Chapter 1

There are advantages to being a ghost. Not a ghost in the unsettled, floating-above-the-living sort of way. But a ghost in the sense of being unseen, adjacent to a conversation, in proximity to a secret being shared, bearing witness to something salacious. There, but unnoticed.

Maybe that makes no sense. How could a person be standing right there in the middle of a gossip session or watching a botched attempt at a hook up without being noticed? Surely one person would make note of someone standing by. It would be impossible to not see an actual human being less than two feet away. Wouldn’t it?

Not if a person dressed uneventfully, never starting a fashion trend but never bucking the status quo. Not if the details of her everyday movements faded into the background of her trendier friends. If she never made much of how well she did in school and didn’t have a notable family, especially when surrounded by prep school names that mattered, her value in a social setting could easily be pushed aside. She could be a guest at a party but never the host, never the popular leader, never the revealer of the punch line, never envied. The world depends on these worker bees, filing along behind someone with a dominant personality and a sense of entitlement. But the rules are different in high school.

In the teenage years, being a ghost is its own sort of social purgatory. Not for the reasons you’d think. It’s not the being unnoticed, the lack of social currency. It’s the fact that when you’re a ghost, you move freely without consequence. You overhear everything, and therefore you know everything, especially if you’re perceptive and smart, like Lila Stone. Being a ghost can feel like a gift, an omniscience which could give an unremarkable person a feeling of remarkable power. But that’s not what happened to Lila. On the contrary, she took her anonymity for granted. And all it takes is one person who notices you to change everything.

Lila’s first mistake was ignoring the color of the drinks. The almost-chartreuse contents of the cups everyone carried around looked artificial and dangerous, a concoction no one should feel comfortable drinking. But there Lila stood, sipping from a cup of sickly sweet punch and thinking it tasted green, if green were a flavor. Not that she was even a drinker. The virtues of taking everything in life in moderation had been drilled into her by her mother from the time she was old enough to understand the whiff of a philosophical thought. Or even before that. Her mother... Lila tried not to think about her too much now, but the situations kept arising when she could hear all to clearly the voice in her head telling her what to do. And what not to do. If only she’d listened, especially tonight.

The pitchers filled with the radioactive-looking liquid were half-empty before eight o’clock. And soon everyone would start in on the pitchers of red drinks. From green to yellow to red. The electric green sludge was a distant memory for most of them, if they even drank it at all. The boldest started with yellow and moved on from there. Only Lila was still nursing green, her second glass of it, but no one noticed. No one noticed anything she did, and she’d long since wondered why. She accepted her role as observer, sidekick, vault of information. And secrets. It’s what happens when no one thinks you matter in high school. You learn things, you see things and you become, in a way, dangerous to others, depending on what you choose to do with that information.

No one remembered confiding in her so no one suspected her when tiny details of their closeted fears and missteps leaked out. Lila wasn’t notable but she was brilliant, knowing how much to divulge to get her a little social currency without ever leaving a trace of her betrayal. She wasn’t devious. She just wanted what everyone in high school wants: to be noticed.

Everyone else was already heading to the potent red punch and no one seemed to be feeling its effects. Maybe it was a placebo. Maybe Jack Spencer only pretended to put Everclear into his various drink concoctions, relying on the power of suggestion and the reality that a bunch of high school kids wanted to think they were drunk on something forbidden on a Friday night. From green to yellow to red. Like a traffic light warning them to slow down. None of them saw it for what it was: a bad slide into a dangerous place. No one thinks that way in high school.

Lila downed her cup of the toxic-looking punch, closing her eyes as though that would prevent her from noticing slightly medicinal taste. Maybe Jack had mixed Kool-Aid with Listerine and tricked them all. She could feel it snaking downward behind her lungs, burning its way through her digestive tract as it went. Something else happened in that dark moment as well. She forgot her life for a second. Not that she had anything particularly wrong with her life, at least nothing she’d freely admit. Lila was the stalwart friend you’d go to when you needed perspective. She rarely talked about herself, which made it seem like she was never plagued by the kinds of fears and insecurities her friends had. As the keeper of secrets, she had an ability to hide her own.

