It was hot outside, too hot for Virginia in November, so the girls were dressed in summer clothes. There had been a lot of giggling and peering around corners to make sure the security guard didn’t see them as they crept across the manicured campus lawn, silently slapping at the mosquitoes that danced under their skirt hems. They’d run past the lake in their flip-flops, cutting through the honeysuckle bushes that lined the northern edge to squeeze through the gap in the fence, sweat and humidity clinging to their hair and eyelashes. Safely on the other side, they’d kept running all the way to the bar, bright-eyed with anticipation of an old-fashioned girls’ night out. They laughed as they passed the old buildings that had been abandoned years ago—the big, boarded-up movie theater, the vacant drugstore with the colony of feral cats in its parking lot, the Dollar General where old men sat on the stoop drinking out of paper bags.

Delilah shouldn’t really have been drinking tonight. She had a self-imposed rule about partying before a practice. This year they had a shot at the league championship, maybe even the state. She didn’t want to show up at her first Princeton team practice coming off a season where she hadn’t tried her very best.

Delilah tried her very best at everything. If she ever stopped trying, she figured, she might as well be dead.

Tonight, though, she was making an exception to her no-partying rule, because that was what good friends did. Maria had acted like the two of them going out tonight was really important. She must have been stressed about something, because as soon as they sat down at the bar Maria had ordered a Corona and downed it in three gulps.

When she was ready, Delilah hoped Maria would tell her what was wrong. Delilah liked to be helpful. In the meantime, she wasn’t about to let Maria show her up on the drinking front. They were always just a little bit competitive, the two of them. So Delilah had ordered a Red Bull and vodka, then winced her way through half of it. She finally had to put it down before it burned her throat. Then she made a big show of leaning over the bar’s ancient window-unit air conditioner and trying to suck in the cool, stale air. Maria only laughed and ordered another round for both of them.

All night, Maria had been laughing a little too hard and drinking a little too much. When she wasn’t laughing, she was staring into space and fiddling with something in her purse.

Delilah hoped Maria wasn’t pissed about the Kingsley Prize. It wasn’t like she could’ve actually been surprised. Delilah had a higher GPA, higher SAT scores, and better extracurriculars.

Besides, she was Delilah Dufrey. Everyone on that prize committee knew her name.