Under all this lies the terrible quicksand of fear. What if they are right? What if it’s true that we are terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad people? If I allow myself to dip my toes into that idea, that I am not actually the hero of my own story but a villain, I quickly find myself neck deep.

And, of course, there’s the heartbreak that slithers in late at night, when I’m alone in bed, the darkness so heavy I can’t breathe. Sure, I can handle the humiliation of Levi temporarily blocking me. I can understand that he needs time. Time I can give. Time I have in spades. What hurts the most, what sends me into the fetal position, is thinking about Shola. I’ve sent her increasingly desperate text messages:

I’m sorry

I need you

I can’t do this alone

Please

I’m begging

Of course, no response.

“If I don’t go to school, I’m not going to get into college, no matter how much you pay the next Dr. Wilson. You want to ruin my future too?” Isla says, and this shuts my mom right up. My sister has always known how to angle the knife, especially with my mother. Sometimes I wonder why they don’t get along with the same seamlessness that my mom and I do. I think it’s because they are eerily similar people—stubborn, competitive, compulsively diligent—who can’t help but be as hard on each other as they are on themselves. Isla’s 4.4 GPA, it turns out, is not unlike my mother’s abs.

“I’ll drive you, Isl,” I say, because my sister is still a few months away from getting her license. “I can drop you off a block away so you don’t have to be seen with me.”

“Thanks,” she says.

“Carrie will get you a driver,” my dad says, and it comes out like a command. He too reaches for the Xanax bottle, shakes one into his palm, pauses, shakes another. His hair is wet and neatly combed, and he’s wearing a stiff, white shirt, fresh from the dry cleaner. A small way, I think, of signaling to the rest of us that he still has this all under control. “Chloe is not leaving this house.”

I don’t know if this is a punishment—am I grounded?—or if this is for my own protection. It doesn’t matter. Even though my mom has been negotiating our first public outing since the scandal broke with the crisis people, I have no interest in going anywhere. That’s what we’ve been calling it around here—“the scandal”—which I think is a cop-out. The word scandal divorces us from our own culpability, makes it sound like something that happened to us instead of something we’ve done.