“I need to meet more Catholic girls,” Liam said, his eyes sleepy.

“I hear they use teeth,” Olivia murmured, low, as though nervous to see how the joke would land. It invited a robust laugh, which Olivia shushed frantically, her fear of her father temporarily overriding pride—she’d steered correctly.

Dean clapped me on the back. “Don’t worry, Finny, you were pretty out of it.”

It was one of those awful moments where you have no control over your reaction, when the pain is too exposed to hide. I laughed, the sharp contrast between the sound and the look on my face only making it worse.

Once we wore the joint down to a nub, Liam said he had to use the bathroom and retreated into the house. I wondered if I should follow him as the conversation hummed on. I felt the consequences of what I’d just done, of my bravado in trapping the smoke in my chest for so long, close on my heels. My heart was marching in my ears when I realized Olivia was gone too, had slipped off without my even realizing it. I peered through the maple’s ruby leaves and over the flat green hedges guarding the windows, but the kitchen was empty.

“I’m cold,” I said, panicking when I realized just how cold I was. I was shivering. “Let’s go inside.” I needed to move, needed to focus on putting one foot in front of the other, on my hand on the cool doorknob twisting, anything but the way my body was shuddering, like one of those plastic windup toys, candy red gums and stark white teeth on a pair of feet, chattering across the table, a cardigan-wearing uncle’s idea of a gag.

“Let’s just hang for a while.” It was Dean speaking. It was Dean’s arm pulling me into him. Dean was the only one there. Where had everyone gone?

“Wait.” I dipped my head low, my forehead against Dean’s chest, anything to avoid his mouth, the angle at which it was coming at me.

Dean wiggled his finger into the crevice between my chin and my neck, applying an upward pressure.

“I’m really cold,” I protested even as I gave in to it. I swallowed when I felt Dean’s wet lips on mine. Just for a little bit, I thought. You only have to do this for a little bit. Don’t be rude.

I toyed with Dean’s fat tongue, realizing my palms were on his chest, still pushing him away. I wrapped them around the back of his hairy neck obediently.

Dean’s fingers were stumbling over the button of my khakis. It was too soon to stop, Dean wouldn’t believe me if I put an end to it now. As calmly as I could, I broke the kiss.

“Let’s go inside.” I tried to make it sound breathy, seductive, but we both knew there was nowhere to make good on my promise inside the house. Too late, I realized my play was dangerously transparent, that I’d fatally miscalculated Dean. He seized the button on my pants with such gusto my pelvis thrust forward and my feet flew off the ground. I stumbled backward, landing on my wrist at a ruthless angle, and I let out an injured-puppy yelp that reverberated through the yard.

“Shut up!” Dean hissed. He dropped to his knees and slapped me.

Even before I’d come to Bradley, even before all the evidence proved I was the one not like the others, I was still not a girl you slap. The hot hand on my cheek undid me. I was screaming, the sound guttural and ancient, something I’d never heard before. There is so rarely an occasion in this modern life when your body takes over, when you find out what it will do, the smells and sounds it will release when it’s trying to survive. That night, on the ground with Dean, clawing and screeching, a starchy sweat collecting in my armpits, I found out, and not for the last time.

Dean had the button undone and my pants low on my hips when the lights in the front of the house popped on, when we heard Olivia’s father hollering. Olivia burst out the back door and screamed at me to go and never come back. I heard Dean gasping behind me as I ran to the gate and my hands shook over the latch.

“Move!” He shoved me out of the way and released the hook, the gate swinging open. Dean charged through but paused, inexplicably holding the gate open behind him so I could escape as well. The dark driveway was shortening ahead of me when I heard the patter of more footsteps behind me, the other boys, heading for Dave’s Navigator parked on the street.

At the road, I turned right. I didn’t know where I was going, just that right was away from Dave’s car, away from the direction its nose pointed. I kept going until the light from Olivia’s house faded completely, and it was dark and I could collapse on the side of the road, my lungs sharp with the cold night air, my heart cartwheeling madly, as though I’d never run a mile straight in my life, as though it wasn’t the school sport I chose of my own accord.

I was deep in the bowels of the Main Line, the mansions set far back from the road, burning bright and smug in the trees. I slipped into the brush at the mere vibration of a car on the road, peering through the lingering red and yellow leaves and exhaling only when I saw that it wasn’t Dave’s Navigator. Adrenaline had purged my body of any high, but by the way I zagged on the road, I could tell it would be hours before the vodka and Diet Coke wore off, hours before I realized my wrist was swollen to two times its size, that it was throbbing in sync with my heart.

A plan had formulated in my mind: Get to Montgomery Avenue, then walk the straight line to Arbor Road, where I would turn right to get to Arthur’s house. I’d chuck pebbles at his window the way boys do when they like a girl in the movies. He would take me in. He had to.

I kept turning on different roads, each time so sure that was the one that would lead me to the main strip. At one point I grew so desperate that I didn’t flee when a set of headlights appeared at the top of a steep hill, the vehicle to which they belonged low and sleek, definitely not Dave.

As it rolled to a stop at the bottom of the hill, I jogged up to the window to ask how to get to Montgomery. The mom face in the window panicked, her mouth dropping open in horror and the car squealing beneath her foot. Her Mercedes shot out ahead of me, tearing into the night, in fast pursuit of the dinner party where she would no doubt regale her flaccid friends with the tale of her narrow escape of the hooligan carjacker who appeared like the boogeyman on Glenn Road.

After what somehow felt like both forever and a second, I found a turn that opened up into a long row of streetlamps, a Wawa anchoring the curve of the last quarter mile. I was so impatient I broke into a run, my hands loose at my sides the way Mr. Larson taught us. “It takes energy to make a fist,” he explained, showing us his own, clenched tight. “And you want to conserve as much of it as possible.”

I jogged under the gas station’s fluorescent lighting, shielding my eyes against their sudden, razor brightness, as though it were the sun that just burst free from the clouds. I pushed the door open with my shoulder, discovered how warm it was inside, realized just how raw I smelled now that I was in a contained space. I stopped a few inches short of the counter to keep the stench from reaching the cashier.

“Montgomery Avenue is further up on the right, right?” I was horrified to realize I was slurring my words.

The cashier looked up from his crossword puzzle, irritably. He blinked, and it was like it reset his entire face.

“Miss.” He covered his heart with his hand. “Are you all right?”

I touched my hand to my hair and felt dirt. “I just tripped.”

The cashier reached for the phone. “I call the police.”

“No!” I leapt forward, and he took a step back, still holding on to the phone.

“Don’t do that!” he yelled. I realized for the first time that he was scared too.

“Please,” I said. His finger had hit only the number nine. “I don’t need the police. I just want you to tell me how to get to Montgomery Avenue.”