"It's like I won the friendship sweepstakes," I said, sarcasm being the safest route to truth. "I fall asleep every night whispering my thanks to the universe."

This was the first time she'd been to my house. I would happily have postponed it indefinitely, not because there was anything so revealing but because there wasn't. Our house was lush and half-assed, stuffed with all the leftovers my father'd grown tired of: an unfinished jungle gym, stacks of unframed photos and unread books, unused appliances bought on midnight infomercial whims, unhung "native masks" from an ill-advised sojourn in anthropological sculpting. My mother's detritus was devoted to self-discipline and improvement, calendars and double-underlined Post-it notes, forgotten to-do lists, meditation and relaxation pamphlets, aerobics videos. Home was two homes in one, bridged by a sea of unclaimed clutter, ashtrays no one had used since my grandfather died, needlepoint throw pillows, tacky souvenirs from trips we barely remembered taking, all of it enclosed by a moat of browning weeds and an eyesore of an overgrown vegetable garden whose inception each of my parents blamed on the other. Beige-and-tan-striped wallpaper, my grandparents' hand-me-down coffee table layered with Time-Life books, posters of exotic landscapes we'd never seen. Through Lacey's eyes, I could see the house for what it was: a generic split-level of quiet desperation, ground zero for a family with no particular passion for anything but living as much as possible like the people they saw on TV.

Lacey had told me of quantum incompatibilities, qualities so opposed to each other that the very existence of one eliminated all possibility of the other. I didn't understand it any better than the other brain-knotting theories she liked to regurgitate, convinced that knowing the universe in all its weird particularity was key to rising above what she called our middlebrow zombie hell, but I could recognize Lacey's presence in my bedroom as its ultimate illustration, Lacey's combat boots crushing my turquoise shag carpeting, her eyes alighting briefly on the stuffed turtle I still kept tucked between my pillows, Hannah Dexter's past and future in a doomed collision, matter and antimatter collapsing into a black hole that would consume us both. Translation: I was pretty sure that once Lacey saw me in my natural habitat, she would disappear.

"Your parents have a liquor cabinet, right?" she said. "Let's check it out."

There was no lock on it, of course. There was no question that I could be trusted around my parents' dusty quantities of brandy, scotch, and cheap wine. Maybe it was the boots that gave me the courage to clomp downstairs and show Lacey the dark crevice behind the abandoned board games and unread Time-Life books where the bottles lived.

"Scotch or rum?" I asked, and hoped it sounded like I knew the difference.

"Little from column A, little from column B." She showed me how to pour out an inch or two from each bottle, replacing the liquid with water. We mixed a little of everything together in a single glass, then, one at a time, took a foul swig.

"Juice of the gods," Lacey managed when she'd finished choking.

I swallowed again. It was the good kind of burn.

The carpet in the family room was a harsh orange-and-brown-striped shag that, until Lacey settled onto it, stretching into a snow angel and pronouncing it not bad, I'd found repulsive. Now, with her approval and a boozy, warm buzz, it seemed almost luxurious. I lay beside her, arms stretched till our fingertips touched, and marinated in the juice of the gods and the hot air gushing from the heating vent. The dissonant chords of Lacey's latest bootleg washed over us, and I tried to hear in it what she did, the foghorn promise of a ship that would carry us both away.

"We should start a club," Lacey said.

"But clubs are lame." I said it like a question.

"Exactly!"

"So . . ."

"I'm not talking about a chess club, Dex. Or, like, some kind of Let's read to old people so we can get into college thing. I'm talking a club club. You know, like in books. Tree houses and secret codes and shit."

"Like in Bridge to Terabithia!"

"Let's pretend I know what that is and say . . . yes."

"But without someone dying."

"Yes, Dex, without someone dying. Well . . . at least not someone in the club."

"Lacey."

"Joke! Think blood oath, not blood sacrifice."

"So what would we do? A club has to do something."

"Other than sacrifice virgins, you mean."

"Lacey!"

"Clubs are stupid because they're not about anything that matters. But ours would be. We'd be . . . the ontology club."

"A club to study the nature of existence?"

"See, Dex, this is why I love you. Think there's a single other person in this crap town who knows what ontology means?"

"Statistically?"

"Come on, Dex, you can say it. It's not going to hurt."

"Say what?"

"That's why you love me, too."

"That's why I . . ."

"Love me, too."

"Love you, too."

"Clearly I'll be club president. You can be vice, and secretary, and treasurer."

"And no other members."

