"Oh my G.o.d," Ginger said, looking over at me. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," I hacked out. "Totally good." I stopped coughing finally, and waited to see what would happen. Maybe I would completely freak out and be unable to speak. I thought I might sit under the table in my parents' dining room, or eat everything in the kitchen, or my eyes would turn red and veiny and I'd be a complete junkie.

Instead, I felt nothing.

"You want another toke?" Ginger asked.

I shook my head. "No, I'm good," I said.

Ginger took a few more tokes and then we climbed down.

"Are you high?" she asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Good," she said.

We walked through the backyard, and she started giggling, so I started to fake giggle, hoping that's what you did, and she said, "So your brother's friend called me."

"Yeah? Santana?"

" Uh-huh."

"And?"

"We're supposed to hang out this Friday night."

"Wow. Really?"

She gave me a nonchalant look. "Yeah, I mean, he's okay and everything, but honestly, I wasn't sure I wanted to, so I waited two days before I said I'd hang out."

I couldn't resist. "Because he's forty and should get a girlfriend his own age?"

She shot me a sideways look. "I just don't know if I like him. What about you?"

I deflected. "Did you and Santana hook up at the party?"

"Nothing major," she said, and we hit another impa.s.se. I had no idea whether Ginger and I agreed on what major meant-I mean, I had seen them making out in front of everyone. But I didn't want to explore the terms. Mainly, I was relieved to know they'd hooked up at all, since that probably meant she hadn't left with Kyle.

"Did you hook up with anyone?" she asked.

"Not at the party," I said, blushing. "I was too busy hosting, I guess."

We went upstairs to my room, and as I closed the door, I heard my mom's car pull into the driveway, and Sam, pulling the empty garbage cans up the driveway. I climbed onto my little stool to look out the window.

"My mom's home," I told Ginger.

She looked at her watch. "Wow," she said, "she gets home early. My mom works till like nine or ten every night."

"My dad's doing dinner at the Grill tonight because Sam had something he had to go to. Do you want to stay for dinner?"

"If it's okay with your mom," she said. She giggled again. "I'm hungry!"

I guessed that this must be related to the smoking, so I said, "Yeah, me too!" and she gave me a knowing look, like we had a secret together, and I was glad we'd done it, even though it had sucked and had no effect on me at all. Maybe I was impervious to pot, I thought, maybe it doesn't work on little people. Then there were keys in the door, shoes in the hallway, voices pouring up the stairs.

"Judy? You home, sweetie?"

I tried to smell my hair and clothes, to see if they smelled like pot, without Ginger noticing. I took a pack of Eclipse out of my pocket and frantically chewed several pieces.

"Don't worry," Ginger said. "There's no way she'll notice. I mean, it was only one hit and we were outside for a long time after."

Sam came bounding up the stairs to my room, his coat still on.

"Judy! Do you want to see it?" he shouted to me, pushing the door open. "Oh!" he said when he saw Ginger. He shrank back like a tiny weed. "Sorry, I didn't know-"

"That's okay, Sam. Come in-this is Ginger."

He looked down at the floor, nodding so that his straight hair flopped over his eyes. I could tell he found Ginger pretty, and that this unnerved him. The truth is, Ginger might be the prettiest person I've ever met, and either she doesn't try or she tries so hard that it makes it look like she didn't even have to try. I mean, she wears almost no makeup, had the kind of skin so clear you can basically see through it to her veins, floppy blond hair, and all small features except for her lips, which are so puffy that they look like some kind of sea monster attacked her and sucked on them until they swelled up. Well, that's not an attractive way to put it, but the point is, her lips are huge and everyone wants to kiss them because they present themselves so a.s.sertively. The result is that Ginger looks like a commercial for whatever she happens to be doing or eating or holding. Now she was selling my bed, sprawled across it like a giant when Sam came in.

"You can show both of us," Ginger said. She propped herself up on her elbows.

"Show us what?" I asked.

"Whatever you were going to show Judy," she said to Sam.

I liked her for saying this to him, rather than answering me. It seemed respectful, made Sam feel dignified.