In that moment, she felt a wave of calm and recalled the last time, months earlier, when she’d been at a party at Jack’s house, drinking something equally dismal. The details of the night were foggy even then, but Lila knew she’d spent most of her time at the party locked in a conversation with Jack’s much older step-brother who was there as a sort of chaperone, though he had no sway with kids half his age and twenty times cooler. Lila had gotten to the party early, too early, a social faux pas that left her with no one she knew to talk to or even to observe. So the two of them talked about the classes she was taking and the syllabus for honors math, which he’d studied back during his time at their school. Lila felt relieved to have someone interested in her and was even a little grateful that he’d saved her from awkwardly lurking at the party. He’d poured her a glass of a sweet, alcoholic concoction, which she downed happily, each sip making her feel more at ease and less self-conscious. Once her friends arrived, he continued to dominate her evening, pinning her into a corner and talking just a little too close to her face, but she really didn’t mind. In her deepest moment of insecurity, Lila knew only a degree of separation lay between them, in what they represented to the kids for whom having fun at a party was second nature. Which is why she decided in that moment to see if maybe he was at the party tonight. He wasn’t a bad guy, just a boring guy. He couldn’t help what he was.

When Lila opened her eyes, she had as always the persistent hope that something would be different this time around. Blink and you’ll be transported. She kept her expectations low and was rarely disappointed. Lila’s understanding of math and numbers taught her to expect patterns. It was probably why she gravitated toward math in the first place: the calculation and the end result were formulaic and expected. Math was about truths and predictable behavior, something Lila found reassuring in a world where a person’s mother could disappear one day without explanation.

This night, however, proved that there can be a hiccup in the pattern of ordinariness. Lila found herself staring at probably the most effortlessly-gorgeous guy who’d ever walked the planet. Soft dirty blonde curls looked like they’d been arranged by a stylist on his forehead above eyes so aqua blue and pale they were slightly shocking, even from across the room.

He was smiling at no one, the way confident people do when they enter a room, showing off dimples and almost perfect teeth. Even under an old grey Dartmouth sweatshirt and jeans, it was clear he was an athlete, just by the way he carried himself, muscles tight, shoulders broad. Lila studied him, waiting for her intuition to do the heavy lifting and realize he was smiling at someone else, someone she could study for clues to tuck away into her vault of knowledge. Guys that good looking were always talking to one of Lila’s pretty, self-assured friends, girls with clothing allowances and hair-straightening irons and Kiehl’s skin products that wouldn’t possibly matter for fifteen years and whole drawers of Mac cosmetics. Lila made an effort at fashion and a skin care regimen, but it went unnoticed. Truth was, her pale skin didn’t require more than soap and water to keep it mostly blemish-free and she didn’t see much difference between the Maybelline products from Walgreen’s and the designer stuff she couldn’t afford anyway.

The bigger issue was that Lila made almost no effort because she didn’t see the point. It also served to protect her from feeling utterly unnoticeable when it was clear she could have tried harder. By making herself disappear, she became the indispensable friend who was always there to live vicariously through someone else’s secrets. That way no one really suspected her of what she was surreptitiously doing behind all their backs. Seeing but not seen.

But back to the guy. He was standing there in full splendor as one of the singlemost perfect specimens of high school gorgeousness that ever existed. Lila knew she ought to look away, but she snuck one more glance in his direction. And there he was, smiling back at her.

It wasn’t an act when Lila self-consciously looked around for a moment, certain he must have been trying to catch someone else’s eye, someone more obviously beautiful, someone who knew how to flirt and would know what to do with a guy that good looking. But no other girls stood in her immediate radius and when she looked again, he was still standing there, smoothing the front of his faded jeans. Like he might have been wiping the perspiration from his hands. Like he might have been a tiny bit nervous.

