10

Mary Alice stared at the book in her lap but wasn’t reading a word. Her mind was on Katherine and Ellie and Michael, how much each of them knew and the blanks she would inevitably need to fill in once they stopped letting her get away with silence. Ellie had probably noticed the rental car in the driveway but was too polite to call her with questions. Michael had probably told Katherine more than what she let on, and he could easily be telling John everything else while they sat there. She suddenly regretted canceling today’s coffee with Ellie last night, realizing that Katherine’s presence would be public knowledge soon enough. The quicker everything blew up in her face, she thought, the quicker she could emerge from the rubble—that is, of course, if she made it out alive. But she was never good at working up the nerve to have a difficult conversation. The things she never wanted to say somehow always burst from her without any warning at the worst possible time, making her seem thoughtless and cruel. She sighed, knowing this time would be no different, perhaps even the worst of them all, so she began preparing an apology. None of this would go well, but with a week of work, maybe her apology could help repair everything she’d broken, even if only a little bit.

The sound of the sliding glass door behind her made Mary Alice’s eyes dart back to the page of her novel, pretending to look busy. It was one of those crime thrillers everyone seemed to not only love but respect. She’d bought the author’s first book expecting to be disappointed, as most books about murder felt like they pandered to a reader’s most primal fears and emotions, but she found herself captivated by the sustained dreadfulness of the landscapes juxtaposed with tenderly written, broken people doing the investigation. Despite the abundance of dead people, it really was her favorite kind of novel, a meandering story about sad people who get a little less sad by the end. She was used to those sad people living humble lives in the suburbs of small American cities; these sad people just happened to be solving a murder. This was the author’s latest. Not her best, and thus far, arguably her worst, but Mary Alice kept reading because she found the author’s voice comforting. And because the chair beside her was empty.

“What’re you reading?” Katherine asked as she sat down, twisting her head to read the spine. “Looks scary.”

“A murder mystery,” Mary Alice said.

“Yuck,” Katherine said, setting a box of crackers on the table between them. “I grabbed these from the pantry, hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not. You’re welcome to anything inside, not that there’s much.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Katherine said, pulling a handful from the box. “I assume the same sentiment applies to the old place?”

“The old place? What do you want with the old place?”

“I always liked it down there. And how often am I here to visit? I just need a ride because I sure as hell won’t find it on my own.”

“Well, I don’t want to go there. Sorry, but I think you can understand that.”

“Well, it’s mine as much as it’s yours, and I want to go.”

Mary Alice looked up from her book for the first time since Katherine sat down. “Go ahead. Key’s on the hook next to the garage. Still got the rabbit’s foot on it.”

“You know I’ll never find it on my own, all those turns. You’re the one who always drove.”

“So you want me to take time out of my day to drive you to my least favorite place on planet Earth?”

Katherine laughed. “Yes. I expect you to agree to this teeny-tiny little favor, because it’s just about the least you can do considering the circumstances.”

Mary Alice grew stiff. “Let me get my pages in.”

“Fine,” Katherine said, rolling her eyes as slowly as possible. “Get your precious pages in. But I’m staying right here while you do.”

Katherine picked up the paper and unfolded it with a whip in front of her. By the time Mary Alice set the bookmark in her novel, Katherine had read every word of the main section. “Five minutes,” Mary Alice said. She stood up and left her sister behind, knowing there would be no argument, knowing that, once again, Katherine was getting exactly what she wanted.

It’s not uncommon for people in large cities to spend their entire childhoods with the same group of people, but it’s an entirely different experience in a town as small as Billington, where there’s more space to play, but fewer options about who to play with. One of Mary Alice’s earliest memories was her first day of kindergarten. It was an atypically hot day in what was already a typically hot month, the sort of cruel swelter that laughs in the sweaty faces of people who drone on and on about the benefits of “dry” heat. Her teacher, Mrs. Schlortt, only wore prairie dresses and smelled like menthol cigarettes. When her mother, Loretta, a tall and gentle woman who slept in long gloves and had a different dessert recipe for every possible ailment or tragedy, dropped her off at the classroom door, Mary Alice refused to let go of her hand. She squeezed so hard that Loretta gasped. Mary Alice could remember it so clearly, that sudden, awful feeling that she was making her mother feel pain. So she let go and began to cry, unaware at the time that her tears only made Loretta hurt more.

