I pushed through the people gathered around and headed down toward the other end of the lot. I found an empty cup on the ground, swilled some beer around to clean it, then filled it. I moved a few yards down from the keg and sat on the gravel, my back against the chain link. Tony De Martino and his brothers were back at the woodpile, conducting and orchestrating the delivery of branches to fires. My cheeks were burning. I hated what Abbey had said, and I hated that Wilson was here. That afternoon when he was in our house during the thunderstorm, I’d told Marie how it bothered me that Wilson hung around teenagers way younger than himself, showing up at parties, being awkward. Marie said there was an obvious reason. I didn’t get what she meant. She looked at me like I was dense.

“He sells,” she said.

“Wilson actually sells drugs?”

“Clearly.”

Abbey had implied that people on the mountain knew Wilson was hanging around us. And that bothered me, not only because he was a psycho who sold drugs but because I didn’t want any of us to be associated with him when he was on a hit list.

A few yards away, the third keg had been tapped. One of Abbey’s older brothers was standing on it, making a war cry and pounding his bare chest. He was even older than Wilson. He was nearly thirty. He’d been to Vietnam and in and out of prison ever since. He always wore his army tags around his neck and his army jacket with the arms cut off and nothing underneath. He had shoulder-length brown hair that girls would envy. Marie said he was the image of Jackson Browne. But something had happened to his left eye when he was on his tour of duty so that the pupil was always dilated, like David Bowie’s, except on Abbey’s brother it looked crazy instead of interesting.

“Libby!” Sage was standing at the corner of the fence, shouting down to me. “Libby! Come back.” I could see the shadows of the others as I walked toward them: Wilson standing there on the margins instead of sitting like a normal person; Tony De Martino like a fire god, dancing around, pushing in branches; Abbey stoned and storytelling. Jack was there now, too. Sage sat near where Wilson was standing. The only place left was between Jack and Sage.

“Abbey’s still on her ghost stories, how we’re living on Indian graveyards,” Sage said.

“Like the Amityville Horror,” Tony said.

“That wasn’t about an Indian graveyard, was it?” I whispered to Sage. “Wasn’t it because there were people murdered in the house?” Sage had the book and had seen the movie.