I lit up inside and chirped, “Cross-country!” But the truth was that ever since that night, the only thing I could stomach was cantaloupe. I slogged through my runs, my mile time worsening rather than improving, Mr. Larson shouting, “Come on, TifAni!” Not encouraging. Exasperated.

When Hilary invited me to sleep over at Olivia’s house on Saturday, the last Saturday of my sentence, Mom said yes, like I knew she would. She said I’d been so helpful and well behaved that she would shave one day off my grounding. That was also a riot. She was obsessed with Hilary’s and Olivia’s parents, particularly Olivia’s mom, Annabella Kaplan, née Coyne, who was a descendant of the Macy’s family and drove an antique Jaguar. Mom knew not to interfere with that burgeoning friendship, the tuition’s true payoff the connections, not the education, the same way I knew to just look away when Liam looped his arm over Olivia’s ballerina shoulders, the acid charging up my throat like a linebacker.

Mom deposited me at the mouth of Olivia’s house at 5:00 P.M. on Saturday. It didn’t look like much from the front, you would certainly expect more from the granddaughter of the Macy’s guy. But it was just that it was so obscured by trees and vines and ivy, and once you walked through the back gates you realized that the house continued on and on, the yard opening up into an acre of land with a swimming pool and a guesthouse where Louisa, the Kaplans’ maid, lived.

I knocked on the back door. Several seconds passed before I saw the top of Hilary’s berry-tinted bleached head bobbing toward me. I never once saw the Kaplans when I came to Olivia’s house. Her father had a ferocious temper, which Olivia wore in moody bruises on her wrists, and her mother was usually recovering from some kind of plastic surgery. This parental amalgam—abusive and vain—only further solidified Olivia in my mind as the glamorous, poor little rich girl I longed to be for so many years after I knew her. Not even what she did to me, not even what happened to her later, was enough to quench my bloodlust.

Hilary swung open the door. “Yo, girl.” Hilary and Olivia called everyone girl. It took me years to break the annoying habit.

My eyes lingered on the slit of Hilary’s flat stomach, exposed by her cut-off T-shirt. Behind her back, the guys called her HIMary, for her broad shoulders and athletic frame. But I found her toned muscles fascinating. She wasn’t Olivia thin, but there was not an ounce of fat on her body, and Hilary did not play a sport and her mother forged a letter from her “squash coach” to get her out of gym class. It was like she had a Pilates body before Pilates was even a thing.

I’d been nervous to come. Olivia hadn’t invited me—Hilary had. Over the last two weeks, Olivia had really upped her game with Liam. I let him go without a fight. If it was between him and Olivia and Hilary as friends—we’d realized that with my name, our acronym was now HOT—well, I knew which one had more long-term potential.

“Come on.” Hilary charged up the stairs two at a time, her hamstring muscles flexing with each push against gravity. Hilary always had to do everything a little bit weirder than everyone else. It was part of her schtick.

Olivia had an entire wing of the house all to herself—a large, loft-like space with a bathroom separating her room from that of her little sister, who was away at boarding school. Hilary told me once that Olivia’s sister was the pretty one, the favorite one. It was why Olivia barely ate.

Olivia was sitting cross-legged on the floor, propped lazily against her bedpost. Bags of Swedish fish and Starbursts, a bottle of vodka, and an overturned liter of Diet Coke surrounded her like sweet casualties of war.

“Hey, girl.” Olivia pulled a Swedish fish between her teeth until the body snapped in half. She reached for the bottle of vodka. “Drink.”

We chased the vodka with Diet Coke, sinking our teeth into the candy, wincing, trying to absorb the bite. The sun tiptoed away from the window, our pupils ballooning, but we still didn’t turn on the lights.

“Let’s get Dean over here,” Olivia said, only when we’d put a safe enough dent in the vodka. When the goal is to get fucked up, Dean’s greediness must be considered.

I was woozy with hunger and sugar. Olivia grinned at me, the seams between her teeth Christmas red. “He’ll come if he knows you’re here.”

If only I could have liked Dean back, if his mere presence, the sensory memory of his sperm on my tongue didn’t make me heave, maybe everything would have turned out differently.

“He’ll come!” Hilary rolled onto her back with a laugh, holding her knees to her chest and rocking back and forth. I could see her underwear. Radioactive green, this time.

“Shut up.” I wrapped my lips around the opening of the vodka bottle and shuddered as the liquid trickled into my stomach, lava hot.

Olivia was on the phone, saying, “Just wait until it’s dark, or Louisa will see.”

If I had been with girls from Mt. St. Theresa, we would have all clamored to the mirror, feverishly rubbing our cheeks with blush, so much mascara on our eyelashes they’d look like hairy spider legs. But Olivia just pulled on the messy loop on top of her head, securing it closer to her scalp. “They have forties.”

“Who is it?” I waited, hoping to hear Liam’s name.

“Dean, Liam, Miles.” She worked her jaw through a Starburst. “And Dave. Ugh.”

“Fucking Dave,” Hilary agreed.

I said I had to go to the bathroom. I stumbled down the hall and locked the door behind me, what I was about to do more shameful than clogging the toilet: make myself up. My cheeks were ruddy when I looked in the mirror; I splashed water on my face, trying to cool down, trying to ready my canvas. I scavenged around in the drawers for eyeliner, lip gloss, something. I found some crusty old mascara and plunged the brush into the tube over and over, trying to scrape as much out of it as I could.

I heard the guys pounding up the stairs, and I locked eyes with myself in the mirror. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” I hadn’t bothered to turn on the light, and the sun’s last remaining thread fell across my face, bleaching any semblance of confidence I’d hoped to see.

When I returned to Olivia’s room, I saw everyone sitting in a circle, drinking those forties out of sweaty paper bags. There was an open spot between Liam and Dean. I took it, edging as close to Liam as I dared. Dean passed a bottle to me. I didn’t understand the difference between a regular beer and a forty, and I pushed the paper bag down to read the label: malt liquor beer. I drank it without asking what malt liquor was.

After an hour of brain-dead conversation, the words going wobblier and wobblier in my mind, Olivia announced it was safe to go outside and smoke.

We crept down the stairs, filing through the kitchen and out the door one by one, like the most well-rehearsed fire drill. We huddled in a circle by the privacy garden shielding the kitchen’s windows, the arms of a small, plush maple tree stretching toward us, waiting for a hug. I hadn’t realized that was only the second kitchen. “The maid’s kitchen,” Olivia explained, which was bigger than the one in my modest McMansion. Olivia’s parents rarely used this side of the house, she said, and we would remain undetected so long as we stayed quiet.

Dean extracted a joint from a pack of cigarettes, running a lighter underneath its belly before bringing one end to his lips and firing up the other.

We passed to the left, Olivia and Hilary going before me, neither of them able to hold the smoke in, erupting into spastic coughing fits, the guys rolling their eyes and urging them in hushed whispers to hurry up and pass before it burned out.

I hadn’t smoked pot since that night in the eighth grade, at Leah’s house. I was terrified of that feeling, the way the high slunk up from behind and closed its cape around me without any warning. Every vein in my body had engorged and pulsed, and I’d been convinced it would never go away, that I would never feel normal again. But the desire to do better than Hilary and Olivia was greater than the fear. I pulled on the joint, the end flaring like a lightning bug on the first day of summer. I held the smoke in my lungs for a long time to impress Liam, blowing it out in a slow, graceful ribbon that curled around his face.