Lila actually felt the laughter rumble up at the thought of someone who looked like that feeling the least bit uncomfortable. Then she realized this was all happening in a public place, that she was standing there having conversations in her head and bursting into spontaneous laughter there by herself. The epitome of cool. She quickly forgot about Jack’s step-brother and shoved the drink back up to her lips, draining the last acid drippings of green punch and stifling her laughter in the dry plastic smell of a Solo cup. Wiping the sloppy ring of punch from around her mouth in the most indelicate way, she looked and saw him walking closer. She suppressed an instinct to run. Run fast and avoid whatever could come of this. She could feign an emergency and leave the party, or at least head for the bathroom. But first, one more look at his face. She couldn’t help it. Something in those eyes wouldn’t let her off that easily. So she mustered up a gulp of confidence she didn’t actually have, sat on the end of a scruffy beige couch and waited for him to make his way over. That would count as her second mistake.

“That was cute, what you just did,” he said. Better opening words were never uttered. At least to Lila’s ears. Although she didn’t know what she could have possibly done that was cute, she felt herself blush. She had always been bad at knowing. Bad at relationships. Or even conversations for that matter.

“Oh, hey,” Lila said, feigning a casual tone when her heart had just started thumping in her windpipe. Small-talk. Panic. And the habit of ignoring complements, if that’s what was happening. She couldn’t look him in the eye. It was like trying to look at the sun. She could glance at him for a millisecond at a time, but it felt dangerous to stare too long.

“Hey,” he said back, looking Lila right in the eye and not letting her off with her lame opening banter. There’s something Lila would never admit if you asked her, probably because she’d hope you didn’t notice. But she had an uncanny ability to drive away guys by erupting in sarcasm, self-deprecating humor or all out negativity at the least opportune moments, namely when any remotely-attractive guy starts talking to her. It’s a knee-jerk reaction developed over many years of protecting herself from failure where guys are concerned. This was not something her mother taught her. If anything, her mom would be screaming at her for sabotaging herself. And almost as if she heard her, in that moment Lila vowed to change.

“How’s it going?” Lila asked, willing herself away from the urge to say something sarcastic, caustic, subjectively funny: “Very impressive verbal skills. Witty. ‘Hey’ makes me think of my great-uncle Eddie who used to do stand-up.” She stifled all of it. He was almost a foot taller than Lila, putting him at around six feet.

“It’s goin’ alright,” he said, watching her carefully. He couldn’t tell yet that she was different from most of the other girls in the room, but something about her amused him. He nodded when he looked at her, like he could read her, which of course he couldn’t. Not yet. Lila took comfort in the fact that it was an impossibility. It was just a look. He sat across from her on a striped ottoman which sat lower to the ground than the couch arm where she was still perched. “So… I assume you go to school with everyone,” he said. He couldn’t know for sure because he stuck out as a stranger here. She’d never seen him before, which meant he most definitely didn’t go to Eastborne Academy. Which meant he might not know that many people at this party. Here was an opportunity. Lila realized she didn’t have to retreat into the persona everyone already knew, the girl who could never interest a guy like this. Here was an opening if she did things right. She downed some more of her punch, feeling her head get lighter from the nerves and the guy sitting there.

“Yeah, but I’m not like them.” She regretted it as soon as she said it. One of the side-effects of being unnoticed it that Lila herself sometimes forgot she was visible. Or audible. The result was that snippets of observation in her head came tumbling out her mouth without being edited first. Only when she heard herself say them did she realize others did too.

Lila caught the look on his face, questioning why she’d say that. She covered, “Just kidding.” She held up her drink. “Clearly the alcohol talking. We’re all the same. Clones, actually.” This was just making it worse. “I just mean we all go to Eastborne. Which means we’ve been together since seventh grade. So we know each other really well. How about you? Where do you go?” Lila could hear herself talking and knew she needed to cut bait and get out of this verbal gut-spill. Better to let him talk. Unless it involved something academic, her comfort level disappeared. She felt herself digging a fingernail into her palm. He noticed but took pains not to look there.

