“Suit yourself.” Isla went upstairs and left me alone on this couch to wait for this moment, when I would again face my mother. You would have thought in all those hours I’d lain here staring at the ceiling, I’d have figured out how I felt or what I wanted to say.

Now that I see her, I feel only one thing: the sense of the world righting itself. Like that moment on a flight when the fasten seat belt light dings off, and you think, This will probably not be the day I die after all.

“Mommy,” I say, a word I don’t ordinarily use that makes me think of my childhood—fairy wings and birthday parties and the unfolding of endless free afternoons. She’s been Mom for a long time.

“Are you okay?” I ask, at that exact same moment my mom says: “You all right, baby?”

I nod and she nods, and then she opens her arms wide. I think, I’ll be angry tomorrow. I think, I’ll never forgive her. I think, Maybe tomorrow I’ll gather the courage to ask, What have we done? But thinking is different from feeling, and at this moment there’s no space inside for any of it.

I’m too filled up. No room at the inn.

I want my mommy.

I burrow into her outstretched arms and rest my face in her neck.

We both cry.

CHAPTER SIX

Then

I hadn’t planned on drinking at Xander’s party, but Levi handed me a cup and I took it and started sipping. I was nervous, and now I’m not—thank you, beer that tastes alarmingly like urine—and for the first time, talking to him is almost as easy as it is to text. Levi puts the flat of his hand on my exposed back and his fingers spread like a starfish.

This silk tank top, which I borrowed from my mother, knows what it’s doing.

I hope he can’t feel my pimples.

Shola is off somewhere with Mateo, a guy from Brentwood Country Day she’s been crushing on, and I wonder if they’ve disappeared into one of the bedrooms upstairs. We’ve been to many identical parties here before, down to the playlist blasting from the backyard speakers, the same groups of kids holding red plastic cups, the same listless carrots-and-celery platter that someone, though I have no idea who—Xander? His Carrie equivalent?—has laid out on the kitchen table. Xander has rich absentee parents who keep a fully stocked bar and spend most of their time, for reasons unexplained, in Monaco. I imagine they are unaware of how many and how often teenagers traipse across their lawn and puke in their bushes.