Inside the room were twelve children she’d already known all her short life, quietly playing with blocks and crayons, not thinking anything was strange about the scene unfolding in the doorway. Even then, as a small child, Mary Alice noticed the uncomfortable disconnect at play, how her agony was being seen and heard, yet wholly ignored. Her mom bent down and said, “I promise it’s going to be all right!” There was pity in her voice, but also amusement. My silly little girl, she must have been thinking. Always making a mountain out of a molehill. She gave Mary Alice a kiss and said, “Look! There’s Maria!” And she looked up and saw Maria holding a picture book against the far wall. “Go say hi to Maria.”

And that’s what Mary Alice did. She ran across the room and grabbed Maria, who recoiled at the gesture and asked, “What’s wrong? It’s just school.” The other children in Mrs. Schlortt’s class were the same ones she grew up with for the rest of grade school, plus or minus two or three whose families came and went. There would never be cliques. There would never be feuding cafeteria tables. There was simply the class of 1975, and a year was something no living soul could escape.

“Remember how scared you were?” Loretta would sometimes say to Mary Alice, as though she could ever forget. “I never understood it! The day before, you were riding bikes with at least four of them, but in that room they were strangers.” It wasn’t a nasty recollection, but Mary Alice wondered how her mother was never able to see that moment as a defining piece of her life. The event that focused all her traits and solidified her into the person she would never stop being: someone afraid of being left behind. Some irritating presence that no one really cared enough to remove.

By second grade, teachers knew she would be the senior year valedictorian, not because she was exceedingly brilliant, but rather there weren’t many other options. By middle school, a growth spurt made her the tallest person in her class. She was taller than all the boys in her class, while Katherine fit snugly, just below their arms, a place Mary Alice had never once desired to be. And though bullying never got physical—only the boys in her class fought with each other—nicknames were persistent. For years she was Stretch, which led to a brief period of walking with a hunch. (A habit her parents quickly rid her of by having a doctor scare her about scoliosis.) She began shaving her legs after being called Hairy Alice, and the nickname remained long after she bought her first razor. But no nickname hurt worse than the one that was never designed to. There was a simple elegance to “Katherine’s sister” that cut so deep it could have drawn blood.

She never understood why everyone seemed so surprised by their differences. No two people were exactly alike, not even actual twins, so why did the disparity between her and Katherine bring the town to its knees? Mary Alice did more work, so of course she did better in school. Katherine talked to more boys, so of course she went on dates. And people complimented Katherine’s appearance because, after being disappointed by Mary Alice’s tomboyishness, Katherine was raised as her mother’s doll from birth. She became the plaything Mary Alice was never asked to be. She dressed better than Mary Alice, meaning she wore dresses; and she wore more makeup than Mary Alice, meaning she wore makeup at all. But at night, when they put on their matching sleep shirts and crawled in bed beside each other, their twin mattresses separated by a single long nightstand, they looked like one young girl who’d been split in half. If only the rest of town could see them like this.

The summer before Mary Alice became a senior and Katherine became a freshman is when it all came to a head. Now, suddenly, Katherine was able to date. It was the rule in their house—though until then it had been entirely theoretical, as Mary Alice never took advantage of the privilege after entering high school. Katherine, on the other hand, awaited the moment with a kind of glee she’d never seen before. In that final summer of their joint childhood, the two of them spent more actual quality time together than they had since Katherine was a baby, as if they knew it was the last hurrah before Katherine would leave Mary Alice forever in favor of athletes and binge drinkers.