“As of tomorrow, I go here. To Eastborne. Well, sort of. I’m an RA, not a student,” he said, still slaughtering Lila with those aqua-colored eyes. This time, she decided to look a bit longer. They were so pale it was almost arresting. No one could look at him without staring at those remarkable eyes. And then it sunk in. What he’d just said. He would be starting work at school here tomorrow. Lila could possibly be one of the students he was in charge of, a thought which immediately made her feel like a child, even though he was probably only a couple years older than her. The school hired college kids to work as Resident Advisors, living in the dorms for free in exchange for “policing student activities,” according to the school’s website. The reality was that some RAs liked to party even more than the students they were supposedly policing, so most of them didn’t last long. None of the students would ever sell them down the river, but somehow the administration always got wind of it when they were the ones supplying beer to minors or sneaking out of their rooms after curfew. An imperfect system.

Instead of feeling the normal tingle of elation that might come when learning that an intensely attractive guy would be hanging around the dorms on a regular basis, Lila only felt dread. A whole semester of watching as her more self-assured friends made boyfriend material out of him until he got fired like the rest of them. A semester of trying to avoid losing herself in those crazy eyes, just so she could keep from falling into a complete depression because he’d soon be dating someone else and she’d have no choice but to watch and serve as that friend’s confidante and wise, rational friend when things didn’t work out.

“Oh. Well, welcome,” Lila said, hearing the sigh in her voice, the listless assumption of defeat. She played with the hem of her blue shirt, noticing that a thread had started to unravel. She pulled at it and it unspooled another three inches of thread. He watched as Lila tried to tie the string into a knot to stop the massacre, wondering what he had done to make her so uncomfortable. He still had no idea the effect he had on people.

“I think you’re making it worse.” It bugged Lila a little bit that he was watching so closely, mainly because he was right. The shirt hung there frayed and awkward like a dog cocking its head to figure out some unintelligible code. Having her ineptitude on display didn’t make Lila feel any better.

“Yeah. Okay,” she said, wrapping her brown wooly sweater tighter, obscuring the shirt entirely. “So where’d you come from? I mean, are you in school somewhere near here or what?”

“I am. I mean, I was--in college. Did three years in California. But my parents live in upstate New York and they felt like it was too far to have me all the way on the west coast. So I’m transferring out here.” That was partially true. A story he’d created because it sounded likely and it wasn’t so far from someone’s truth. Just not his.

“Makes sense.” Lila felt herself starting to feel a little more at ease. Maybe it was the dangerous yellow punch. “You’re okay switching in the middle? Must be kind of hard, leaving all your friends and getting going all over again,” she said. And as she said it, it made her really think about how much it would suck to be yanked out of Eastborne tomorrow and moved across the country to start someplace new.

“I’ve made my peace with it,” he said, smiling again. He looked probingly at Lila like he was studying her facial features, committing them to memory or something. It gave her a strange uneasy feeling. “I’m Nelson, by the way.”

It was then that it occurred to Lila that they’d been talking for ten minutes without introducing themselves. “I’m Lila,” she said, hearing the way her name might sound to a stranger and wondering if he liked her name. He didn’t think that way at all, so he just reached out and extended his hand. They shook both feeling oddly formal, but politely official.

“Hi Lila. So tell me, what do I need to know about the kids at Eastborne?” It felt like a loaded question to Lila. Nelson knew as much. Even though Lila had gone to Eastborne Academy with most of the kids in this room since they were twelve, she never deluded herself into believing she was one of them. It’s not that she considered herself superior. On the contrary, looking at her, you’d probably rank her very low on the roster of people most likely to go to Eastborne, which showed up on all the lists of fancy east coast boarding schools with the kids of politicians and magnates. She did not come from a wealthy family. Not by a long shot.

