I nodded and she turned and headed for the staircase, leading the way. She spent enough time in my house that she knew her way around and was finally comfortable enough to just reach into the fridge and take something if she was hungry. I followed a few steps behind, still not clear on why she’d come to my house after the party but happy to have her there nonetheless. She was walking a little more carefully than usual, her ankles wobbling just slightly in the heels, holding her dress out to the side so she wouldn’t trip on it.

When she made it into my room, she kicked off her heels and went right to the drawer where I kept my pajamas. Sure enough, she pulled out one at the bottom of the stack, the crew T-shirt from the disastrous Bug Juicemovie. It had been beset by problems the whole way through, starting with the fact that the producers had changed the ages of the kids from eleven to sixteen, and the lead actress had been shipped off to rehab mid-shoot. The shirt read You Can’t Handle the Juice,a crew in-joke, and the first time Sloane had seen it, she had cracked up. She loved the shirt for some reason, and was always threatening to steal it.

“I swear,” she said, yawning again as she pulled the shirt on over her head and then wriggled out of her dress, dropping it into a pile at her feet and stepping out of it, “one of these days. This shirt will just disappear, and you’ll have no idea where it’s gone to.”

“I think I’ll have some idea,” I said. I went to the laundry pile on my dresser and saw my best pair of pajama pants was clean. “Want these?” I asked, holding them up. She nodded, I tossed them to her, and she pulled them on.

“Oh my god,” she said, yawning again as she beelined for my bed. My bed was old and the mattress sagged in the middle, but it was queen-size, and there was enough room that we could face each other and still have enough space to see each other and talk. She took the side she always took when she stayed over, nestled down under the blankets, then hugged her pillow and smiled at me. I knew when she had something to say, and I could tell that she had been waiting for this moment—quiet, with my full attention—since I’d opened the front door. “So I met a boy tonight.”

“You did?” I asked, getting into bed as well, pulling the blankets up and turning to her. “At the party?”

“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “He was there with his parents too.”

“Does he go to Stanwich?” I settled back, only to realize my pillow was still on the floor. I leaned half out of the bed to grab it, then plumped it once and settled into it, preparing to hear the story.

Boys had been besotted with Sloane since she’d shown up at Stanwich High, but she’d been picky. She’d dated a senior for a few weeks our sophomore year, then a fellow junior this past fall, and the summer before, had a brief fling with a guy who normally went to boarding school and was just in town for the summer. But none of these had lasted, and she hadn’t seemed particularly devastated when they didn’t—she was always the one who did the breaking up. But it had been a while since a guy had appeared on her radar—until tonight, apparently.

“No,” she said. “Stanwich Academy.” It was the private school in town, and while I vaguely knew some girls who went there, the two schools didn’t really have much overlap socially. “His name’s Sam. Sam Watkins.” She pronounced the name carefully, like it was a foreign word she wasn’t used to saying but nonetheless loved the sound of. She smiled, wide, and I saw in that moment that she really liked him.

“Oh my god,” I said. “You’re smitten already. I can tell.” She didn’t deny it, but buried her face in the pillow, so all I could see was her hair, the waves coaxed into curls for the evening. “So tell me about him.”

She turned her head toward me, yawning, but didn’t open up her eyes again when the yawn was finished. “He’s great,” she said, her words coming slower than before. “You’ll see.”

I waited for something else to come, an explanation of his greatness, when it occurred to me it was probably Sam who’d dropped Sloane at my house—Milly and Anderson would have just taken her back with them. Not because they would have cared if she slept over, but because they wouldn’t have wanted to make an extra trip. I tried to recall if there had been a car there when I’d opened the door, someone waiting to make sure she got in okay, but I just couldn’t remember.

“Hey,” I whispered. I nudged her ankle with my foot. “Did Sam—” I was about to ask her when I realized that she was breathing slow and regular, her mascaraed eyes firmly closed. Sloane could always drop off to sleep immediately, something she attributed to Milly and Anderson never giving her a set bedtime when she was little. “So you learn to sleep when you can,” she’d explained to me. “None of this story-reading, glass-of-water nonsense. I was always the one falling asleep on the pile of coats at a party.”

I waited to see if she was out for good, giving her one more gentle nudge. But she didn’t stir, so I figured I’d just ask her in the morning. I closed my eyes, and felt myself drift off, somehow comforted by the knowledge that when I woke up in the morning, Sloane would be there.

I woke up with a start. I looked around, trying to figure out why I wasn’t still sleeping. It wasn’t that the cat had fallen asleep on my head again, or that either of my parents were yelling at me to wake up. Pieces of the night before came back—delivering pizza with Dawn, Jamie Roarke, hugging mini-mart James—and I realized, with some surprise, these weren’t dream fragments. They had actually happened. I was about to try and go back to sleep, when the phone on my nightstand lit up.

A text.

I grabbed it and saw I had two—the first one must have been what woke me up. But despite the fact it wasn’t even eight yet, as I looked down at the phone, I was wide awake. Both texts were from a number I didn’t recognize. And as I held the phone in my hand, it buzzed with a third.

Emily. You awake?

I’m outside.

Let’s go.

It was like my brain short-circuited for a moment, then started working again, double-time. It was Sloane.

She was back.

I was out my door and down the stairs in a flash, not putting anything on over the T-shirt I’d been sleeping in, not trying to be quiet, not caring if I woke the whole house as my bare feet pounded down the stairs. Sloane was here, she was waiting for me, and she could tell me what had happened, where she’d gone—actually, I realized as I jumped down the last two steps to the first floor landing and launched myself into the mudroom, I didn’t even care about that. All that mattered was that she was here, and things could go back to how they’d been.

I pulled open the front door and stopped short. Frank was sitting on the steps, wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers, iPod strapped to his arm, and he stood and smiled when he saw me. “Hey,” he said. “Ready to go for a run?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it when I realized I wasn’t exactly sure what to say. I just stared at him as I felt my heart rate start to slow, my hopes fall. It wasn’t Sloane. She hadn’t come back.

She was still gone.

“Uh,” Frank said, and I noticed for the first time that he looked confused and a little uncomfortable.

I looked down at myself and suddenly realized that I had bigger problems. I was standing in front of Frank Porter— Frank Porter—in my nightshirt. Though it was slightly longer than a regular T-shirt, it wasn’t by much, and I quickly tugged it down. I was barefoot, and—oh god—I still had on some of the zit cream I’d put on my face the night before. I wasn’t wearing a bra. I quickly crossed my arms over my chest, then regretted this, as it caused the T-shirt to ride up higher.