"How old is he?" he finally asked.

Other people began to invade our cold and dusty table.

"Hey, man! I've been looking everywhere for you!" Chris shouted at Kyle. When Kyle didn't really respond, Chris and Alan started doing shots of Jagermeister from a bottle they'd carried out. Alan was bragging about how he was going to L.A. over Christmas break with his dad, and maybe he'd "take some meetings" while he was there. His plan, which I knew because everyone talked about it constantly, was to go to Stanford, major in film, and grow up to be an oily Hollywood producer. I had heard a rumor that Alan's dad, who I guess was a big-shot rich guy of some sort, had lined up summer internships for both Alan and Chris at production companies in L.A. This would be a big promotion for Alan, who I knew, from seeing him and his blond leg hair all summer, had been a lowly lifeguard at Fuller Pool. I went there every day with my friend Meghan from California. Alan was always either reading or pretending to read what he called the "trades," Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, and he and Chris, who was apparently going to go to UCLA and then be a famous stand-up comedian, were both also writing screenplays in their spare time. I had heard Chris talking before SV about how he couldn't talk about his, the idea being that it was so great and high-concept that someone might steal it and get the movie made before he could graduate from high school and take over Hollywood while at his unpaid internship. I had overheard enough self-loving snippets to know that Alan's screenplay was about a Stanford swimmer who is so irresistible and fabulous that some hot girl stalks him and tries to kill him. I guess no one told him that there's already a very stupid movie about exactly that. I don't know what Chris's screenplay was about, because it was such a state secret-probably a gorgeous guy with huge muscles, short dark hair, and bruised-looking eyes who gets stalked by a desperate supermodel. I mean, come on.

"He's almost twelve," I said to Kyle about Sam, even though it was too late.

But he was still waiting to hear, his face calm and still like a lake at night. I thought how smooth Kyle was, and I don't mean smooth in the terrible way. I mean like you could have skipped a stone across the surface of him.

"Twelve, huh?" he said, the corners of his mouth rising in a smile. "What's he like?"

Kyle Malanack seemed so not like a fake person. I mean, he's the kind of guy who asks what your little brother is like. And when he asks, you're certain it's because he's curious. And he deserves real props for both things-I mean, for being curious and for asking. Most people aren't curious about each other, unless there's something sickening or hideous to be curious about. And most people talk about themselves endlessly without asking questions. Or when they ask questions, it's like totally perfunctory and they don't really listen to the answer. Kyle Malanack is the type of boy, and I mean, he's a high school boy, who asks "What's he like" about your little brother, Sam, and when you say, "He wants to be either president or a rap artist," laughs with his head thrown back and you can see all his teeth and you can tell he sees how much you love your brother and that if Sam were his brother, he would love him too. And that's why you believe, even after it turns out to be false, that Kyle Malanack loves you.

Then he asked, "Is he a little person like you?"

I felt my breathing get faster, my heart pop a little in its cage. I really didn't like the question. But why? I mean, wasn't he just saying what we'd both been thinking anyway, that if we got married and had kids, they might be dwarfs like me?

And how did he know to use the words little person like you? Did he even know that LP was a phrase with capital letters? Or was it just how he thought of me, as a person who's kind of little, rather than a dwarf or midget?

"Nope," I said, "both my brothers are tall."

"Your parents, too?" he asked.

"Everyone in my family except me." I felt suddenly drunker than ever and realized my winegla.s.s was empty. I wanted another gla.s.s.

"So it's not genetic?"

He asked this in a kind way, the way you might ask someone about her job, or dog, or vacation. I shrugged unhappily. "It might be, I mean, you don't have to have a genetic condition to pa.s.s it on to your kids." I couldn't help but feel like now he might not want to have kids with me.

He took a swig of beer, noticed I had no drink, offered me a sip of his. I took the beer, so excited that he'd offered me a sip that it overrode my hatred of the taste.

"Do you have siblings?" I asked.

He looked confused by my question, but only for a moment, and then he looked totally freaked out. I had no idea how this could have been an offensive question, but I was instantly sorry I had asked.

"I'm an only child," he said. He took another gulp of beer, and something about the way he drank it made him seem like a little kid to me, like it was milk or something.

"So are you in town for Thanksgiving too?"

"Nah. I think I'm going with Alan to his grandparents' in Grosse Pointe." He said this as if he had just decided it, finished his beer, pulled another out from under the table.

