The Sullivans’ house sold in June. Liam McBride and his family’s moving truck were the talk of Inga’s sleepover. The Sullivans left after a train killed Frankie in April. He was the last of the four boys killed in the spring of our senior year. Betty lived down the street from the house, on Lake Road, a strip of mansions on the bluff dropping off to Lake Michigan. The best real estate in town. Betty and I had seen the truck that day when we took our towels and cherries down to the beach, to honor the first full day of our last summer before college. 

Inga Becker had seen Liam getting ice cream at Sweet’s and tailed him on her bike. Inga was going to study journalism and could always be counted upon. He was tall, with curly dark hair and, judging by his U of I t-shirt, was headed to Champaign-Urbana in the fall. She reported this with a pore strip on her nose, pinching still-warm brownie out of the pan. 

We discussed Liam in our pajamas. Inga, Erin, Betty, and I held a sleepover the first night of the summer since middle school. We’d just walked at graduation and it was nice to be surrounded by a group of girls I’d known all my life. Celebrating the end of this era meant to me that our group would congregate on breaks from college, would shell out for bridesmaid gowns, have kids at the same time. It was important to me to know them a long time. 

“He’s rich,” Inga said. “That house has a conservatory.”

“Like for music?” I was doing my prerequisites at College of Lake County in the fall before finishing at U of I; I’d applied to one other place, Julliard, for piano. Betty filmed my pre-screen tapes for me in the practice rooms at the school. I hadn’t told my mom, which was just as good, because I didn’t get asked to audition. 

“No, a greenhouse.” Erin Morrow lived in the same complex as my mom and me. There weren’t many around here, the town was mostly houses. “The Sullivans grew oranges there.”

“I want a conservatory one day,” Betty said. 

Betty was rich. Inga was, too, but she didn’t know it. By Lake Forest standards her family was middle-class (they had a four bedroom house and two cars, but didn’t take vacations), but Betty was rich-rich. My mom cut hair at the salon near the bank and worked in the bar on 176. We lived in an apartment near the bowling alley, in the Cedar Hills complex. 

“It’s a shame he came here right when we’re leaving,” Inga said. “Though maybe that means one of us has a chance.”

At Lake Forest High School, the smart boys could be popular if they were also rich. They hung out with other rich girls who could be smart if they cared about their grades, but instead went to parentless parties and got trashed. They all dated each other like a concentric circle of blow jobs. 

None of the girls at our sleepover had ever had a boyfriend. Last month, Betty and I ditched prom and made sundaes out of every frozen yogurt flavor in the shop. The only one to come close was Erin, who’d been friends with Frankie Sullivan before he died. They had hung out in the art room at lunch. She made a sculpture of his head for the end of the year exhibit; the school didn’t display it in case it aggravated the copycat effect.

“It’s our last summer,” Inga said, holding up her sprite and rum. “We studied hard. We followed the rules. One of us needs to lose her virginity.”

Erin made her voice into an old man’s. “Pour me a drink, it’s gonna be a long life.”

Betty had been quiet this whole time. She could do that, disappear in front of everyone. She had her knees up and held her drink in her hands. I wished I knew what she was thinking. She caught my eye and smiled, just a little. It was enough to warm me from the inside. 

◆

When the others were asleep, Betty and I snuck out the basement door for a cigarette. We went to the far end of Inga’s backyard, behind the fire pit, and sat in the dirt with our backs to the wind. As soon as we were hidden in the trees, Betty kissed me. 

“Are you going to lose your virginity to Liam McBride?” I asked against her mouth. 

She snorted. Betty’s beautiful. I say this not in appreciation, but like a bodyguard. Betty is the person I love most in the world. She writes poetry and I’m the only one who gets to read it. She’s shy about being smart. She likes to bake and loves to swim. What she wants most is to live in a cabin in Wisconsin, grow her own vegetables, and write poems. Together we like to make soap with the flowers from her garden. We talked about how, if we were born five hundred years earlier, we’d be burned as witches. 

But she’s beautiful. She has huge blue eyes and this soft brown hair that always looks like it’s settling around her face. Earlier at the beach, in her yellow bikini, she looked like a 1940’s movie star, before they got so skinny. Her hair frizzes, and when she’s on her period a constellation of red bumps appears on her forehead. It’s like if you met one of those stars before Hollywood caught and coiffed them. Like if Rita Hayworth showed up at your birthday party. 

