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State in 1980, the town’s marijuana market had dried up. His customers got promoted, got pregnant, got older.
    But then there were their kids. By the end of 1987, at Ira Allen High School, the hippie thrived again, enjoying with the jock a marriage of tolerance, if only for their sheer numbers. Metalheads and punks, though, were few and far between, and they knew how to watch their backs. At Tory Ventura’s house, no orgy greeted Jude with outstretched hands. He and Teddy and Eliza entered the room just as someone was snapping a picture: they would be forever captured in a photo they didn’t belong in, blinking against the flash. Escaping from the room, they took cover on the landing of the staircase, in the shadows of the wide window seat. Eliza went in search of beer while Teddy and Jude stayed put, keeping an eye out for Kram and Delph.
    “She knows her way around a party,” Teddy observed.
    “She’s not shy,” Jude agreed.
    “You like her?”
    Jude looked out the window. “She’s awful damn nosy.”
    “She’s just trying to be nice.”
    In the backyard below, a bonfire was blazing. The light caught a flash of glass—a beer bottle soaring into the lake.
    Teddy said, “She’s pretty, though, right?”
    “She’s pretty,” said Jude.
    Here came another girl now, slithering down the stairs, and up her denim skirt went Jude’s eyes. Whether Tory Ventura, escorting her, caught Jude’s glance, Jude didn’t have time to decide. Tory grabbed Jude’s devil lock and gave it a jerk, as if milking a cow. “I like your pigtail, Maybelline.”
    Tory had given Jude the name in Spanish II on the day Jude had made the mistake of borrowing his sister’s acne concealer, a tube of what looked like flesh-colored lipstick. He gave Jude and Teddy a hard time in the halls, for Teddy’s glasses, Jude’s retainers, their band T-shirts. It didn’t help that the members of the Christian Fellowship Club had started wearing T-shirts that reconceived the logos of these bands— Prayer instead of Slayer, Megalife instead of Megadeth—implicating Teddy and Jude in the same substratum of hallway prey.
    “You and your boyfriend been making out?” Tory asked Jude. He was staring with disgust at the rash around their mouths. “Looks like you got a giant hickey.”
    “It’s from huffing,” Jude said. “Turpentine? To get high ?”
    Tory was wearing a hot pink T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a pair of pleated khakis with a braided leather belt, and boat shoes with no socks. From his pocket, he withdrew a tube of ChapStick and circled it lazily over his lips, concealing the whole tube in his hand like a kid would hold a crayon. “Hell you doing here, anyway?” he asked Jude, his lips shining.
    “Hell you doing?” Jude asked, feeling bold.
    Tory laughed. The girl, still standing at his side, combed her fingers through the dark hair at the nape of his neck. “It’s my house, dipshit. Who invited you? Fitzhugh?”
    Jude hopped down from the window seat, and Teddy followed. The fact that Tory Ventura suspected Jude might have been invited to his party, by a person named Fitzhugh, whom Jude didn’t know; that a girl who had taken a train to see him was fetching him a beer; that Lintonburg might in fact be bigger, more generous than he’d believed, gave him courage. He ran a slow finger around the bruised contour of his lips.
    “Fitzhugh?” he said. “You mean the guy who gave me this?”
    Jude grabbed Teddy’s elbow, and they took off running. A group of people had gathered on the steps below, trying to move past, and they dove through them, taking the stairs two at a time.
    O utside, the night was so cold it hurt to move through it. It was 9:35, and Delph and his pot weren’t anywhere. They found an unlocked LeBaron and slipped inside, Jude in the driver’s seat, Teddy in the passenger’s. They scrunched down low, even though they didn’t seem to have been followed. “Why do you always have to piss people