The story was all over Dalton the next day. Robin and Jonas weren’t talking about it, but April had probably mentioned it to a few people. It bolstered the already considerable perception that April’s parents were the coolest parents on earth. And Robin’s misfortune, as misfortune will do, lent her an aura of respect, even a sort of celebrity.

But eventually Robin did go back home. Either the situation cooled down there or she agreed to pretend it had. That was the thing about families: once they decided to close ranks, for whatever reason, you really had no way of knowing anymore. In school she was just like always, laughing and way into sports and usually surrounded by guys-a little needy for April’s taste, maybe, but nothing that seemed like a red flag. If it was an act, she was fooling herself with it at least as effectively as she was fooling anybody else. The only one who really had trouble getting over the whole thing, April recognized, was her mother. Robin had all but stopped returning Cynthia’s texts, and when she did her tone was disappointingly chirpy and distant. It wasn’t just that Cynthia didn’t believe everything was now all right; she didn’t seem to want to believe it. More than once April came home from school and found her mother sitting at the dining room table with a cup of coffee, crying.

April was proud that her home had such a rep as a stable place that it would actually occur to her friends to go there if they were in trouble. There was always somebody staying over at the apartment, not necessarily because they needed a place but just for the hell of it. Other kids’ mothers would try to gain their trust by acting young, like they understood everything, and it was just pathetic. But April could tell that her friends really did consider her mother to be one of them-older, but just enough for her superior knowledge to seem attractive, like an RA in college. They confessed to her, they asked her advice, they shopped with her (though part of that was surely mercenary, since any time Cynthia thought something looked cute on them she would buy it). They would even talk about guys with her, which should have seemed creepy and out of bounds and yet somehow it did not. The fact that all the other Dalton mothers hated and mocked her only bolstered Cynthia’s cred.

April’s own circle had contracted a bit after eighth grade when a dozen or so kids went off to boarding school. Just like that they were gone from your social life, though occasionally in between classes some kid would immodestly flash a text or a camera-phone photo from a departed peer. The move didn’t always work out for them; there was always some story circulating about someone who had gotten himself expelled from one of these places and been forced to return home, not to Dalton but to the kind of second-tier private school that still had openings mid year. Still, an air of sophistication attached itself even to those of them who failed. April had no desire to go live in a regimented compound in some picturesque New England village where there was nothing to do at night and you weren’t allowed out anyway, but she felt a touch of envy all the same. They were her age but, just by virtue of leaving, they seemed older.

Of course they did come back in relative triumph for a few days at Thanksgiving and then for longer at Christmas. Their homecoming for any vacation was pretext enough for a series of parties. On one of the first really warm nights of the spring, April went to one at a townhouse in the East Fifties, thrown by some girl they didn’t even know-she’d been at Spence and was now home from St. Paul’s-but dotted with enough Dalton kids to make her presence there plausible. She even ran into Robin on the street outside. The townhouse itself was phenomenal, a real old-money museum, and its trashing had a terrible inevitability. It was like the reign of Pol Pot, when legions of ten-year-olds were handed carbines and put in charge of national security. On the first floor was the kitchen and living room, speakers hidden somewhere in the walls blasting Jay-Z, every surface already sticky to the touch. April saw a Matisse on the wall, one of those paintings where figures danced in a circle, and she almost asked someone if it was real but then realized what a stupid question that was. It was hot inside, even with all the windows thrown wide open, and bodies were everywhere. A girl named Julie from April’s Spanish class was lying on her back on top of the piano. She opened her mouth, and a guy in a hockey jersey poured streams of lime juice and vodka from two bottles he held up about a foot above her head. He put the bottles down, placed his hands on either side of Julie’s head, and shook it. When he was done, Julie sat up and opened her mouth to show she’d swallowed it all. She bowed in triumph, but no one was looking.

April thought she’d just stick to beer for now. Robin was scanning the crowd for some guy named Calvin who was probably home from Andover and whom she’d hooked up with one night over Thanksgiving break. She staked out a spot halfway up the front-hall steps and said she’d promise to wait there if April would bring her a beer. April asked some strange girl where the keg was (you never asked a strange guy a question like that unless you were hitting on him, because that’s how he’d interpret it anyway) and found it in the bathtub off the maid’s room, behind the kitchen. She saw that some people had opened up the drawers in there and were trying on some clothes that belonged to the maid or the cook or whoever had been given the night off. Unreal. But low-rent shit like that went on at every party, though usually not this early. People continued to throw parties even though they always went bad in this way, every single time. Strangers showed up, fights broke out, cops came, shit got ruined. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted.

Naturally by the time April made it back to the front hall, struggling not to let the two beers she was carrying get dumped all over her, Robin was gone. There was no way April was going back through that mob again, so she kept going, out to the stoop, where some guys were smoking and where it was at least not so sweltering-a little chilly, in fact. She didn’t recognize any of them, but one was wearing an Andover sweatshirt. She asked him if he knew a guy named Calvin. He nodded, and smiled broadly, apparently at the very thought of Calvin. He was either stoned or else just one of those guys who always appeared stoned.

“Haven’t seen him, though,” he said. “Want to get high?”

She did want to get high, being at this stupid party where she didn’t really know anybody made it seem imperative to get high, but she didn’t like the looks of the guy: his interest in her, for all his glazed affect, was too obvious. Her cell phone started buzzing in the back pocket of her jeans. She saw the caller ID and scowled and smiled at the same time. “Where the fuck are you?” she said.

“I’m at this party,” Robin said. “Where the fuck are you?”

“Outside on the stoop,” April said, taking a couple of steps away from the stoner, who shrugged. “I looked everywhere for you.”

“I think not,” Robin said, giggling. She was already wasted and April felt a flash of resentment. “We’re up on the third floor.”

“There’s a third floor?” April said, looking up.

She got there eventually, picking her way past a group of boys who had found a silver tea tray and were trying to surf down the stairs. Robin, red-eyed, hugged her for a good thirty seconds, which told April that it was X. But the X was now all gone, supposedly. They were all in some kind of den or study or something; this house was a trip, one of those houses that even this crowd couldn’t quite believe somebody they knew lived in. The room itself, as a place to hang out, was tolerable-only about ten of them, the music reaching them as a kind of modulating throb-but the downside was that they were now so far away from the beer that there was no question of convincing anyone to make the trip. Someone passed April a warm bottle of Grey Goose and she did the best she could with it.