Again their teeth clash. Lips mash. Her tongue finds his, and it’s as if he can’t believe this is really happening—but then his body settles into it and he leans closer. It’s awful and wonderful at the same time. A thousand synapses fire in her head like a missile battery—voosh voosh voosh voosh—and she has no idea how she can feel unwound and knotted up all in the same moment. Maybe it’s the Ritalin. Maybe it’s all the memories. Maybe it’s what’s coming tomorrow.

It goes like this for a while. One minute, then two, then five. Then ten.

Eventually she pulls away, face red, lips chafed.

“Guh,” Steven says.

“Yeah,” she answers. She feels like a sparking wire jumping on the ground.

“I thought . . .”

“Don’t talk,” she says. “Let me talk. I don’t like you—wait! No, I mean, I don’t like you like that. You’re just—you and me—we can’t. And I don’t want anybody right now. But this was good. This was nice. I needed this. I still feel like—I mean, I think I want to throw up? In a good way. In a real good way.”

Steven blinks. Like he doesn’t know what to do with what she just said.

Instead she just kisses him on the cheek and says, “Thanks.”

Then she hurries back outside.

The night accelerates toward morning like a hard-driving truck with wonky headlights.

Atlanta drinks.

The Ritalin sets her up; the alcohol knocks her down.

She’s a set of bowling pins rolling loose.

Whitey chases her as she chases fireflies into and out of the corn.

She talks with Kyle about how she doesn’t understand comic books, and Kyle tells her she’s just not reading the right ones, the ones about girls and women doing kick-ass girl-and-woman things. Batgirl, he says, or Ms. Marvel.

She goes to the house to bring back chips for real this time, and then Steven’s gone but Shane and Damita are making out—Damita’s in his lap and she’s way taller than he is, so Atlanta has to cut short a laughing jag as the two of them mix spit and slap tongues.

At one a.m. she teaches Eddie to shoot.

At two a.m. Eddie teaches her to pirouette—he’s a dancer, you see, trained in ballet and apparently quite good (though him being drunk and high makes for an interesting show). They spin together and laugh, and at one point he whispers to her how he misses Chris, how they never dated but they would’ve been good together.