I never understood how Betty made it through high school without anyone else confessing their love; maybe lots wanted to, but no one was brave enough. I wouldn’t have been if I knew she was beautiful when we met. But that’s the thing about being friends so long. Thirteen years of school lunches – that’s a lot of life. I know Betty when she’s sick, when she snort-laughs, when we drive up to Wisconsin to get cheese curds and she farts in the car home. If you picked someone to be with Betty, you wouldn’t pick me. But I am with Betty. I love her more than anyone in the world. Betty deserved someone who’d burn with her. 

“Do you think it’ll hurt?” She quaked her voice, smoking seeping out her lips. We started when we turned fifteen – we liked having something secret to do together. “Will I bleed?”

Behind us, lights lit the lawn. “Shit!” I ducked. Inga’s dad was in the kitchen window, filling a glass of water. Their motion-activated lights glowed on the grass. 

Betty laughed into the inside of her arm. 

I rolled onto my back, breathing hard. “I hate getting in trouble.”

My shirt had ridden up. Betty reached over and ran her fingers over my belly, into my navel. She was soft everywhere. I didn’t understand it, but she liked the long hard lines of my body. She liked that she could see bones and muscle beneath my skin. When she looked at me, I liked my body, too. “Mr. Becker would think it was only a cigarette.”

I blinked. My breathing was too hard. I gripped her hand in mine. “I know,” I said.

She bent down and kissed me. Her lips were soft; her hair touched my cheeks. “Bets,” I said. “Do you have to go away?”

The light on the lawn went out and I couldn’t see her anymore. She ran her fingers through my hair, her nails scraping my scalp. I wanted her to tell me things won’t change that much, or that the important things would stay the same. 

If we got caught, I didn’t think my mom would mind. She worked a lot. We had rules and I mostly followed them; she made sure I had everything I needed. Now that I’m out of the school district, my mom and I are moving to a cheaper town as soon as our lease is up. So it’s not for me that I’m worried. I’m out of here. 

But Betty’s family is Catholic. In three months, she was going to major in business at Notre Dame, like her father before her. She went to church, she wore cardigans over her perfect breasts and smiled at teachers. No one expected Betty to be kissing me behind the trees at sleepovers.

We’ve only been together since New Years, when we left Colin Pankherst’s party and walked home alone. The thing between us, the nameless thing that had always been there for me, in some form, had shifted and grown. We stopped at the steps to the beach. In the moonlight, we watched the ice floating in the lake. She started to shake. She looked me in the eyes, and I knew I had to be the one to do it. I kissed her, softly enough that we could pretend it didn’t happen if we wanted. She kissed me back. She bit my lip. 

If we lost three months, that’s half of our relationship. I counted on every day of our summer.

“I know you have to go,” I said. “I want you to go.”

She blew smoke in my face. “No you don’t.”

“I want you to go to college.”

She put out the cigarette. “You know I don’t want to leave you.”

“I can visit.” I rolled onto my side, laid my arm across her lap. “You’ll come back. It’s only a few hours.”

I could barely see her, but I knew she was smiling at me. “Sally,” she said. 

“We’re adults now. It should get easier from here on.” 

“It’s so unfair. What did we do to deserve something so hard?”

She touched her fingers to my lips. “We don’t have to talk about this now. It’s still only June.”

I kissed her fingers, then bit them, again and again, until I made her laugh. 

◆

For Betty’s graduation party, I made a scrapbook. I’ve always been a saver—if I ever get my own place without my mother to hound me, I’ll turn into a hoarder — so I had thirteen years of photos, birthday cards, movie tickets, and passed notes to work with. At sleepovers, we used to play an elaborate version of the game MASH, where you list options for marriage, profession, type of home, and get your predicted life based on a random number. We expanded the categories to include affairs, embarrassing moments, ugly babies. On the last page, I couldn’t resist putting up a picture of us, from Betty’s debutante ball. She in a white gown, me in a black dress. 

