I looked over at Tony and Sage. He was whispering something to her, and she was laughing. In the firelight Tony looked half handsome, and all his Boy Scouts of America effort had clearly paid off, because Sage was leaning on him and had her hand on his thigh.

Abbey poked Wilson in the leg with her skewer. “Hey, Wilson, why didn’t you just go around the blockade? Why’d you come through the woods like a ghost to scare us all?”

Wilson just laughed. It was strange how he sat with us when across the lot at other fires there were people his age that he should be hanging out with, that he must have been friends with when he was younger, before he became different. If he was the oldest at this fire circle, I was the youngest one here, and probably only tolerated because I was friends with Sage. I looked at Abbey, her wild curly hair glinting in the firelight, her eyes still shuttered. She looked like a fortune-teller. Sage and Tony had started making out; he had cupped her face toward his. I looked away.

I wondered if Mrs. De Martino was afraid of her boys, who drank beer in their yard and took potshots at passing kids with BB guns from their lawn chairs. I had seen her with her eldest son earlier this summer, the one who’d taken the overdose, leading him by the arm to the car, his feet unsteady, his skin pallid and fleshy. Only two summers earlier, the first time I waited outside the fence while people broke into the swim club at night, I had seen him and his friends jumping naked off the diving board, young powerful bodies arcing through the air, whooping, shaking their long wet hair as they reemerged, breaking the surface of the water. It was like they belonged in a movie. Now, even though his mother was probably only five feet tall, he’d seemed small beside her, unused to light and air, dependent on her small self.

Marie said Sage had a class complex, that she was drawn to the working classes. She said it was to defy her family, to go against the grain. I didn’t think that. Sage just preferred people like Tony and Abbey and our family. I felt sorry for Tony, who must have been collecting wood for a week and had gone to get marshmallows, thinking Sage would be there. He’d obviously been waiting for her to arrive. He’d probably get his heart broken. I had started to feel woozy from the beer. I’d lost count of how many. Four or five. I wanted to go tap Sage on the shoulder and tell her to walk home with me, to ask her what the hell was wrong with Jack. Wilson must have sensed it.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride home.”

“On the motorcycle?”

“Yeah.”