“It's part of the theme.” Zora whispered back, smiling madly all the while. “You're the one who said it was a lame tradition. This is me, trying to spice things up.”

There was nothing I could say to that, so I tried to keep my eyes fixed on Z's tanned shoulder-blades as she maneuvered us toward the hotel entrance. She is very graceful, I’ll give her that. With seemingly no effort, she'd steered us to the front of a long line of other women in ball gowns, trailed by other bewildered-looking dudes in suits.

Only once we were inside the hotel lobby did Z release her skeleton grip. She looked me up and down, as she had several times that day already—eyes withering, hunting for a flaw. She looked fantastic in a peach-colored dress that complimented her honey skin. It was a light, gauzy fabric that drifted through the air behind her as she walked. And her dark hair was piled high on her head, sculpted into this fountain shape. She was beautiful.

“It's too bad your Dad can't swing the Hyatt for his wedding ceremony,” she was saying now, apparently satisfied with the picture I took. (Or not: she reached a manicured hand up and smoothed a lock of hair back from my scalp, not a second later.)

“His whole thing is pretty anti-flash, remember?” This change in conversation made me even grouchier. I would rather have talked about the long road to finding the perfect florist for Betsy's deb ball than spend a second admitting that Pop seemed about to go through with his hare-brained matrimony, despite my very logical protests.

“I know you think he's being crazy,” Z said, eyes roving the lobby. Periodically, she'd raise her hand and wave at some other couple or group. “But IMHO, it's romantic. He's a man of the cloth, he's getting up there...why shouldn't he have someone to spend the rest of his life with? I mean, when you get drafted next year it's not like you'll have a bunch of extra time to spend at home.”

I bit my tongue. Even during our best times, I'd never exactly felt the need to confide in Z about the real quality of my relationship with Pop. From the outside, I knew it looked like something out of a sad fairy tale or bad movie: Wounded Veteran Raises Only Son, Finds God On The Way...but the truth was, we were more complicated than that. Of course I wanted Pop to find someone to take care of him. Of course I did. But I'd never have gone so far as to call his storefront operation “of the cloth,” nor would I ever deign to call his shacking up with Anya “romantic.” I'd also never entertained any plans of coming back to live with the old coot, draft or no. Sticking around Pop for my last college summer was turning out to be a huge ordeal. If not for all the oddly scheduled football training, I would have been able to at least fly the coop every so often to a job—but alas. No dice.

And as much as I hated to admit it, there'd been a grain or two of truth in Ash's bitchy rant at our first dinner. I didn't think Pop was scamming Anya, exactly. Nor did I think she was scamming him. But I'd decided that there was something unseemly about their union, and could only hope it was mutually beneficial. After all, Pop had never exactly been a good husband to my Mom. I worried a little about his ability to be...decent. Or perhaps it was just that I didn't like to bandy the word 'love' around so lightly. My idea of love looked a whole lot different than what had become our tri-weekly pizza parties, those evenings spent in mostly silence.

But this wasn't the kind of thing you could say to girlfriends. Especially not family-oriented, marriage-crazy Christian ones, like Z.

“I want him to be happy,” I said curtly, hoping this would seal the matter. And Zora did seem temporarily satisfied. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I grinned at her impulsiveness, but in another second registered the camera waving in our face. Aha.

“I'm sorry you're getting a little twat of a stepsister in the deal, though,” Z murmured, as the camera-lady sauntered away. “That girl has the most sour face I've ever seen, except for maybe that Twilight chick. Like, what's her deal? And does she go outside? I haven't seen anyone that pale in Texas, ever.”

I didn't have the energy to rebut most of this, and luckily, I didn't need to. For there was Betsy, appearing at the top of the lobby staircase like Scarlet friggin O'Hara. Everyone in the vicinity clapped. Zora's little sister was first in a short line of trembling sixteen and seventeen year old girls, their faces spanning the spectrum of from giddy to nonplussed. But Betsy, in her short and comparably boring white dress, was definitely not feeling her big day.

“I am going to murder that girl,” Z said in the direction of the staircase, though she clapped and smiled as she whispered the threat. “She's going to regret that face in her pictures. She's not going to want to hang that puss on the dorm room walls.”

For something to say, I cast about the room of beaming faces.

“What's her date like?”

“Oh, don't even get me STARTED.” Zora barely gestured in the direction of a tall, sallow-looking redhead who immediately struck me as gay. But then again, what did I know?

Zora spent most of the rest of the ball hunting for people to yell at. During Betsy's short—but surprisingly funny—remarks about her future plans, Z was in the kitchen, harassing some caterer about a fruit plate that wasn't up to snuff. I couldn't help feeling bad for poor Betsy, who spent much of the evening looking miserable in her frilly gown. At one point, she and Sallow Red made a break for the lobby, looking like Bonnie and Clyde after a successful heist. Even though I knew Zora would pitch a fit when she realized her sister had escaped her own deb ball, I watched them go without raising my head. Kids were supposed to have fun, right?

Left to my lonesome, I spent a lot of the party looking at the array of high-school kids on display. Most of the guests, like Betsy, were fixing to finish high school in the fall—a few were headed to college. They all seemed bright-eyed and full of themselves. They had no idea about the future, the little posers. Most of the girls were like Zora minions—perfectly made up, flawless as Beyoncé. And I couldn't help thinking of what Ash might have made of this set-up. Try as I might, I couldn't picture her fitting in with these kinds of kids. These happy, breezy kids who seemed so certain about their place in the world.

Over the past two weeks, Pop had been spending almost every night at Anya's. I'd been finding elaborate reasons to keep guard at our house, or crash at Denny's, or sneak into Zora's room once her parents fell asleep. (Even though we were twenty-two and consenting, Mr. Hall was not a fan of mine when it came to his daughter.) I wasn't willing to risk another night of accidentally wandering into Doll's bedroom and finding her half-naked, like some kind of Lolita. I hadn't slept a wink that night, pinned as I was between fury (the little twerp...) and frustration (...her giant tits). It was like Denny said: you could crush a problem with your mind vice. And Doll was a problem.

Two more weeks, I told myself, letting the ice cubes clink in my tumbler. In Z's absence, I'd had to find comfort in Jim Beam. The Hyatt was beginning to blur around the edges, in echo of that rooftop night. Why was it that I couldn't stop thinking about her? I gripped my glass till it stopped feeling cold in my palm. Why?

“There you are,” Z murmured, the touch of her lips on my ear surprising me so much I dropped my whiskey. The cup shattered loudly along the parquet floor, causing the band's lead singer to stutter. I couldn't help but smile. Event bands were so cheesy anyways.

“Leave it,” Z was saying, her chest flush against my back. I could feel the round, warm bulges of her breasts as she breathed in and out. “The help will get it.” Then her hands appeared around my waist, revealing a crisp, laminated card in her outstretched palms.