I gave him a disgusted look, at which Arthur laughed. “I’m just kidding. He has a girlfriend. A hot one. I heard she models for Abercrombie & Fitch.”

“Who told you that?” I snapped, instantly feeling thick and squat, a fat little loser Mr. Larson took pity on once.

Arthur shrugged. “That’s just what everyone says.”

Even though I was grounded, my parents had only a vague sense of when cross-country practice ended, so I could easily hang out with Arthur most days. For the first time, I was grateful I lived so far away that I had to take the train home. “Sometimes practice is an hour and a half, other times two,” I told Mom. “It depends on the mileage of the day.” She took me at my word, and so all I had to do was call her from the germy pay phone at the Bryn Mawr station and say, “Getting on the six thirty-seven.” By then, practice had been long over and the initial blast of my high had mellowed into thick, warm sludge. I’d place the phone in the receiver, watch the creaky 6:37 come to a stop with an exhausted white puff. Either I was moving more slowly or everything else just appeared to be.

Arthur’s eyes darted over my shoulder, to the squash courts behind me and the parking lot behind that, nannies waiting to pick up kids from practice, their beat-up Hondas pulsing with a commercial-free stretch of Y100. “People have been coming by, ringing the doorbell, and running away.”

“Who?” I asked, feeling sick.

“Who do you think?” He looked at me accusingly, like I’d brought them to his door.

“Can you just let me in already?” One quivering bead of sweat escaped my sports bra. Took its time snaking into my underwear.

Arthur swung open the door, and I ducked in underneath his arm.

I followed Arthur up the stairs, three flights that moaned noisily beneath our weight. He had moved out of his bedroom and into the attic over the summer, he’d explained to me the first time he brought me up there. “Why?” I’d glanced around the bare-bones room uneasily, rubbing away the goose bumps on my arms. There was no insulation in the walls, and as a bedroom it felt makeshift, vulnerable. Nothing homey about it. Arthur had stuck his hand out the window and tapped the crusty belly of the pipe against the ledge. Some black ashes fluttered away, like charred snowflakes. “Privacy,” he’d said.

He’d taken very few possessions with him when he moved, even his clothes remained in his old bedroom, so that every morning before school he used it as a sort of dressing quarters. But one very important object had made the journey north with him, was granted a prime position on a stack of textbooks that served as his nightstand: a picture of him as a child with his father. It was summer, and they were at the shore, laughing and looking out at the mucky brown ocean. Someone had glued pastel-colored seashells all over the picture frame. I’d picked it up once, quipped, “This looks like a kindergartner’s arts and crafts project,” and Arthur had snatched it back. “My mom made it for me. Don’t touch it.”

Beneath this cherished picture was the Bradley middle school yearbook, which played an integral role in one of our new favorite pastimes: defacing the class pictures of the HOs and the Hairy Legs. It was more fun to destroy them in their middle school form—braces, frizzy hair, lanky limbed, and ugly.

We would do this after we’d smoked and stumbled down the stairs, jelly legged and giggly, to raid the kitchen. Mrs. Finnerman held office hours in her classroom until five, then stayed another hour or two to catch up on paperwork, so the place was ours until then. It was the perfect arrangement she didn’t know about.

Some people lose weight, can’t eat, when they’re stressed. I thought I’d be one of those when everything first happened, but once the acid-flavored anxiety of what would become of me dissolved to reveal what had become of me, the hot new girl already washed up seven weeks into the semester, food had never tasted so good.

Arthur had figured this out years ago, and he was an enthusiastic partner in crime. Together, we came up with all kinds of concoctions to feed our emotional voids—nuke Nutella and it becomes a hard chocolate cookie. This was pre-Nutella ubiquity, and I’d asked, “What the hell is this?” when I first came across it in the cabinet. “Some weird European shit,” Arthur had said and shrugged, and I’d made a face at it, impressed. Or we’d plop a roll of cookie dough on a baking sheet and shove it in the oven without even breaking it up, roasting it as a log until the outer ends were golden and the inside was raw, eggy mush that we ate with a spoon. All the clothes Mom had bought me at the beginning of the semester were rebelling against me, the opening of my khakis spread like my legs with Peyton’s head between them, refusing to close no matter how hard I ran.

Today, after we clattered down the stairs into the kitchen, the yearbook tucked underneath Arthur’s arm like my future mother-in-law’s vintage Chanel clutch, Arthur announced that he wanted nachos. He held the doors to the kitchen cabinets out wide, a conductor directing his symphony.

“You’re a genius,” I said, the corners of my mouth pinching hungrily.

“You mean a genachos.” Arthur gave me a sassy look over his shoulder, and I laughed so hard my knees buckled. Then I was lying on the tiles of his old kitchen, tiles Mom would have called “fuddy-duddy.” The word “fuddy-duddy” made my sides itch even harder with laughter.

“TifAni, come on,” Arthur scolded. “You don’t have much time.” He pointed at the display on the stove. It was 5:50.

The thought of not getting my fix centered me. I climbed to my feet and began to pull toppings from the fridge—a shiny block of orange cheese, blood-red salsa, a watery container of sour cream.

We arranged our nachos in silence, stoned and sloppily dressing the chips. We took the plate to the linoleum breakfast table and sat, still not speaking, too competitive for the chips with the most cheese. When not one tortilla crumb remained, Arthur got up from the table and retrieved a gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream from the freezer. He found two spoons, staked them through the pastel surface, and placed the carton on the table between us.

“I’m so fat,” I moaned, exhuming a large chunk of chocolate.

“Who cares.” Arthur stuck his spoon in his mouth, pulling it out slowly, sucking all the meat off the bone.

“I bumped into Dean in the hallway today. He said, ‘You really are a wide load, aren’t you?’” I liked the ice cream in the corners best. It melted first, obeyed when I coaxed it around the edge of the carton.

“Fucking rich white trash.” Arthur stabbed the ice cream with his spoon. “You don’t even know the half of it.”

I tongued a back molar, chiseling away its thin chocolate coating. “What don’t I know?”

Arthur furrowed his eyebrows at the ice cream. “Nothing. Never mind.”

“Okay”—I stopped eating for a moment—“now you have to tell me.”

“Trust me.” Arthur dropped his chin to peer at me over his glasses, and an extra layer of skin gathered in his neck. “You don’t want to know.”

“Arthur!” I demanded.

Arthur sighed heavily, like he was sorry he ever brought it up, but I knew he wasn’t. The more sacred a piece of information, the more desperate the gatekeeper is to reveal it, the harder you have to work to relieve her of the burden. That way she doesn’t feel horribly guilty about betraying confidences—what could she do? She was browbeaten into it! I say “she” because it’s an inherently feminine game, and when I look back on all of this now, at the way Arthur was a natural at navigating the ball on the field, I realize it’s much more telling of his sexuality that his own declarations so theatrical, so over the top, that I could never figure out if he was just messing with everyone. Playing the role assigned to him, and brilliantly.