“Oh, please. I saw the YouTube video of your initiation last year, pretending to be Beyoncé in your bra in the freezing cold after homecoming. You don’t need me to explain a damn thing to you.”

Tracy didn’t see that coming. Conrad is giving her a real run for her money, and she’s not used to it.

“Dancing in a parking lot and practically being killed by your teammates are kind of different, don’t you think?” I ask.

“Being straight in Union and being me in Union are kind of different, don’t you think?” he mocks in a high, girly voice that sounds nothing like me. Then he sighs, more annoyed than defeated. “Your ex went the extra mile with me because the thought of me looking at him naked in the locker room scares the panties off him. God, what a fucking cliché.”

Tracy doesn’t respond. Neither do I. Ms. Maso would not be pleased with our inability to be supportive of someone who just came out to us. Even if he did do it in a way that was carefully crafted to make us feel as stupid as possible.

Conrad misinterprets our silence. “I’m gay,” he says with exasperation.

“We know,” Tracy responds with ice in her voice.

“You mean someone in Union actually has gaydar? Shocking,” Conrad grumbles. “Although if anyone would have it, it would be the girl with back issues of GQ and Vogue in the trunk of her Prius. Everything about Union is so typical.” Conrad slouches down, jabbing his knees into the back of my seat. “So, Rose—that’s your name, right?—are you and Jamie together or is he just doing his usual dark-and-brooding, now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t thing where he shows up at your door every once in a while and does something sexy just to make sure you’re still dangling on the line, waiting for him?”

Tracy and I are both stunned into silence, for different reasons. I’m sure she’s not surprised by my inability to keep up with Conrad, but it’s pretty rare for Tracy to be without a good comeback. I’m also marveling at Conrad’s ability to go right for the sweet spot and stick a knife in it. It’s a gift. Must run in the family.

Suddenly, I’m angry. Sure, it’s true that Conrad was just humiliated in front of half of Union High, but that’s no reason for him to take it out on me, especially after I just dove, fully clothed, into a pool for him. Well, okay, I was pushed. But the whole reason I was close enough to get pushed was because I was going to dive in.

Snark doesn’t come naturally to me, but I just happen to have some deep inside. I take a breath and let it fly. “I have no clue what’s going on with Jamie because we haven’t talked since your batshit-crazy sister had him arrested for committing the apparently horrific felony of attempting to take someone like me to the prom.”

Tracy takes her eyes off the road to look at me. She stops just short of giving me a thumbs-up. I feel Conrad’s knees in my back again.

“So, Jamie didn’t call you once this whole summer? After standing you up for the prom?” He lets out that angry laugh again that sounds like it should come from someone a lot older. “Wow, that is cold. Well, he was busy chasing after ’Gina in summer school.” Conrad pauses, knowing full well that this is information I didn’t have. “Of course, she was busy throwing herself at that puck-head Anthony, just to drive Jamie crazy. And it worked. He totally wants her back. ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave.’ Is that Shakespeare? I think that’s Shakespeare.”

“Sir Walter Scott,” I correct, trying to sound unfazed although my brain is reeling.

So Jamie was avoiding me all summer and hanging out with Regina. That’s fantastic. Well, at least now I know why he doesn’t want anything to do with me. Apparently, the way to Jamie’s heart is to have him arrested. I’ll have to remember that.

But what about Anthony Parrina? If Regina just wanted Jamie back and now Jamie wants Regina back, what is Regina still doing with Anthony?

This is all so far over my head it’s not even funny.

“Where am I going?” Tracy asks Conrad impatiently.

“Take Hill to Barry and turn left. My house is halfway down the block. Next to the Fortas,” Conrad says pointedly.

All three of us fall silent, which is kind of a relief. We leave the fancy part of Union, where all the houses are huge with perfectly edged bright green lawns, and we drive into the next neighborhood, where the houses are smaller—some nice, some not so nice. We pass one with dark metal siding and an American flag hanging over the front door, with a “Support Our Troops” banner tacked up beneath the windows, practically glowing in the dark because of all the floodlights trained on it. If Conrad weren’t here, I’d ask Tracy to stop so I could take a picture for Vicky, who likes to post photos of troop-support banners from all over the country on her son’s memorial site.