Lila’s mother worked in the kitchen at Eastborne for most of her life. And that doesn’t mean she was a head chef or some culinary expert. She mostly worked the grill, which made her fingernails permanently greasy and gave her pimples on her wide pink cheeks. Sometimes Lila looked at her mom and tried to see if she was objectively someone people would find attractive. But she suffered from a certain myopia which comes from loving a person too much. Of course she was beautiful.

And then she was gone. Without explanation, she just didn’t show up for work one day. Lila didn’t know about it at first because she’d always gotten up before dawn and left the apartment before Lila woke up. It wasn’t until after school, when the Dean came looking for her, that she began to realize something was wrong. Her mom didn’t come home later and Lila began searching for a note, checking her phone for texts, looking for something, anything, that would explain what happened.

The dean went down to the police station with Lila the next day and they filed a missing persons report. The police asked all kinds of questions, none of which seemed to give them any clues to why a grown woman, by all accounts happy and responsible for raising a teenage daughter, would leave of her own will. Yet there was no evidence of any crime either, no outstanding debts, no threatening mail or anything on her computer to indicate trouble. The police told Lila that sometimes people just don’t want to be found. They searched for her, but apparently she’d done a very good job of disappearing because they never found any trace of her, no credit card transactions, no cell phone use. She’d just vanished.

By then, Lila was fifteen and had been coming to Eastborne on an employee scholarship since the age of twelve. The school felt like home, and now, with no parents, it’s was literally Lila’s surrogate family. No one particular person takes responsibility for her. The dean has always acted paternally, but he has his own family and makes no mistake that Lila is not part of it. She doesn’t go home in the summers. There’s no home to go to. Home is the dorm at school. And that fact presented an interesting quandary when faced with a question like Nelson’s: what could Lila say about the kids at Eastborne? That she had never really understood what it felt like to be them? She’d have to assume Nelson was just like them. Most people who apply for RA jobs at boarding schools come from boarding school themselves and they know the drill. Not to mention, they usually have to know some alumnus or big donor to get a job interview in the first place. One look at him told Lila he’d fit in just fine and would find out soon enough that she didn’t. She was torn between wanting to be sufficiently helpful so he’d want to keep hanging out with her, but not so helpful that he’d get to know that she was nothing like the rest of them, that I really didn’t belong at Eastborne.

“You should know that everyone’s a rock star,” she said, choosing banter over substance. The she smiled, trying to exude confidence to back it up.

“Yeah, I kinda figured. You don’t get to a place like this without being special somehow. Major athlete or huge brain or, of course, very impressive parents.”

“Yup, that pretty much sums it up,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t ask which one of those groups characterized her.

“So which of those groups do you belong to?” He leaned back and took a sip of his drink. Lila noticed for the first time he was drinking the red punch and wondered if he’d gone through the green and yellow first, as instructed.

“I’m just a completely well-balanced friend to all,” she said, hoping he’d believe it. Or if he was going to run away screaming in terror, it might as well be now.

“Nice. Sounds like you’re the right friend to have,” Nelson said, which immediately bugged Lila. He knew it as soon as he said it; he could tell by the look on her face, which she immediately hid. What was she expecting? For him to refer to her as his girlfriend? Of course the rational Lila knew that was ridiculous. But somehow hearing him call her a friend left her feeling like that was all she’d ever be. It was a ridiculous feeling to have, she knew, but she couldn’t shake the sense of disappointment that she’d been labeled and put in her categorical place as his friend, while some other more self-assured girl would be his girlfriend. Wasn’t that the way it always was?

He was staring at her, which pulled Lila out of the pity party in her head. He’d kept on talking all this time and she hadn’t heard a word.

“Um, sorry. Did you just ask me something?”

“Yeah… where did you just go?” She shrugged. He laughed and bumped Lila with his elbow. Like a friend. “I just asked who’s your favorite teacher here.”

“Oh. Um, Raven,” she said, lying. For some reason she didn’t want to tell him her favorite teachers always taught math. Something about the reasonableness of math made her comfortable. If you had a rule and you used it correctly, the solution was guaranteed. Maybe in a world where a person’s mother could just disappear one day with no explanation, math gave Lila something to count on. But she didn’t want to admit as much to a guy she’d just met, so she went with the safe choice of an English teacher.