"Oh, that," he said. "It was just a move."

He looked up, and I was amazed and alarmed to see that he did, in fact, want to show Ginger and me his "move."

"Go for it, Sam-show us," I said.

He took his coat the rest of the way off, revealing a Kanye West T-shirt so absurd and big and aspirational on him that I wanted to wrap him up and protect him from whatever Ginger was about to think. But she was smiling.

Sam began jogging in place and then threw himself down on the rug in my room and tried to spin himself up into a headstand of some sort. It didn't work out very well, but, perhaps in an effort to save face, he vaulted himself from a triangle kind of yoga pose into a regular headstand and then came crashing down, leapt up, and did some more jogging. I applauded.

He stood there, blushing.

"It doesn't really work on the carpet," he said, picking up his jacket.

"No, no," I said. "We could tell it would be great on a real floor. Very impressive." But he was looking at Ginger, who had a huge smile on her face.

"That was great," she said. "You'll be breaking on stages across America, no doubt. You should audition for So You Think You Can Dance. Or at least go out for D'Arts." She used a very serious voice to say this. Sam regarded her for a moment, trying to tell whether she might be mocking him and deciding, from her unblinking performance, that she was not.

At dinner, my mom watched Ginger carefully, with an interest I couldn't place. She asked lots of polite questions about Darcy, some less polite ones about Ginger's parents, who, it turned out, were divorced, both remarried, her mom redivorced and her dad living in Texas with a young wife Ginger said she hated. I was totally shocked, had a.s.sumed Ginger had an absolute picket fence around some perfect family in a white house. My mom, although not surprised, was also not impressed, and when Ginger left after dessert and a bit of lingering, my mom put on a flat voice that sounded like she was helping me run lines: "It was nice to meet her."

Then she waited for what she thought was long enough before she asked, "When is Sarah coming over again? Do you two have any plans?"

Adults are so obvious. It's weird that the teenage brain is considered underdeveloped. Maybe the more we develop the less capable we are of hiding our mostly pathetic motives. Or maybe we just give up, stop trying.

"No," I finally said. And went up to my room, listened at the vent to see if my mom would tell my dad what I knew she thought of Ginger, that she was a bad influence on me, or that I had "fallen in with a bad crowd." I was so sick of the idea of being careful. My plan was to feel thrilled about having smoked pot. But instead all I heard was my mom and dad bickering about Christmas and who was staying in what room when everyone visited and whether some people should stay in a hotel and whether Chad would want to come home or stay in his dorm over the holiday. My mom was furious that my dad wasn't helping figure everything out in advance without being nagged to; my dad was annoyed that she was nagging him. He never thought planning or setting anything up was a big deal. Of course he didn't have to do the planning or setting up, and maybe that was why. Or maybe if she had nagged him less, he would have taken more initiative.

Listening to them, all I could think was, "Can I please keep my exuberant brain forever?"

7 I was so nervous the night of the senior voice concert that I couldn't stop asking Chad if teenagers could have heart attacks. My pulse was like 210, pounding in my neck like an alien trying to escape. Chad said teenagers never die of heart attacks.

"You're going to be great," he kept saying. "The nervousness is the sign of a true genius." He said he was so nervous before his swim meets that he sometimes threw up, and the more nervous he was, the better he did.

"I'm not nervous when I dance," Sam said.

It was a cold, rainy night and the pavement in the parking lot shimmered as we walked up to the school from the car. I had on boots, black skirt, white blouse, and red tie, since those were the colors the seniors were wearing. I had dark lipstick on too, like Ms. Doman's. She had told us she was going to bring her husband. And since we all wanted to be married to her, this was interesting for us.

