“Do you feel at all bad?” I asked him. I wanted him to tell me no. I wanted us to feel the lack of guilt together.

He said, “There’s something going on with her. The night she was roofied—she never goes out drinking alone. Also, I called her late one night when you were upstate and she answered, asked if it was Carlow. As if he were the one who’d call her late at night.”

So he was using me as revenge. My stomach knotted up but I said nothing.

LONNIE DRESSED ME UP, AS SHE HAD IN THE ADIRONDACKS. I wore a dress of the same Alice blue as her school uniform with a thin black sash under my breasts. Lonnie spent a long time putting my hair in hot rollers, and when she pulled them out it fell around my shoulders in perfect waves.

“Who taught you all this?” I asked, referring to what color lipstick to use, what dress to pick for which occasion. My mother had never given me any advice in these matters. She had the same reaction to anything I tried on in front of her—neither affirmative assent nor disagreement—she said, in the same tone as Carlow had accepted the request to take me to his studio, “Mm-hmm.”

“All what?” Lonnie said absentmindedly, tugging at my last hot roller. Before I answered, though, I guess she gleaned what I was talking about and just said, “Oh, you know, you pick it up along the way.”

Lonnie had been just as bad off as me, I realized, since she’d lost her mother at a young age. Maybe the lack of a female role model had made her pay closer attention when aunts or girlfriends gave counsel. Maybe it had perversely benefited her in that way.

The gesture of smoothing my hair while looking at my reflection in the mirror gave me a peculiar sensation. It was affectionate, but also corrective. I thought about Sienna’s tic, tucking and untucking her hair from behind her ears. I wondered why she lavished me with this sort of attention. I liked being the recipient of her touch, but it made me feel like a doll as well—just a prop in whatever game she was playing.

I sat with her as she did her own hair and makeup and put on a white dress. We’d passed William off to James and it felt good to be rid of him, to listen to music on Lonnie’s bed and watch her dust her eyelids with glitter at the vanity.