“No worries. I’m stopping for the night myself.” Mateo set down his beer bottle and smiled again. He was showing off that slight Puerto Rican accent that made the other girls joke about trying to turn him straight. “So, are you excited about Stanford?”

Lily hid her surprise. No one ever asked her about Stanford. “Yeah, I guess.”

Stanford had been the number one school—really, the only school—on Lily’s list for as long as she could remember. She’d been hearing about it since she was a kid. Her parents had met there. Every now and then she took down the old album and looked at the pictures of them laughing together over candy-colored drinks, playing Frisbee on manicured lawns, and making silly faces into a black-and-white photo booth, looking at each other with light in their eyes.

To see Lily’s parents today, you’d never know they were the same people. Their faces were creased from years of worry, and the light in their eyes had been replaced by the dull glow of fatigue and resignation.

At Stanford, though, her parents had been happy.

Maybe at Stanford, Lily could see what it was like to feel that way. She just needed to make sure Maria wound up there, too.

Lily had told a few people at Acheron she was going to Stanford, but no one seriously thought she’d get in. No one remembered that Lily wrote poetry for the school literary magazine, or that she’d worked her ass off as class vice president (“President” Delilah was pretty much useless), or that her application essay on why the Americans with Disabilities Act had set the disability rights movement back thirty years had been called “sheer brilliance” by all three of Acheron’s college counselors. No one cared that Lily was a fourth-generation legacy at Stanford, or that her grandfather’s name was up on a sign over the entrance to the political affairs building.

When people at Acheron looked at Lily, they didn’t see all the things she’d done. They only saw The Girl with the Crutches.

Lily had been in the popular group ever since she first transferred to Acheron in sixth grade, when her newness and her crutches made her exciting and exotic. Except for Maria, though, no one had ever bothered to talk to her about anything real. And she’d heard what people around here said about her and Stanford. That if she got in, it would be “affirmative action.”

Lily had been in an accident when she was a kid, and even after all the surgeries she still couldn’t make it twenty feet without her crutches. Her legs hurt like hell most of the time. There wasn’t a single day when Lily didn’t have to push past the pain just to swing down the three steps that led to the school cafeteria.