They drove into Trevino to buy records and ignored the boys when they approached, instead shuffling away in a fit of giggles. They bought Cokes and rode their bikes down to the brick yard. But the happiest memories were spent at the old place. Not quite a ranch, which would technically have required livestock, and not quite a second home, which would have required more creature comforts; the old place was just somewhere to be when you didn’t want to be anywhere else.

It was about twenty minutes outside of town. Not east, toward Trevino, or north, toward the Hill Country, or west, toward Mexico, but south, toward nothing. Getting there required directions, not a map, and a series of turns you had to memorize on roads without signs. You felt the trip there as much as you saw it. There were the harsh sounds of cattle guards, and the way the car began to handle differently when the road changed from gravel to dirt. There were turns you made out of confidence, not because you saw anything that looked like an actual road. And if you did everything right and made sure not to forget the keychain with the old white rabbit’s foot on it, you could unlock a dull silver gate with a POSTED sign on it and drive toward a dusty brown two-bedroom house with a tin roof and an inviting porch that sat fifty yards from a small lake surrounded by tan grass and a mess of brush and mesquite trees. “The old place” is what Mary Alice and Katherine’s parents always called it, because they couldn’t for the life of them imagine a time when it was new.

The land had been in the family since the Parkers arrived from the old country, Germany, back in the early nineteenth century, when families chose central Texas as their new home because they were promised three hundred acres of land as part of their journey, despite its then occupation by the Lipan people. Over time, those hundreds of acres of land an original family began with would split and fuse, contract and expand, due to any number of contentious inheritances, disagreements, and business propositions that may or may not have been wise. The old place was all that remained of Mary Alice and Katherine Parker’s great-great-great-great-grandfather’s initial claim, a scraggly sliver of a shard measuring some thirty-five acres on which nothing could be grown or raised without total dedication, something which no one in the Parker family had wanted to do in decades. Once Mary Alice and Katherine’s parents were the rightful owners, the old place was little more than a watering hole, somewhere for the family to escape to for a swim or a barbecue. Mary Alice remembered the occasional Christmas in that house, a birthday party or two, the weekend when Katherine swears they were both nearly killed by a cougar, but mostly she remembered the swimming.

The two of them would spend entire days in the water as their parents stayed inside doing whatever their parents did when they were alone. They would swim laps or float in the center on a tube, Mary Alice reading Once Is Not Enough or Jaws or whatever she’d grabbed from the library as her sister lay out on the grassy edge. Miles away from everyone else, she and Katherine were free to be best friends. It was like magic. But their remote sanctuary would soon become found, as even the most unpolished of silver linings always has a little luster to lose.

It started with a funeral. A cousin, second or third, who died in a car accident in Uvalde. They were likely three sheets to the wind behind the wheel, but because no one else was involved, the family decided not to dwell. A man was dead and hurt no one but himself. Mary Alice would have gone to the funeral, but Katherine asked if the two of them might stay home while their parents took the trip alone. Mary Alice never even considered this an option. Going was just what had to be done. But it was Katherine whose naïveté sometimes manifested as something almost radical, maybe even feminist. Why should they go along? For tradition’s sake? Is there a value to public mourning or is that in and of itself a selfish act? She didn’t say any of that, of course, just asked if the two of them could be left behind, but Mary Alice always projected a kind of righteousness on her sister, as though she was always trying to meet her powerful potential. And in a way, she did, because their parents agreed to let them spend the weekend alone.

“I’ve already invited everyone,” Katherine said with a conniving glee as soon as the view faded on their parents’ departing Rambler.

The announcement hit Mary Alice like a hammer, her mind reeling. “Where? And who’s everyone?”

“Jack knows the way, so everyone’s just going to follow him. It’s a perfect weekend to have a party at the old place.”

