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deposited a lump of ice cream on her tongue and swallowed. “I was in the neighborhood.”
    “Stowe’s not really in the neighborhood,” Teddy pointed out.
    She shrugged. “I feel bad, I guess. I’m hogging Les all to myself.”
    Jude laughed. “Really, that’s okay. You can keep him.” Then, having lost his appetite, he turned his ice cream cone over onto the table. “No offense, but it’s not really your business.” The cone settled, and then began to melt.
    Teddy was working on his own cone. Jude looked at him and Teddy looked back. Teddy’s rash looked like a birthmark, a twin scar that bound them together. They were parentless; they were orphans, fiercely so. Eliza, Misfits or no, could not get to them. Her red mouth was pouting. Jude wanted to lean over the table and glide his tongue against the groove between her teeth: that would shut her up.
    “Maybe you should go see him,” Teddy said to Jude.
    “What?”
    “Maybe you should give him a chance.”
    Jude looked at him. “Don’t mind Teddy. His mom left this morning. He’s feeling homesick.”
    Teddy fired a look at Jude. It was the same look he’d given Jude in front of Harriet earlier, drained of all its pleading warmth. Their silent pact had been broken.
    “She left?” Eliza asked. “Where’d she go?”
    “We don’t know,” Jude said. “We just woke up and she was gone.”
    “Just—gone?”
    “Just gone.”
    Eliza put her small white hand on top of Teddy’s brown one. “Oh, shit . What should we do?” Her nails were painted with red polish, now chipped. Jude wanted to put his hand on top of theirs, as if they were making a promise or cheering before a game, but he didn’t know what they would be cheering for.
    O n Christmas, Les had asked her, “Do you know what your problem is?”
    “I don’t appreciate my mother.”
    “That’s true.”
    “Or my trust fund.”
    “That, too.”
    They were sharing a bottle of wine on his fire escape overlooking St. Mark’s Place.
    “You’re young,” Les said. He got like this when he was tipsy—enigmatic, flirtatious—but now he was full-on drunk. “You’re naive, girl. You’re a drama queen. You’re a sad-story addict. You’re drawn to them like a moth to a flame. You believe you can save the world by saying so.”
    “Whatever,” Eliza said.
    “Fine,” said Les. “Go up there. Scatter your pixie dust.”
    S alvatore “Tory” Ventura lived on Lake Champlain in a colossal stone house, bearded with ivy, that Jude and Teddy had passed a thousand times. Up and down the street, cars were double-parked, jammed in snowbanked driveways and scattered across the white lawn. A guy who was not Tory was manning the door, and with an indifference that Jude took as a sure sign of their triumphs to come, he waved the three of them in, through the foyer, past the piles of coats and shoes, through the marble kitchen smelling of microwaved food. In the cavernous, wood-paneled living room, “Pour Some Sugar on Me” was drowning out Dick Clark. People were crowded around the coffee table, playing poker in the low light, and Jude recognized them as he recognized semifamous people on television. Wasn’t she from that one show? Wasn’t she in his homeroom? It was nine o’clock, but he didn’t see Delph or Kram.
    Twenty-odd years ago, when Les and Harriet had been in college here, they’d met at a party. Les once told Jude it had really been an orgy, that he had found Jude’s mother’s body in a pile of other bodies (a mass like a writhing octopus), and that she’d been wearing nothing but a string of love beads, purple and pink. He’d taken her hand and pulled her out, Les to the rescue.
    Since then, the health of Lintonburg’s hippie movement had followed a series of dips and inclines, the same undulating route of the Dow Jones, for which most of the New England Boomers, by the end of Vietnam, had abandoned their peace pipes. By the time Les was fired from his lab position at Vermont