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shut until after she’d eaten.
    We went through a drive through for food—we had to since Hazel wasn’t wearing pants—at a place that served their whole menu all day. Hazel ordered egg rolls, tacos, and coffee. I ordered a cheeseburger and a gallon size Dr. Pepper. I was very thirsty—an unfortunate side effect of doping.
    Hazel pulled into a space and parked the Audi. She scarfed down her food, making growling noises, and mumbling about how good everything tastes when you think you’re starving, even if you know that normally it tastes like shit. I didn’t try to make a conversation out of anything she was saying, I just let her ramble. When she finished eating, she crumpled up her trash and got out of the car.
    “Where are you going?” I asked, slightly panicked. I mean, she was almost naked. Of course, she didn’t answer me, so I turned around and watched her walk between cars in the drive through line in her tank top, panties, and Mary Jane’s to a trash can. She was honked at, hollered at, and whistled at—all of which she casually ignored.
    When Hazel returned to the car, she sat down hard in the driver’s seat, angled the rear view mirror down, and watched herself scrub her pointer finger over her top front teeth. She blindly forced the mirror back into place, then picked up her coffee, finished the contents in four swallows, tossed the empty cup out the window, burped like a man, and let out what sounded like a sigh of relief.
    “Now,” Hazel said, turning to look at me. I figured she was going to tell me that I was too boring and embarrassing for her and her friends to hang out with, and that she was going to take me home and never talk to me again. But she didn’t say anything close to that.
    “I’m only telling you this because I know you won’t blab it.” She reached across me to open the glove box, taking a cigarette from the pack inside. “So, the thing with me and Asher,” she began nonchalantly.
    Shocked, I instantly stopped chewing and sat perfectly still. I didn’t want anything to impede my hearing. I hadn’t expected Hazel to tell me anything about her relationship with Asher, but for some reason, I really wanted to know what had happened between them.
    “He was my first,” she continued, before lighting her cigarette and peeling out of the parking lot. “It happened a few weeks after my sixteenth birthday. It was sort of a weird time—nobody was really around. Tosh’s dad was home, so she was on lockdown. Luke was away with his family and Kasey—” she stopped and shook her head. “Kasey and I weren’t that close yet, and Chase didn’t enter the picture until later. Anyway, Asher and I had been together, like, all week, and that night we’d stolen a bottle of my mother’s vodka and made screwdrivers. They were ultimate screwdrivers, too. You know, with the orange peel in them. You ever had one?” she asked, her eyes cut at me, blowing smoke out the window.
    I told her I didn’t think so, instead of just saying no.
    “You would have remembered if you had,” she said. “Anyway, once Asher and I were good and blurry we decided we should be each other’s first, so we could practice for the real thing.”
    She glanced at me, I guess to make sure I was keeping up. I was following her, but I thought a person was supposed to wait for the real thing before doing it the first time. But then again, I thought I’d had the real thing with Derrick.
    “We were friends, and I trusted him, so we did it. The next time we were together, we did it again, and so on. We got really good at it, too,” she growled, smiled, and then went silent.
    “So…what happened?” I asked mildly, hoping to nudge her into telling me the rest.
    “I fell in love. He didn’t.”
    “Oh,” I breathed, unsure of what to say. Especially since that wasn’t what I expected her to say. She was so angry with him that I thought something more dramatic had happened. Like Asher had cheated on her with