"Really?" Bad says. "I thought it was a zeppelin."

"It's supposed to be kind of a romance," Lee says. "You know. With werewolves and stuff."

"Any vampires?"

"No vampires," Lee says. "In fact there aren't even any werewolves yet."

"That you know of," Bad says. "So is it sexy?"

"Um, no," Lee says. "The heroine's twelve years old right now."

Bad says, "She almost drowns, right? I've read this. That's the first story, the werewolf one? The werewolf story is definitely the best, although the werewolves don't actually show up until-"

"La la la, Spoiler Girl!" Lee sings loudly, covering her ears. "Not listening!"

"Here they come," Bad says. And then, "Uh-oh."

Czigany has her blindfold on. And the handcuffs. Nikki has her arm on Czigany's shoulder, guiding her. Then Maureen. Then Czigany's sister Parci.

"What's she doing here?" Bad says to Maureen and Nikki when everyone's in the car.

"Hey," Czigany says. Her mouth is unhappy, under the blindfold. "Great timing, people."

"I have an ear infection," Parci says. She looks around the van with great interest, as if she's expecting to see a black folder, somewhere, labeled czigany's ordeal. "I'm supposed to stay home from school today."

"So why aren't you?" Bad says.

"Are you kidding me?" Parci says. "You're kidnapping Czigany and taking her off on some adventure and you want me to stay home?"

"She said she'd call her mom if we didn't let her come, too," Maureen says. "We were going to tie her up and leave her in a closet, but Czigany wouldn't let us."

"Whatever," Czigany says. "Let me just say it again. Your timing is just perfect. If Parci and I are not home by five o'clock tonight, my mother is going to really freak out. I mean, call the police, call the president, send in the marines, summon all the powers of hell freak out. Can I take this freaking blindfold off now?"

"We'll have you home before five," Lee says, crossing her fingers down below the seat, where she hopes Parci, in the backseat, can't see her do it.

"The blindfold stays on," Maureen says sternly, then spoils the effect by sneezing three times in a row. "It's part of the deal. The Ordeal. Why does the van suddenly smell like the pound? I'm allergic to dogs. You're covered in dog hair, Czigany."

"So sue me," Czigany says. "We have a dog. You're not really going to take Parci. Seriously? This is such a bad idea. I promise she won't tell on us. Come on."

"I will too tell. And I want a blindfold," Parci says. Lee and Nikki and Maureen and Bad look at each other and shrug.

"Okay," Maureen says, sneezing again. She gets Lee's gym bag and pulls a shirt out of it. "We can use this."

"A real blindfold," Parci says. Her eyes are shiny with excitement. "I don't want to be blindfolded with a smelly shirt."

"Don't do this, guys," Czigany whines. "Please, please don't do this." She starts to sit up, and Nikki, who is sitting next to her, pushes her back into the seat and buckles her in.

"Don't worry," Lee says. She reverses out of the Khulhats' driveway. "The shirt's clean. I don't actually go to gym. I have a doctor's pass."

"Her mom's a doctor, like yours," Bad explains to Parci. "Lee stole a pass from her mother's partner's office. It says Lee has an enlarged heart or something. So she gets to sit in the bleachers and knit while we run around."

Lee really does have a bad heart. But she's told everyone that the pass is a fake. It's easier than having everyone be sorry for her all the time.

"I have a condition," Parci says, importantly. "So does Czigany. That's why we have to be home by five. We have to take all of these disgusting pills with weird names."

"Parci," Czigany says. "Shut up! They don't want to know about any conditions."

"I wasn't going to say anything else," Parci says sullenly. With their blindfolds on, it's remarkable how much the sisters look alike. They have the same thick, black hair and heavy, slanting eyebrows. The same scowls; narrow shoulders; thin, downy wrists.

"Home by five," Czigany says. Her voice is more serious than it ought to be. Deep and ominous, like the voiceover in a movie trailer. "Or the doom falls on all of us."

"Home by five," Maureen says. Lee accelerates onto the on-ramp of 295.