I arrived on time, thinking I’d be the first one there. I didn’t like Betty’s house. Those hard, glowing surfaces didn’t fit her serene, private personality. I took the gravel path to the back and said hello to her grandparents, cooling off by the pool, before leaving my present on the iron table. Betty stood near the cake in a white dress, talking to a boy I didn’t know. She didn’t see me until I was near her. 

I watched her face change, her smile coming from the inside out. She hugged me, leaving sweat on my shoulders. “Sally, this is Liam McBride. Liam, this is my oldest and best friend Sally.”

I hadn’t known the new kid would be here. There didn’t seem to be a point in meeting him now that school was out. He looked at me too long. Inga had been wrong — he wasn’t cute. He had small eyes, and, uncommon in a rich kid, crooked teeth. He wore a t-shirt so green that when I closed my eyes, I saw orange. 

“Liam is going to U of I,” Betty said. “He’s a runner, too, Sal.” Sometimes in company, her upbringing seeped out and she talked like a hostess.

He asked me for a good spot to run. 

“The streets are calm here.”

“I’m from downtown,” he said. “Lincoln Park.”

“He says he can get us fakes,” she said, leaning close, “so we can go out.”

I worked in the golf club restaurant five nights a week. The summer had twelve weekends – eleven left. I imagined sharing even one with Liam. “Sounds fun.”

Betty was called away to greet her family. Liam stepped closer. “This town sucks.”

“How refreshing, a city kid who hates the suburbs.”

He came even closer. “Hey, do you know about the suicides?”

I straightened up. “What?”

“The suicide epidemic.”

To hide my face, I sipped my soda. The suicides happened this spring — four, though really it might have been only three. The first trio happened the same way: before school, on the tracks across from the front lawn. January, February, March. Jack Dorsey, Will Green, Daniel Turner. Witnesses saw them jump. Frankie Sullivan died in April, in the middle of the night. He was found miles away, along the grassy part of the tracks near the nature preserve, so wasted on booze and pressies that he might have fallen. If not for the previous three, it would have been called an accident. But trains were on everyone’s mind. And in any case, Frankie and his long trench coat set off alarms at Lake Forest High School. Jack, Will, and Daniel hid their secrets behind clean-cut faces. Frankie’s piercings and stick-and-poke tattoos spelled depression to the teachers. Erin Morrow, the only one of us who might know, wouldn’t talk about it. 

“It’s awful,” I said.

“The second kid, they say his dad hit his mom. Do you think that’s why…?”

I put my soda down on the table next to the cake. Congratulations, Betty!

“It’s not your business.”

To my surprise, he looked chagrined. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve never known anyone who died. I’m sleeping in one of the kid’s rooms.”

 “Look,” I said, “This town is fucked up. That’s all you need to know.”

He looked around the party. Some kids from school had started to arrive. Boys in pastel-colored pants, girls in sundresses like Betty’s. He glanced at me again, in my khaki shorts. “You wanna run with me sometime?”

I smirked. “Running is my alone time.”

Over cake, Betty cornered me. “Liam’s parents aren’t home. Let’s go.”

I had worked lunch that day and spent the party on my feet. Erin had already offered to drive me home. “Why don’t you come over?” I said. “We can watch a movie.”

“Don’t sulk.”

Normally, I’d have stayed, helped clean up, had a second slice of cake after everyone left. But I knew that if I did, I’d get roped into an evening with Liam. “I’m tired,” I said. 

She smiled over my head. I knew Liam was behind me. “I’ll call you.”

Then, she squeezed my arm three times. We developed that code in February. It meant, I love you. I want to kiss you right now. 

I smiled and squeezed her back. 

On a Wednesday afternoon, we went to the movies, Erin, Liam, Betty, and I. After, we sat on the curb outside as the sun set, trying to decide what to do next. I brought a twenty for the movie ticket and a slushie — my trick to limit spending— and wanted to go home. My mom was working, and I had a joint from Steve at the country club that I wanted to share with Betty. 

“Let’s get some food,” Liam said. “There’s nothing else to do here.”

“There’s plenty to do,” Erin said.

I told them that I didn’t have enough money.

“We’ll get noodles. They’re like, two bucks,” he said. 

“I doubt that.” 