Everyone was there-and I mean the entire school, every teacher, student, sibling, parent, and custodian, all crowded in the hallway outside the auditorium. Mrs. O'Henry was all dressed up in a long maroon dress with b.u.t.tons shaped like flowers, and she waved to my parents and me. Then I saw Ginger and some woman with enormous hair. When the woman turned, I stared. Her face looked like plastic that had been melted and molded, and now could never be moved. She was weirdly ageless, and resembled, in the way that all victims of plastic surgery do, Michael Jackson. Maybe it's the absurdly tiny noses that make people look like that, shadows of their original, real noses hovering above the new ones. Like the way you have limb anxiety when your leg gets cut off but you feel like you still have a leg. Maybe you break your face's heart when you chop off parts of it, and it longs for the other half of its original nose. The woman with Ginger had eyebrows so high up across her forehead that they looked suspended by puppet strings. I wondered how she closed her eyes to sleep, because she had practically no eyelids left.

"Hey, Judy, this is my mom," Ginger said, and the woman reached out and shook my hand and then my mom's hand, and after I recovered from the shock of Ginger having a mom who looked like that, I thought how her hands betrayed her, looked like they belonged to a fifty-year-old woman who had been married and divorced twice and was raising Ginger alone. Her b.o.o.bs, on the other hand, looked like they were about to torpedo off her chest and puncture anything in her path. My mom took a tiny step back.

"Hi, I'm Mimi," said Ginger's mom.

"h.e.l.lo," my mom said, in her flat voice, and I was furious at her for acting like a sn.o.b, even though I was stunned by Ginger's mother too. My mind was surging forward. For one thing, as soon as I met her mom, I thought maybe Ginger had a scholarship too. For another, maybe she wore sweatpants and stuff all the time because she didn't have that much money to buy fancy clothes. For a third, maybe she was insecure, embarra.s.sed of her mom. Of course, it was sweet that her mother would show up at the senior voice concert when Ginger wasn't even in it. Maybe she just wanted to see the school. Or had Ginger been hiding her from us and now her mom had found an excuse to meet everyone? I would have to a.n.a.lyze with Molly, who was smart about other people's parents. Sarah was too mean about Ginger to be able to help.

"Thank you for having Ginger over," Ginger's mom was saying, and I couldn't stop thinking about how weird it was that Ginger's mom wore so much makeup and had such a crazy-single-lady look with the big painted nails and everything when Ginger was so pretty in her sweatpants without trying. And then I thought how Goth Sarah was the opposite of her mom too, because her mom was all plain while Sarah was so Goth. This made me wonder if I was the same as my mom or different, and maybe it's just because it's hard to see yourself, but I couldn't decide. The truth is, even now, I don't know if either half of me is like my mom. Is the regular Judy half of me like my mom, even if the dwarf half isn't? Even if I weren't a dwarf, would I be like her? When I think about it, it gets hard to say what either of us is even like.

I did know one thing: my mom was being unfair by thinking just because of the way she looked that Ginger's mom couldn't be doing a good job. My mom never said she thought that, but I could tell. But she was wrong, because I know now that Ginger's mom is actually a good mother, and maybe my mom had an after-school-special idea about her just because she wants to be younger than she is. Of course, I kind of had the wrong idea about Ginger and her mother too, so maybe I am like my mom.

I saw Kyle walking into the auditorium by himself, and was thrilled that he had come, even though it was impossible to know who he'd come to hear; I mean, all of his friends were seniors, so it could have been anyone in SV.

Then Ms. Doman came in with an old man, and I wondered who he was-her dad? A new teacher? Then I saw that he had his hand on the back of her waist, and a jolt of terror shot through me like an arrow. That hundred-year-old man was her husband! My mom made her way over to them, dragging me by the hand like a five-year-old.

"You must be Ms. Doman," she said, and I was embarra.s.sed that she would say such a boring thing to the most brilliant teacher in the school.

"Are you Judy's mom?" Ms. Doman asked, holding my mom's gaze like a movie star in love.

My mom nodded and put her arm behind my head, which is her way of putting an arm around me. This way, she doesn't have to crouch down, but also doesn't appear to be patting my hair like I'm a pet of some sort.

Ms. Doman leaned forward, glanced around politely, saw that no one but her ancient husband was in earshot. "Judy is the best student I've had in twelve years of teaching," she told my mother. I thought my mother might leap into her arms.

"Thank you so much for telling us that. We're very proud of her, of course."