They're barely past Teaneck, heading towards the wilds of upstate New York, an hour into what all of them think of as czigany's ordeal, folder or no folder, just like that, with all caps in some fancy gothic font, when Maureen pokes Lee in the shoulder and says, "Roll down the windows."

"It's too cold," Lee says. They've already stopped, once, so Maureen could pee and buy Claritin. Bad is driving, and Lee is sitting in the passenger seat, reading her romance. Still no werewolves.

"Roll down the windows, please," Maureen says. "Or pull over. I'm carsick."

"Switch with Bad. You can drive."

"No way," Bad says. "I get carsicker. You switch with her."

Lee compromises. She rolls down the windows an inch.

"More," Maureen says. "I'm in hell. This is hell. It's like it's my Ordeal, not Czigany's. When we get to your aunt's place, I bet it turns out I'm allergic to goats, too."

"Maureen, shut up!" Lee says.

"Don't worry," Maureen says. "They're asleep. So is Nikki. Parci's drooling on your upholstery. Can I say how much I love being an only child?"

"So does this change our plans?" Lee asks the other two. She can't help it: she whispers.

"What? Parci?" Bad says. "No way. Ear infection, my sweet curvy ass. Maybe her mom buys that act, but I don't. Look, Lee, it's not like we're going to let them get hurt or anything. We give them cab money and drop them off at the movies at midnight. At the latest. So they'll have to take some pills a couple of hours late. So their parents freak out just a little. Czigany's parents could use a wake-up call, you know? They act like they own her. It isn't natural and anyway, it's not like Czigany's going to tell on us."

Maureen says, "Parci won't tell on us, either."

"How do you know?" Lee says.

"I told her we'd spread it around the school that Czigany hit on Bad. That she tried to feel Bad up in the locker room even though she knows Bad already has a serious girlfriend, and that when Bad told her to back the hell off, Czigany asked if she was into threesomes."

"Nice touch," Bad says. "I'm flattered. Look, Lee. Parci is into this, okay? You can tell. And it makes it more of a real Ordeal for Czigany to have her little sister along."

"For my Ordeal all they did was make me wear a sandwich board for a day," Lee says.

"Yeah, a sandwich board, at the mall, that said people i have thought about making out with. Listing all the names they'd coaxed out of you at a party and then made you sign."

"It was a short list!" Lee says.

"Steve Buscemi?" Bad says.

Maureen says, "Don't forget Al Gore, Gandhi, and Hillary Clinton. Not to mention John Boyd and Eric Park. That went all over the school."

"I didn't know what it was for," Lee says. "I didn't want to be rude! Besides, Eric asked me out the next day."

Bad says, "Only because he felt sorry for you. The point is, it's not like we don't like Czigany, you know? The accent is cool. She's been all over the world. She's met the Pope-wasn't he on your list, Lee? Whatever. The point is we're going to give Czigany the coolest, most legendary Ordeal ever. But the girl is weird. Admit it."

"It's her parents," Lee says. "The whole overprotective thing. She told me once that they had to have a bodyguard when they lived in the Ukraine or somewhere like that. Because of kidnappers."

"Funny," Bad says. "Considering. They probably make her pee in a cup, too, after she hangs out with us. Mom the doctor totally gave me the stink eye the last time I ran into her. Like she wanted to shred me into little pieces."

"She hates you for sure," says Maureen.

"Just because Czigany was, like, thirty minutes late for dinner? On a weekend night? No. I think it's because they know I'm a lesbian. I mean, your mom gets kind of freaked out, too, Lee, but she totally compensates by trying to be extra nice and making me cappuccinos and stuff."

"The Khulhats will go insane when they get home and they can't find Czigany and Parci," Lee predicts. She realizes something. The Ordeal was Bad's idea. And it isn't just Czigany's Ordeal, either. You don't ever want to get on Bad's bad side, which is what Mrs. Khulhat has done.

"Yeah, well," Bad says. She gives Lee what Lee thinks of as the invisible smile. That is, Bad isn't smiling at all, and yet you can tell how very pleased Bad is with herself. As if she is holding the perfect poker hand and all of your money is already on the table, and the smile will cost extra.