Betty gave me a look from behind Liam’s head. They hung out after her party, and again last Saturday, while I worked. She invited me, so I wasn’t jealous. She wanted me to trade shifts on Friday and go bar hopping in the city. “So we can practice before college.” I didn’t envision a tremendous amount of bar hopping after my commuter classes at CLC.

“I’ll cover you,” Betty said, bending to my ear. I didn’t like borrowing money, but I wanted to stay with her. She squeezed my arm, then looped hers around my waist. We walked across the parking lot like a real couple. I imagined Liam behind us, watching her hair waft against her back. I reached up and touched the ends with my fingers. 

Liam drove us home. I should’ve gone with Erin, since both lived at Cedar Hills, but she wanted to leave early, skipping noodles. I sensed she didn’t like Liam, either. He did sleep in Frankie’s old room, after all.

I felt nervous leaving Liam and Betty alone in the car together. I saw how he looked at her when she wasn’t talking. Betty is so beautiful that I’m used to this, but never from someone who made her laugh. I didn’t like Liam, and not because they hung out without me, or because he was a rich boy. He talked too much about his life in Chicago, like he was older than us because he didn’t grow up in the suburbs.

“I’ve seen you running,” Liam said. He looked at me through the rearview mirror like he was my dad. “Near the high school. Do you live around there?”

“I pass it on the way to the lake sometimes.” I liked to pick out somewhere to run to, I found it easier to go long distances if I had a destination. I wondered what Liam would think of where we lived, or why I cared. 

“Hey Bets?” I leaned between the two seats. “You sleeping over?”

She turned. “My mom is taking me shopping early tomorrow, for dorm stuff,” she said. “This weekend?”

“We still heading downtown?” Liam drummed the wheel. 

“Oh, right.” Betty looked stressed. “Just come with us Sally.”

“I have work.”

When Betty was annoyed, she got quiet. She turned to the window and watched the streetlights go by. 

“Betty, I do.”

She shrugged. “It’s the last summer, that’s all. I wish you’d have fun with us.”

Liam glanced at me in the mirror. I turned to the window. He didn’t get to see my face.

We pulled up Cedar Hills, three brown buildings eight stories high around a grass square. I could’ve invited them both in — Steve rolled fat ones, it would support the three of us — but I didn’t want Liam on my balcony. When I shut the car door, I heard them turn the music up. I watched him pull out of the parking lot backwards, way too fast in that way boys did which was supposed to be impressive. Like risking not only their own life, but everyone else’s, made them sexy. 

The club was popular that summer, and now that I was eighteen, I could serve alcohol. On a dinner shift, I could make two-hundred bucks. I couldn’t afford to turn them down. I ended up working most nights a week, and missed the city hangouts. Still, I made time to see her.

One afternoon in July we were all by her pool — Inga, Erin, Liam, me. Betty was helping her mom with lunch. I laid on a lawn chair while the other girls swam. Liam had been staring at me. In my blue bathing suit, you could see the points of my hip-bones. I put my book across my lap. 

“Don’t you have guy friends?” I asked. “Or do you think you’re going to get laid?”

Liam had gotten a sunburn last time he was at Betty’s and it hadn’t healed. It made him look like a child.

“I don’t know anyone else.” He was staring at the pool, peeling the dead skin off his skinny thighs. 

“Sorry,” I said.

“I have friends. Just not here.”

“I know. In Chicago.”

He heard the snark in my voice and turned. “How come you never come out?”

I rolled my eyes. “Some people have to have a job, you know.” 

“Well, when aren’t you working? It’d be fun if you came sometime.”

“Why? Did Betty make you ask me?”

His ears went pink. “No,” he said. “Why would she do that?”

I picked up my book. “I really need to save money this summer.”

Before I went home to change for my shift, I went back into the water. Liam and Betty had already gone in — he was a cannonball kind of guy, much to my unsurprise — and I didn’t want to watch from the lawn chairs. 

Under the water, I opened my eyes. The chlorine burned, but I liked the tiles at the bottom of the Hamilton’s pool. Community pools never had such pretty tiles, they were only for rich people. I dove to the bottom and ran my hand across the smooth ceramic. Betty’s yellow bathing suit looked like two sunbursts in the expanse of blue. She hopped on her toes in the deep end, her curved thighs bouncing in the water. 

