Paige yawned. “Like, my family?”

“It just seems like there are a lot of rooms.”

“There are a lot of rooms. It’s a big house.”

“It is,” I said. “Enormous.” My mother once told me never to buy a big house, even if I had the money. You’ll spend your whole life dusting rooms you never go in, she said.

Paige looked over at Sexanie, and I imagined her eyes rolling behind her sunglasses. Still, I pressed on. “So who all’s in your family?”

“Like, my parents and my brother? We used to have one of those cats from the cat food commercials, but it shed everywhere so my dad put it outside and it basically froze to death. What about you? Do you have any siblings?”

“I’m an only child.”

She laughed and settled further into her chair. “Thought so.”

I wasn’t sure what this was supposed to mean, so I focused instead on my body, making sure my suit was positioned in such a way that my boobs looked big and my tummy flat. Not that it mattered; nobody was looking. But at any moment they might.

After a few minutes of idle talking, the girls went quiet so that the only sound was the sound of the pool filter gulping for air and the distant bass of a rap song on the patio speakers.

In time, I was bored and hot and longed to get in the water. It was midafternoon, the sun trained on us like an interrogation lamp. Kansas was in the thick of a heat wave; for more than a week the high temperature had hovered just below 100. Figuring the heat would knock the girls out for at least a half hour, I decided it was the best time to act.

“Is there a bathroom inside?” I asked Paige.

She squinted at me and sighed. “Only like twenty. Just go in and open doors till you find one.”

I rose from my chair and walked back to the house, whose massive shadow now reached across half the pool. Glancing back, I admired the Preps lying in a row, their painted eyes shut to the sun, thin bodies glistening with future cancer. How lovely it was to be one of them.

It still seemed a dream, to be at Paige’s house. She’d once flown to L.A. to be in a commercial for Crest whitening strips and on weekends her dad let her drive his extra Lexus, even though she barely had her learner’s permit. I’d witnessed this only once, when she’d come in hard to the parking lot of the Warren Theater, where my mother and I had tickets to an abysmal PG feature. The other Preps threw their hands into the buggy summer air as Paige dialed up some gangster rap. One of the Farhas was smoking a cigarette that she eventually threw to the ground and twisted out with the toe of her stiletto, just like in the movies. I found it all very glamorous—a pack of fourteen-year-old girls in high heels and silver eye shadow piling out of a Lexus. My mother mumbled something about a circus car of child prostitutes.