The air is stifling—the smell of stale beer coats everything. I feel as if I can hardly draw a breath.

“She tried to tell us, too. What do you do about something like that? Misha accused her of wanting attention. Misha was always accusing everybody of wanting attention.”

I clear my throat. “That’s called projection,” I say, and she laughs, throaty and surprisingly rich.

“I’d say.” Suddenly she leans forward, putting her elbows on her knees, her eyes fighting their way to sharp focus. “I think that when she got sick, it was because of that. You ever heard about that? How the mind can make you feel bad even when you’re not?”

“Sure,” I say carefully. “But I thought she was only pretending?”

She leans back. All at once, she seems totally exhausted. “No,” she says quietly. “It wasn’t pretend. She was sick all right. We all were. It was no one’s fault but our own.” She directs the words toward her beer, as if it’s proof of this.

Misha always said that what happened senior year was a prank that quickly spiraled out of control: as more and more girls began to get sick, no one knew what was real and what was pretend anymore. Cora’s idea is that the sickness was a kind of punishment.

But for what?

She avoids my eyes and watches her beer drain toward empty with every sip, as if trying to figure out what’s happening to it. No point in holding back now. “Was it because of the Game?”

Bingo. She jerks her head up to stare at me. “That was some sick shit. I remember when they found Becky Sarinelli hanging. I thought I was going to puke.”

“Me too.”

“It was Kaycee’s idea, you know.” She stabs a smoke ring with her pointer finger to dissipate it. “Not the Game itself. The senior boys had been competing for nudies for years. But the money part.”

The cigarette smoke is making me nauseous.

“That was typical Kaycee,” she says. “Always running some scheme.” And I know she’s right. Kaycee was always scheming for money, even when we were little. Her family was worse off than mine, or even Cora’s. “She used to steal stuff whenever she could. We all did—beer and rolling papers and gum and shit like that. But with her it was like she couldn’t help it.” She shook her head. “So then Kaycee had this idea, right, that we could ransom back the pictures they took. Make the girls pay, or else. I didn’t want to. But you know how Kaycee was…” She trails off, shrugging.

She doesn’t need to finish, anyway. I know what she would have said: It was impossible to say no to Kaycee. She could talk you into anything.

Dogs like that should be put down.

“What did she do with the photos after people paid up?” I ask. “Did she actually return them?”

Cora frowns. “What do you think?” She leans forward to stub out a cigarette. “She kept them.”