Something happened when I was in grade school--the opening of Slide with Clyde, I suppose--and suddenly he was in a bad mood all the time. My mom would say that unlike her, unlike me, he was a quiet person. He didn't want or need to talk out his observations about life or his problems. He kept his own counsel. I resented him for that. But considering that my mom had gone insane, it wasn't wise to continue along her path. I would keep my own counsel from now on.

And I would get started on my investigation, asking Keke and Lila what happened, if my dad and Ashley would hurry up and leave already. Waving my fingernails in the air to dry them, I glanced up at the cameras every ten seconds. There was no reason for the cameras to irk me. No one would be watching me but my dad. Like he said, it would be as if he were here in the house with me. And I'd never done anything to alarm a parent anyway. Except have sex with Brandon.

But now, with the cameras rolling, I wanted what I couldn't have. I wanted to take advantage of my dad leaving me alone for a week. I wanted to throw a wild party, roll a joint on the cutting board in the kitchen, make love to Brandon on my dad's bed. Anything bad. I wanted to make out with Doug right here on the sofa where he'd sat an hour ago. It still smelled faintly like him, of chlorine and sea.

Finally they came downstairs. My dad's arms were full of Ashley's luggage as he blustered through the room, but I called to him anyway. I had to take care of myself and my own needs, because clearly nobody else was going to. "Dad, if I get an insurance check in the mail while you're gone, can I shop around for another car?"

"Y owe me out of that check," he said. "I paid to have your car towed to the junkyard from the road into town."

I filed away this information: he'd just told me where the wreck happened. And I nodded, trying not to make waves. "I'm pretty sure I can get another classic Bug for the same price as the first."

"Absolutely not," he said. "No Bug."

I looked to Ashley. She looked out to sea. She couldn't see it through the living room wall, but she looked in that direction.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Y ou're not buying another heap," he said. "That Bug had no air bag. The aftermarket seat belts broke on impact. That's how you got so banged up in the first place." He gestured to my forehead. "Next time you'll be dead."

I realized I'd been rubbing my head. I put my hand down, took a deep breath, and asked reasonably, "If you want me to use my own money for a car but you won't let me buy an old car I can afford, what do you expect me to drive?"

He shrugged. "Y can drive my Mercedes next week while I'm gone. Next summer you can work again and add to your money."

"And in the meantime? How am I supposed to get around? Is Ashley going to homeschool me?" Never let the jury see how angry you are. My mom had taught me that. Never let them see you lose your cool. However, my mom did not argue cases in court while people whacked her in the head with marbles.

Ashley laughed. "I'm sure it will all work out," she said, patting my dad's butt to scoot him on out the door. He had to make a second trip upstairs to carry down all her luggage. They were lucky to fit everything in her Beamer. In the end Ashley seemed fonder of me than she'd ever been before, while my dad glared at me like it was my fault he had to worry about me dropping dead from brain damage, thus ruining his vacation. I wanted to reassure him that when I started school a few weeks ago, I'd listed only my mom as an emergency contact. If I dropped dead at school, they wouldn't have a phone number for my dad anyway.

I decided to let him sweat it. I kept my own counsel. Cheerfully I waved good-bye and best wishes to them as Ashley executed a seventeen-point turn in the courtyard and sped through the gate. Then I sank onto a teak bench on the porch and called Keke and Lila.

***

"WHERE WERE MIKE AND DOUG HEADED when you hit each other?" Lila asked from the backseat as Keke sped their rusty Datsun through the warm morning. Hitching a ride with them was the best way I could think of to reconstruct last night. They could take me by Brandon's for a visit and debriefing. Then I'd go with them to the swim meet and grill the team about what happened, though I wouldn't compete. And I didn't think I should drive myself. The headache was still marble-sized, but I felt like I was standing on marbles too. I might lose my balance at any second.

