to spend one last night out partying together, complete with a pregame in their old dorm suite (even though they have to kick out the current inhabitants).

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The next morning, a somewhat-packed Leighton hits the road with her dad. She’s off to rock more challenging math classes and set herself up for a career in finance. But she will be missed.

New episodes of The Sex Lives of College Girls drop Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT, on Max.