“Shhh.” Ryan’s phone was nowhere to be seen. In a drawer I found a laptop with a sliver of charge left. I flipped it open but it asked for a password. Of course. Two accounts populated the log-in list: Ryan and Skylar. “Elle, can you get files off a hard drive if the laptop asks for a password?”

“Yes, probably. But listen, there’s something—”

Her voice was too loud in the stillness. I turned off speakerphone. “Hold on a second.”

Quick search of other drawers: no phone, no photos, nothing but school notebooks and assigned paperbacks. Max had already gone through it all.

“Can you hear me? Vada?”

“What’s up?”

“We have to go. Where are you?”

I tilted my head, listening. Feeling the darkness. Tasting it. Stagnant summer air, vibrating with suppressed energy, like the inside of a hive. “Second floor. Ryan’s room.”

“Get out. Get out of the house now.”

The skin on my back stretched canvas-tight. “Why?”

“His laptop. It’s showing webcam feeds. There are cams all over the house. He’s watching us.”

Through the floors, the buzzing air, I sensed the shift of weight. Of movement.

I tucked the laptop under my arm and ran for the window, floorboards squealing under my heels. Then I was outside and sliding down the shingles, kicking tiles loose, chips flying, skin grating off my ankles and knees. At the roof’s edge I leaped, blind, onto the boat below. I struck the hull and buckled and rolled over the prow, hitting the ground hard, but kept rolling, absorbing the shock. The laptop spun across the dirt. Hands gripped my shoulders and I clawed at them wildly.

“It’s me, it’s me.”

Elle hauled me to my feet. I fetched the laptop and kept running for the trees.

We crashed through the brush and froze, stumbling together. Ellis put her hands on me. Shadows stirred around us, black dye swirling in darkest violet.

“Did he see us come to the house?” I said.

“I don’t know. What did you take?”

“A laptop.”

“Great. Grand larceny.”

“Worry about it later.” Below my knees I felt a crawling, festering heat, abrasions meeting air. “We need to get out of here.”

This time she took my hand and led me through the woods. When I stumbled she caught me, braced an arm around my waist. We skirted lit houses. At the shore she pushed the skiff out solo and made me get in to avoid the salt. Then she shucked her button-up shirt and tossed it to me.

“Clean those cuts. I’ll row for a bit. The current’s with us.”

“Ellis—”

“Come on. While I’ve still got adrenaline.”

She made good on her word, taking us out swiftly. She rowed till her arms trembled, her hair and tank top pasted to her skin, gluey with sweat. Red strands trickled over her temple like blood. Once we cleared Peaks she let the oars collapse. For a while we drifted, the water enameled with starlight and hurling itself at the hull before shattering like ornaments, jet and chrome disintegrating into glitter.

I joined her for the final leg, and when we finally reached the shore of Chebeague we were both exhausted and silent. We glanced at the beach house, shook our heads. Staggered through the trees to the big oak. In her kitchen she boiled water and I let her clean me up because looking at the peppery flecks of asphalt ground into my skin made me dizzy. Memories surged to the surface like kicked-up sediment. The reek of gasoline and tequila. Headlights splintering the rearview. Glass and bone sticking through human meat.

“Vada,” Elle said, “stop looking. Drink this.”

Vodka, crisp and icy as glacier runoff. I gulped it down and felt like I’d swallowed a frozen sword. It soothed me.

The abrasions weren’t that bad. I was being a baby. It was just tough to look at my own blood. I kept thinking, What will I lose this time?

Ellis dropped sopping crimson towels in the sink without batting an eyelash, like some wartime nurse.

“You’re sort of a badass,” I murmured.

“You’re sort of crazy. But brave.”

“Recklessness isn’t brave.”

“Recklessness makes you act. Bravery is following through.”

We eyed each other a moment, thinking of other things. Other times I hadn’t been brave.

She left to fetch supplies from the beach house. I drank more vodka and thought about how a man with a gun scared me less than telling my mother I’d fallen for my best friend.

Ellis returned with clean clothes, spare hard drives, and a plan.

“I’m going to clone the data from Ryan’s laptop. Then we’re putting it back. Well, I’m putting it back. While he’s out of the house. You have a different role.”

“What’s my role?”

She eyed me grimly. “You’re the decoy.”

I stayed the night at Elle’s. By tacit agreement—I glanced at the couch; she pulled some pillows down from her loft bed—I curled up and let her work in the kitchen while I dozed, fuzzy-brained and lead-limbed with vodka. Sometime in the wee hours my phone pinged with an email.

thinking of you. like i do every night.

you and your friend.

i’m jealous of her.

of anyone who sees you off cam.

anyone who touches you.

i think about your skin. obsessively.

i want to be inside it, like your ink.

and deeper.

i want to feel you. i want to fill you.

are you thinking of me, morgan?

—blue.

of fucking course I am, I began, then realized sending it from my phone would reveal my IP, my geolocation, and I trashed it.

I peeked over the couch. Ellis sat on a kitchen stool, shoulders hunched, working on the laptop. Candleglow bled through her seersucker shirt as if she wore a fairy wing, turned the flyaway wisps of her hair into little filaments of electric light. Guilt churned in my gut, hot and queasy.

Here I was, thinking filthy thoughts about my Internet crush, while Prince Ellis, my real friend and maybe-whatever, sat ten feet away, fixing my mistakes.

Vada Emery Bergen, scumbaggiest friend ever.

In the morning I found Elle sprawled across the counter, sleeping. I tucked her in on the couch. She struggled to speak through yawns.

“Max is meeting me for lunch,” I said. “You’ve got time. Go back to sleep.”

Most of my abrasions were superficial and already scabbed over, ruby filigree lacing my skin. The worst I’d suffered was a plum-black bruise on one thigh. In the kink camworld, bruises and scabs were commonplace.

I sat beside Ellis and brushed her hair from her eyes. “Poor tired thing.”

She mumbled something unintelligible.

In another lifetime, I’d have grabbed my notebook and pencils and sketched her. The sleeping prince in her forest cottage. Now I could only trace her bones with my fingers, etch the lines in memory.

Recuerdo, el corazón.

I kissed her forehead and left.

Max had responded to my text with a time and place in the Old Port. I took the ferry to the mainland. On the way over, I watched the waves.

Ellis explained to me once how light is both a particle and a wave. Think of what happens if you drop pebbles in water, she said. Their ripples overlap. Some cancel out, some double up. Colliding ripples create an interference pattern, a dizzying web. But light was both the pebble and the wave. It was a point and also a probability. The same way she was both a friend and more than a friend and when we collided, we made an interference pattern.

The Old Port on a late-summer morning: fishing boats thronging the wharf, nets full of sun-sequined bass and traps swarming with lobsters, all those feelers and claws writhing, insectile. Cooks haggled with fisherfolk and threw live animals into trucks. The air was so wet and briny it seemed obscene. Like if I dabbed at it with my tongue, it’d be a lewd act. I loved Portland like this: rough hands dredging up shellfish and clams and all the weird pale meat of the ocean, that bizarre underworld spilling into the hard sun. Tourists flooding on and off ferries, the water a perfect Yves Klein blue. I sat on an iron stanchion and watched the catch come in, listened to the thud and slap of meaty tails on the dock.