I didn't say, "What about your family, aren't they in Ann Arbor?" I knew from Ginger and his Facebook page that Kyle had lived in Boston until this year, that he was new in the school. Past that, I knew nothing about him.

"Oh, cool," I said.

"Yeah. Maybe me and Alan'll catch a game or something."

"You like football?"

"I like to watch it," he said.

"Ann Arbor's a good place for you, then. We have season tickets to the Wolverines-"

I almost got to "if you want to come sometime," but before I made it there, from across the table where Chris and Alan had started a game of quarters, Chris threw a coin at Kyle, hard, but Kyle dodged it and then got up and put Chris in a headlock. Then they jumped off the deck and started rolling around in the yard. Alan shouted out to Tim Malone, "Dude, look at the lovebirds." Everyone looked, of course, so Kyle and Chris let go of each other right away and came back up to the tables and resumed their conversations or drinking or whatever they were doing.

Teenage boys are hybrids of people and monkeys. This kind of interaction was a daily occurrence at school: the h.o.m.oerotic banter followed by physical contact, followed by someone calling the whole thing what it was (love, desire for contact, although put in fouler terms, usually), and then an embarra.s.sed retreat back to the solo corners of teenage boy dom, the lone seat at the lunch table, or the cla.s.sroom desk, or wherever. I sometimes think, especially now after the whole s.e.x thing, that life would be easier for all of us if boys just had s.e.x with each other. I mean, I guess lots of them do do that, but I mean the ones who don't, the ones who think they're so straight, so into girls. Because maybe sometimes it's what they want. And if straight boys want to sleep with their friends once in a while, that would be fine, right? I mean, other than ruining their idea of themselves, it wouldn't cost anyone else anything. Then they wouldn't have to use girls, or s.e.x with girls, as a way to bond with each other instead of bonding with the girls. Because I know I'm not the most experienced person in the world, but that's what I think guys are doing sometimes. I don't know why no one told me. No one ever talks about this stuff . And maybe it's surprising to everyone and not just me, because the brochures and website for Darcy are all full of pictures of people dancing across stages, singing in brightly colored musicals, or studying on the neon green lawn, but there are a lot of sketchy things happening there, and I don't just mean people f.u.c.king and then never talking to each other again-I mean, like, gang bangs.

And when I say "gang bang," I mean any s.e.x that involves one girl and more than one guy. Because even though I'm only almost seventeen now I know what that kind of s.e.x means. I didn't even know the term gang bang until I heard it in a song Chad was listening to, and when I asked him about it, he said, "Oh, that's group s.e.x."

And I was like, "What is group s.e.x?" because I was only thirteen when this happened.

And he was like, "More than two people having s.e.x," and I couldn't even imagine what that meant, really, because my parents had read me that stupid body book for girls, and it had "s.e.x" in it, but only the kind where you and your husband are in love and then you make a baby, by putting that in this, yadda-yadda. The body book for girls did not have gang bangs in it. And either Chad didn't really know what he was talking about or he wanted to protect me from the truth, because gang bangs aren't just a group of people having s.e.x because everyone wants to. At Darcy, gang bang means boys and other boys having s.e.x with a girl-and really, she's just a fake thing, a conduit between the people who want to have s.e.x with each other but can't-Kyle and Chris, for example. Or Kyle and Alan. Or Alan and Chris. Maybe those are just the guys' way of experimenting, or "practicing," as we used to call it when I was twelve and thirteen, at Tappan, and we used to gather in Stacy Levinson-Monroe's bas.e.m.e.nt and French kiss each other and slide our nightgowns off our thin chests and "practice." But we never used real guys in those experiments, just played a little bit with each other, seeing how it would feel, making sure we'd be "good at it" if the need ever arose. We never talked about those nights after they happened, not once. Or acted them out at parties. And we didn't take it to mean we were gay, even though the kissing felt good. And I'm not saying that Kyle or any of his guy friends is gay, because I think they're straight if what that means is that they'll marry girls and have kids and live in the kinds of places where no one's allowed to admit to being gay anyway, even if they are. I just mean I don't get why they have to use girls instead of just admitting they're sometimes in love with each other. Maybe it's because they're teenagers, or maybe guys are just chicken in general. But for whatever reason, the boys I know were too scared to use each other for their practice.