Mary Alice had never thrown a party in her life, and neither had Katherine. Until then, their parties had been thrown for them, and consisted of little more than cake, a few choice presents, and music played softly enough to speak over. But Mary Alice knew this wouldn’t be a time for cake and their parents’ collection of 45s. This would be like the party she went to at the Kerrigans’ place the summer before, where she had two Shiner Bocks and spent the rest of the night asleep on the couch. This would be like the parties she knew Katherine went to when she said she was sleeping over at Linda Attaway’s, and that’s why she said, without missing a beat, “No.”

“No?” Katherine said, her face contorting into shock and despair.

“No,” Mary Alice said. “Mom and Dad will absolutely kill us.”

“Not if no one tells them, and I know I won’t.”

“What if the other parents find out?” Mary Alice said. “It could get back to Mom and Dad in any number of ways.”

“We’ll be miles away from the nearest parent. Believe me, no one coming is going to tell their folks. If you actually went to parties, you’d know this.”

That was probably true, but it didn’t calm Mary Alice’s newly frayed nerves. Nor did the sudden realization that her sister, no matter what she said, had no intention of agreeing to Mary Alice’s arbitrary rules. This was happening, she realized, whether she liked it or not. And, come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t that bad of an idea. There was a small pleasure in succumbing to Katherine’s wishes, and Mary Alice quietly began anticipating the party not long after her sister made the decree. What would she wear? What would she talk about? What would she drink? Katherine saw the growing excitement behind Mary Alice’s disapproving frown and grabbed her arm to drag her to their bedroom.

“I’m going to do your hair,” she said, pausing to take in her sister’s tall frame. She looked so unsteady Katherine wanted to tap her forehead to see if she might tip right over. Instead, she just squinted, and kept speaking with a confidence no one else in their household was capable of mustering. “And I’m going to do your makeup. And I’m going to tell you exactly what to wear.”

“But are you going to let me think for myself?”

Katherine crumpled up the right side of her face for a moment’s thought and said, “Yes, but run all your thoughts by me for approval.” She pulled a pair of black slacks from the left side of their shared closet, jammed a hand into the dividing line between their possessions, and smashed all of Mary Alice’s clothes to the left in one dramatic, squeaky push. “That’s it from your side. You’d never fit in my pants.” She flipped through blouse after blouse before landing on a paisley print she’d sewn herself earlier in the year. “This. Tuck it in. Wear a belt.”

“Like, with a buckle?”

“No!” Katherine shouted. “Oh my God, you’re impossible. Just a normal belt. Don’t you have one?”

“I think so. I thought you’d want me in a dress,” Mary Alice said.

“This isn’t that kind of party,” Katherine said, a devious smile appearing on her face.

“What kind of party is it?”

Katherine turned and bit her lower lip, holding in a giggle. She thought hard about how to answer the question truthfully but didn’t want to send her sister bolting from the room forever. “The fun kind. Trust me.” It worked.

It was still morning. They wouldn’t need to leave for the old place until around five o’clock, and while Katherine was happy to spend the day lying on the floor watching television, Mary Alice couldn’t ease the tension she felt about the evening. She sat in a compact ball on the armchair behind Katherine, her knees under her chin, looking years younger than her seventeen. She’d drank before and knew she could easily avoid the pressure of overdoing it, but she’d never been around boys in such an open, unchaperoned context. At the Attaways’ party, her home was visible—a series of flickering lights on the horizon. Escape was easy. But out there, at the old place, there was no escape. Only darkness and brush, and maybe even a cougar.

The phone began ringing at 3:00 p.m. One of Katherine’s friends after another, asking what they should wear, if they should pack a swimsuit, what they should tell their parents, and which boys were confirmed to be attending. “Something casual but cute—pants would do the trick, but please, no jeans. Yes, unless you want to skinny-dip. That you’re spending the night at Maria’s house in Trevino while her parents are out of town, but that it’s a girls-only slumber party, because it’s just specific enough to prevent any alarm bells. All of them.” She delivered the same response to girl after girl with a sustained enthusiasm, not once appearing annoyed by the questions, instead seeming increasingly delighted by the answers.