“I’ll have to seek Raven out. I just saw a whole list of names and office numbers and my brain kinda got slammed. A couple of the other RAs I met said I should come to this party, which was definitely the right call, just so I’m not trying to make sense of names and faces all in one day tomorrow.” He sipped his drink some more. Lila debated whether to get a refill. The concoctions she’d had so far were making her light-headed and she still had a long night ahead. Something told her the red variety wasn’t going to help matters, especially since she rarely drank anyway.

“How’s the red? I haven’t had it yet,” she asked, deciding then she didn’t care how great it tasted. She was done with all of it.

“It’s pretty awful. You should stay away.”

“Maybe,” she said, suddenly feeling unsteady. Maybe it was Nelson’s presence. Maybe not.

“I’m not sure there’s any alcohol in it. Which is just as well since as of tomorrow, I’m in charge of keeping you all in line and you’re definitely under age for drinking. Besides, it tastes like crap.”

“I think I’ll avoid it, then. I mean, because of the crap-tasting part. Not because you’ve scared me into thinking you’re an authority figure.”

“Oh, so you’re a rebel, huh? Guess I’m gonna need to watch out for you.” Lila liked the sound of that. He drank some more of the red drink anyway. Lila stared deliberately at the liquid sloshing in his cup, mainly to avoid the pull of those eyes. The red looked way less frightening than the yellow. Less like a toxic substance and more like red jello. She picked up his cup from the table and took a swig. It didn’t taste like anything. She sipped from the cup, suddenly feeling thirsty, tasting nothing, feeling even less.

Of course the thing she’d feared would happen did happen at that very moment. Her group of girlfriends, the ones she’d been close with from almost the first day at Eastborne, caught sight of Lila talking with the stunning new guy and they pounced. Like they were staging an intervention. On his behalf.

To be fair, Lila’s friends would be the first to say her near-pathetic social life was in need of fixing, but with a somewhat geeky, brainy non-athlete or a quiet guy from a prominent family, one with unfortunate teeth. Guys like Nelson, the six-foot tall, effortlessly cool and rumpled like someone who’d just woken up from the world’s best disco nap, those guys were not exactly lining up for Lila and her friends never considered the possibility that Nelson might be the first.

“Hey, who’s your friend?” Courtney practically shrieked. Her voice had a tendency to sound like shrieking on the best of days and when she got excited, like she currently was at the sight of Nelson, the pitch soared into the stratosphere. Oddly, guys didn’t seem to find it irritating. Maybe it had some sort of dog call effect, appealing to them in way normal ears found deafening.

“Nelson,” he said, extending his hand again like he had toward Lila. If they found anything strangely formal about the gesture, they didn’t indicate it. Instead, one by one, each of the girlfriends stuck out their own hands and introduced themselves. “I’m Courtney.” “Amanda.” “Sydney.”

Sydney, to her credit, shook his hand and took a step back, sitting down on the arm of the couch with me. Maybe it wasn’t meant as a gesture of solidarity, but it looked that way. Sydney, Lila’s roommate for the past three years, would never think of stepping on her toes when it came to a guy who might be interested, no matter what he looked like. It didn’t hurt that she already had a boyfriend, albeit a guy no one had met yet. “One of these days for sure,” she always said when anyone asked when she planned to introduce them. But so far it hadn’t happened. Lila took her almost-nightly forays across school grounds as a given at this point and it became just another bond they shared. So far, Sydney had never gotten caught sneaking out.

More problematic, Courtney had wedged herself in between Nelson and Lila on the edge of the couch like she was assuming her rightful place. No one even thought to marvel at how effortlessly she slipped in, probably because she was so rail thin and everything she did came off like a right of birth. Courtney was that girl.