Liam, half pink skin, half green bathing suit, swam toward her. His hand touched the little divot on her waist, where a roll of skin folded before her hips flared out again. She hated being touched there, said it made her feel fat. 

I pushed off the bottom. The air burned my eyes. I blinked. When I could focus again, Liam was on the far end of the pool. 

Betty split the can of Sprite between us and added rum from her flask. We sat in the beach chairs on my balcony, our feet entwined on the guardrail. Betty had her toes done in pink.

“My feet look like crabs,” I said, wiggling my long toes against her ankle. 

“No they don’t.”

I was tall, five-eight, but my feet really overdid it. They were bony and angled as the rest of me. I made my toes grab at the gold bracelet she wore on her ankle. “Crabbity crabbity…”

“The better to run with, my dear.” She handed me a cup. “One day we’ll probably think this is gross.”

We’d been drinking rum and Sprite since sophomore year. “Never.”

From my balcony, you could see down into the back of the strip mall on 176. I was enjoying the sounds of summer: the crickets in the weeds, zips of music out of open car windows, the buzz of the fluorescent parking-lot lights. The nail salon was closed for the night; so was the breakfast place where they knew my mom’s and my orders. We watched one of the workers from the bar emerge and remove his cap, mop his forehead and look up at the sky. 

I lit a cigarette. When Betty left, I doubted I’d continue smoking, I didn’t like it much. I only did it with her. 

 “I wish you’d try harder with Liam,” she said. 

I’d hoped our night wouldn’t include him. I heard his name like a pebble dropped in a calm lake; even after the ripples faded, I’d know he was there at the bottom. “Why?”

“He’s not so bad.”

“You like him a lot.” I handed her the cigarette so it wouldn’t sound like an accusation.

“It’s fun to break some rules.”

“We break plenty of rules,” I reminded her. 

She brought her feet down and shifted in her seat, brushing a mosquito away from her thigh. “You know what I mean. We didn’t go out and have fun.”

“He’s just a boy who used to live in a city.”

“So?”

It wasn’t because I liked girls that I didn’t like boys — or maybe it was, in that I saw them without muddling attraction. I didn’t like how boys in Lake Forest who said “please and thank you” got treated like they should run for president. Meanwhile, my friends did amazing things. Erin had a perfect GPA and created sculptures out of her bare hands. She was going to Stanford on a full scholarship in the fall. Stanford. Inga spoke three languages. And Betty — she was so much more than anyone saw. With her big eyes and grades, teachers thought her a decent student, a good girl. But catch her in a quiet moment, and ask her what she’s thinking, and she’ll say just the most amazing thing. None of those walking boners would ever surprise me like that.

Betty was watching the cars pass on 176. 

“What are you thinking about?” I asked, my heart going. Not Liam, I thought. Don’t say Liam.

 She looked over and smiled. And despite everything, I knew then that it would all be ok. She reached across, pushed off from her seat, and kissed me. 

“That,” she said, touching my cheek. “I was thinking about that.”

The next Saturday I got up early and ran to the lake. I didn’t get home from my shift until one-thirty and couldn’t sleep, buzzing with adrenaline, feet throbbing — but sometimes it felt good to get my blood going in my tired legs. I listened hard until I heard the lake splashing several hundred feet below. I timed my footfalls to the waves. The surf was rough. Six steps for every crash. One two three four five swish. 

Outside Betty’s house, I pulled my t-shirt up to wipe the sunscreen out of my eyes. I looked up at her room, wondering if I should text her, see if she wanted to walk into town for coffee.

I saw motion across the grass from the backyard. Sometimes Betty liked to swim early in the morning. But then I saw the figure hunch, running under the windows.

It was Liam. He glanced back at the house, then saw me on the sidewalk and flinched, before putting a finger to his lips. He ran toward the sidewalk, choking on his own laughter. I stared. He marched us both down the sidewalk, where we’d be hidden from the windows. 

“You caught me red-handed,” he said. 

My tongue was too big. I couldn’t feel my hands. “What were you doing at Betty’s?”

“Hanging out,” he said. “We lost track of time.”

“All night?”

