I know without looking that the curls springing out of my puff are wide-awake, reaching toward the sky in the night’s humidity. I bristle, because his tone is the one that feels less like a compliment and more like he’s happened upon a fun oddity—and that fun oddity is Black me with my Black hair. Wonderful.

Alice shoots me a sympathetic glance that Evan misses entirely, because of course he does. “I think we’re done here. Can we go?”

Charlotte pouts. “Half an hour more, I promise. I wanna check out the party.”

“Yeah! Y’all come watch me shotgun a PBR!” Evan slings an arm around his girlfriend’s shoulders and leads her away before we can protest.

Alice grumbles under her breath and takes off after them, stepping high over rangy weeds at the edge of the tree line. Fall panicum and marestail, mostly. My mother had called the stuff “witchgrass” and “horseweed fleabane” back when she was alive to call out plants to me.

Alice is almost to the trees before she realizes I’m not following. “You comin’?”

“I’ll be there in a sec. I wanna watch some more jumps.” I jerk a thumb over my shoulder.

She stomps back. “I’ll wait with you.”

“No, that’s okay. You go ahead.”

She scrutinizes me, torn between taking me at my word or pushing further. “Watch, not jump?”

“Watch, not jump.”

“Matty.” Her childhood nickname for me—Matty, short for my last name—twists at something deep in my chest. Old memories have been doing that lately, even the ones that aren’t about her, and I sort of hate it. My vision goes fuzzy with the threat of tears, and I have to blink Alice’s features into focus—pale face, glasses perpetually sliding to the tip of her nose. “I… I know this isn’t how we thought it would be. Being at Carolina, I mean. But… I think your mom woulda come around to it. Eventually.”

I cast my gaze out as far as the moonlight allows. Across the lake, treetops are the shadowed fringe between the quarry and the murky sky. “We’ll never know.”

“But—”

“Always a but.”

Something hard slips into her voice. “But if she were here, I don’t think she’d want you to… to…”

“To what?”

“To become some other person.”

I kick at a pebble. “I need to be alone for a minute. Enjoy the party. I’ll be there soon.”

She eyes me as if gauging my mood. “ ‘I hate tiny parties—they force one into constant exertion.’ ”

I squint, searching my memories for the familiar words. “Did you—did you just Jane Austen me?”

Her dark eyes twinkle. “Who’s the literary nerd? The quoter or the one who recognizes the quote?”

“Wait.” I shake my head in amusement. “Did you just Star Wars me?”

“Nah.” She grins. “I New Hope’d you.”