“See? I bet they have all kinds of Gucci stuff, they just don’t wear it to school. If you like something, why not wear it all the time? If it makes you happy. I used to have this leather jacket from Paris that—” She stopped. She sounded even more spoiled than the Martinique spring break kids.

Liam pulled up a chair and yanked a pad of graph paper and his calculator out of his backpack. “So. Algebra. Can I see your homework?”

Shy flipped open her binder and sighed enormously. “Please be nice to me?”

Liam chuckled into the buttons on his calculator, promising himself he wouldn’t do something awful like spell out I LOVE YOU backward in numbers and then flip the calculator so she could read the words on the tiny screen.

He looked up, blushing. Shy was staring right at him. He forced himself not to look away. “I’ll be nice.”

“How ’bout we smoke some of that weed tonight?” Stuart suggested after they’d eaten tortellini and garlic bread on the big bed and he’d read Harry Potter to Ted and piggybacked him to his room. He sat at Mandy’s blanketed feet and shook the jam jar.

Mandy pressed pause on her iPad and sat up against the pile of pillows. She’d just started a new anorexia movie on Lifetime. “Now?”

“Let’s get wasted,” Stuart said, tossing the jar into her lap.

“Shhsh.” Mandy giggled.

She held the jar up to the light. It certainly didn’t look like the pot she’d smoked in high school, which was brown and clumpy and unappealing. This pot grew in fuzzy, forest-green whorls, pretty enough to decorate a sweater with. There was a little white label on the jar with the words PURPLE HAZE written in purple calligraphy.

“I got this, too.” Stuart retrieved the little purple pipe he’d bought at a shop on Atlantic Avenue on his way home. It had a USB port and released vapor, not smoke. The guy at the store had showed him how to use it. Smoking a joint was still probably more fun, but this was how everyone smoked now. He was excited to try it. “Why don’t I get it set up and we can go down to the stoop?”

“The stoop?” Mandy hadn’t sat on the stoop since June. She hadn’t left the house in a week. More than that maybe—she’d lost count.

“Yeah, come on. It’ll be fun.” Stuart walked around to her side of the bed, took the jar out of her hands, opened it up, and sniffed it. “How can you resist?”

Mandy folded her arms over her chest. “I can’t,” she said, more worried about getting out of bed with Stuart watching than smoking the pot. Her legs probably had a diamond-shaped pattern on them from the mattress.