"Turn on the radio," Maureen says. Maureen is full of the kind of reasonable demands that Lee always wants, most unreasonably, to refuse. Friendships of long standing are defined by feelings of this kind perhaps more often than they are by feelings of harmonious accord. "A road trip's no good without a soundtrack."

"This isn't a road trip," says Bad, who has known Maureen just as long as Lee has. Bad never tries to be reasonable when she can be perverse. "It's a kidnapping. And it's already all messed up. Just like in the movies. It will end up with Lee shooting all of us and then having to dispose of the bodies in a wood chipper."

"It's not a kidnapping," Lee says. "It's an Ordeal." She turns on the radio. Opens up her book again.

The next time Cabell Meadows saved Clementine Cleary's life, Clementine was fifteen and Cabell was twenty-one. The occasion was the wedding of John Cleary, Clementine's mother's younger brother, who was getting married for the second time around, this time to a local girl, Dancy Meadows. Cabell's nineteen-year-old sister.

That Dancy Meadows and John Cleary met in the first place had been Clementine's fault. Dancy Meadows managed the T-Shurt Yurt down along the strip and, knowing this, when Clementine was fourteen she lied about her age in order to get a job at the Yurt. She planned to befriend Dancy, who was just out of high school herself. This turned out not to be as easy as getting the job had been, but even before John Cleary made his entrance, Clementine had managed to steal a picture of Cabell out of Dancy's wallet. And once Dancy mentioned with loathing her brother's habit of sleeping in the nude and how, during a sleepover in seventh grade, she'd charged her friends ten bucks each for the chance to sneak into his bedroom in the middle of the night to see, by the light of the full moon, for themselves.

Clementine's uncle, who had already married one girl straight out of high school, came into the Yurt on a Thursday afternoon looking for a gag gift for Clementine's grandfather's eighty-first birthday. Finding Clementine behind the counter, he used this as an excuse to spend the rest of the day in the T-Shurt Yurt, telling jokes and flirting with Dancy. Some of the jokes were pretty funny. Even Clementine had to admit that much.

And she could tell that the flirting was working, too, because Dancy began to act as if she and Clementine were very best friends, even when John Cleary wasn't around. Dancy told Clementine the story about Cabell's evil first girlfriend, and how Cabell had cried for three days when she dumped him just before Valentine's Day and then kept the diamond pendant anyway, and then how he'd cried for a whole week when their dad had accidentally stepped on Buffy (his pet tarantula), getting out of the shower.

Dancy showed Clementine how the senior girls put on eyeliner. And explained what boys liked. Clementine didn't believe all of it, but some of what Dancy said must have been true because by Christmas Dancy was pregnant, and Clementine's aunt was divorcing John Cleary and moving down to Charleston. Out of the frying pan and into the next frying pan, Clementine's mother said.

By this point, Clementine wasn't quite sure how she felt about Dancy. She was Cabell's sister, which was a point in her favor. They had the same eyes. She seemed to know every one of Cabell's secrets, too. Clementine kept a file on her computer in which she put down every single thing Dancy said, with annotations where she felt Dancy was being unfair. Once Dancy and Uncle John were engaged, Clementine spent some sleepless nights thinking about the fact that she was going to be Dancy's niece. It might be awkward if she ended up being Dancy's sister-in-law as well. And if she was Dancy's niece, then what would Cabell be? An uncle-in-law? Some sort of second cousin? There wasn't really anyone that she could ask for advice, either, because she'd stopped talking to her two best friends. That was because of Cabell.

Cabell had visited Clementine's tenth-grade biology class in May. He'd been tracking black bears along the Blue Ridge Trail over Chapel Hill's spring break, part of an independent study. Clementine went up to say hey before class started, while Cabell was setting up his slides. She'd wondered, sometimes, where Cabell would have sat in Mr. Kurtz's biology class. Stupid, stupid. Her heart was somewhere down at the bottom of her stomach, but she said, "Hey, Cabell. Remember me?"