Mr. Doman harrumphed and Ms. Doman opened up the side of herself that was next to him. "Judy, Ms. Lohden, this is my husband, Norman Crump."

"Norman Crump?" my mother asked. "The Norman Crump?"

"The one and only," Ms. Doman said, half sweetly and half bitterly, as if she knew he was famous but wasn't impressed anymore after years of having to pick his undershirts off the back of her desk chair or something.

"It's nice to meet you both," Norman Crump said in a gentle way, and I felt bad for having had mean thoughts about him before he'd even opened his mouth. What was wrong with me? As if to make it worse, he turned to me. He had an afro of gray hair around his head, and wore round frameless gla.s.ses. I wondered if he had been cute when he was young, thought probably only in a so-ugly-it's-lovable way. He had a big, weird-shaped nose right in the middle of his face; it looked like someone had made it half an hour before out of modeling clay and put it on him as a disguise.

"Emma has shown me some of your writing," he said. "I hope you'll be a writer someday."

"Really? Thank you!" I was unable to mask my babyish delight, even at hearing him call Ms. Doman "Emma" in front of me. I tried to recover my dignity, but made everything worse by adding, "I mean, coming from you, that means a lot."

Norman Crump is a Michigan hero. He's a writer who sets all of his novels in Ann Arbor, and describes the town perfectly every time, making it seem like the center of the universe, instead of just a top-ten university town like Madison or wherever else college students gather in the Midwest to drink beer and get educated. He always has young people having s.e.x in unmistakably Ann Arbor locations: the stadium, Gallup Park, on the steps at Hill Auditorium. Maybe he and Ms. Doman frolicked all over the town when he was young. Although when he was young, she wasn't born yet. So maybe he did it with someone else and then married Ms. Doman as soon as she turned eighteen. Old famous writers always marry their students. Maybe Ms. Doman had been the prettiest and most promising one in his cla.s.s, so he had married her. I couldn't think of a polite way to ask how they'd met, although I was curious. What if I asked and he had been her nursery school teacher? No one wanted to have that conversation.

My parents went into the auditorium, where we saw Mr. Luther taking a seat by himself. He was so wrong for being a schoolteacher. It was like he was a sea sponge, removed from its natural habitat and unable to survive in the world he had picked. I hoped he was gay and had a boyfriend, but was just too shy to bring him. I hoped the boyfriend was sweet and sociable and helped Mr. Luther interact with whatever world they lived in when he didn't have to be at school. As long as he wasn't just alone all the time, living in the math room, slinking out from behind his desk to attend our events. I told my parents to go sit with him and headed backstage, where all the seniors were chattering giddily and putting on lipstick. Alan was rubbing Amanda Fulton's shoulders and bare neck. I stood in the wings, waiting for Ms. Vanderly to gesture to me and Carrie to come out, and trying to breathe deeply even though every time I did, I inhaled so much dust from the thick dark red curtains on the stage that I thought my throat would close off entirely like a clogged bathtub drain. Ms. Vanderly was on stage introducing us, and then she turned a beaming smile toward the wings. Carrie and I looked at each other, nodded, and walked out snapping. We started the whole concert with the intro to "Take Five," and honestly, I was so nervous I felt like I might black out. But the audience was dark enough that I could pretend they weren't there, that the blazing above me was sunshine coming through my bedroom window, and I bolted that introduction out, all the boo boo shoo be doo bops, listening for Carrie's voice and trying to make sure we matched, that I wasn't drowning her out. I could hear her slight, high voice like a glittering string above mine, and I relaxed. We sang, "Still, I know our eyes often meet / I feel tingles down to my feet," and I could feel Ms. Vanderly's proud eyes on us from the wings.

Then everybody came out, and we did four numbers together before the six of us doing real solos exited and lined up backstage. I came out first again, the spotlight so bright in my eyes I couldn't see anything. I took a steadying breath and sang "We Belong Together," the whole song out into absolute blankness that could have been my room or the shower or outer s.p.a.ce, except my parents and Chad and Sam and Kyle and Ginger and her mother and Molly and Goth Sarah and what I considered to be the rest of the world were all watching, listening.