Courtney and Lila had never been real friends, the kind who’d tell each other real secrets and have latenight heart-to-heart talks. Not that Lila didn’t understand innately what motivated Courtney. Mostly it was insecurity, fear that the world would think she only got to where she was in life because of her parents, who were part of a family dynasty that went back to oil barons at the turn of the century.

When Courtney talked about a guy she had a crush on, she did it dramatically, blinking tears back from her green eyes under lashes that had no earthly right to be so thick. She pretended he couldn’t possibly be interested in her, waiting for the rest of us to fill in the blanks and tell her she was crazy, that any guy who crossed her path was in love with her by the time she’d said hello. She needed to hear it from everyone else, proving that someone could like her for herself, even if that was based on something as shallow as looks. Courtney never talked about herself or her family and unless it was about a guy, she rarely shared anything. And even then it was superficial “does he like me?” kind of stuff.

Courtney had never done anything overtly mean to anyone, but she was capable of it through ore subtle means. Even when she tossed her blonde bouncy curls right in front of a guy Lila might like and claimed him as her own, it somehow didn’t look like an overt slight. It was more like she was just acting on instinct, like a female bird displaying basic mating behavior. She couldn’t help it. Her beauty existed to attract guys, while other girls needed to resort to more obscure techniques like brain tricks and witty conversation. Sometimes Lila actually felt a little bit sorry for Courtney. She kind of got the sense there just wasn’t very much below the surface and that maybe Courtney knew it too. Of course, even people who rely on brain tricks sometimes get it wrong.

“So you’ve met Lila,” Courtney cooed, sounding just like the host of a talk show. “She’s a brain. Not like the rest of us aren’t smart, but we have lives.” There it was: another Courtney jab. She really doesn’t mean for things to come out sounding the way they do. That is to say, bitchy. She just doesn’t have any sort of editing mechanism between her brain and her mouth. And to be fair, her brain isn’t exactly pulling double shifts.

“I could tell she has something upstairs,” Nelson said, flashing Lila with that adorable grin. Lila sighed and looked toward the door, knowing the minutes of seeing that smile reserved just for her were numbered. Courtney had that effect on guys.

“Yeah, we’re all jealous of her, especially her obsession with math. What was that thing you were going on about the other day, that thing with the patterns?” Courtney thought she was being cute, but it just made her sound even more nerdy than even she’d admit to being.

“Safe primes and factorization algorithms. It’s really not that exciting,” she said, looking down but glancing at Nelson to see if all hope was lost. He didn’t look bored with her nugget of math geekdom. He looked alarmed. No one but Lila seemed to notice.

Sydney patted Lila’s hand, like you would a small child. “It’s okay, sweetie. We still love you.”

“Ooh, you’re drinking the red. How bad is it?” Amanda gushed, holding up her own cup of punch which was still the green variety.

“Really, Mans? You haven’t left the green? C’mon, live a little,” Sydney said, holding up her own cup which was half-filled with red punch. Nelson clinked his plastic cup against hers in solidarity. Lila saw her connection with him slipping away before her eyes.

“Oh, finally someone who can keep up with me,” Nelson said, sounding pleased. Funny, Lila thought, because he’d told her to avoid it. “Gotta say, I’ve had worse.”

“Hard to believe,” Sydney said, distorting her face into a grimace. And still managing to look beautiful doing it. Amanda stood in front of Nelson. Sydney leaned in next to me. Between Amanda and Courtney, Nelson had no way to escape. Even so, he inched slightly away from Courtney on the back of the couch. Lila felt the air seep out of her lungs, leaving her with the hollow sense that she’d been passed over. Again. Courtney was chattering on about how amazing Jack Spencer’s house was and asking Nelson if he’d been upstairs.

Lila felt the vibration of a new text and with it the chance to bail on a losing situation. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and took a quick look at the message. “Are you coming!?”

Sydney shot her a look, curious who it was from, but Lila gave nothing away. It was the third text Lila had gotten that night from the same person. Each one had been more insistent, culminating in this one with the exclamation point. But she shoved the phone back in her pocket without responding.

