I was crying before they got the door open, even knowing there'd be nothing to find, because even amateur, self-righteous vandals weren't dumb enough to stash their spray paint at school, but it was still humiliating and there was a cop forcing open my locker and how the fuck had my life turned into this movie-and in the seconds before they deemed the locker inoffensive and sent me on my way, incriminating tears or not, I cursed Lacey, and thought, if only for a second, Nikki was right.

Lacey was ebullient when she scooped me up in the parking lot. We'd officially gotten away with it. "Bonnie and Clyde, right?"

"Bonnie and Clyde ended up dead."

"What crawled up your ass?"

I couldn't explain that I'd turned on her, however briefly, that I didn't deserve her or the celebration she proposed, and instead I made her drop me off at home. If I could make it to my room before I started to cry, I thought, I would be safe. The day could end and tomorrow everything would be erased.

My father was waiting behind the door. "Your mother's in your room," he said. His face was doom.

"What? Why's she not at work?"

"Just go up there."

"What's wrong?" It seemed likely someone was dead, or at least on the way there. I could see no other reason for my mother to leave work in the middle of the afternoon, no other end for this shitty, decompensating day.

He shook his head. "I promised her I'd give her first shot. But . . . let's just say, officially, I'm very disappointed. Unofficially?" He winked.

So fucked.

"Any chance we can pretend I never came home?"

He pointed at the stairs. "Go. And, kid?"

"Yeah?"

"Gird your loins."

WHAT SHE'D FOUND: TWO CANS of spray paint, which Lacey had insisted we not throw out (but that she not keep). Rolling papers and a glass pipe I'd never used. Condoms, equally unused, extra-large and strawberry-flavored at Lacey's insistence. Lipstick, too ugly to wear but shoplifted from Woolworth's just because. Dusty bottles filched from the liquor cabinet. A Polaroid of Lacey's boobs that had served us some ridiculous purpose I couldn't remember.

How she knew to find it: A call to her office from a nameless "concerned friend" who was obviously Nikki Drummond, concerned only about ruining my life.

What she said: You are a disappointment. You are a disgrace. You are, it goes without saying, grounded.

You are not the daughter I raised.

You are lucky I'm not calling the cops.

You will never see that Lacey again.

I didn't cry. I didn't betray Lacey, not this time, not out loud. I admitted what I'd done, said I'd done it on my own, and if my own mother wanted to turn me in to the police, I'd be happy to tell them exactly the same thing. I told her that she couldn't keep me away from Lacey, that the only bad influence here was sitting on my bed, holding two cans of spray paint like they were live grenades. I told her I didn't need anyone, especially Lacey, to give me ideas or bully me into standing up for what was right. I was an adult, and if I wanted to fuck the Man, that was my business.

She sighed. "This isn't you, Hannah. I know you better than that."

"The name is Dex," I said, and it was the last thing I would say to her that night or the two that followed. The silent treatment was still the only real weapon I could muster.

I must have seemed ridiculous. At least as ridiculous to her as my father seemed to me, cheering me on behind my mother's back and making the occasional frontal assault with vague references to their shared posthippie past, invoking long-lost good causes and heroic stands, though my mother shut him down every time, in a way guaranteed to make both of us feel like shit. "She doesn't care about feminist politics any more than you do, Jimmy," I heard her say, after I'd tossed my burnt meat loaf and returned to my room. "She's simply infatuated. You should know the feeling."

She'd unplugged my phone and was monitoring the ones downstairs.

"No, Hannah can't come to the phone," I heard her say that Saturday morning. "Please stop calling."

Lacey, I knew, would never stop calling.

Maybe this was it, the catalyst we needed to escape. Maybe I could finally shake off my suburban shackles, fuck high school and college and my permanent record, climb into Lacey's Buick, slam my fist on the dashboard, and grant the permission I'd withheld for so long, say Go west, young man, and chart a course to freedom.

When I packed for school that Monday, I slipped my escape fund, all $237 of it, into my backpack, along with my copy of Stranger in a Strange Land and the first mix Lacey had made me, the one with HOW TO BE DEX scribbled across it in permanent marker-all the essentials, just in case. I waited for her in the parking lot, desperate for proof that she existed, and as I waited, I composed revenge plans in my head, a gift for Lacey, because before we escaped we'd need to avenge ourselves against the enemy. We would sneak through Nikki's window and shave her head; we would slit the seams of her prom dress, just enough that the gown would dissolve as they placed the crown on her perfectly coiffed head; we would frame her for cheating; we would find someone to break her heart.

They were lame schemes, cribbed from Sweet Valley High books and half-remembered teen movies, but evidence of my will. Lacey would supply the way.

