“Your parents are sixty,” Kit says. “They go to bed at nine.”

“They’re technically fifty-four.” Hazel scratches the number into a patch of dirt with a twig. Her parents are old, yeah, but not sixty. So what if they go to bed at nine? Hazel does too. Sometimes, before she goes to sleep, she takes her pet rat into bed and lets it run over her, its nails pulling up loops of thread on the comforter. “Whose house is it again?”

“Esther Meng’s,” says Melissa. “Jesus, do we have to write it down?”

“I’m not certain I’ll remember the date, is all.”

“It’s New Year’s Eve,” says Melissa, kicking snow that survived the last melting massacre. The powder scatters into nothing when her sneaker strikes.

Melissa and Kit have been Hazel’s friends for all of seventh grade, and she thinks about them each minute. Before this year Hazel stuck close to home, but now she has trouble sitting still, even in school. The world is so much sharper now. And when she’s with Melissa and Kit, it’s sharpest of all. She never knows what to expect when she marches with them down the Diamond Middle School driveway, into the afternoon air. Each day is its own adventure. Sometimes they switch outfits, including underwear, in the hair-care aisle of CVS. Other times they drop grapes off the bridge above the interstate, simulating a plague of eyeballs. Lately, though, Melissa and Kit have been going over to this Esther Meng person’s house, whoever that is.

Melissa squints at Hazel, setting her jaw in the way that means she’s about to pronounce judgment, and Hazel’s cells shrink. When Melissa loves Hazel, all is right, but she can be mean. She calls Kit a pervert for being a lesbian, and when Hazel didn’t know what a donkey punch was, Melissa spat on her shoe.

“Sometimes I don’t know if you’re dumb or just crazy,” Melissa says now. “But I know you’re not dumb.”

“I’m not crazy,” Hazel says, though sometimes her thoughts jitter in a certain way, like molecules moving in the night.

“Chill out, everybody,” Kit says. “Let’s do a practice sex and then go home.”

Maybe Melissa will practice on Hazel. The notion jars her, but she wilts when, once again, Melissa takes Kit’s shoulder in that irresistible, tender way, the way she never touches anyone outside the practices. “Are you ready?” Melissa’s voice is hard and low.

Kit lies down on the slope, on her back like the corpses buried under her. Hazel wipes her hands off on her snow pants and pins Kit’s wrists into the icy grass, tight enough to cut the dirt. She must hold Kit in place while Melissa dips her fingers into Kit’s body. Not that Kit would try to escape.

The air shivers. Melissa unzips Kit’s jeans and slips them to her knees. This is Hazel’s favorite time, when anything in the world could happen. This is the moment when she most clearly understands that she would do anything for Melissa.