“Liv,” I said, hoping the sound of her nickname would soften her to me.

“Huh?” she asked, as though she’d thought someone had said her name but she wasn’t sure. I sat down next to her.

“I’m so sorry about Saturday.” I remembered what Dean said to me and added, “I should never smoke after I drink. It makes me so fucked up.”

Olivia turned toward me and gave me a smile so eerie, so detached from human emotion that I still sometimes start awake in the middle of the night, haunted by the memory. “I’m fine.” She pointed at my cheek, at the cut covered clumsily with concealer. “We’re twins.”

“There you fucking are, Finny.” Dean was next to me, holding a lunch tray overflowing with sandwiches and chips and soda. He slammed it down next to me. “What the fuck? I thought we had a deal?”

I said I didn’t understand.

“I just came from fucking Mah’s office,” he said. Then announced, loudly, to the group gathering at the table, that he had gotten a warning about an “incident” that had occurred over the weekend and that he might not be able to play in the big Haverford game this week. This aroused a scandalized gasp from all.

“That’s fucking bullshit,” Peyton fumed, and Liam nodded ferociously even though he didn’t play soccer.

“Well,” Dean mumbled. “I can play if nothing else happens between now and then.”

(I always wished I’d said, Then, just don’t rape anyone in the next two days.)

Dean gave me a withering look. “I thought we were cool?”

“It wasn’t me,” I whimpered.

“So you weren’t in his office earlier this morning?” Dean demanded.

“I was, but I didn’t go there on my own,” I said. “Mr. Larson and him called me in. I didn’t have a choice!”

Dean narrowed his beady eyes at me. “But how did they know to call you in if you didn’t say anything?”

“I don’t know,” I said, lamely. “I think they just assumed.”

“Assumed what?” Dean’s chest heaved with a mean laugh. “They’re not fucking David Copperfield fucking mind readers.” Dean crossed his arms over his chest to the chorus of group laughter. It was something I would have joined in on if the barb hadn’t been directed at me. There was something so bizarrely charming in the fact that Dean knew who David Copperfield was, referenced him like that. “Just get out of here, TifAni. Go bite Mr. Larson’s dick or something.”

I looked around the table. At the smirks on Olivia, Liam, and Peyton. Hilary didn’t do that to me, but she didn’t look at me either.

I turned and walked out of the new cafeteria, beneath the plaque on the last beam that bragged, THE BARTON FAMILY, 1998.

I thought Mr. Larson would take it easy on me at practice later that day, after all I’d been through, but he was more ferocious than ever. I was the only one who couldn’t complete the mile test in under seven minutes and thirty seconds, and everyone had to run laps because of me. I hated him. Walked out on final stretch even though Mr. Larson once proliferated that old wives’ tale that our muscles would get bulky if we didn’t stretch them taffy thin after we ran. He called at me to come back, but I just said my mom was picking me up early and I had to go.

I usually took the train home from school, but that day Mom was picking me up so we could shop the presale at Bloomingdale’s in the King of Prussia Mall.

I never used the showers in the locker room after practice. No one did. They were gross. But that day I had to make an exception because I didn’t want to spend the next few hours shivering in my sweaty clothes while trying on wool peacoats. I quickly washed up under the water, which smelled neglected, like it had been sitting in the pipes since the place was a boarding school. Wrapped in a towel, I walked to my locker on the sides of my feet, trying to limit the amount of skin the gummy floor could contact. As I rounded the corner, Hilary and Olivia came into view. Neither of them played a sport or had to take PE, and I’d never seen them in the locker room before.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“Hey!” Hilary said, her odd throaty voice peppier than usual. She’d thrown her hair into a high half loop since I’d seen her in Chem. One strand of bleached berry blond hair escaped, so brittle and overprocessed it pointed straight up in the air, a sharp spoke in her crown. “We were looking for you.”

“You were?” My voice went up.

“Yeah,” Olivia chimed in. Under the sallow laboratory-like lights, her nose appeared seeded with tiny black kernels. “What are, um. What are you doing tonight?”

Anything you ask me to. “I’m supposed to go shopping with my mom. But I can do it another night if something is going on.”

“No.” Olivia glanced at Hilary, nervously. “It’s fine, we can do it another time.” She started to walk away, and I panicked.

“No, really,” I called after her. “It’s not a big deal. I can just tell my mom we’ll do it another night.”

“Don’t worry about it, Tif.” Hilary turned, her profile practically samurai. There was something like remorse in her alien eyes. “Another time.”

They hurried away. Damnit. I’d been too eager. I’d scared them off. I pulled my clothes on angrily, fought a brush through my wet hair.

I was sitting on the curb outside the gym, waiting for Mom, when Arthur dropped his book bag on the ground next to my feet and sat down. “Hey.”

“Hi,” I said, almost shyly. It’d been a while since we’d spoken.

“You okay?”

I nodded, and I meant it. That interaction with Olivia and Hilary had revitalized me. There was a chance still.

“Really?” Arthur glanced up at the sun, his eyes turning to slits behind his glasses, the lenses smudged sloppily but somehow with intent, like graffiti on an abandoned building wall. “Because I heard what happened.”

I twisted my head to look at him. “What did you hear?”

“Well.” He shrugged. “I mean everyone already knows about the party at Dean’s house. What happened with Liam. And Peyton. And Dean.”

“Thanks for listing them all like that,” I muttered sullenly.

“And the morning-after pill,” he added.

“Jesus Christ,” I groaned.

“They all think you busted up Olivia’s party because you were jealous she and Liam were hooking up.”

“People think that?” I buried my head between my knees, strands of wet hair sliding over my arms, snakelike.

“Is it true?” Arthur asked.

“Don’t people wonder how I got this?” I pointed at my cheek, which I hadn’t even bothered to cover up with concealer after my shower.

Arthur shrugged. “You fell?”

“Yeah.” I snorted. “And Dean caught me.”

I spotted Mom’s red BMW pulling into the drive. It stood out like a sore thumb among the somber black and tan sedans and SUVs. Of course TifAni FaNelli’s mother drove a whore red car, her skank was genetic.

“I have to go,” I said to Arthur.

The morning arrived, brittle and bright. Fall in earnest, and I excitedly strapped myself into the new black peacoat Mom had bought me the night before. I’d found it at Banana Republic, and it wasn’t on sale like the ones at Bloomingdale’s. But Mom said I looked so sharp that she would get it for me anyway. She had to split the purchase between a credit card and cash and then told me not to tell Daddy. God, it grossed me out when she called him Daddy.

On the train ride to school, hope was still a fat shiny balloon in my chest. Hilary and Olivia weren’t done with me yet. The air held a new charge, and I looked “sharp.”

When I walked into school, I felt something else. A pulse. The hallways pumping, alive with it. That morning, a small crowd of freshmen and sophomores, outcast upperclassmen, clumped together at the entrance, rubbernecking something epic. I neared the Junior and Senior Lounge, a place where only juniors and seniors were allowed, a deadly serious rule that even parents and teachers respected. They’d hover in the doorway, calling the name of the student they were looking for rather than step inside and see for themselves.