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large table and a vanity mirror whose edges were decorated with pictures of Fessica riding a horse at what appeared to be various competitions. There was a white dresser across the room, and on top of this was a mirrored tray covered with bottles of drugstore nail polish and pop star concocted perfumes, fragrances with names like Forever Girl and Galactic Kiss.
    She fell onto the bed with a sigh, her eyes still half closed. I turned off the light and stood in the middle of the room and watched her for a while, the low-hanging Pluto on a mobile of our solar system sometimes brushing across the top of my head. Above us were the sounds of people skidding down the roof, laughing.
    “Do you want to get in with me?” she asked.
    Her voice was small and narrow, the voice of someone who spent a good portion of her life trying to not draw attention to herself. I’d sensed the same thing in my own voice at times, and it occurred to me that there were people downstairs who thought I was just as sad of a case as Fessica Montana. I moved slowly across the room and lay next to her. Our shoulders touched as we stared up at the sagging canopy, at the shadows that came through the window. They shifted whenever a car passed by before finally settling back into their primary pose.
    “Remember when someone wrote faggot on your locker after that thing in the lunchroom?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “What about it?”
    “That was my sister. I heard her and Judy laughing about it on the phone.”
    The thought of it caused an ache in my chest that blossomed like a firework and then faded.
    I let out a sigh. “Yup. That makes sense.”
    She turned onto her side. She was staring at me, her eyes so wide, they seemed to give off their own light.
    “I heard the strangest conversation down in the kitchen,” she said.
    “Yeah?” I asked. “What about?”
    “These two guys were saying that they were smoking pot on the golf course the other night and they saw that girl who disappeared. Jenny Moore. They said she walked out of the woods right by the seventh hole and then walked right back in. Like she was stepping out of the house to see what the temperature was like.”
    “Really?” I said. “And what do you think about that?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “People see things.”
    “People lie, is more like it.”
    “That too,” she said. “I bet you never lie.”
    “I lie every day,” I said.
    “About what?”
    “About everything. Sometimes I lie about the lie itself. That’s where things get tricky.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    I shook my head. “Never mind. I’m being stupid.”
    She swallowed. It made a wet, foreboding sound.
    “Dade?” she said.
    “Yeah?”
    “Can we try something?” she asked.
    “Try what?”
    Her response came in the form of her hand working on the button of my fly.
    “Whoa,” I said. I tried pushing her hand away, but she resisted. “Not cool.”
    She kept at it. She even sat up a little bit to get a better handle on it.
    “Stop,” I said.
    I jumped off the bed, falling onto the ground in the process. I checked my fly and fixed the top button that she’d somehow managed to undo.
    “What are you doing?” I said. “Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind?”
    “I’m sorry.” She sat up quickly and backed against the head-board as if repulsed by what some outside force had just made her do.
    “Not cool,” I said. “Not cool at all.”
    “It’s just—”
    “I should go.”
    “Please don’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”
    “I gotta go.”
    I was out the door before she could respond. A girl at the end of the hall was sobbing uncontrollably while two of her friends hung on either shoulder. I stumblingly ran down the stairs into a sea of people bouncing in unison to some hip-hop track that had been popular two summers before.
    “See ya later, Vagisil!” someone shouted as I made my way to the door.
    When I reached the porch I was out of breath and my heart