Mr. Kurtz said, "Clementine? Did you have a question for Mr. Meadows?"

Cabell squinted. He said, "The sleepswimmer? No way!" He said she'd changed a lot, which was true. She had. It turned out, no surprise, that Cabell was an excellent public speaker. Clementine smiled whenever he looked in her direction. He finished by telling Clementine's class a story about a girl in California who went and had her hair permed and then, the same day, went hiking and got knocked unconscious.

"When she woke up," Cabell said, "she was way out in the middle of the woods, off the path and under a tree, and she put her hand up on her hair, and it was all wet and foamy." That seemed to be the end of the story. He grinned out at the class. Clementine smiled back until her face hurt.

Madeline, who lived down the street from Clementine and had wet the bed until they were both in fifth grade, raised her hand. Mr. Kurtz said, "Yes, Madeline?"

Madeline said, "I don't understand. What happened to her? Why was her hair wet?"

Cabell said, "Oops. Sorry. I guess I left that part out. It was a bear? It was attracted by the smell of the chemicals in her perm? So it hit her over the head, knocked her unconscious, dragged her off the path and into the woods. Then it licked all the perm out of her hair."

"That's disgusting!" Madeline said. Other kids were laughing. Someone said, "It liked the taste of the sperm in her hair?" It worried Clementine, because it wasn't clear whom they were laughing at: Madeline, Cabell, or the girl with the perm.

"She was lucky," Cabell said. "Not that it licked her head," he explained, in case Clementine's class was particularly stupid. Which, in Clementine's opinion, they were. "Lucky that it didn't eat her."

After all of that, Clementine couldn't even manage to ask any questions. Even though she'd spent the whole night before coming up with questions that Cabell might be impressed by. At lunch she said, "So he's pretty amazing, isn't he?" She couldn't keep it in any longer.

Madeline and Grace, who was going through an awkward phase, according to Clementine's mother-although this was just being kind; Grace had been awkward since the second grade- just stared at her. Finally Madeline said, "Who?" Madeline was annoying that way. You had to explain everything to her.

"Cabell," Clementine said. Madeline and Grace continued to stare at her as if she had something in her teeth. "Cabell Meadows?"

"Very funny," Grace said. "You're joking, right?"

They looked at Clementine and saw that she was not joking. Clementine saw that they were astonished. Cabell Meadows, she said to herself. Cabell Meadows.

"Cabell Meadows doesn't wear deodorant," Madeline said.

"That's because of bears." It was like the perm. Bears were sensitive to manmade smells that way. Clementine said this, hoping to reason with them. They were best friends. They liked the same movies. They borrowed each other's clothes. When they went out for pizza, they never ordered pizza with onions because Grace hated onions.

"Let's put it this way," Madeline, former bedwetter, said. "Even if he did wear deodorant, he could wear all the deodorant in the world and I still wouldn't lick him. Anywhere. His eyes are close together. He has weird hands. They're all veiny, Clementine! And his hair! Even when he was still in school here, he wasn't exactly prime real estate, okay? He was a smelly hippie. And it's worse now! Much, much worse!"

She stopped speaking in order to wipe the spit away from the corners of her mouth. Madeline was a sprayer when she got excited. Most likely, Clementine thought, Madeline still wet the bed sometimes, too. Leaky, squeaky Madeline.

Grace took over, as if she and Madeline were training for the Olympics in the freestyle unsolicited advice relay. She said, "It's kind of romantic, Clementine. I mean, you must have been in love with him for a long time? I remember how you used to talk about him when we were just little kids. But you've grown up, Clementine, and he hasn't, okay? At a certain age, for guys, it comes down to robots or girls. Superheroes in tights or girls. Online porn or real girls. Bears or girls ... although that's not one I've run into before. The point is that this guy has already made the choice, Clementine. If you were all hairy and ran around in the forest maybe you'd have a chance, but you're not and you don't. If Cabell Meadows is the big secret crush you've been hiding all of these years, God help you. Because I sure can't."