Kathleen hates it when I say it, but Vicky is my friend. Her son, Sergeant Travis Ramos, was one of the people who died with my dad when the convoy they were traveling in blew up. I discovered Travis’s memorial site last fall, and it inspired me—eventually—to start designing the one for my dad. One night when I couldn’t sleep, I posted a comment on Travis’s site, explaining who I was and asking for advice about how to—and whether I should—launch my site. And that’s how I met Vicky.

She emailed back right away, full of reasons why a memorial site is a great way to honor someone. It was Vicky who suggested I launch the site on the first anniversary of the explosion, and Vicky who later contacted everyone on her mailing list to let them know that there was finally a site up for Alfonso Zarelli, which is how I ended up getting tons of posts on the anniversary. And how I learned that my dad had decided to stay in Iraq for a year, when he’d promised me that he was coming home after six months.

I kind of got a little obsessed with the posts for a few days, but Vicky and I emailed a lot, and she helped me. She understood what I was going through.

The day after the anniversary, my mother came to my room and flipped out about Vicky, claiming that I didn’t need to expend my “emotional resources” on a grown woman who was grieving. I knew right away my mother had been reading my emails, which wasn’t hard for her to do—she’d set up my account for me in middle school, and I’d never changed the password. I’d never thought I needed to.

She doubled our therapy sessions that day.

To be honest, I think my mother was jealous that I’d said more to Vicky about missing my dad than I’d said to her. That’s probably why I didn’t change my password right away after I found out she was reading my email. In a way, I sort of liked that she was jealous.

Sometimes it’s just easier to talk to people you don’t really know.

When we pull up in front of the Deladdos’ place, it takes exactly one second to figure out which house is Jamie’s. The house to the left of the Deladdos’ is perfectly maintained and lit up like the Fourth of July. I can see a TV on the wall and a dog bouncing up and down on the couch, barking and wriggling furiously as we idle on the street in front of his territory.

The house to the right of the Deladdos’ is small and rundown. The lawn is scraggly with bald spots where grass refuses to grow. Brown shutters droop on their hinges and white paint has peeled off the house and landed in half-dead shrubs, creating a dirty-snow effect. The gutters are bursting with dead leaves and branches that look like they’re sprouting from the house itself. There are no lights on and no one seems to be home.

This is where Jamie lives with his dad.

Jamie turned eighteen this summer. Technically, he doesn’t have to live here anymore. And considering what his father did to him when he got arrested, it’s hard to believe that he’d want to. But I’d be willing to bet that Jamie won’t leave his dad alone unless he has to.

Jamie can be loyal to a fault.

I wonder what Jamie’s mother would say about his father leaving him in jail overnight.

I saw Jamie’s father from a distance last Thanksgiving at a restaurant, and he seemed way more interested in the football game that was on than in talking to Jamie. I don’t know a lot about him—I know that he’s a cop, and that he went a little crazy for a while and Jamie actually had to live with the Deladdoses for a few months, which I try not to think about because it drives me crazy.

But I know even less about Jamie’s mother. Only that she didn’t live with Jamie and his dad because she was in some kind of institution near Boston. I also know that it was soon after she died that Jamie got kicked off the hockey team.

Which is when he became one of my mom’s patients.

Yes, I am the very lucky daughter of an adolescent psychologist who is in therapy herself. No wonder I avoid conversation with her at all costs.

It drives me nuts that my mother knows more about Jamie than I do. Although, at this point, that would be true of anyone who actually had a conversation with Jamie this summer—the cashier at the grocery store, the guys he worked with on the road crew, his probation officer.

Regina.

“What do you want me to do with this blanket?” Conrad asks, unbuckling his seat belt. Before Tracy can answer, the Deladdos’ front door opens. A woman looks out at us, her hand hovering over the screen-door handle as if she’s unsure what to do. She shields her eyes against the glare of the light above her front steps in order to see us better.

