boys shaking their heads, but not registering any of their faces. I barely noticed that someone had gotten Luke; I heard him pounding down the sawdusted stairs. He was heading not for me, but for Rocking Chair kid, who was inexplicably bent over by the closest part of the beer pong table. What was wrong with him? No one had punched him!

“What the fuck, Swanstein?” Luke demanded. “I’m talking to you.”

Luke gave him this cold stare and Swanstein looked up from the ground. And, get this—Swanstein was crying.

Luke was merciless, though.

“You fucking lay a hand on my brother again,” Luke threatened. “Or you pussy punch any kid anywhere, and I’ll really give you something to cry about. Did you hear me?”

Swanstein seriously had tears coming down his face! I watched in amazement. Seeing girls cry makes me very uncomfortable, but a fellow male in tears, in public, was pure fascination. I wanted to get a front-row seat and put on some 3-D glasses for the show.

“Did you hear me?” Luke barked louder. The party went still and silent. Luke enunciated every word. He said, “I. Would. Kill. You.”

One of Luke’s lazier friends told Swanstein, “You weren’t even invited, man. We just called you for weed.”

The word weed perked up one of the senior guys, who remembered why my Rocking Chair aggressor was there in the first place.

A merciful jean-skirt-clad girl came down the steps next to me, holding two paper towels. She handed them to me, but then backed away, clearly grossed out.

But Luke came over and stepped right on the bloody sawdust in front of the first step. He tilted my head up, his knuckles under my chin.

“You all right?” he asked.

I felt dizzy. “Yeah. Lots of blood, though…”

“The head always bleeds a lot,” Luke told me. “Remember when I fell from the chandelier?”

I smiled through my nausea. “Yeah.”

“And from that third-story window?”

“Yeah.”

“And from the flagpole of our Montessori school?”

“I remember.” I managed a small laugh. “But I’m surprised you do.”

“Frame!” one of the seniors called from the beer pong table.

We both looked up.

The senior laughed. “I forgot there were two Frames. Luke Frame, that is. Next game?”

“I’m gonna play with Finn,” Luke said.

“Nah,” I interrupted. “I’m going to find Kate.”

“ ’Kay,” Luke said. “But when you come back, find me. We’ll switch shirts.”

“What?” I asked. “I’m covered in blood.”

“Yeah,” Luke said. “But Mom will be less freaked out if it’s me. I’ve come home covered in blood before.”

Kate wasn’t in the living room, or the kitchen, or anywhere near the bathroom, where some girl was throwing up and another girl was choreographing it. “Here, you tie her hair back. You get a glass of water. You get a garbage bag.” Kate wasn’t in the backyard either when I stepped past the suspicious North Face congress. I walked down the driveway to get to the front yard, and there she was, at the end of the driveway, standing beneath a street lamp with her arms crossed.

She looked cold—she hadn’t brought her jacket. I looked down. I looked like I’d wandered off the set of a Tarantino movie. No jacket to give her.

“Kate!” I called.

She turned briefly. In the light of the street lamp she had reached, her eyes looked big and wet. She wasn’t crying yet, but she was close. Oh, God.

I jogged across the damp lawn to her.

“Are you okay?” she asked numbly, in a strange monotone.

“I’m fine,” I said. “What happened? Who was that guy?”

“Swanstein,” Kate said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “We went to Larchmont together. But I left because…”

I stood, waiting patiently, cold, wet, bloody.

“I got in trouble,” Kate said, looking me straight in the eyes. “I drank too much at a party and I had to get my stomach pumped. The cops came to the party and everyone got in trouble. Everyone at school hated me for it.”

Even the last part she said coldly, steadily, rapidly, and without emotion.

“I’m not who you think I am,” Kate continued, confessing at a faster and faster rate. “At Larchmont, I was a party girl. I wanted everyone to know who I was, so I started drinking more than all the other freshman girls. And doing more stuff with guys…”

Doing more stuff with guys. What stuff? I felt sickened at the thought of pickle flips and other foreign acts.

“Wait.” I realized something terrible. “That picture in your locker. That wasn’t your sister.”

Kate bit her lip.

“That was you.”

A guy came out of the house and performed an interpretive