“You finish your homework?” Jake glanced over at the empty recliner, and Alice took her usual seat, accepting the remote control from her stepfather.

“Yeah, I didn’t have too much to do. Just algebra, and some reading.” Alice flipped the channel to CBS. My Sister Sam was on.

“School going all right for you?”

Alice shrugged. “Yeah, it’s fine.”

“You have friends?”

“Gina.”

“Oh, right, Gina.”

Alice turned to look at Jake, still staring at the television, lips pressed together as though he was concentrating on what was happening on the screen. Alice assumed he must be asking these questions only because Edith had asked him to, or because they’d been discussing it together. But discussing what? The fact that Alice seemed to have only one friend at school?

The truth was that Alice hated Kennewick High School and the students who went there. The incident that sparked this hate had happened her freshman year, when she’d met a senior named Scott Morgan because their lockers were next to one another. He was a lacrosse player with a good smile and bad acne on his forehead. When Alice told him she was from Biddeford, he said that his dad owned a car dealership there, and he mentioned a pizza place that Alice knew. Whenever he saw her again at the lockers, he’d always ask, “How’s Biddeford?” as though she still lived there. On the first warm day in April, he told her about a party that was happening on the beach at midnight. It had been easy for Alice to sneak away; she didn’t even need to be quiet, knowing her mom could sleep through pretty much anything. She wore cutoff shorts and a big hoodie, and carried a bottle of Sprite that she’d spiked with some of her mother’s vodka—not because she wanted to drink it, but because you brought alcohol to a party. When she got to the section of beach that Scott had mentioned, Scott was there alone. He handed Alice an open can of beer and said, “I lied about the party.”

“How come?”

“To get you here alone.”

They were on the south end of the public beach, near the playground and a picnic area shaded by pine trees. They walked to the darkest bench and began to kiss, Scott’s hands instantly fumbling under Alice’s hoodie, and pulling at the zipper of her shorts.

“You a virgin?” Scott asked, when he’d gotten Alice’s shorts down around her ankles.

“Yes.”

“My friend told me that all the girls in Biddeford do it in middle school.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Do you want to do it now?”