For a while, an hour so in, Lori and Nancy got up and started dancing in place, doing a kind of modified Twist they tried to time to the skittering beat, but none of the boys would join in and after ten or fifteen minutes of gyrating their hips and pumping their arms like cheerleaders they gave it up and sank back down to the floor. Where it felt safer. Closer. Solider. Where they could fold their legs under them and give themselves up to the all-embracing force of gravity that would hold them in place so their minds could roam free. And so what if Nancy took hold of Corey’s hand and intertwined her fingers with his and held on to him as if she owned him, as if they were ten years older and married and stretched out on their own bed in their own house somewhere in a future existence neither of them could begin to fathom? So what if every day of her life she regretted getting pregnant at nineteen and missing out on college and was determined to spare Corey that sort of burden? It was all right. Nothing was going to happen between Nancy and Corey, not while she was here. (“Is she on birth control?” she’d asked Susannah the morning after she’d found them in bed together and Susannah had said, “Are you crazy? She’s fifteen,” and she’d said, “My point exactly.”)

She was watching. Right here, watching. Sipping and nodding her head to the music and trying to sink into the mood of the room on the fumes of alcohol alone. Which wasn’t happening and wasn’t going to happen. Not as things stood. Fitz sat with her a while after Ken and Fanchon had gone into the library to commune with some of the others—the ones who were tripping instead of sitting there straight as arrows—and they both watched the kids, but the kids were quiet now, deep into their own minds, and really, it couldn’t have gone better, they both agreed on that. Still, she wasn’t satisfied, not in herself. And when she let her gaze fall over the room to see how tuned-in everybody was, she felt even less satisfied. She wanted to be there with them—with Corey, with Fanchon and Ken and everybody else—and it came to her that there was no good reason why she had to deprive herself aside from paranoia and her own ego that just wouldn’t let go even if she swilled a gallon of gin. So why not? she thought. Really, why not join the party?