"Obviously. Think about it, Dex. We could read Nietzsche together, and Kant, and Kerouac, and figure out why people do what they do and why the universe has something instead of nothing and whether there's a god, and sneak into the woods and blast Kurt as loud as we can and close our eyes and try to, I don't know, connect with the life force or whatever. Bonus points if it pisses people off."

"So basically, keep doing what we're doing?"

"Basically."

"No regular meetings or anything."

"Nope."

"And no tree house."

"Do you know how to build a tree house?"

"And the blood-oath thing?"

"Hello, AIDS?"

"I don't think you can actually-"

"The blood oath is a metaphor, Dex. Keep up."

"So not an actual club, then."

"No, Dex, not an actual club. That would be lame."

If we had started a club for real, ontology would have taken a backseat to Lacey's preferred activity: dissecting the evil exploits of our shared enemy, Nikki Drummond. For years I'd hated her on principle, but after the incident-which was how we spoke of it, the better to forget words like stain and blood and cunt-I hated her in concrete particulars that Lacey was eager to help me parse. "What kind of person needs a reason to hate the devil?" she liked to say, when I asked what had put Nikki in her sights in the first place, and I was left to conclude that Lacey hated Nikki because Nikki so plainly hated me.

"She's a sociopath," Lacey said now, bicycling her feet in the air. "No emotions. Probably kills small animals, just for fun."

"You think she's got her own little pet cemetery in the backyard? Rabbits with their tails pulled out, that kind of thing?"

"Imagine the possibilities," Lacey said. "We could exhume the bodies. Give little Thumper some justice. Show the world what she really is."

This was our recurring theme: If only we could expose Nikki's rotting heart. If only the world knew the truth. If only we had the ammunition for a frontal assault.

The day before, we'd slouched behind her in the auditorium's ratty seats, enduring an assembly about satanic cults, the third so far that year. No one in Battle Creek had been foolish enough to invoke the Antichrist since Craig's death-that is, at least not since the November morning when a gang of grieving jocks jumped Jesse Gorin, Mark Troslop, and Dylan Asp and strung them up by their ankles in a tree. I'd seen them up there, dangling over the school parking lot, we all had, three scrawny stoners stripped to socks and boxers, shivering in the snow. Punishment for satanizing half the churches in town on the same night Craig Ellison died; punishment for trying so hard to scare people, or for succeeding. A sacrificial offering to Nikki, their grieving goddess, and-even if the rumors were wrong, even if she hadn't commanded it-she'd accepted it in kind. A thing like that in a place like this, people kept saying after they found Craig's body in the woods, like it was impossible that anything so ugly could happen in our pretty backyard. But ugly things happened all the time in Battle Creek: Boys beat other boys bloody and tied them to branches while girls like Nikki pointed and laughed.

After that, Jesse, Mark, and Dylan stopped chalking pentagrams on their shirts. They stopped bragging about how dangerous they were, stopped breaking into the bio lab to steal fetal pigs. A couple towns west of us, though, a few cows were found slaughtered under "ritualistic" circumstances; in another town to the east, a girl our age washed up on a riverbank, naked and blue and, in some way no one was willing to specify, defiled; here at home, Craig was still dead. Something was wrong with the children, the latest guest speaker said from the stage, and by the children he meant us. Something was wrong with the children, and so here we were, and here Nikki Drummond was, perched directly in front of us, shiny, pink-scrunchied ponytail defying anyone to suggest the something wrong might be her.

"Did you hear she fucked Micah Cross in the teachers' lounge?" Lacey whispered, just loud enough. Then looked at me, expectant.

"I heard . . . it was Andy Smith." This was the best I could come up with, and a clumsy lie-if Andy were any more obviously in the closet he'd be a pair of shoes-but Lacey nodded in approval.

"That was the girls' locker room," she whispered.

"Right. Hard to keep track."

"Imagine how she feels."

"Hard to imagine she feels at all." It was easier with Lacey there, finding the right thing to say-and doing so in the moment, not days later in the shower, when there was no one to appreciate it but the mildewed tiles and the face in the mirror.

"Not that I think there's anything wrong with a healthy sex life," Lacey whispered.

"Of course not."

"But personally, I think it's kind of sad to try to fuck your way to popularity." She was so good at it, acting cold-blooded. The secret of pretending to be someone else, she'd told me, was that you didn't pretend. You transformed. To defeat a monster, you had to embody one.

"Tragic," I said.

"What's tragic is trying to fuck yourself into forgetting you're a miserable bitch."