Ginger invited herself over the Monday after the party. I wondered if she had seen me on the porch with Kyle and that was why. Like maybe because he was interested in me, she suddenly found me interesting for real too. Because I had invited her over once before, but she'd said she had to be somewhere else and not said where and I'd a.s.sumed it was a lie and that she just didn't want to come to my house. But then during lunch, she came over to where I was sitting with Goth Sarah and Molly and stood in front of us.

"Hey, Judy, I could come over this afternoon, if the invitation still stands," she said. I was pretty surprised, but I tried to shrug and said, "Sure," like it was nothing. I didn't have a voice rehearsal that afternoon, because the freshmen were apparently not at all ready for their fall concert and were having extra rehearsals in the auditorium. And I could give up my practice room time for Ginger.

Molly didn't care at all-but I could tell Goth Sarah didn't like Ginger coming over to talk to us and also probably noticed that I was happy not to go to the practice rooms for Ginger, even though I never skipped that hour for Goth Sarah. Sarah kind of had a thing about some of the other girls at D'Arts, even though she was big on women uniting and taking over the world together instead of fighting with each other. I guess someone had started a rumor about her at Scarlett Middle School, that she had gotten crabs at Interlochen summer camp. Which is completely stupid-I mean, she was twelve. Maybe it was lice or something, and they blew it out of proportion. Everyone gets lice at camp. I know the one time my parents let me go to overnight camp for one traumatic week, I came home with bugs absolutely leaping off my head. Or maybe she didn't even get lice that time; maybe it was nothing at all and those girls just made the whole thing up, I don't know. But I guess everyone believed it and thought Sarah was dirty and gross. And Sarah still held a ma.s.sive grudge, which I could kind of understand, even though it was clearly time to let it go. Ginger could also just make you feel bad about yourself, even though she didn't mean to. Something about her reminded me of the Cheshire Cat, maybe her ability to materialize suddenly, looking somehow more than three-dimensional. Her ratty clothes felt like an insult to the rest of us, a statement about how easy it was for her to come to school in her pajamas and still look a thousand times more gorgeous than any of us (except Elizabeth Wood), no matter how much effort we put in.

I knew I should invite Goth Sarah and Molly to come over to my house that afternoon too, but I couldn't bring myself to. I didn't think Molly wanted to come or that Sarah would be able to be nice to Ginger, and I didn't want the whole afternoon to be an awkward nightmare. And isn't it okay to have more than one group of friends? So we said nothing about it for the rest of lunch, just rehashed the fun, mundane matters of our party: Tim Malone had flirted with Molly all night, and we were sure he was about to ask her out. Kelly Barksper had unb.u.t.toned her shirt all the way down to her jeans and done a dance standing on the couch in front of a group of guys; Chad's friend Santana humped everyone in sight like Sarah's house was the dog park. Susie Schultz had made out with both Mike Conner and Ian Sarbell; Elizabeth Wood had pa.s.sed out, but not before barfing all over Tyler Phillips and the jade plant in Sarah's parents' foyer. Another giant stain had appeared mysteriously on the living room rug, so Sarah and I had moved the couch over two feet to hide it. Maybe her parents would never notice, or we'd say Sarah got food poisoning from ordering pizza too many times while they were gone. It had taken nine hours to clean her house on Sunday, and Chad had come to pick up the kegs.

As we were leaving the lunchroom, Goth Sarah snuck her cell phone out of her purse, even though we weren't allowed to have phones at school unless they were locked in our lockers or they would get confiscated until the end of the week. Molly was like, "Sarah! I can't believe you have that thing with you again. Put it away-are you crazy?"

"Whatever," Sarah said. "If they take it, it's worth it-Eliot just texted me!"

Then Molly rushed off to her locker because she had to get notes for an open-book Latin test, and I guess Goth Sarah had been waiting until we were alone, because she was like, "Be careful of Ginger Mews. She's a b.i.t.c.h."

I wished Molly had stayed; she would have been reasonable. "Really?" I asked.

"She's just the type to, like, steal friends and boyfriends and start rumors."

"Everyone dates each other's boyfriends in high school-there's only like twenty boys in the whole cla.s.s. And what do you mean, rumors?" I wondered if she'd mention the crabs thing.

"Nothing. There was just this thing last year where she told everyone that she had seen Jessica Lambkin making out with some old guy and it became this huge mess."

