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happened to be wasted. She'd finished off more beers than I could count. Everyone seemed to be zeroing in on her, choosing her to down the beer, even after it was clear that she was drunk.
    She was changing right in front of me. I could see something different in her eyes. She wasn't the Emma I knew. She became this confident person, acting like all these strangers were her best friends, like she was the Queen of Quarters. She was laughing and throwing her head back and twirling her hair in her fingers, but not in her usual absentminded way. In-stead she was twirling it in this “hey, look at me and how gor-geous my hair is” kind of way. She took off her sweater and she was wearing a tight T-shirt I'd never seen before. And slowly, she was inching her way closer to Owen. By the time the game was over he had his arm around her, his left arm, the one with the string bracelet, and her hand was on his leg.
    I hadn't seen Emma with a guy since Michael Landau in seventh grade and that hardly counted. He was a total dork. I told her what I thought of him lots of times but she didn't seem to care. Going out is way different when you're in sev-enth grade than it is when you're in high school. In seventh grade you sometimes sit together at lunch or you sit out in the quad during free periods. You don't disappear into someone's bedroom and come back all flushed.
    Emma confessed to me, months after she wasn't with Michael anymore, that he had put his hand inside her bra a couple of times on the lawn behind the science center. But still. That was seventh grade. And that had been it. Therewasn't anyone between Michael Landau with his hand in her bra and this moment with her hand on Owen's leg.
    Emma did have a huge crush on this friend of Silas's everyone called Ax. His real name was Tom Axelrod and he was a senior like Silas and he would hang around the house after basketball practice and tease Emma, and sometimes even grab her in a headlock and make her smell his sweaty armpits, and for some reason this only seemed to make Emma's crush even stronger. But Emma knew nothing would ever come of it. There was an understanding. He was a senior. She just turned fifteen. That doesn't happen at ODS. But here we were, sitting around with a bunch of people we didn't know, and there she was with this guy Owen's arm around her and her hand on his leg like it was the most natural thing in the world. Come to think of it, Owen even looked a little like Ax. He had short spiky hair and dark eyelashes and green eyes and thick muscu-lar arms that you never see on the boys in the freshman class. He was wearing an Orsonville High varsity letter jacket in blue and gold. ODS colors are maroon and gray.
    Sitting there with her hand on his leg, with his arm around her, she looked like someone we each someday wanted to be. I just didn't realize it would happen so quickly.
    It must have been around two in the morning. Chris and Becky never came back from wherever it was they went. Brian was out on the porch, smoking a cigarette. DJ said he was beat and he took Mariah by the hand and they went upstairs. I'll say this about DJ: he didn't seem to have nearly as much to say to Mariah as he did to his friends, and other than pinching her butt when she would get up to go to the kitchen for more beeror to the bathroom for a pee, he didn't really pay any attention to her. But now that it was time to go to bed, he had a firm grip on her hand.
    He told us where the extra blankets and pillows were. It was a small house and the only two bedrooms were occupied. That left a couch in the living room and another in the den.
    I went to the linen closet to get pillows and blankets for Emma and me, and when I came back she and Owen were lying next to each other on the couch. Her head was on his chest. She looked like maybe she was already asleep and he was gently stroking her hair. Her hand was still on his leg. I walked over and Owen took a pillow and a blanket from me and said