The perfect head never moved. Nikki Drummond wasn't the kind of girl who flinched. It only added to the fun of trying to make her.

That afternoon at my house, exactly drunk enough, we lay on the carpet and fantasized about using hidden cameras to make undercover recordings that would expose Nikki's sins to her doting parents and adoring teachers and every drooling moron lined up to take Craig's place in her pants. Between that and Kurt and the way the ceiling spun when I stared at it too hard, I didn't notice the car pull into the driveway or the front door slam or my father's loafers padding across the rug or much of anything until he leaned over us and spoke.

"Something wrong with the couch, kids?" He took off his sunglasses and squinted down at us. My father blamed allergies for his sensitive, red-rimmed eyes; my mother blamed hangovers. I thought he just liked how well the knockoff Ray-Bans paired with his goatee. "No, let me guess, you've fallen and you can't get up."

"You're not supposed to be home."

I sat up too fast and had to immediately lie down, and that was when the panic crept in, because my father was here and Lacey was here and we were drunk, or at least I was drunk, and he would certainly notice, and there would be a scene, the kind of ugly, uncool scene that would mark me as too much trouble and drive Lacey away for good.

But somewhere beneath that, secret and still, animal eyes glowing in the dark: I was drunk, and it was good, and if anyone didn't like it, fuck them.

My father took Lacey's hand and hauled her to her feet. "I'm guessing you're the Pied Piper?"

"What?" I said.

Lacey repossessed her hand and blushed.

"That's you, isn't it? Leading my daughter astray in the musical wilds?"

"What?" I said, again.

"I'd like to think my purposes are less nefarious," Lacey said, past me, to him. "And my taste in music significantly more impressive."

My father grinned. "If you can call it music." And just like that, they were off, Lacey leaping to the defense of her god, my father throwing out phrases like new wave, post-punk pop avant-garde, the two of them batting names back and forth I'd never heard, Ian Curtis and Debbie Harry and Robert Smith.

"Joey Ramone couldn't lick Kurt Cobain's shoes."

"You wouldn't say that if you'd seen him live."

Her eyes popped. "You saw the Ramones live?"

"What?" I said again, and fought the sudden urge to climb onto my father's lap, wheeze whiskey breath in his face, force him to see me.

"Saw them?" He gave Lacey a patented Jimmy Dexter smile. "I opened for them."

"You were in a band?" I said. No one was listening. No one was offering me a gallant hand, either, so I pulled myself upright, and tried not to puke.

"You opened for the Ramones?" That was Lacey's Kurt voice; that was awe.

"Well . . . not technically." Another smile, an aw shucks shrug. "We played in the parking lot before the Ravers, and they opened for the Ramones. It got us into the after-party, though. Did a shot with Johnny."

"Lacey was in a band," I said. Lacey had told me all about it, the Pussycats, like the cartoon, all girls, guitar straps slung over their shoulders, Lacey tonguing the mic, sweaty hair matted to her face, crowd-surfing on a wave of love. Never again, she'd told me, never here in Battle Creek, never anywhere. "The fact that we've even heard of grunge all the way out here in the middle of nowhere?" Lacey had said. "It's like those stars, the ones that explode so far away that by the time you get the news, they've been dead for a million years. We're too late. We missed it. Only the truly pathetic pretend to be artists by making something that's already made. And I do not intend to be pathetic."

I was jealous of Lacey's band, of those girls who'd been her Pussycats, but glad, too, because I couldn't be in any band, obviously, and if she'd started a new one it would have carried her away from me.

"Tell him about your band, Lacey."

But she didn't want to tell him, or didn't hear me. "What was he like?" she said. Breathed the name. "Johnny Ramone."

"Drunk. And he smelled like dog shit, but man, he gave me one of his guitar picks and I thought I'd build a shrine to that thing."

"Can I see it?" Lacey asked.

My father reddened, slightly. "Lost it on the way home."

I cleared my throat. "When were you in a band? And how did I not know this?"

He shrugged. "Long time ago, kid. Different life."

My mother listened to music only in the car, and then only to Rod Stewart, Michael Bolton, and, if she was feeling frisky, the Eagles. My father, when he drove, alternated between sports radio and silence. We had a stereo no one ever used and a box of records in the basement so warped with damp they'd been deemed unfit for the previous year's yard sale. For the Dexter family, music was a nonissue. Except that now my father was talking about it the way Lacey did, like music was his religion, and it turned him into a stranger.

"How did a guy like you spawn someone so musically illiterate?" she asked.

"I ask myself that every day," he said.