But then Sonia had stumbled on the Song of Solomon, buried in the middle of some incredibly boring proverbs. “Upon my couch at night I sought the one I love—I sought but found him not. I must rise and roam the town.”

It was like the story of her life, or the story of her love, roaming through the town, looking for her beloved, peering into the windows of the bars downtown until she saw him at the Diamond Duck. It was eleven o’clock, and neither parent knew or cared that she wasn’t home. Matt was having a beer with Jennifer Perec, of all people. Stupid Jennifer.

Sonia imagined sauntering in, feigning surprise at seeing him. “Just passing by, I’ll join you for a minute if I may. Let me have a beer.” The bartender would try to throw her out for being too young to drink, and Matt would get to his feet, fling a few bills on the table, and say curtly, “She looks too young to you because you can’t see beneath the surface, to the quality of her soul.”

She couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. If she’d had a friend, someone to egg her on, double-dare her, maybe she would have, but she didn’t have friends.

Lucinda, the lab tech, said to leave the poor boy alone, find someone her own age in high school, but the high-school boys were all acne and gross jokes, and anyway, what difference did it make when deep down Sonia knew the truth, that she was fat, lumbering, unlovable? Her life was working in Nate’s lab, then home to do homework—that was pretty funny, everything at home was work. She washed the dinner dishes while Mother passed out in front of the TV and Daddy was at some seminar or his experiment was running late. Or he was pecking the Magpie, that was Mother’s claim.

She’d taken Matt’s T-shirt out of the trash. She was in the lab, wondering if she could filch one of the petri dishes Matt had put in the tub, when she smelled smoke and heard him swear. He’d bent too close to the Bunsen burner and his T-shirt had started to smolder. He ripped it off before it actually burst into flames and thrust it under the cold-water tap, but when he pulled it back, the front was full of blackened holes.

“Don’t tell your dad,” he’d said to Sonia, who was looking at his bare chest, wide-eyed. “He already thinks I’m the clumsiest SOB who’s ever set foot in his lab.”