I wished for a drink. I didn’t particularly want to get drunk. I definitely didn’t want to be hungover when I had an airplane to fly the next day. Grayson was right about that. But forced to stay here with these people, I would have preferred to nurse a beer in a corner and bond with some geek I hardly knew from history class, who was plastered. It was easier to make a good impression on plastered people. As it was, I stood in the same circle with Grayson, or sometimes with Alec, and listened to what these drunk girls had to tell them. I grinned so I wouldn’t look unhappy.

After several years of this, I snuck up behind Molly and whispered that I was going to find a soda. I was parched from my long, hot flights that day. “Come with?” I asked hopefully.

“No, I’m good,” she threw at me before turning back to Alec and the girls. Alec didn’t even glance at me. Grayson did, though, over several girls’ heads. He probably thought I was going to get wasted. I would let him worry.

I wandered through the crowd standing on the expensive hardwood floors and lounging with their feet up on the white sofas. I’d almost reached a wide doorway that I assumed led to the kitchen when Francie Mahoney herself caught up with me. She was about a foot taller than me even in my stilettos, and she had a tall friend with her. When she took me by the shoulder and rudely whipped me around against the wall, I had to fight down the urge to run between their long legs like a rabbit cornered by dogs.

“You’re here with Alec?” Francie asked me. “The cute one?”

I felt my brows go down, perplexed that she thought Alec was the cute one. I supposed I understood why she would think this. Alec had the face of an angel. A girl might think he was sexier than Grayson if she’d never seen Grayson move, walking with barely contained energy across the tarmac. “Yes,” I said.

“But I heard you were dating Mark Simon,” she said.

I wondered how she’d heard this. Mark was about as far as possible from popular, and her crowd did not keep up with his crowd. Only their own. “No,” I said.

“Yes,” she insisted. “I heard he moved into your trailer with you.” She smiled at me, teeth large and white, lips glossy red, but her words dripped sarcasm. It was hard to say which part of this scenario held more derision for her: moved into or trailer.

Girls like her slept with boys. They even slept over with them when they could get away with it. But they and their boyfriends would stay at home with Mommy and Daddy until they were safely ensconced in a college dorm. And girls like her did not live in trailers.

At school I avoided these girls by arriving late on the bus so I didn’t have to hang out before school, leaving early on the bus so I had no opportunity to hang out after school, and skipping lunch. It was unintentional but lucky that I’d neglected to turn in my homework throughout middle school and landed in the stupid classes, so I never encountered these girls in their college-track experience. In the unlucky event that I ran into them in the women’s bathroom, I played deaf.

But at school, they hated me only in passing. Now they wanted to take me down. I was in possession of the beautiful blond boy who had stolen their hearts long ago and moved away. They didn’t like it.

I couldn’t tell them the truth: “Yes, I shacked up with Mark Simon, and now I’m dating Mr. Popularity from another school.” Even “Yes, I had shacked up with Mark Simon, but now he’s moved out” sounded hopelessly trashy, and “It’s none of your business” would verify I had something to hide. Briefly I considered taking the offensive with “You are a bitch,” but these girls would tell everyone what I’d called them without explaining what the provocation had been, which would make me seem, if possible, more trashy.

So I squinted at Francie and said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but what have you been eating? You’ve got something stuck in your teeth.”

She blinked at me, straightened, and inserted one manicured fingernail between her front incisors.

“Let me see,” said her friend, whose name was Tara, I thought. My only interaction with her was that she had tried to trip me with her tennis racket in the locker room in PE.

“Check in the mirror,” I told Francie. “It looks like gristle.” I stepped past her, which I could do easily now because she was headed to the bathroom. She must have suspected I was lying, but she wouldn’t waltz away through a party without verifying that.

“Your lipstick looks like blood,” Tara called after me.

I said something back to her that was a comparison between her own lipstick color and her twat. Molly would have been proud of me.

“Hey!” Francie said so loudly that I stopped, and so did everybody else around us in the grand living room.

“Don’t go into that kitchen,” she said. “The drinks are for invited guests only.” The two of them laughed and turned for the bathroom again.

I stood there in the passageway with eight people staring at me. I couldn’t continue on my path toward the kitchen, because one of these people might be a friend of Francie’s, or just an as**ole who would go rile her up and tell her I’d defied her order. Then there would be a bigger scene. But I couldn’t slink back to hover at Molly’s feet, either. Undecided, I stuck my chest out, then realized I was sticking my chest out.

I had only six more weeks of high school, I told myself. Six more weeks. Six more weeks.

And then what? If high school was supposed to have been the time of my life, what did I have to look forward to?

“God, what have you done now?” Molly hollered, catching me by the arm and dragging me into the kitchen with her. “I can’t take you anywhere.” She crossed the room like she owned it. At the sink she scooped ice into a plastic cup, poured me a soda, and handed it to me. Then she drained the dregs of her own plastic cup that somebody must have brought her. She made herself a soda. Looking around the kitchen, probably for Grayson, she sloshed in a generous helping of bourbon.

“Spill it,” she said. “Grayson told me Francie watched you leave and then followed you. He said it was like an old Western.”

I told her what had happened, expecting her to congratulate me on my twat line.

Instead, she put her hands on her h*ps and said, “I don’t see why you’re upset. Ten years from now, you’re going to be an airline pilot.”

Without even thinking, I reached one hand to the cabinets to knock on wood.

Molly didn’t stop talking. “In ten years, do you know what Francie’s going to be?”

“A presidential candidate?”

She pointed at me. “An ignorant, frightening one? That’s good! But no. With her holier-than-thou attitude and her level of mean, she’s headed for only one thing. Pastor’s wife.”

I laughed.