"Had she?"

"Had she what?"

"Seen Jessica with some old guy."

"That's not the point. I just mean, even if she had, why ruin Jessica's life with it?"

"Why would that ruin Jessica's life?"

"The guy was her dad."

"Let me get this straight: Ginger saw Jessica Lambkin making out with her dad."

"Jessica's dad."

"Her own dad. Jessica Lambkin was making out with the man who sired her."

"What?"

"The guy whose sperm made her."

"I know what sire means. Stop being so pretentious."

"Jessica was French-kissing her own father?"

"That's what Ginger Mews told everyone," Sarah said.

"Wow. That's really horrible."

"And it wasn't true. I mean, maybe they were kissing and hugging or something, but they couldn't have been, you know, making out. But it was one of those stupid things-and once Ginger said it, everyone talked about it so much that whenever you saw Jessica, you were just like, ew. Even if you didn't think it was true."

"That's really stupid. That whole story is just incredibly stupid. You do realize, don't you, that this is why everyone thinks teenagers are idiots." I stood and walked over to the trash can at the entrance to the cafeteria.

Goth Sarah followed me and stood there while I dumped my lunch out. "Actually, people think that because when you're a teenager, your brain isn't fully developed yet," she said. "I saw it on PBS. They used to think your brain was, like, finished growing once you weren't a little kid anymore, but then they realized that this part"-she tapped on her forehead-"right behind your forehead, where you control everything you do-that part isn't 'fully matured' or whatever in teenagers."

"What's your point?" I asked. "That we are stupid?" I spat my gum out.

She laughed. "No. I mean, their point on PBS was that the forehead part is like the boss of your brain, and the older it gets, the better you are at judging what you shouldn't do. Your brain is all exuberant when you're young, but then it gets you know, adulted out with rules or whatever. Some kind of disgusting white film starts covering your brain as you get older, mummifying your thoughts."

" Really? Gross."

"Not until you're in your twenties," Sarah said, grinning joyfully. "So we still have a while with our underdeveloped brains." I loved Sarah's fact h.o.a.rd. She watched a lot of PBS, and more than once I had seen her reading science books in the library and hallways-ones that weren't a.s.signed.

But I couldn't resist saying, "If that's true, then isn't it wrong to hold a grudge forever just because someone once said some stupid s.h.i.t about you when you both had infant brains?" I asked.

"Touche!" Sarah said, but now the bell was ringing and she dashed down the hall because as usual she had to go hide her cell phone in her locker, and was going to be late.

Maybe Sarah was right that Ginger had done something b.i.t.c.hy to Jessica Lambkin, but even without the whole brain argument, can you really define a whole person by one cruel thing she does? I ignored her warning, of course, and Ginger came over that afternoon. When we got to my house, it was totally quiet; Sam was with my parents at the Grill, and Chad was living full-time at his dorm now, coming home only to do laundry or have dinner whenever he had nothing better to do. I poured us some raspberry pop in the kitchen, and then Ginger and I took it and some potato chips up to my bedroom, where we sat listening to Bob Dylan.

I wished I had torn down the white curtains with lavender flowers, or changed the matching bedspread to something cooler, although I didn't know what that would have been. She poked around the room a bit when we first came in, looking at the pictures I had tacked to my bulletin board: me and Sam swimming at Silver Lake; my parents getting married in St. Louis, the arch visible behind them; Chad at his graduation from Huron High, still shaved bald from nationals; Meghan and me at the LPA conference the summer before, with Joel in between us, raising his eyebrows like, "I'm in a picture with two hot girls."

"Who's that guy?" Ginger asked, pointing at Joel.

I yawned. "Some guy I met at a conference last summer."

"Did you f.u.c.k him?"

In spite of myself, I felt the blood rush to my head, and hoped it wasn't visible. I tried to sound nonchalant.

"He wanted to," I lied. "But I didn't want to lose it to him."

Ginger nodded, as if this was not only an appropriate response, but also the answer she knew she'd get. "Guys are pigs," she said. She came over and lay down across my bed. Because it was low to the floor, she had to fall a long way down, and she looked oddly disproportionate. I shifted my weight in the purple beanbag chair I was sitting on, felt its millions of tiny pellets shift, pour, and regroup. I thought maybe the thing about pigs was something she had heard her mother say. It sounded like that, like something that hadn't originated in Ginger's mind or mouth.

