Twelve bathrooms. Somebody had to clean them and it wasn’t going to be Hollingshead or the amphetamine addict or the amphetamine addict’s wife or girlfriend or whoever she was. More food was needed too, which meant more money and more trips to the supermarket in the station wagon, which really—and she was being honest here—made her rethink, or at least put limits on, the concept of brother-and sisterhood. And while the rest of the hangers-on had eventually left once they saw that the party had played itself out and Tim wasn’t the walking drug dispensary he appeared to be, one guest, if you could call her that, didn’t seem to have gotten the message. That was Lori, Nancy’s smart-mouth friend, who as it turned out was eighteen and not in high school at all—she was a freshman at Bennett, who should have been in her dorm room, should have been studying and joining the Thespians Club or whatever else she was meant to do, but seemed always to be sitting in a prime spot in front of the fire in the evening and at the breakfast table in the morning.

Joanie asked her about it one day, not meaning to be confrontational, or not exactly. She was just curious, because college life for her—at least until Corey came along and she had to drop out—had been very different, with a full class schedule five days a week and enough homework to keep her busy most weekends too. What was this girl thinking, that was what she wanted to know. How had she insinuated herself here? What did she expect? More importantly: When was she going to leave?

It was just after breakfast. Nancy, Corey and the other kids had left for school and she and Susannah had done the dishes and fed the animals and the house had settled into a profound morning silence. This was her favorite time of day, some people not up yet, others off in the woods or sequestered in one nook or another and all the excitement of the group experiment tempered in the simple routine of being alive in the world till it would build to climax again in the evening when there’d be dinner, discussion, music, sometimes a film on Tim’s brand-new projector and on Saturdays the weekly group session everybody looked forward to. She found Lori in the library with Fitz and Ken, who’d started a fire there to take the chill off the room. They were all reading, Fitz and Ken absorbed in the newspaper, Lori in a book of what appeared to be poetry.

“Oh, hello, all,” she said, settling into the couch beside Fitz but looking only to Lori, who was sprawled on the other side of him with one of the cats—a bloated tabby with a head the size of a cantaloupe—asleep in her lap.