By the tenth or eleventh ring, Katherine was as practiced as a career receptionist. “Hello!” she said in a singsong and smile that quickly drained when an unexpected voice on the other end spoke up.

“The phone barely rang, were you hovering over it?” said Loretta.

“Oh, yeah,” Katherine said, adjusting her voice to the gentle tone that kept her parents happily ignorant of her more vibrant personality outside the house. “I just got off with Linda Attaway. How’s the funeral?”

“Well, awful,” Loretta said. “It’s a funeral. But I’m with Uncle Joe and Aunt Delores and they want to say hello to you girls. Get your sister to pick up the other phone.”

Katherine put the receiver to her chest and told Mary Alice to grab the kitchen phone. She obliged immediately.

“Hi, Mom,” Mary Alice said, slipping back into her default tone of someone’s reliable daughter. “How’s the funeral?”

“Why do you girls think that’s an appropriate question to ask someone? ‘How’s the funeral’? Think about that when you hang up. And say hi to Aunt Delores and Uncle Joe.”

Mary Alice kept the phone to her ear and listened as they droned on and on about how badly they were missed, and how they could not believe Mary Alice would soon enough be out of the house. She responded in polite laughs and yeses and nos while walking toward the kitchen door, phone in hand, so that she could silently commiserate with her sister and roll her eyes at the situation. Katherine covered her mouth to hold in a laugh, and in a few short minutes the conversation had run its course. They hung up and burst into laughter, recalling the time Delores had had so much wine with Christmas Eve dinner that she started snoring during Midnight Mass.

Secretly, Mary Alice hoped Katherine would cancel the party, or that her parents would have announced they were coming home early. The two of them alone together was too nice, too special. She had a nagging feeling that this would be the last time they would ever have so much fun together, laughing at shared memories in their childhood home while their parents were away to pay respects to a dead man. But they had places to go.

That Mary Alice would drive them was assumed by both of them, as she was the only one with a license, but she nonetheless resented Katherine’s presumption. She rolled her eyes as Katherine entered the passenger side before Mary Alice had even grabbed the car keys, a princess awaiting her chauffeur. By the time the doors were locked, and a select few lights were turned on so as to keep the neighbors assured of the house’s occupation, Katherine was sitting calmly in the passenger seat, waiting for her driver to arrive.

“We need to stop for beer,” Katherine said.

Mary Alice would have slammed on the breaks. “What? Why? You said the boys were bringing plenty,” she said, her head shaking violently back and forth before pulling out onto the road.

Katherine was twisting a few fine strands of her blond hair between her fingers, staring languidly out the passenger window. “Well, they hit a snag, so it’s up to us now.”

“How do you know they hit a snag? You didn’t mention that earlier.”

“Linda told me on the phone just before we left, didn’t you hear her call?” She kept talking, seeing as how Mary Alice’s answer couldn’t have mattered less. “Jack couldn’t get his cousin to buy us any, and Martin wimped out once he got to the beer barn because he saw his uncle in the parking lot.”

“Well then, we just won’t have beer.”

“Mary Alice! Grow a brain! No one’s coming to this if there’s no beer.”

“Then they can just be disappointed. It’s not like they’ll leave if we don’t have any.”

Katherine guffawed. “That’s exactly what they’ll do.”

“Why! We can swim. And the stereo Dad keeps there is better than the one in our house!”

“Which of us has been to more parties, huh? Trust me on this.”

Mary Alice scoffed and tightened her grip on the wheel. “Well, I don’t know what you expect me to do,” she said, already fearing her sister’s response.

“What about that new boy in your class? Doesn’t he work at the H-E-B in Trevino?”

“Samuel Roth? I can’t ask him to buy us beer. I don’t even know him! And he could get fired!”

“He wouldn’t be buying it. We would. We’ll just go through his checkout line.”

“What if he’s not working today!”

“He is. Linda told me.”

“I’m sorry, but how does Linda know everything?”