"I don't know where they were going," I said, hoping I wasn't supposed to know. I'd been trying to get Lila and Keke to tell me what happened since they'd picked me up. It was harder than I'd thought. I'd admitted to them only what I'd told Doug: that I didn't remember the wreck itself. More than this and I was afraid they would report it to their mother, she would try to report it to my mother but get my dad instead, and he might actually make good on his threat to have me committed.

The twins didn't automatically offer a recap of events. Very frustrating. And as I prompted them, I had to choose my words carefully so I didn't give away how little I knew. I couldn't say I had such a great time at the football team's party or I had such an awful time at the football team's party because the opposite might have happened. After a few seconds of a boy band wailing on the CD player, I settled for, "Wow, what a party. I'll remember it for the rest of my life."

"Why?" they asked at the same time.

I threw up my hands like they were so dense. "Because of what happened. Y know."ou

"No," Keke said, "we don't know. Y told us you couldn't find Brandon, and then you disappeared. Then it started raining, so Lila and I came home.

ou What happened?"

"Oh, just the usual," I said.

"What was so great about it that you'll remember it for the rest of your life?" Lila persisted. "Maybe I was drunker than I thought, but it sounds like we weren't at the same party."

"My head hurts," I said out the open window. We'd reached the straight stretch of the road into town, where my dad had said I'd wrecked. Sure enough, black tire tracks careened across the road, and broken glass twinkled in the grass on the shoulder. A deer stood in the trees, chewing, watching traffic. I shook my fist at it.

"Y ou're nuts," Keke said.

We reached downtown. The high school and the football stadium. City hall. The police station. The county courthouse where my mom worked. A historic town square with striped awnings on storefronts, including the police station and my mom's office. The dried skeletons of petunias in pots outside her office door, because no one was there to water them. It was a quaint little downtown like any small town's, built in an era before tourists cared about the beach. The only difference was that ours was built on sand.

Keke turned the Datsun off the square, down the road with new housing developments: the one where Gabriel lived, then the one where Keke and Lila lived. After a couple of miles, the impressive entrance to Brandon's neighborhood appeared, an enormous facade of an antebellum mansion with faux marble columns painted to look like they were smothered in wisteria. The neighborhood itself was a grid of brand-new identical brown brick houses, one story, on such narrow lots that they'd put the front door on the diagonal, set back from the wide two-car garage door dominating the front.

"And I thought all the houses on our street looked alike," Lila said. "How do you find him in here?"

"Count three streets over and then six houses down," I said. Not that I came over much. We'd been together only a week, and he'd been busy. I had cruised by a few times on my way home from swim practice in case he was outside. His family didn't seem to be outdoorsy types. His house was always shut tight.

Today we didn't need to count. Clouds parted. Angels trumpeted. In the grassy strip that passed for his lawn, powerful spotlight beams crisscrossed, advertising his house. An airplane flew overhead like the ones that dragged advertisements for tourists at the beach, proclaiming BRANDON LIVES HERE. He stood in his driveway, soaping slow circles along the Buick, with his shirt off.

"Y can say that again." Lila breathed at the sight of the muscles moving in Brandon's back. I wondered what strangled noise I'd made that she was

ou agreeing with.

"Stephanie Wetzel can say it again," Keke declared, nodding toward the house across the street from Brandon's. A curtain in the diagonal front door fluttered shut.

"Do you think she needs us to give her a ride to the high school?" I suggested.

"She's the one who's been giving Brandon rides," Keke said.

Lila hit her.

"Hit her again for me," I grumbled.

"I don't mean that kind of ride," Keke said. "I mean, she's been giving Brandon rides to school since Brandon's Buick broke. Y didn't know that?"

I had not known this. I had not known the Buick was broken. It explained why Brandon hadn't popped over to my house for a visit during the week. It didn't explain why he hadn't asked me for a ride.

"If the Buick is so broken, how'd he back it out of the garage?" Lila asked.

I whirled in my seat to face her. "What happened to Brandon and me being perfect and dreamy?"

"Only if you keep up the maintenance," Keke said. She parked the Datsun in the street because Brandon's driveway was too small for two cars. "Flirt hard."