Except that when Lacey finally showed up-not a half hour early, as I had, bouncing with eagerness and certain she was feeling the same way, but twenty minutes after the start of homeroom-and I cornered her in the parking lot, she didn't want to hear about my revenge schemes, and she wasn't full of sympathy for my weekend of torment. She didn't, in fact, seem particularly concerned about my problems at all.

"How worried do I have to be?" she said. "Is your mother the kind who's going to call mine?"

"Depends whether she thinks it'll torture me or not."

"Fuck, this is serious, Dex. You have to ask her if she's planning to tell. Get her not to."

"That's going to be hard when I'm not speaking to her."

"So fucking speak to her. What is wrong with you?"

"I don't know, Lacey, maybe being a prisoner in my own home has driven me crazy? Maybe it's been a little difficult, having my own mother look at me like I'm some criminal who's going to shiv her in the night? Maybe I'm a little worried that she's forbidden me from seeing my best friend, and I thought my best friend might be a little worried about that, too."

"You're seeing me right now." She sounded distracted, as if there could be anything more important to think about.

"How are you not getting this?"

"How are you not getting it, Dex? I can't have the Bastard finding out about this. I can't."

"Oh, but it's totally fine when I get caught?"

"That's not what I meant. But, okay, yeah. You seem pretty fine to me."

"Oh, I'm awesome, Lacey. Everything is fantastic."

"You don't get it-"

"I get that it's okay for me to get in trouble as long as you don't get in trouble. Even though this whole fucking thing was your idea."

"Can you for one millisecond entertain the hypothesis that not everything is about you, Dex?"

I heard myself spit out the world's ugliest laugh. "Tell me you're fucking kidding me."

She didn't say anything. I willed her to. Say something; say anything. Fix this.

"Well?" I said. "Really? Nothing?"

"Please ask your mother not to tell mine."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

SCHOOL HURT WITHOUT LACEY THERE, even more because she was there, just no longer mine.

I was the angry one. I was the righteous one. I was the one avoiding her in the halls and getting on the bus after school instead of waiting for her car. So why did it feel like she'd abandoned me?

Temporary, I told myself. She would apologize, I would forgive, all would be the same. But when I saw Nikki, I couldn't say anything. It felt different, not having Lacey at my back. All the things I wanted to say, all the fuck you, how dare you, what gives you the right curdled in my throat, and I knew how they would come out if I tried.

You won.

I DID SPEAK TO MY MOTHER that week, just once, just to ask her not to tell Lacey's parents what she suspected. Because there was no evidence Lacey had done anything, I reminded her, and being my mother only gave her the right to ruin my life.

I didn't speak to Lacey.

I didn't call anyone, for that matter; I didn't go anywhere. I came straight home after school and watched TV until it was time for bed. Life grounded was a lot like life before Lacey, and it terrified me.

"Like old times, right?" my father said, during a commercial, while we waited to see which inbred family would win their feud. And my face must have revealed what I thought of that, because he added, "I know. I miss her, too."

This did not help.

What did: Friday afternoon the phone rang, and after he answered it, he handed it to me. My mother was down at the Y, tapping into her inner artist at a pottery class-and the customary liquor-fueled wallow that followed-that would reliably keep her occupied through midnight. We were alone in the house. No one to stop him from breaking her rules; no one to stop me from saying, cautiously, hello, and finally breathing again when I heard her voice.

"I'm sorry."

I wanted to wait for her to say it first, but I was too puppy dog eager, and so we chimed together, overlapping, desperate, both of us so, so sorry, both of us so quick to dismiss and fast-forward, whatever, it was nothing, ancient history, stupid, inessential, inconsequential to the epic and never-ending story of us.

"I have it, Dex," she finally said. "The perfect revenge."

"Nikki?"

"Of course, Nikki. You think we let her do this to you and get away with it?"

"So, what's this perfect plan?"

"Not now. Tonight. You heard about the foreclosure party, right?"

Everyone had heard about the foreclosure party. An abandoned house at the edge of a half-built development, guaranteed empty, out of the way, and equipped with ample bedrooms. Nikki's father worked at the villainous bank, and every month or two she managed to snag an address and a key. Lacey and I were supposed to be above such things.

"I'm grounded," I told her, even as my father mouthed, It's okay, and nodded.

"Sneak out. I promise, it'll be worth it."

It's not that I didn't want to see her. I didn't know what it was. "Lacey-"

"Pick you up at nine." She hung up before I could answer.

"I don't want to know where you're going," my father said. The dial tone was still droning in my ear. "Plausible deniability. Just be back before your mother."

So I was going to a party.