“Linda doesn’t know everything, her cousin knows everything, and they talk all the time.”

A silence passed between them as they waited at the main intersection off Front Street. Mary Alice’s turn signal was blinking right, ready to take them straight to the old place.

“I have plenty of cash from babysitting and I brought everything from your desk drawer.”

“You stole from me?”

“I didn’t steal, I borrowed because the boys promised to pay me—I mean, you—back!”

This is how it always went with Katherine; a genuinely lovely moment free from conflict was always tainted with the realization that she had been a few steps ahead of you all along, filling in the cracks and potholes of whatever path she was dragging you down. Like most beautiful people, she was used to getting what she wanted. What made her so talented was that she rarely had to ask.

Katherine slowly moved her hand onto Mary Alice’s shoulder, breaking her trance. “Please? Can we just try? What’s the worst that could happen?”

Mary Alice knew the question was hypothetical but couldn’t help but ponder the possibilities. The worst that could happen was that they would be arrested. Though, sure, that was unlikely. The second-worst that could happen was that they would fail and someone in the store—be it the manager or a nosy shopper behind them in line—would somehow get news back to her parents, getting them both in months upon months of trouble. Then there was the possibility that Samuel would be offended by the request and immediately lower his opinion of Mary Alice, a mortifying proposition given the fact that they knew nothing about each other, which meant it couldn’t have been all that high to begin with. A purely personal embarrassment, sure, but in some ways the worst of them all. First impressions are a precious commodity in a small town, and Mary Alice couldn’t remember the last time she was able to make one. She wanted to make this one count. Sure, it would be sending the wrong messages—that she was someone with a lot of friends, someone who partied, someone who was trusted enough to be responsible for acquiring alcohol, not to mention someone who was confident enough to take the job—but at least that sounded more interesting than the truth.

Mary Alice let out one more performative sigh and flipped the signal from right to left, turning toward Trevino. The two of them didn’t speak for the remainder of the drive, which Katherine must have realized would happen after just two miles, when she turned on the radio. “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” was playing, one of Katherine’s favorites, though she didn’t sing along as she normally would have in less tense situations. As frustrated as she was, the silence from the passenger seat disappointed Mary Alice, who always enjoyed listening to her sister sing along to the radio. There was a tinny quality to Katherine’s singing voice: just off-key enough to exist in the extremely narrow range between insufferable and charming. Mary Alice’s enjoyment of Katherine’s blissfully unaware wailing wasn’t schadenfreude, per se, but something gentler. She liked to be reminded that not all of Katherine’s flaws were hidden psychological quirks only noticeable to her. But even more, she liked to know Katherine enjoyed things that had nothing to do with anyone else. That she derived at least a tiny bit of pleasure from her own mind, her own abilities.

In the parking lot, Katherine gave her sister the rundown, which was less complicated than Mary Alice had expected. “As much beer as you can buy with this,” she said, handing her a wad of bills that, once flattened and counted, amounted to around fifty-two bucks.

“So I’m just supposed to walk in there, put fifty dollars of beer in my cart, walk up to Samuel’s line, and hope that he plays along?”

“No,” Katherine said with a hint of frustration. “Look, the only way this works is if he gets something out of the transaction, too.”

“So you want me to give him some of the beer? What if he doesn’t drink!”

“You’re not paying attention. What I’m saying is . . .” Katherine said before hesitating again. This was going to be the toughest part, she thought: doing her best to sound confident while delivering the most crucial aspect of her pitch. “You have to flirt with him.”

“But,” Mary Alice said, suddenly looking for something to do with her hands, “what if he doesn’t like me? What if I don’t like him!” She was rubbing her wrists, as if she were desperate to be in handcuffs. She couldn’t do this if she were in handcuffs.

“This has nothing to do with either of those things, this has to do with flattery. This guy is smart. He can read between the lines. He’ll interpret the fact that you’re going to his line as a compliment. It means you trust him!”

“Or it means I think he’s an easy mark.”