I came back to consciousness during the last verse: Shall we weigh along these streets Young lions on the lam?

Are the signs you hid deep in your heart All left on neon for them?

Then it was a blur. The audience was standing and screaming, and we were done, had sung our solos and the finale and felt like rock stars even though the fans were our parents and brothers and teachers and their hundred-year-old husbands. Backstage was like being inside a hot air popper. Everyone had rushed back there and was hugging and screaming and congratulating each other. I spotted Kyle right away; he was standing near the doorway to the auditorium with Chris and a woman I guessed must be Chris's mom. She was fine-boned, wearing a simple black dress with a cream cardigan over it, and black boots with a lot of st.i.tching on them. Her hair was pulled up into a gold clip, and she had on soft pink lipstick. Both of her arms were wrapped around Chris, and she looked like she might die of love and pride. To my surprise, he didn't seem to mind, was returning the snuggle, unembarra.s.sed. I wondered how his dad could have left them, if she had lots of boyfriends, if Chris was jealous. Alan was there too, but before I could figure out who his parents were, mine arrived to smother me with compliments.

I could see past them that Kyle was making his way over, although maybe he was just headed to the door to leave. But in any case, as he walked by, he was like, "Judy Lohden, congrats, man, that was great!"

My parents were standing there like cardboard cutouts of themselves. I said, "Thanks, Kyle!" really fast, and my voice was all high-pitched and squeaky so I tried to cover it up by saying, "So were you," which was horrible because he hadn't been in the concert because he wasn't in senior voice. But instead of being like, "I mean, I know you would have been good," or whatever I could have said to unembarra.s.s myself and continue making it worse, I managed to stay quiet. This was good, because it meant I could keep hearing my name in his voice. It echoed in the dark, empty chamber of my mind. Ginger was standing there too, and she was like, yeah, good job, Judy, and even though I was grateful that she said it, because now the stupid thing I'd said to Kyle wasn't the last thing anyone had said, I pushed her voice away so it wouldn't ruin Kyle's. Because my name sounded different when he said it from how it was when anyone else, including me, said it. In his voice, it was crunchy, like car wheels on a gravel driveway.

My parents took Molly, Goth Sarah, Chad, and Sam and me to the Grill that night, where Brad, the manager with floppy blond hair and a unibrow, already had banana splits ready for Chad and Sam and a mint chocolate sundae for me. He asked what Molly and Goth Sarah wanted, and Goth Sarah was like, "Coffee, please, black," and Molly ordered lemon sorbet. I saw my parents look at each other. I'm not allowed to have coffee, maybe because it stunts your growth. I felt like a little kid, eating my stupid frothy sundae while Molly and Sarah spooned sorbet and sipped coffee. We sat in the front, listening to the rain pound down on the roof and gossiping about the concert.

"He's a thousand-year-old fossil," I said.

"Yeah, but he's amazing. I mean, did you read Under Babylon?" Goth Sarah asked. My mom was so impressed she could barely contain herself.

"I didn't," I said, "but my mom did."

"It's a wonderful novel," my mom said, "I've been encouraging Judy to read it for years!"

"My dad has that book at home," Molly said. "I'm going to check it out."

"Norman made a point of coming up to us to say what a fabulous job you did tonight, honey," my mom said to me. This made me think of Kyle's voice saying, "Judy Lohden, congrats, man," and my stomach flipped like a pancake.

"You were dope!" Sam said. "I mean, no one else was as good, and they were seniors! Everyone in the audience thought so."

"Thanks, Sam."

"So, is Ginger coming over again?"

I was surprised he would ask this in front of Sarah and Molly. I saw Sarah shoot Molly a look like, "Of course," but Molly grinned.

"Who's Ginger?" Chad asked, and I started to say, "You know Ginger-" but Sarah was staring at me like, "Shut up," and then thankfully my mom said, "Ginger is a new friend of Judy's" before I could say, "The one your hideous friend Santana freaked at that party we didn't tell Mom and Dad about."