My eyes streamed; the sunscreen. I wiped them again, then looked at her house, as if it would tell me the rest of the story. I felt it in my lungs, my intestines. I pictured them together as if I’d been there myself. More than anger or betrayal, I regretted those nights out I’d missed. Maybe if I’d been with her more, this wouldn’t have happened.

He looked at his own house. “I need to sneak back in before my parents notice. Can you help?”

My whole body felt numb. I blinked at him.

“Ring the doorbell. I’ll go through the back door.”  

“It’s early.”

“Tell my mom we’re going running,” he said. “I’ll meet you in a few minutes.”

I didn’t want to help him. But I couldn’t handle anything other than what someone else told me to do. “Sure.”

He grinned at me. “I finally got you to run with me.”

A few minutes later, we were back on the sidewalk. He’d brought me a bottle of water and I drank it while he stretched. 

“So where were you headed?”

I swallowed the water down over a raw throat. My plans for coffee seemed from another life. “Home, I guess.”

“Great.”

“It’s seven miles,” I warned.

“You set the pace.”

I wanted Liam to fall back, out of breath, but he was a good runner, good enough to hold a steady conversation.  “So you grew up here?”

“Yep.”

“It’s a very beautiful town.”

“Everything is regulated by the town council,” I said. “The roofs, the paint, the trees. It’s all perfect on the outside.”

“Isn’t that every suburb?” he asked. 

I was annoyed. Liam came to the suburbs the last summer of his youth, and yet he’d claim them, I could tell. Tell everyone at school what it was like. Lake Forest wasn’t just any suburb, it was a bubble, a greenhouse north of Chicago with even more of a veneer than the other places. Sure, many small towns had secret rotten insides, but none as rotten as this one, I thought. 

Heat wafted up the pavement and over my legs. I could feel the sweat dripping down. “I hate it here.”

“Yet you’re staying.”

“Just for awhile.” And I decided then that that was true. I’d apply out of state. I wouldn’t get a scholarship to Stanford, but maybe somewhere else, somewhere far, so that I’d need to fly on a plane to visit my mom. I wanted to go somewhere the bad things showed. That way everything, the good, the bad, the in-between, could be sorted out in the open. Right now all I knew was that Betty and I had to be a secret, which meant we were one of the bad things. And Betty, with her white marble house, didn’t want to be one of the bad things. There were worse things than kissing another girl, but in Lake Forest, this wasn’t a matter of degree.

I poured us water when we got to my apartment. If Liam seemed surprised by the inside, he didn’t show it, just went to the bathroom and splashed his face. 

“Where’s your mom?” he asked when I opened the sliding door to the balcony. I pulled my shirt up and tucked it into my sports bra, letting the sun shine on my belly. He took his own shirt off and let it slap, wet, on the concrete. 

“Work,” I said.

He had his eyes closed, still catching his breath from the run. His body was long. I wondered what it was about him she liked. His wiry forearms? His broad shoulders? His waist was straight and trim, like mine, only he had a bit of hair I hadn’t noticed before, under his belly button. He opened his eyes and saw me looking. I flushed and looked away. 

I could hear the plates clacking from the open kitchen window in the breakfast place, where the fan blew the hot air into the parking lot. 

“You wanna smoke?” I asked. 

We went into my room. Our apartment was on the top floor, so if I opened a window and turned on a fan, I could get away with it. Still sweaty, we sat on the floor, our backs against my bed. I closed the blinds, enjoying the darkness of the room in the hot summer day. 

“What do you and Betty talk about?” I asked. 

His fingers brushed mine when he handed me the joint. “Normal stuff. School. Movies. Our parents, sometimes.”

I dropped my head against the mattress. The light shone through the slots in the blinds, striping across my legs and Liam’s face. 

“Both of us have strict parents,” he said. “But she followed all the rules. I broke them.”

I didn’t want to make her more interesting to him, but couldn’t resist defending her. “She’s braver than you think.”

He took the joint back from me and made a noise in his throat. “And what about you?” he asked. “You’re always quiet.”

“I’m not.”

“Why don’t you like me?”

 I looked at him. “It’s not that.”

He made a face at me, then smiled, his ears going pink. A bit of ash fell from the end of the joint and burned his stomach. He hissed, sucking in. I laughed. 