“To guys there’s no difference. They don’t care as long as they’re getting attention.”

Once again, Katherine was, unfortunately, making sense.

A few steps from the door, she turned her head back toward the car and saw her sister waving her on through the windshield. At least fifty yards between them, but the force from Katherine’s invisible push nearly knocked her over. She grabbed a cart from the chrome caterpillar underneath the awning and pushed it inside. The store was brightly lit and sparsely crowded for a Saturday, which made Mary Alice feel even more self-conscious. She began by weaving through the produce area, then through dairy and past the butcher. For a moment she thought she recognized the man behind the meat counter, tall and old and mustached and wiping bloody hands on his white smock, but it was just any old man.

Past the slabs of cow and pig came the frozen food, then finally, the beverages. There was a small rack of wine, a mere acknowledgment of the drink’s existence, but what filled the bulk of the space was the beer. Few options, but plenty of everything. Budweiser and Shiner Bock and Lone Star and Miller and ZiegenBock, plenty of each. She fingered the prices. ZiegenBock was cheapest, so ZiegenBock would do. After calculating the math in her head, she decided that they could get five twelve-packs of the putrid stuff. She looked behind her to check for witnesses. No one. She put the first twelve-pack in the cart and checked again. Again, no one. After the second was loaded, she crept backward, dragging the cart along, to check for approaching customers. Satisfied by her privacy, she loaded the fifth and final twelve-pack. It was all going so well, she thought. This must be how bank robbers feel. A few short, wonderful seconds alone in the clouds with your prize before falling back to Earth, forced to contend with the bigger problem: escape.

Mary Alice pushed the cart toward the entrance, fingering a few items and examining their boxes and bottles to put on the show of a normal, trustworthy customer. No one was watching her, but she wanted to commit to the act, because even crimes deserve 100 percent of one’s effort. Samuel hadn’t made the biggest impression on her when the school year began a week earlier, and she worried she might not remember what he actually looked like, trying to recall the most basic details. He was taller than the other boys, though not as tall as she, with a fumbling, unsteady control over the gaunt frame of someone who just had their final growth spurt the night before. He had tightly cropped brown hair and flushed cheeks, and wasn’t yet handsome, but he would be. Mary Alice knew it, and wondered if he soon would as well. She took a deep breath, shook out her nerves, and marched to his line.

Their eyes met, and she smiled first. A wave of confidence brushed over her, and she began unloading the beer from her cart as though there could never be a problem. As if she had never been questioned in her life. The trick, she quickly realized, wasn’t pretending to be older, it was pretending you were the kind of person who never believed they could be told no.

Samuel eyed the drinks, then Mary Alice as she placed them on the conveyor belt. He, too, was now playing a role. Their individual tensions seemed to melt away, as if they had been pretending all their lives and only now were being themselves.

“Having a party?” Samuel asked as he entered the price of the first twelve-pack of ZiegenBock.

“Sure am,” Mary Alice said without even the most microscopic of twitches.

“That sounds fun,” he said, adding another twelve-pack to her order.

“I hope it is,” Mary Alice said, rolling her shoulders and asserting her height.

When he finished scanning, his finger lingered over the button that completed the order. He took a breath and held it, looking down at the cash register as though it might contain a script to follow. Finally, after another moment of hesitation, he gave up and pressed down. Hard. The bell of the machine rang, a rewarding sound for them both, and he gave her the total: $43.68, just under her budget.

Mary Alice fiddled with her pocketbook and removed the freshly smoothed-out bills as Samuel placed the beer in two large paper bags. She handed him the money once he returned to the register, and he responded with the sort of beaming, dumbstruck smile you might offer a magician, or the satisfying finale of an elaborate heist movie. “Your change is seventy-nine cents,” he said, placing the coins in her hand and making sure their skin touched.

