Older boys were standing around in groups. Sage filled her cup first, and a guy with greasy lank hair started singing “You Shook Me All Night Long,” apparently to her, but he only knew fragments of a line about thighs and kept singing them over and over. I tried to fill my cup, but just foam came out. I opened and closed the lever, opened it again, but nothing. Someone leaned over from a group behind Sage and the AC/DC guy and pumped the keg.

“It just needs more pressure,” he said. “Hold your cup lower.”

I knew before I looked up that it was Jack Griffith.

“Once in a lifetime,” he said.

“What?” I looked at him. Up here, in the middle of the Valley Forge Mountain crowd, he looked clean-cut and tidy, while most of the other teenagers had Harley badges and wore denim or army jackets with cutoff arms, their hair long and wild. I had no idea what he was talking about. It sounded deep, like something I should understand.

He pointed at my shirt and I looked down.

“Oh. Oh, yeah. Talking Heads. It’s not mine, it’s Marie’s.” My cup was full, and I took a clumsy mouthful and coughed because I had swallowed too much. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

Sage was watching us. “Come on, Libby,” she said. “Abbey’s waiting.”

“See ya,” I said to Jack, and walked toward the black line of trees on the other side of the clearing, the tower lights intermittently blinking red across all the gathered faces.

19

Sparks from the burning branches leapt and floated in the night air, and the lights from the towers flashed in steady rhythm; above us, in the open sky, the absence of moonlight magnified the endless stars. Someone had taken out a guitar, and the tune drifted across the tower lot. I was conscious of Jack at another fire, people from his high school sitting around it, kids Thomas used to hang out with. At our fire, Tony De Martino was playing Boy Scout, hauling over branches and logs and making skewers for us with a knife. I was baffled. I only ever saw him with a greasy rag, working on Honda 50s and lawn mowers or cleaning the barrels of BB guns. I didn’t know what we were going to skewer on our sticks, but we all held them at the fire. Sage had brought me another cup of beer.

“Does anyone have a ghost story?” Abbey asked. “Like the haunted house on High Point?”