Madeline said, "I agree with everything she just said."

No big surprise there. Madeline and Grace were both big fans of personality quizzes and advice columns and self-help books. They could spend hours agreeing with each other about what some boy had meant when he walked by at lunch and said, "Ladies."

Clementine thought about stabbing Madeline with a spork. The only thing stopping her, really, was that she knew Grace and Madeline would get a lot of mileage out of analyzing that, too. Like how it was a cry for help because what else could you ever hope to achieve by attacking someone with a plastic utensil? The reasons they had plastic utensils was because kids did that sometimes. Once someone had stabbed a teacher in the arm. Lawyers had claimed it was the hormones in the hamburger meat. Cabell was a vegetarian. Clementine had learned that in Mr. Kurtz's class. She thought about what her mother would say when Clementine came home and said she was a vegetarian, too. Maybe she could sell it as a diet. Or a school project.

Clementine realized that she was still gripping her spork defensively. She put it down and saw that Madeline and Grace were once again staring at her. Clementine had been somewhere else, and now they knew who that somewhere else was.

Clementine said, "He saved my life."

"Let me save you from the biggest mistake of your life," Madeline said. Her voice took on a thrilling intensity, as if she was about to impart the secrets of the universe to Clementine. Madeline's father was a preacher. He was a spitter, too. Nobody liked to sit in the first pew. "Cabell Meadows is not hot. Cabell Meadows is at least six years older than you and he still doesn't know that tube socks are not a good look with Birkenstocks. Cabell Meadows voluntarily came to a high-school biology class to talk about how he spent his spring break shooting bears in the butt with tranquilizer darts. Cabell Meadows is an epic, epic loser."

Clementine put down her spork. She got up and left the table, and for the rest of the year she avoided Grace and Madeline whenever possible. When they began to go out with boys, she would have liked to say something to them about standards and hypocrisy and losers. But what was the point? It was clearly just the way the world worked when it came to friends and love and sex and self-help books and boys. First you're an expert and then you go out into the field with your tranquilizer guns to get some practical experience.

Clementine found Cabell's LiveJournal, "TrueBaloo," after some research online. He had about two hundred friends, mostly girls with names like ElectricKittyEyes and FurElise who went to Chapel Hill, too, and came from San Francisco and D.C. and Cleveland and lots of other places that Clementine had never been to. She got a LiveJournal account and friended Cabell. She sent an e-mail that said "Remember me, the dumb girl u saved from drowning? Just, thanx 4 that & 4 coming to talk about bears.;)" Cabell friended her back. Asked how school was going and then never wrote again, even after Dancy broke up Clementine's uncle's marriage, and even after Clementine wrote and said everybody had missed him at the engagement party. Which was okay, because Cabell was probably busy with classes, or maybe he was off watching bears again. Or maybe he thought Clementine was upset about the whole thing with Dancy. So Clementine wasn't all that bothered. What mattered was that he'd friended her back. It was a bit like him and the bears, like she and Cabell had tagged each other.

Clementine loaded up her iPod with all the music that Cabell had ever mentioned online. One day they might get a chance to talk about music.

Most Chapel Hill students came back for parties, or to do laundry once in a while, but not Cabell. Not for Christmas, not for spring break (which was understandable, Clementine knew: if you grew up an hour away from Myrtle Beach, you'd officially had all the spring break you'd ever need). He'd shown up to talk about bears, but he didn't show up at Dancy's engagement party, not even to denounce John Cleary for being a sleazy, cradle-robbing son of a bitch. Which he was. Even Clementine's grandfather said so. Exstar quarterback, which was all that anyone needed to say, really.

Clementine had to be grateful about her uncle and Dancy- except for the wedding, who knew when Cabell would have come home.

Dancy had talked John Cleary into getting married down on the beach, near enough to Headless Point that it felt like a good omen to Clementine. She went running along the beach at Headless Point some mornings, remembering how she and Cabell had walked back through the dunes when everyone else in the world who cared about Clementine had thought she was dead. Drowned. Only Cabell and she had known otherwise.