He kissed me. 

I was so surprised I moved backwards, knocking my spine against the metal bed frame. 

“Sorry,” he said. He was still holding the joint, and put it out in the coffee mug I’d brought as an ashtray. 

“That’s all right.” I couldn’t think of what else to say. He was looking at me with wide eyes, like he was afraid of me. His kiss had been gentle, quick, dry. Was that what Betty liked?

I kissed him again, slower this time. To see. He cupped the back of my neck. His hands were bigger than Betty’s. He smelled different, too. The bones in his face seemed harder than hers; his teeth pushed against my lips, and I opened them. 

What had they done together? What had she felt? I thought of her under this coltish male body, running her hands on his skin, her pink toes touching his hairy, skinny calf muscle. It embarrassed me that she had wanted something so simple and obvious. I ran my hands over his chest, his skin drum-tight. The more I touched him, the more excited he got; he trembled, I felt the excitement coursing under his skin. His entire body seemed designed to advertise his desires. It was easy to feel powerful when he reacted like that. 

Then he pulled me onto his lap. He was strong despite his thinness, he could move me where he wanted. Another kind of power, one I didn’t have.

On my bed, he stretched above and below me. My feet didn’t reach his feet, he bent his head to kiss me. This was how it felt when he touched Betty there, and there. I pictured her moving her head back. He touched my breasts, nipples differently than she did, differently, I think, than I did to her. I wanted to be sick, or scream; how could she like this? It was so dull, so rote. But she had, more than she wanted me. At our last sleepover – our last one ever, I realized with a jolt – she’d been tired and gone to sleep after just a kiss.

His hands were nervous. Maybe that was what she liked, the male quaking in the face of her beauty. I didn’t cower. I’d been looking at her too long. If he was this nervous with me, what had he been like with her?

He was breathing hard when he pulled away. “Do you want to…?” he asked. 

Was this what she had wanted? Somewhere along the way, I began to want it too. Not because I wanted him — though in my arms, trembling like this, he really wasn’t so bad, no one could say he was bad. But because she’d wanted him, and she’d had him. And then it was like I was her. I wanted to feel what she felt, everything she felt. 

It was too hot for the sweat to cool from our bodies. We lay side by side, not touching, watching the ceiling fan, until he reached out and touched my hand with his. 

“Cool,” he said. We both began to laugh. I had to let out the feeling somehow. I didn’t know what that meant, if in laughing I was telling him something I didn’t mean. 

Liam wrapped the condom from my mom’s stash – almost expired, it wasn’t like she ever had a chance to use them, I almost felt bad opening the box under the sink – in toilet paper, and then a plastic bag, to throw away on his way out so she wouldn’t see. 

I met him in the kitchen as he tied on his shoes. He kissed me again. 

“I hope that was okay.” 

“Yeah,” I said, as if he was asking me to borrow a pencil.

“Honestly I had no idea what I was doing.” He touched his hair, looked up. “You really thought it was okay?”

My mouth went dry again. “You haven’t…?”

He looked pleased. “You couldn’t tell?”

I stepped back. The room seemed to swirl. “What about Betty?” 

“Betty?”

“I thought you two were together.”

“No.” He laughed at little. “No. I always liked you. You didn’t notice?” He smiled, and then frowned. “I thought you were best friends?”

I ran into the bathroom. I locked the door and turned the shower on. I sat on the floor, thinking I might vomit, before I pictured him leaving, running home, telling Betty. 

I ran out of the apartment barefoot, across the hot asphalt. But he was already gone. I stepped back, onto the grass with the sign CEDAR HILLS HOMES and the thirsty impatiens. My feet felt better in the cool grass. 

I heard my name from the balcony above my head, and looked up, already feeling my stomach drop. It was Erin’s apartment. She was frowning at me with a mug of coffee in her hand, her red hair in a big bun on top of her head. 

“Was that Liam McBride?” she asked. “Were you guys…?”

“Nothing happened. Don’t — don’t tell Betty.” I knew right then that this was the wrong thing to say. I watched Erin look curious, and then her face went blank. I didn’t know what she was feeling, if she was mad at me for not telling her, or if she just didn’t like Liam. 

