Hallsy swatted Luke’s shoulder. “Anyway, now she’s not speaking to me or my mom and it’s this whole thing. It’s like, I was just trying to be supportive!”

Luke was laughing. Everyone was laughing. I thought I was, too, but my face felt numb in the fog. Maybe it wasn’t even a fog, maybe it was a poisonous gas and we were under attack, and I was the only one who realized it. I found my legs and stood, picking up my glass of wine as though I was going into the kitchen for a refill, which is what I should have done. Should never have said what I said next, which was “Don’t worry, Hallsy.” The laughter died down and everyone turned to look at me, standing, obviously about to say something of importance. “We’ll stick you at the flabby singleton table with the rest of your kind.” I didn’t ease the back door into its hinges, like I usually do. Just let it clap shut, sudden and mean as a Venus flytrap.

Luke waited a few hours before he came and found me in bed. I was reading a John Grisham paperback. There were John Grisham paperbacks all over the Harrison house.

“Um, hi?” Luke hovered over the bed, a golden ghost.

“Hi.” I’d been reading the same page over and over for the last twenty minutes. The fog had cleared, and now I wondered how bad it was. What I’d done.

“What was that about?” Luke asked.

I shrugged. Kept pretending to read. “She said ‘sand nigger.’ She told one of the most ignorant stories I’ve ever heard. That didn’t bother you?”

Luke snatched the book out of my hands, and the rusty springs in the bed crunched as he sat. “Hallsy is batshit crazy, so no, I don’t really let anything she says bother me. You shouldn’t either.”

“I guess you’re just a cooler customer than I am then.” I glared at him. “Because that bothered me.”

Luke groaned. “Ani, come on. Hallsy made a mistake. It’s like”—he stopped and thought for a moment—“it’s like if you heard someone had cancer and you sent that person flowers and it turned out not to be true. Like she said, her heart was in the right place.”

I stared at Luke, slack-jawed. “The issue isn’t that she got her information wrong. The issue is that she thinks being gay is such a horrible ‘diagnosis’”—I bunny-eared the word, calling out Luke’s offensive analogy—“that it warrants flowers and her condolences!”

Luke folded his arms across his chest. “You know. This is what I’m talking about. When I say I’m getting really fucking sick of this.”

I scooted up on my elbows, the sheets rising, a white cotton drawbridge unlatching with the bend in my knees. “Getting really fucking sick of what?”

Luke gestured at me. “Of this. This . . . this . . . poutiness.”

“I’m fucking pouty for taking offense at blatant racism and homophobia?”

Luke brought his hands to his head, like he was protecting his ears from a loud noise. He shut his eyes, opened them. “I’m sleeping in the guesthouse.” He tore a pillow from the bed and left the room.

I didn’t expect to sleep at all, so I settled in on The Last Juror. I finished it by dawn, the sun filtering through the blinds in lazy yellow strands. I opened The Runaway Jury next, had read almost one hundred pages before I heard the shower start next door, Luke shouting to Mrs. Harrison that he wanted his eggs sunny-side up. He’d done that for my benefit, I could tell. He wanted me to know only a single wall separated us now, that he’d chosen to come in from the guesthouse and start his day without speaking to me. I hated myself a little as I bent the corner of the page, running my finger over the crease to seal the fold. Then a little more as the humid shush of the shower sounded closer. I pushed the curtain all the way to the right and stepped in, felt his hands forgiving on my hips, the hair around his erection wet and coarse.

“I’m sorry.” Beads of water gathered on my lips. It was a hard thing to do, apologize, but I’ve done harder things. I pressed my face into the crook of his neck, hot and steamy as a New York City sidewalk helplessly exposed in the thick of summer.

CHAPTER 8

Mom grounded me for two weeks after Dean’s party. She’s fond of timing the statement, “That’s a riot,” to the corny punch lines of Friends, and that’s exactly what my punishment was, a riot. With the performance I’d given at Dean’s party, I’d grounded myself.

Still, I was tolerated at the lunch table, and that was mostly thanks to Hilary and Dean. Everyone else just seemed relieved when I announced I was under house arrest for the rest of the month. Quarantined, they had time to decide: Were my missteps contagious?

For whatever reason, Hilary had really taken a shine to me. Maybe because I aided and abetted her trashy teenage rebellion, maybe because she asked me to read her theme paper on Into Thin Air and I basically rewrote it into an A+ assignment. I didn’t care. Whatever it was she needed from me, I would give her.

Olivia tried to act like she didn’t care when she found out about Dean’s party, like it didn’t bother her that I’d been invited and kept it secret, or that I’d hooked up with Liam, which she’d made clear was something she wanted to do. “Was it fun?” she asked brightly. Her blinking went rapid, as though it powered the phony smile on her face.

“I think?” I turned my palms up, and that got a real laugh, at least.

In the movies and on TV, the most popular girls in school are always gorgeous, with buxom curves scaled to impossibly Barbie proportions, but Bradley and other schools with a similar milieu defied this law. Olivia was pretty in the way that a grandmother would notice: “My, what a lovely young lady.” She had hair so curly it puffed up, frizzier and angrier when she turned a blow-dryer on it. Her cheeks got too pink when she drank, and blackheads pooled in the pores on her nose, collecting more oil as the day wore on. Liam wouldn’t come around to her on his own, the attraction had to be painstakingly manufactured.

Nell later taught me to tone down my beer commercial potential rather than capitalize on it. Actively striving for the traditional markers of beauty and status—the blond hair perfectly styled, the tan skin perfectly even, the brazen logo stamped all over your bag—why, it’s downright shameful. This was something that took me years to learn, because Mom had been catching my chin in her hand and applying “a little color” to my lips since I was eleven, because preening was celebrated, never mocked, at Mt. St. Theresa’s.

Like me, Liam was learning to see Olivia’s curls as charming, rather than kinky, and did her flat chest actually have more of a curve than he thought? I didn’t interfere with this. All my life, I’ve found it difficult to advocate for myself, to ask for what I want. I fear burdening people so much. I’d like to blame it on what happened that night, on what happened in the ensuing weeks, but I think it’s just part of my blueprint. Asking Liam to go with me to get the morning-after pill was about the boldest thing I’d ever done, and with that single word, “Friend,” scribbled slowly on the page like a fourth grader’s reminder to himself of the rule “‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c,’” I remembered why I so rarely do it.

Olivia just needed a little time to be sure that my retreat wasn’t a maneuver. To accept it was sincere. Almost three weeks after Dean’s party, I saw her in the distant end of the Math wing. She paused as I advanced on her and said, “You look skinny.” It came out as more of an accusation than a compliment, the way even fourteen-year-old girls know to do. How did this happen? How did you do this?