That whole first winter after her mother died, Alice had successfully avoided any contact with the kids she’d known from Kennewick High. All except Gina, who wrote frequent letters from New York City that Alice would occasionally answer. At the end of her freshman year at NYU, Gina had, predictably, gotten a modeling contract that was going to keep her in the city throughout the summer. But in August, she came home for two weeks, and showed up unannounced at Alice’s house on a Thursday afternoon.

“I knew you wouldn’t answer my calls, so I just thought I’d come over.” She held out a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine.

Alice suggested they go to the beach, but Gina said it was too hot. They ended up drinking the wine in the living room, and eating Triscuits with port wine cheese. Gina was skinnier, and prettier, than ever. She’d lightened her hair, and it had been styled so that it lifted off her forehead, then cascaded down her back. Her dark, thick eyebrows had been shaped, and her nails were painted a neon orange.

“Tell me about modeling,” Alice said.

“You want to hear the good parts, or the sordid details?”

“What do you think?”

Gina told a few stories. The first time she tried cocaine (“It made me act like my little sister, or like Stephanie Richmond from cross-country, remember her?”), a slew of parties, endless proposals from older men, one of whom offered her ten thousand dollars to sleep with his wife while he watched. “They’re so gross,” she said. “The older they are, the grosser they are.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?” Alice asked, hoping to change the subject from older men. Gina hadn’t mentioned Jake yet, but she knew she would. She’d alluded several times in her letters over the winter that she thought it was strange Alice was still living with him, that she thought Alice should move to New York City and stay with her for a while. It was only a matter of time till she brought it up. And it was only a matter of time till Jake came home. He was always home by five, and sometimes earlier, since the bank closed its doors at four.

“Let’s go swimming,” Alice said, after Gina told her she didn’t have a boyfriend in New York.

“I don’t have a suit,” Gina said.

“Borrow one of mine.”

“Okay. I guess.”

Alice went to go upstairs, and Gina got up to follow. Alice suddenly realized that it might be obvious to Gina she was sharing a bedroom with Jake. Half her clothes were now in his bedroom, and the bed in her old room hadn’t been slept in in months.

“I’ll bring you down some suits to try,” Alice said, bolting up the stairs.

“Sure,” Gina said, shrugging.