“My mom’s calling me,” she said, and went back into her apartment. 

When I got to Betty’s, she was on a lawn chair by the pool, arms around her knees. I planned to tell her myself, but when she saw me, she widened her eyes and turned her back. 

I stayed where I was, on the other side of the pool, near the deep end.

“I’m sorry,” I said. 

She didn’t answer. 

“I thought you’d fallen in love with him.”

She looked up. When she cried, it made her eyes look more blue. Even this far away, I could tell. Or maybe I just knew her eyes so well that I didn’t need to look. 

“I’m sorry,” I said again. I couldn’t think of anything else. “I love you.”

She stood, raised her arms, and dove into the pool. 

August. Betty’s birthday was an all-girls beach party, meant to keep out Liam. I didn’t need a gender ban to know I wasn’t invited, but it was a public beach. On my way down the stairs, I saw the girls in the water, spotted Betty’s yellow bikini as she bobbed and caught a wave. Erin Morrow was on a pink towel, drizzling sand onto her freckled stomach. Coming over, I had all kinds of ideas, but as soon as I reached the shore I realized I couldn’t talk to Betty yet. 

I bought a Coke from Colin Pankherst in the snack bar, and hid behind a pillar. Twenty yards away, I saw Betty’s mom unloading a cake from the back of the car. I was tracing my initials on the picnic table when I saw yellow in my peripherals. I looked up and Betty was standing over me, her legs sandy up to her knees, her arms across. 

Until I saw her, I hadn’t admitted that I really thought she might kiss me. I’d imagined it a million times. Her kissing me in front of everyone, our friends, her parents. I always told myself this was a fantasy. But only when she looked at me, her eyebrows up like she pitied for me sitting there, did I admit that I hoped she might still want me after everything. 

“What are you doing here?” she asked. 

If this fight had been like any of the others, I would have told her that this beach was public, thank you very much. 

I looked at her. She’d gotten some sun that day, and her cheeks were red, which made her eyes look more blue. Her hair was still wet. Her curls were tighter. I thought about kissing her myself. But when I uncrossed my legs, she stepped away from me. 

“This is the first birthday I’m not celebrating with you.”

“That’s your fault.”

“I know that.”

I looked behind her. Erin was watching me from her towel; she must have told Betty. Liam hadn’t. By the time I left Betty’s that day, no one was talking to me. They didn’t need to know I’d cheated on her to hate me. It turned out, Betty had the pull with them all along. 

“You’re leaving in a week,” I said finally. 

She was quiet for a long time. “I knew things would change,” she said. “I thought we had until the end of the summer.” 

“So did I.” 

Looking at her hurt my eyes. I turned my gaze to the picnic table to get a hold of myself. When I looked up, she was gone. 

◆

I leaned against the outside of the McDonalds, making eye contact with a parked cop who was waiting for me to buy drugs or solicit someone. This McDonalds was the halfway point between my house and Lake Road. It was dressed up in dark green shingles to look like a barn, because that was the only way the Chamber of Commerce would allow a McDonalds into town. 

Five minutes late, Liam arrived, smelling of sweat and shaking out his wet hair. We got McFlurries and sat on the bench looking at the empty Sunset Foods parking lot. 

He didn’t know the full truth — for that I’d have to tell Betty’s side, which I wouldn’t do. But he knew about me, and guessed at least some of the rest. For a while, he didn’t speak to me either, until one day he ran to my apartment building. 

“I don’t have any friends,” he told me. “Girls or boys.”

“Funny,” I said. “Neither do I.” 

So we started running. 

He was leaving in the morning. “Your last suburban ice cream,” I said.

“I don’t think Champaign-Urbana is exactly a metropolis,” he said. 

“Still.” I licked the Oreo crumbs off my spoon. “Your first and last suburban summer.”

He had already finished. He always ate faster than me. He stuffed his extra napkins inside the empty container and put it on the ground by his foot. “When something happens here, there’s no way to get away from it.”

 I laughed, but soon that died away. I looked out at the white parking lines reflecting the orange lights of the empty lot. The flower stands outside were empty. The metal carts were stacked and lined up gleaming for the following morning. 

“But it really is a pretty place.”