“Oh.” I looked at the tux. It was velvet but probably not really suitable for outdoors. “Okay, hold on.”

Berry sat on the bed and looked around my room. “So Gilly thought you should go to this party and talk to Sarah?”

I pulled my sweater out of my closet. “Yes.”

“And does Sarah know you’re going to talk to her?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, peeling off my tux jacket and yanking the sweater over my head. “But Gilly will be there. Maybe she’ll be like a liaison, kind of.”

“Right.” Berry sounded entirely unconvinced.

“I mean, we go, if Sarah won’t talk to us, how much worse can things be than they are now?”

As soon as I said it, I realized it was a ridiculous thing to say.

“We could talk to Sarah and Tanner at school? In your mom’s office or something? Like, official?” Berry added, a legitimately good idea.

“Yeah, but Lucy is already, like, dealing with this and if I do it this way, then I’m taking it off her plate,” I summarized.

“I just think— I mean going to Tanner’s house. Like I know you went to Gilly’s house. But.” Berry stuck her finger into the hole on the thigh of her coveralls. “I don’t know, Anne. You know?”

“Hey!” I shoved my foot into a sparkle-covered platinum boot and looked up. “Do you not want to go?”

“Are you going?” Berry shifted on the bed.

Bjorn, who was slumbering on my pillow, did not move.

“Yes, I mean, I said I would.”

“Then we’re going.” Berry stood up.

In the car, she clicked on a Tegan and Sara track and turned the volume up. Blasting music as Mato wound through the various roads that got thinner and thinner for every mile we got closer to Tanner’s house. When we were almost there, she turned down the music with a click.

And then she was just staring at the driveway as it got closer and closer, like it was a lion’s open jaws.

“Hey.” I turned in my seat to face her. “Do you want to turn around?”

“Do you want to turn around?”

I pulled my hands into my sweater sleeves, already cold. Like, really, it didn’t look like a thing that anyone would want to do, drive through that set of tall iron gates.

But I said I would.

And Gilly said she would be there.

“We’ll just stay for a few minutes,” I offered. “Just to see what it’s like, right? Show-of-good-faith kind of thing.”

“Sure,” Berry said, turning the wheel and passing through the gates. “Few minutes.”

At the end of a very winding driveway, Tanner’s house appeared, a green-and-white mini mansion surrounded by manicured, well-placed trees. The front of the property was stacked with cars and trucks. Even before we pulled up, I could hear the music blasting outside the window.