Dylan was singing, "I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways."

I debated whether to be like, "Yeah, I know, I know," which would have been completely false but maybe cool and unawkward, or ask the real, genuinely curious, "What do you mean, pigs?" I settled on the latter.

"You know, they just use you."

"For what?"

She laughed, as if I'd been joking. "s.e.x, of course," she said.

"But don't girls have s.e.x because they want to, too?"

"Yeah. But we also want other things, and s.e.x is all that guys want."

I thought of Chad and Sam. Sam wanted salamanders, and Chad? Time with our dad, and swimming pools and footb.a.l.l.s and, from what I could tell about him and his new U of M girlfriend, Alice, back-scratching. I couldn't bring myself to agree with Ginger, even if it meant we'd never be friends. I stayed quiet.

"You should be careful," she said.

"Careful of what?"

"Guys at Darcy."

"Okay," I said, turning away so she couldn't see my expression. I was embarra.s.sed, didn't know what she was warning me of, exactly, but I didn't like it.

"Hey," she said. She swung her flamingo legs off my bed and found her purse on the floor where she'd tossed it. She opened the zipper. "You want?" She took something out of a ziplock bag and held it out to me. It was a tiny cigarette, all wrinkly and crazy-looking.

It took me a minute.

"Is that marijuana?"

She laughed. "Yeah," she said.

I blushed again. "Sure."

She fished around for a lighter.

"Um, Ginger, maybe we should go out back-I mean, my mom might not like it if she could smell it when she gets back."

"Sure," she said. All of a sudden, I wished Sarah were over instead of her. I didn't have to pretend to be cool in front of Sarah. And I know it's stupid, but I had never smoked pot, and I was a little worried about whether it would freak me out or make me paranoid or something.

We went out to my backyard, which is mostly trees; they back all the way up to Washtenaw. Chad and Sam and I used to think it was enormous, like acres and acres of land, when we were small. We got CB radios once for Christmas, and played with them for two hundred days in a row, calling to each other from across the backyard. A couple of times we even overheard truckers talking. Once, Chad strung a wire from the tallest tree to the shortest, and put a pulley on it, and we climbed the tree and held on to the pulley and slid down over and over until the pulley snapped while Sam was on it and he fell and broke his arm. I remember he got a red cast. Sam always got hurt. Whenever we roughhoused or went wild after dessert, our mom would be yelling, "Someone's gonna get hurt! And it's gonna be Sam."

Walking out into the backyard with Ginger, I wished I were a little kid again, with Sam and Chad, our mom yelling from the deck, "Someone's gonna get hurt!" I wondered if Chad had ever smoked pot. I guessed so, wished I had asked for advice so I could have been prepared for this. I mean, I had smoked cigarettes once with Meghan, sneaking off behind the hotel at an LPA conference. She had menthol ones and I kind of liked them. I hoped, as Ginger and I climbed the rope ladder into Chad's old tree house, that the experience of smoking those would make it look like I wasn't a total infant.

She climbed into the hole in the middle of the tree house floor; I was behind her on the ladder. As soon as my head popped up into the house, I saw the cobwebs and bugs that had taken over the floor. Ginger shuddered and moved herself over to a corner.

"Whatever," I said, hoping to make her feel as stupid about being squeamish as I did about being inexperienced. I brushed some of the mess away down the hole, and she came out from the corner, where she had been squatting on her tiptoes. She took a lighter out of her pocket, sat down, lit the shriveled cigarette, and took a puff. She appeared to have filled her entire body up with smoke, because she got taller and taller as she inhaled, and held her breath for a long time before she blew out a thin stream of smoke and shrank back down to normal size. Then she handed me the thing. I had a vivid flash of how much better a time I'd be having if Molly and Goth Sarah had come over.

"Go ahead," Ginger said. I tried to hold it expertly between my fingers, without burning myself. She leaned her head back against the wall of the tree house and I watched her smooth throat, then put the joint in my mouth too far, so it was more like eating it than smoking it. I breathed all the way into my lungs, almost slurping the whole thing right into my windpipe. I could feel something black and feathery shoot into my body, like a hot pile of raked leaves, burning down my throat and into my body. I hated it, began coughing, gagging, trying to get the taste and smell and feeling out of my lungs.