“Shit,” Conrad mutters. He runs his hands through his hair and looks down at his ruined pants and his red shirt, which now looks vaguely tie-dyed.

“Just leave it there,” Tracy answers.

Without another word, Conrad gets out of the car, slams the door too hard and starts up his front walk. As I watch him, he seems to physically transform, like he’s trying to become invisible. He ducks his head and looks at the ground, pulling his shirt down as far over his pants as he possibly can and then giving up and jamming his hands into his pockets. The woman holds open the screen door for him and he slides in sideways so as not to touch her or let her touch him. She asks him something and he shakes his head while moving past her as if his life depends on it. She watches him take the stairs two at a time and then, after he has disappeared from her sight, turns back to us. She lifts one hand to shield her eyes again, and then gives us a hesitant wave before slowly closing the door.

expiate (verb): to make up for doing something wrong (see also: Jamie…apologizes?)

“MATT IS A TOTAL SADIST.”

“Trace,” I say, pretending to be shocked. “Did you finally open that vocabulary study guide I gave you, like, a year ago?”

She rolls her eyes at me. “He is.”

I’m tempted to remind Tracy that I spent almost all of freshman year telling her that Matt had turned into a sadistic jerk, but we’ve been getting along so great, the last thing I want to do is say I told you so. Even though I kind of do want to say it.

Tracy pulls a pair of super-soft yoga pants and a blue T-shirt that she knows I love out of her dresser and hands them to me. “Here. And don’t forget the leave-in conditioner. There is nothing worse for your hair than chlorine. Matt’s hair felt like straw all the time.”

“Gross,” I say as I pull her silk T-shirt over my head. I know it’s ruined—it now feels more like Styrofoam than silk. As soon as I get it off, Tracy rushes it into the bathroom to begin a special washing ritual in her sink involving a “delicates” soap—I had no idea there was such a thing—that comes in a black bottle shaped like a corset.

“I’m really sorry about your shirt,” I say as I follow her slowly. I hate Tracy’s bathroom. I try to avoid using it because the entire thing is full of mirrors—there is literally no escape from looking at yourself, unless you’re in the shower. And looking at myself is not one of my favorite things to do. I actually took the mirror off the back of my closet door this summer because I was constantly checking my hair and my face to see if anything good was finally happening.

It never was.

Tracy, on the other hand, has what Caron would call a “healthy sense of self-esteem.” She checks herself out constantly to make sure that the outfit she put together works from every angle and that her hair and makeup are achieving maximum effect. When I watch her do this, I don’t think, my best friend is vain, like I used to. Instead, I think, What is it like to actually enjoy looking at yourself? I mean, it’s not that I expect to look in the mirror and see Giselle. But there’s got to be something in between “I’m so gorgeous” and “I’m so hideous.” Right?

There’s got to be.

“Don’t worry about the shirt,” Tracy says as she swishes it around in the water over and over in a figure-eight pattern. Unfortunately, I can tell she just doesn’t want me to feel bad. I know it’s totally killing her that the shirt got trashed before she even got to wear it once.

“I’ll get you a new one if it’s ruined, okay?”

“Uh-uh. If it’s ruined, Matt is getting me a new one. And he’s also getting Conrad some new pants.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” I say.

“I should threaten to call his mother. She always liked me. I bet she’d love to know he was trying to drown a freshman for fun.” She lifts the shirt out of the sink, gives it a sniff and puts it back to soak some more. “Blackmail might work. And if it doesn’t, at least I’ll get to tell his parents that he’s having sex, and his birth control method is to say to the girl, ‘You worry about it.’”

I look at Tracy in the mirror. “I thought you said you guys used a condom.”

Tracy sighs. This is a conversation we had over and over last year, when Matt kept trying to convince Tracy that she should be on the Pill, and I kept telling her that she had to make him use a condom. “We did, Rosie. But only because I had them. He was only thinking about himself. So not worth it. Be glad you’re still a virgin.” She points at a bottle sitting on the edge of the tub, knowing that of course I had already forgotten all about it. “Don’t forget to use that leave-in conditioner.”