“Thank you.” She grabbed the bags, one in each arm, and glided toward the door as the guilt finally crashed down on her. This boy had done her a favor. Not only had he done her a favor, but he also played along without missing a single beat. The whole charade was so charming and, she couldn’t believe she was thinking it, fun. Had she ever had that much fun in her life? Maybe. But maybe not. And definitely not with a boy.

So she stopped, did a smooth 180 on her left heel, and returned to Samuel. His arms were already crossed, his head cocked to one side. “Did you forget something?” he said, surprising both of them with his suaveness.

“We’re in the same class, aren’t we?”

“Yes, I believe we are,” he said, tilting his head to the other side.

“Well, we should get to know each other, then. Free tonight? In case you forgot, I’m having a party.”

“So you’ve said. I think I am, actually. When and where?”

Mary Alice set the bags down on the counter and told him to pull out a pen and paper because this would take some time.

Katherine popped up from her seat when she saw Mary Alice emerge triumphantly from H-E-B, and nearly jumped out of the car to congratulate her before remembering it was no time to make a scene. Mary Alice opened the rear passenger door, loaded all the beer, then slammed it shut. When she was back in the driver’s seat, an electric silence passed between them. Katherine stared at her sister, dumbstruck, like she was some new version who had left a wrinkled cocoon of the girl from earlier somewhere in the canned foods aisle.

“Well,” Mary Alice finally said as she turned the key in the ignition. “Don’t you have anything to say to your big sister?”

“Yes,” Katherine said. “Holy shit.”

They both laughed and Mary Alice told her all about the game she played with Samuel as they drove. She talked to Katherine about Samuel longer than she talked to Samuel, delighting more in the details as she remembered them than she did as they happened. She was still talking about him as they pulled into the old place, the gravel crackling beneath the tires as they came to a stop.

The party began slowly, like all parties do, with the first guests, Ignacio and Maria, arriving a little too early and acting as though there was nothing at all uncomfortable about the situation. Mary Alice and Katherine held their ZiegenBocks, Katherine more gracefully than Mary Alice, and made small talk with their classmates, wondering how it could be possible to know someone for the better part of one’s life and truly know almost nothing about them. The feeling struck them both, but was more overwhelming to Mary Alice, who was less used to seeing people outside the context of Billington ISD. Ignacio and Maria were suddenly human, and, Mary Alice realized, so was she.

For the first two hours, Mary Alice had trouble maintaining eye contact with the guests who deigned to talk to her. Being the center of attention, or at least sharing the role with her sister, didn’t come with the discomfort she’d expected. People were speaking to her as though she wasn’t practically invisible to them back at school. In that moment, she belonged there. But despite the temporary popularity, her focus kept drifting toward the door, with its square window and tiny little curtain pushed to one side so that the blurry head of a visitor could be seen from inside. Every time the door opened—as well as every time a noise came from the front of the house—her eyes darted to the frame, searching for Samuel’s modest but imposing silhouette.

When she went to the refrigerator for her second beer of the night, a hand grabbed her own before it could pull open the door. “Where’s your boyfriend?” Katherine said, slurring her words due to either actual drunkenness or learned performance.

“He’s not my boyfriend, and I don’t know.”

“You’re nervous, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am! Why wouldn’t I be!”

“He’s just a boy. No boy should make you nervous. And I can tell you right now, he’s going to show up.”

“How do you know that?”

“Like I said. He’s just a boy. And boys show up.”

Mary Alice pulled two beers from the fridge and offered one to Katherine, who responded with a headshake and a bitten lip. Her eyes widened and she subtly pointed to her right. Mary Alice’s eyes followed the pulsing of Katherine’s index finger and landed on Samuel, towering over the other guests, his eyes surveying the tops of everyone’s heads before finding Mary Alice. They smiled the same smile at precisely the same time.

“I don’t need another beer,” Katherine said. “Give it to your boyfriend.”

When Mary Alice looked back on this moment—as she did at least once a day—she considered it as the end to the prologue of her life. This moment was the start of everything else. And all of it, absolutely all of it, was Katherine’s fault.