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It’s just me.”
    I blink in the darkness. My bones feel like Jell-O. I’m not wearing my contact lenses.
    “I can’t see,” I say, my voice muffled by the hand still over my mouth.
    “It’s me.” It’s Stephanie. She’s crying. “Here.” She hands me her backup glasses; we wear almost the same prescription, and have been sharing since the seventh grade. As silly as it sounds now, it was one of the things that initially made us such close friends. There was a time when we seemed to have everything in common. Things feel different now; I’m almost surprised that she decided to wake me up and not Grace, since they’ve been spending most of their time together since school started.
    Once the glasses are on my face, I realize that Steph is sitting cross-legged beside me in bed. She’s fully dressed in a blue and white Stonybrook Academy sweat suit, her face red and streaked, her pretty hair tied into a quick messy ponytail. “Will you come to Winchester with me?”
    I shake my head, still foggy with sleep. “Right now? It’s the middle of the night.”
    “It’s barely midnight.”
    I glance at my alarm clock, struggling to focus. It’s 12:47 a.m.
    “What for?”
    “I have to go see Ethan, and I don’t want to go alone.”
    “Steph, I am, like, so heavily medicated right now. Can’t it wait until morning? What’s so important? Ethan’s probably sleeping.”
    She shakes her head. I can tell she’s going to start crying again, that her momentary composure was only summoned in order to wake me up and bring me along. “I got an e-mail . From my dad.”
    “Yeah?”
    “He and my mom are getting a divorce. He’s in Saint-Tropez right now, and she’s moving out of our house like right this second , and they decided to send us a freaking e-mail to tell us.”
    “Oh, Steph.” I wrap my arms around her. “You’re kidding. I’m so sorry.”
    Her voice is shaky. “You don’t have any idea, Emily. Your parents aren’t getting divorced. My mom and dad have been married for ever .” She shakes her head, rubbing her runny nose against my pj’s. My jamiflams. And I don’t care. The whole thing still feels like a dream. “It’s like I don’t know anything that’s real all of a sudden.” She pulls away to look at me. “Come with me? Please?”
    I hesitate. “Why do you need me to come?”
    She looks at me like I’m stupid. “Because you’re my best friend.”
    I straighten her glasses on my face; the whole world feels suspended halfway between sleep and waking, slightly out of focus.
    “Okay,” I say. “Just let me pee first.”
    Digger is late–night campus patrol. He’s Digger-the-dining-hall-carving-station-attendant’s twin brother. Depending on who you ask, they both graduated from Stonybrook like forty-five years ago, when it was still an all-boys’ academy, and basically never left. I’m not sure what their whole story is, but they don’t seem like they were ever Joe Harvard types. My dad says they’re harmless, and he seems to enjoy having them around for posterity. Beyond that, he’s mum on their backgrounds.
    The Diggers share an apartment on campus, in the middle-school boys’ dorm. I’m not sure what their first names are, but it doesn’t matter; you can always tell which one someone’s referring to based on context. Like, “Digger sneezed on my beef au jus last night,” or “Digger caught us smoking a joint behind the field house, so we gave him fifty bucks and a fifth of Wild Turkey not to turn us in.” See? Obvious.
    Without waking Grace, Steph opens her window and lets the rope ladder fall almost to the ground. She gives it a tug to make sure the hooks are firmly in place. Then we both climb out the window. Just like that. The whole process takes fewer than ten seconds.
    As Stephanie and I hurry across campus, we spot Digger strolling near the tennis courts with a flashlight, a hand-rolled cigarette tucked behind his ear while another burns between his lips. He