Tracy closes the door behind her, leaving me standing in the room of mirrors in my bra and the loose-fit white capris I borrowed from her—I couldn’t get my runner’s thighs into her skinny jeans if I covered them in cooking oil. I turn to face the shower curtain and peel the damp clothes off, trying not to catch a glimpse of myself—I don’t feel like seeing my naked body in the mirror while wondering if it’s weird that I’m still a virgin.

I’m a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore—it shouldn’t be weird that I haven’t had sex yet. But somehow, when Tracy points out that I’m a virgin—which has happened more than once since she slept with Matt—it feels weird.

Once the water gets hot enough, I stand under it for at least 10 minutes, feeling the heat soak into me. It’s the warmest I’ve felt since Jamie pulled me out of the pool, his hands hot against my skin, his eyes practically on fire with anger.

Is he mad at me? He’s the one who stood me up, I keep reminding myself. So what is he so pissed off about?

Caron says I have to stop feeling like everything is my fault. And she follows that up with a question about whether I feel like Dad’s death was my fault. My mother always looks like she’s going to vomit when we get to that part.

I turn off the shower and dry myself while I’m still standing behind the curtain. Then I put on the yoga pants and T-shirt and get away from those mirrors as fast as I can.

Tracy is on the floor, meticulously working her way through Vogue with a Sharpie in one hand and a pad of Post-its in the other. I sit down next to her and get to work on a back issue of Elle, carefully tearing pages out that Tracy has marked by folding the corner down.

I have no idea why she wants some pages and not others, because all the models and outfits look pretty much the same to me. But as Tracy carefully explained when I first started helping with her magazines, each outfit is an individual work of art that needs to be studied. When I looked skeptical, she reminded me of the monologue Meryl Streep has in The Devil Wears Prada, where she smacks down Anne Hathaway for laughing at a bunch of magazine editors who are trying to describe the specific shade of blue on a belt. I knew the speech she was talking about—when I first heard it, it made me see fashion as a kind of art, and I’d never thought of fashion that way before.

As I play the role of Tracy’s assistant, I take a look around the room. A year ago, I would have been on her orange shag rug and she would have been in the beanbag chair, asking me whether or not she should sleep with Matt. Now, the shag has been replaced by a flat black rug with gray lines that I think are supposed to be flowers, and two clear plastic armchairs sit where the beanbag used to be. And we’re doing something meaningful—or at least, meaningful to her.

To be truthful, I don’t actually know what we’re doing.

Tracy’s walls are covered with magazine pages and blog photos, but they’re not just taped up as part of a collage, like they would be in most girls’ rooms. She has painted one entire wall with special magnetic paint so she can use these tiny magnets to hang up the images, which she moves around daily and covers in different colored Post-its. Sometimes she’s written a word or a phrase on the Post-it like “Bubble!” or “Blue sky”; other times, just letters.

If I ask her what she’s doing, all she says is I’ll find out soon enough.

We’re not supposed to be keeping secrets from each other this year, but she looks so happy when I ask about her project that I decide not to remind her about that.

“So, Peter went back to school?” Tracy gets up, disappears into the bathroom, and comes back with the leave-in conditioner I forgot to put in my hair.

I nod.

“Back to what’s-her-name? That rich pot freak?”

Tracy—who has had a crush on my brother for most of her life—knows what Peter’s girlfriend’s name is. She just can’t bring herself to say it. I get it. Sometimes I can’t bear to say that girl’s name, either.

“Yup, back to Amanda.” I take the bottle from Tracy and squeeze some of the conditioner into my hands. It smells like tomatoes fresh off the vine. “And I’m sure she just couldn’t wait to get him high,” I add, the words sounding funny—for a whole bunch of reasons—as they come out of my mouth.

It’s hard for me to think about Peter getting high. I never thought that my brother would be one of those guys who would get into drugs just because his girlfriend liked them.

