To think that people really lived like this. My mother’s house—my house—was like a waiting room. Beige curtains. Beige couch. A glass bowl of chewable mints to keep you occupied until the gynecologist was ready to see you. My mother claimed to have once owned a small landscape portrait by a French artist named Suponte, in whose massive and continuously rising auction value she firmly believed. Who Suponte was, I couldn’t say, but it didn’t matter much since my father had stolen the painting when he left us—for a woman named Kitty, I was told. My mother nursed the story like a binky. At the end of every month she would sit at the kitchen table, bills fanned out before her, lamenting, If only he’d left us the Suponte.

Judging from Paige’s house, it would have taken a fleet of disappointing fathers to destroy the bulk of her family’s wealth. She looked natural among her father’s money, as if she too had been shipped in by a designer. She fluttered through the entryway in a sheer white halter dress, her black hair up in the kind of messy bun that took hours to construct. The other Preps were drinking lemon water in the kitchen, where a heavyset woman in jeans and a floral apron was arranging cheese and crackers on a tray.

“Is that your mom?” I asked Paige.

She laughed, looked at the other Preps. “You’re hilarious. My mom basically lives in Cabo.”

“You girly girls hungry?” the woman asked, smiling to reveal a missing canine. You could tell she’d been pretty once, when she was a teenager. Big eyes, big lips.

“Martha, I just had a smoothie,” Paige said. She looked back to the Preps and rolled her eyes. “Jesus. It’s like she wants me to be as fat as she is.”

Martha either didn’t hear or pretended not to and continued arranging the snack tray. My impulse was to go over and help her— my mother had taught me never to watch someone else work—but I knew such a gesture would be suicide. Instead I laughed, sucked in my stomach.

In addition to Paige, there were three other Preps: the class sex goddess, Stephanie Pattuci, whom everyone called Sexanie, and the Farha twins, Holly and Molly, who looked like a pair of Lebanese Barbie dolls and whose mother owned a chain of popular fitness clubs. Holly and Molly were identical in every way except that Holly was kind and Molly was awful. Once, on a field trip to Exploration Place in the fifth grade, Molly put a piece of dried dog poop in my backpack so that everybody, including the beautiful, red-haired tour guide everybody wanted to impress, thought I’d pooped my pants. It used to be that Holly had a big, dangerous-looking mole above her lip, but she’d had it removed over summer break so now you had to just wait and see what kind of Farha you were dealing with.

Paige went around solemnly kissing everyone on the cheek—a new fad among the freshman girls—before leading us to the back of the house, where the perfect yard collapsed into a pool of twinkling water outfitted with floaties and a diving board and a gratuitous hot tub bubbling up into the late August heat.