I turned to Lila for verification. She shrugged. "We're just saying."

This was not exactly the pep talk I needed. But Brandon had already stopped scrubbing and turned his muscled trunk toward us, wondering who might emerge from the somewhat crusty Datsun 280z. I gave myself one last glance in the side mirror. It seemed my makeup was still caked nicely over the bruise. But I got only a glimpse. I didn't want Brandon to catch me looking at myself, like I cared too much. From my angle stepping out of the car, most of my face was hidden by the words OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEYAPPEAR .

"Hey, baby!" I called.

"Hey!" he called back, and he did not glance ever so briefly at Stephanie Wetzel's house. I did not see that. Keke had put that idea in my head, and how could I tell anyway, with the bright sunlight glinting off his pecs?

I walked toward him. He threw his soapy sponge onto the hood and met me halfway, just like he was supposed to. He wrapped me in his muscular arms, squeezed me, and let me go, running his damp hand down my arm.

I said, "We were just on our way to the swim meet" (and took a detour several miles out of our way) "and I stopped by to tell you I had a wreck last night!"

His eyebrows shot up. "With Doug?"

Someone had told him about Doug and me in the emergency room! Only . . . if that were true, Brandon wouldn't have been rubbing his thumb back and forth across my forearm. Maybe he'd heard a less incriminating version of the story, and I could still pass the whole incident off as what it was: lust induced by brain damage. I punched him playfully in the shoulder. "Y heard already and you didn't call me!"

He stared at me for a moment with his mouth open. "I didn't hear you were in a wreck. I heard Doug was in a wreck." Now he looked over the top of my head, toward Stephanie Wetzel's house. This was not my imagination.

It crossed my mind that he was lying about something. I knew he lied. He'd lied to every single girl he'd had sex with over the summer. But I was the one he told about the lies. I wasn't the one he lied to. Of course, that meant I wouldn't know what he acted like to the girl when he was lying to her. He might very well be lying now.

No, I was just paranoid about everything today. Because of our history, Brandon's relationship with me was different. We were good friends, and we could trust each other. I saw there was more to him than beachy-clean good looks and a buff body. I told him about swerving to miss the deer and hitting Mike and Doug.

While I talked, he continued to stare toward Stephanie's house. I thought he wasn't paying attention to me. He verified this by asking, "So, you're not mad about last night?"

He didn't seem very concerned about my wreck. He hadn't lifted my bangs to peer at my bruise. But he must have reasoned I couldn't be too bad off if I was here, talking to him. Right?

Then I realized he was unwittingly about to tell me what happened last night. I asked carefully, "Mad? Should I be?"

"Definitely not." He frowned down at me, blue eyes looking straight into my eyes. "I told you not to come to the party."

"Y did," I agreed. That much I remembered.

"I missed you, though."

I heaved a satisfied sigh. He hadn't told me what I'd been up to last night. But he had told me what I hadn't been up to. If he'd missed me, we hadn't spent a lot of time together. Probably we'd had a big argument about me crashing his man-party.

"Y could make it up to me," I said, stepping closer to him again. My flip-flop was inside his big bare foot, my thigh inside his thigh. My neck hurt,

ou standing this close to him and looking up--which reminded me of doing the same thing last night at the football game with Doug.

WRONG ANSWER. "I want to see you," I said quickly. By see you I meant get down and dirty with you in the back of the Buick. Or whatever car was handy. He stared blankly at me, so I wasn't sure he got it. I clarified, "I want an encore of Monday night. But I'm still feeling a little dizzy from the wreck. I don't think I should drive tonight. Could you borrow a car and come see me after the swim team gets back from the meet? We could go to the beach park again. Shirt optional." I giggled as I slid my fingers across his chest. I noticed the fingernail polish was smeared on my pinkie.

"Mmmmm," he said. At first this seemed like a purr of approval at my touch. But no, it was a rejection of the encore idea. "My parents are going out in their car." And not a single one of my hundred friends on the football team can lend me his wheels. Say it!