Caron says that people’s reasons for using drugs are “often very complex.” It’s the one thing she says that doesn’t get an instant nod of agreement from my mother. Mom and Caron know each other really well—they used to be in the same practice together—so I usually feel ganged up on when Caron is talking and Mom is just nodding at everything like a bobblehead. But when Caron talks about Peter’s “complexity of motivation for using,” Mom gets very quiet and looks at the floor.

I don’t think there’s anything complex about it. I think he’s doing it because Amanda wants him to, and he’s desperate to impress her because he’s never had such a beautiful girlfriend in his life. He’s never really had a girlfriend at all, now that I think about it.

“So how is Peter doing?” Tracy asks after a pause that is meant to make the question seem way more casual than it really is. “Have you talked to him?”

I shake my head.

“Well, you’re going to call him, aren’t you? To check on him?”

“At some point.”

“You’re still mad.”

I nod.

“Maybe you should be worried, not mad.”

“And maybe you should just call him yourself if you want to talk to him so badly,” I tease.

“It’s not that I want to talk to him,” she says too quickly, though we both know she does. “It’s just that I’m worried.” She fixes me with her most serious stare. “And you should be, too.”

About a week before they had to go back to school, Peter and Amanda came to visit. They’d been working in a hotel on Martha’s Vineyard for the summer, and the first thing I noticed was that they looked like they hadn’t been in the sun the entire time. What’s the point of dealing with snotty, demanding hotel guests on Martha’s Vineyard if you’re not going to go to the beach?

Then I thought maybe they were just being really conscientious about sunscreen. Amanda definitely seemed like the type to want her pale skin to stay as pale as possible.

But that didn’t explain the bags under their eyes.

It was the first time my mom and I met Amanda, and I hadn’t been looking forward to it. I was still pissed that she’d invited Peter to go to her house last Thanksgiving, even though she knew it was our first Thanksgiving without Dad. When Peter had called to tell me he wasn’t coming home, I’d actually hung up on him.

So Amanda and Peter drove up in her hand-me-down silver Mercedes convertible that her father—who is also a shrink, by the way—gave her when he upgraded, and they looked like they hadn’t showered in weeks. When I said something about it to my mom, she said that that’s what college students do. Something about rebelling against their parents’ enforced hygiene rules once they finally get out of the house.

Amanda is definitely pretty—there’s no getting around that, no matter what Tracy says about how she’s so super skinny that her head looks too big for her body. She wears baggy clothes that are supposed to make her look like she doesn’t have any money, but they’re so nice that you know she totally does. She has super-long blond hair and green eyes, and when she smiles she looks like a sleepy cat.

Or a high cat.

For a few days after they got home, I actually believed that they had just been working really, really hard, and Peter was too exhausted to speak. He barely deigned to acknowledge my existence until he said that he was giving me his old iPhone because Amanda had gotten him a new one. That was on the third day of their visit.

Not talking may be normal for some brothers and sisters, but it’s not for us. Peter and I were really close. He used to look out for me, and he was even nice to me in public. Maybe that’s because we’re four years apart—we were never really interested in each other’s toys when we were little, or each other’s friends when we got older.

I could go to him if I needed advice for practically any situation. And when he came home with Amanda, I was planning to tell him how nervous I was to go back to Union after ruining Regina’s life, and that I needed some real “coping strategies,” as opposed to the ones that Caron and Mom were coming up with in therapy that involved telling Regina how her actions hurt me, by filling in the blanks of this sentence: “Regina, when you blank, it makes me feel blank.”

The first—and only—time I’ve ever laughed in therapy was when I tried to imagine saying that sentence to Regina.

Anyway, there was no way I was going to ask Peter for advice on anything while he was walking around with such a huge superiority complex. When he gave me his stupid iPhone, he actually patted me on the head and called me “kiddo.” And Amanda gave me a weird little sad-face smile and told me I was just unbearably cute. “Pete, what’s it like to have a little sister?” she said in front of me, using a voice that most people reserve for talking about puppies, kittens, or babies. “Oh, look at her—how sweet. It must just be so fun!”

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