By nine P.M., I had laced myself into the black corset, which I hadn't worn since the night of the Beast. Lacey said it made me into a warrior, ready for battle. It did; I was. She didn't show. I sat on the porch steps, waiting, lipstick congealing, hair wilting in the humidity, time ticking, heart beating, cars passing and never stopping, none of them her. I'd poured some of my parents' scotch into a water bottle-our own private pre-party, or that was the plan.

I drank most of it myself.

Nine, nine thirty, ten-no Lacey. No answer at her house when I called. No fucking way I was going back inside, changing into pajamas, explaining to my father why I'd chosen rules over rebellion, staring at the ceiling, wondering why Lacey had flaked. The party was only a couple miles away, and I had a bike.

BECAUSE I WAS ANGRY. BECAUSE I was tired. Because I was sick of being the tagalong, the one things were decided for. Because I had something to prove. Because I was curious. Because I looked hot, and I knew it. Because I'd seen enough movies where the mousy girl goes to a party and changes her life. Because I hated Nikki and thought if I drank enough beer maybe I'd be able to buzz up the courage to spit in her face. Because Lacey would hate it, or maybe she would love it, or maybe I should stop fucking caring one way or another what Lacey would think. Because I was embarrassed, and sad, and that made me angry all over again, and the rage felt good against the pedals, pumping through the dark, toward a strobing shadow, toward what felt that night, with the wind in my ears and my parents' ancient scotch burning in my throat, like destiny. Because anything, because who knows, because it wasn't a night or a week or a year for because, no why, only who what when where: Me.

A mistake.

After I should have known better.

Here. The husk of a McMansion, bodies moving across windows lit by the flicker of candlelight. On the grandiose porch, two guys in low-slung jeans taking a final slug of beer before going inside.

"Yo, let's get stupid."

"You damn right, son."

"You know it, son."

It was the thing, that year, for the whitest of boys to talk like they weren't, to sling awkward slang and let their pants sag like the rappers they saw on TV, and they were going where I was going, and that could have been my cue to get back on my bike and ride home, but instead I took the water bottle out of my bag and finished the scotch. I was a delinquent, I reminded myself. The cops were after me. I was grounded and sneaking out-albeit with paternal permission. I was dangerous.

The more I drank, the easier this was to believe.

It would have been the nicest house I had ever been in if it hadn't been so clearly left behind. Left in a hurry, it looked like, couches and tables and rugs all in place, which, despite the mass of bodies gyrating to bad music on stained carpet, gave the house a whiff of Pompeii. Someone lived here, once, and fled in a hurry, set down breakfast spoon and morning paper, ran out the door and didn't stop until far enough away to be safe from the thing that was coming. The bad thing.

Nikki Drummond was waiting in the foyer as if she were the grand dame of the estate. "Seriously? Hannah Dexter? Gracing us with her presence."

"Seriously. Present."

"I figured you'd be shipped off to a military academy by now. Or at least grounded."

I wasn't yet drunk enough to spit on her, so I shifted my attention to the jock drooling beside her, Marco Speck, who'd been Craig's shadow and was apparently now looking to be his replacement. "I think you should watch out," I said. "The last guy had to put a bullet in his head to get away from her."

Marco looked at me like I'd just sucker punched her. "Jesus, Dexter. That was cold."

I felt cold.

Nikki only smiled and handed me a shot, which I tipped back without hesitation, thinking maybe it was enough and we were even. Then she pushed Marco at me, saying we deserved each other, and if I wanted to embarrass myself she wasn't going to stop me. When he said he barely recognized me in those boobs, and also dude, whoa, I let one hand play at my cleavage and the other wrap itself in his, because Nikki was watching. Maybe Lacey would have said, Don't be one of them, but then again she'd also said What's the big deal and What are you waiting for and Don't be so fucking precious about fucking, and anyway she wasn't there. The shot tasted like lemon and sugar and fire. Marco tasted like peanuts. His breath in my ear was like the wind on my bike, like coasting downhill in a whoosh of summer. Like letting it happen. Broken glass crunched beneath our feet, everything gritty and sticky and layered with filth, and it smelled like sex to me, sex as I imagined it, smoke and dried beer and rotting fruit. There was music pounding, hard-core rap; there was a crush of strangers doing the things strangers did in the dark. Marco sucked my neck. Marco's hands were in my hands, and then in my pants, Marco was grinding against me, chest to chest, groin to groin, what passed for dancing, and I could feel him hard against me and almost believed I could do this on my own, without Lacey, I could be what the night demanded, push myself into its live and beating heart.

What the fuck are you doing?

I thought I heard her voice in my head, and I answered out loud, "Shut up."

"Not a chance." That wasn't my head. That was Lacey, really her, standing behind me, hands on my waist, pulling me away from Marco and his hot sweat, pushing me through the bodies, up the stairs, into a child's bedroom, a sad parade of zoo animals peeling off its wall.