While Amanda and Courtney continued to chat up Nelson, Lila stared out at Jack Spencer and his friends, sitting around the dining room table playing a drinking game with dice. They’d all been friends since seventh grade but she could never get comfortable with the amount of money they took for granted, probably because she’d never had any. Nobody treated Lila like a scholarship kid. It wasn’t that. It was just that the sheer level of wealth they had was staggering by anyone’s standards, not just the daughter of a cook.

Without saying anything, Lila slipped out of the group. She walked around Jack’s house, noticing how perfectly his mother’s decorator had curated every corner of the room. His mother had given her a tour once, talking about how each area of the house was what she called a vignette, a little gem of a space with its own story, its own reason for being.

On a high shelf she had a collection of Lladro figurines which were horribly ugly but which apparently represented one of the rarest assemblages of the porcelain pieces. Lila’s eye flitted from a couple dancing to a boy pushing a girl in a wheelbarrow and something unrecognizable with wings. She wondered if they were secured with some sort of earthquake gum so they wouldn’t dare fall from their perches. Not that there was much threat of earthquakes on the eastern seaboard, but who could risk a swift wind taking down a porcelain dancer worth thousands?

Every piece of furniture had a heavy brocaded slipcover which matched the drapes, like something out of a European castle. Drawers were all embellished with tasseled pulls and the deep mahogany antiques had been polished to an expert sheen. Lila wondered how it would feel to live in a home like this, which felt like a stop on a historic places tour. Jack, who wore an oversized sweatshirt from a fancy summer camp, leaned back in a wingback dining room chair at the head of the table, eyes bleary and searching for ways to get into trouble. He fit in perfectly to this world, where people who lived like this looked bored of the whole situation and secretly wanted to go skinny dipping in a neighbor’s locked yard.

Jack’s parents were out of town, which made his house the perfect haunt for this week’s party. Eastborne students could always count on someone or other to host on the weekends and with the private jets and vacation homes that went around this group, people’s parents were often MIA. Of course, there were still staff people taking care of the houses, but they were easily bribed to take a night off. Jack had boasted earlier in the week that his parents were on a monthlong trip to Europe and that his house would be the party stop for the next few weeks. No one was complaining.

Not everyone boarded at school. Some kids lived in the area and went home every night and others came from all over the country to live in the dorms during the school year. And then there were a select few, like Jack Spencer, who lived in the tony neighborhood right outside the school grounds but still lived in. His parents traveled too much and worked too hard hosting events for important art patrons and politicians to be around for Jack. So he lived at school with everyone else.

Nelson was laughing at something Courtney was saying and she kept right on talking, gesturing with her hands, laughing too, sharing some secret, funny story with him. Amanda and Sydney had peeled off, probably looking for something else to drink, leaving at Courtney center stage with Nelson. Of course, Courtney, Lila thought. Always so effortless when it came to getting guys to fall for her. She put a hand on Nelson’s arm, leaning in to talk closer to his face. He showed no signs of pulling back.

Lila’s phone beeped again with another text from John. She ignored it, still in awe of Courtney and her ease with guys. She had a fantasy of walking right back up to Nelson and sitting down, just like Courtney had, in between the two of them, and resuming our conversation. What would he think? What would Courtney do?

The phone snapped Lila out of her reverie, beeping again, insistently, nagging her to acknowledge the crucial information it was providing. “Soon?” He was impatient. And she’d promised to come. She always came on time and tonight the time had gotten away from her, so she understood his impatience. But Nelson, he could distract anyone from anything.

This time she answered the text, typing quickly, not checking to see if autocorrect had butchered her words before sending. Nelson and Courtney were laughing at something and Lila saw what little connection she’d had with him evaporate. No reason to stick around the party.

Lila slipped out the door without turning around to see who was watching. But if she had, she’d have seen Nelson take a small notepad out of his pocket and write something down on it. She’d have seen him watching her go.