“At a really big church,” Molly went on, “so I don’t know what you’re snickering about like you’re all that with your big, bad airline pilot self.”

I nodded as if I believed her, because Molly did not like to hear that I didn’t believe her. “I should leave. It’s Francie’s party, and I’m not welcome here.”

“Why don’t you just go outside?” Molly said this absently while she looked over my head, waved at a friend, and moved in that direction. I couldn’t tell whether she was just trying to get rid of me, her whiny companion at this fun party, or whether she understood who sat outside at these parties. The trash sat outside: the boys invited by popular girls because they might bring weed. Maybe Molly was telling me to go out there with the trash and box my weight.

Molly had already snatched up her drink and gone to hug her friend. I let myself out a side door in the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to go back through the house and face down Francie again. Carefully I stepped across the lush lawn kept alive artificially by an expensive sprinkler system. The grass lay loosely across a bed of sand, not a good walking surface for stilettos. I should have watched the ground as I made my way along the side of the house, but I held my head high in case anybody was looking out a window. The storms that had been approaching all day and freaking Grayson out were finally close now. The wind tossed the tops of the palm trees. Though a gust might start cold, it ended warm on my bare arms and legs. I hoped we would get rain only, none of the tornadoes that had been creeping up the map all day.

Among the cars parked anyhow on the driveway and in the yard underneath the palm trees, a cluster of pickup trucks and the faint scents of tobacco and pot told me where the trash was. A couple of boys sitting on the trunks of cars whistled to me as I passed. I smiled brilliantly at them. As I neared the pickups, I recognized Patrick perched on a tailgate. I’d never thought I’d feel so relieved to see Patrick. Someone to talk to! I hoped he didn’t bear me any ill will for threatening to shove beer cans up his ass.

Apparently not. “Hey, girl,” he called as I approached. “You look niiiiiiiice.”

“Ha-ha,” I said, hefting myself onto the tailgate beside him.

“Toke?” he asked.

“No thanks.”

“Smoke?”

“Yes,” I said with relief. I took the cigarette he shook out of his pack and let him light it for me.

After one puff I knew I wasn’t going to smoke it. I felt sick, and I could hear Mr. Hall scolding me. I had promised him.

“You’re making the news tonight,” Patrick said. “I heard you’re here with that pretty boy, Alec Hall.”

That sounded about right. “You know him?” I asked.

“Played ball with him a long time ago,” Patrick said. “He’s not your type.”

“Oh, really?” I laughed. “Who’s my type, Patrick?”

“His brother,” Patrick said. “Grayson? We used to be pretty good friends. You and me, we like playing with fire for some reason.”

“Hm.” I’d held my cigarette so long without inhaling that the fire had died out, and the wind had blown the ash away. I tossed the long butt into the cup Patrick was using as an ashtray. On second thought, I wished I’d thrown it down in Francie’s driveway for her parents to find. They probably cared whether she smoked.

“Grayson and Mark are kind of similar,” Patrick said. “It’s like they don’t have an off button, you know? It’s fun to watch that fire, as long as you don’t get burned.”

“I don’t think Grayson and Mark are anything alike,” I said, watching Mark emerge from the cab of his pickup nearby in a cloud of pot smoke.

Following my gaze, Patrick said helpfully, “Oh, there’s Mark now. You know what? He’s still pissed about the whole thing with you, and then when he heard you were here with Alec… wow. Maybe you should g—”

I was already hopping down from the tailgate, my heels sinking into the sand. That slowed my exit. In two steps Mark crossed the space between us. He grabbed my bare upper arm, pulled me back the way he’d come, and pushed me into the cab of his truck.

I never stopped moving. I slid on over to the other side of the cab and reached down to open the door.

He gripped me by the arm again and pulled me back toward him across the seat so I couldn’t reach the door handle. “Leah, come on. I just want to talk to you.”

I stopped squirming, because pulling away from him was what hurt. I sat still and took a deep breath. I was more angry with him for pulling me around than scared of what he might do to me. He had never hurt me—other than grabbing me—or forced me to do something I didn’t want to do. I’d seen men treat my mother a lot worse than this a hundred times, and I tried to remember what she’d done in this situation.

Started dating them again, that’s what.

“Listen.” Mark put his hand on my bare knee and stroked all the way up my thigh to my shorts. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said. I see now that you were right about Brenda. I broke it off with her, and I won’t do anything like that again if you’ll let me come back. I’ll talk to my uncle about letting you fly for him too.”

I shouldn’t have considered this offer seriously. Not when he’d dragged me to his truck. But he was stoned. He didn’t realize he’d hurt me.

And the more I’d thought about Mr. Simon’s job over the past few days, the more I’d wondered whether Grayson had told me Mark had made it up just so Grayson could get me to work for him instead. When it was a matter of finding a cheap employee, I didn’t think Grayson would stoop to that level. Now that I knew Grayson needed my help to keep Alec in town, for whatever reason, I was sure Grayson would stoop to that level. Which might mean Mr. Simon’s job had been real all along.

“You can’t move back in with me,” I said. That had been the worst part of being with him. I wouldn’t have gotten so angry at him in the first place if there had been less of him.

“I won’t. I’m getting my own place.” He gripped my knee harder. “Just come by the hangar tomorrow morning.”

“I can’t do it tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve got another job.”

“Oh, right,” he said, “with those Hall assholes, over spring break. What kind of job is that, Leah? My uncle says they’ll last another week or two without the old guy around. My uncle will hire you permanently.”

He should have stopped when he was ahead. Now I was thinking about working for Mr. Simon permanently. Working with Mark. Being trained with Mark. Dating Mark under the constant threat of having my job taken away if I did something he didn’t like. I’d been ready to give his job another try as soon as I could get out of this tangle with Alec and Grayson, but now I was having second thoughts.