Kit closes her shivering thighs. “Put me out of my misery.” She squints at the fading sky. She always falls silent at this stage, as though she’s entering a fresh land, her mouth displaying a narrow strip of teeth. Melissa hooks a finger into the elastic of Kit’s underwear and pulls down. A puff of hair springs out.

“You gotta shave, man,” says Melissa. “At least before New Year’s.”

Kit shakes her head. “You can’t cut it while it’s still growing.”

Kit has the most body hair of the three girls, but her head is buzzed. In the cold, her scalp is red between the follicles. Hazel wants to give her a hat but can’t disturb the moment, everything hanging on thick rubber air.

Melissa releases Kit’s underwear, the elastic snapping up, and leans back. Hazel clings to Kit’s wrists. They can’t stop now. They need this for the friendship.

“I don’t have the heart for this today,” Melissa says. “I can’t stop thinking about New Year’s.” She stands up against the sky, glowing in the evening as though she’s been painted with bright oils. Even though her body could belong to a boy their age, skinny and flat under her Korn hoodie and ballooning jeans, her hair is long and yellow, cropped straight without bangs or layers, parted in the center and bending glossily around her skull. Her foxy muzzle tips up, the pimples on her chin full and angry.

She looks hungrier than ever, her gaze aimed above Kit’s half-dressed body and into the snow-fat clouds, like she wants to rip free and disappear, a dog racing into the woods. She’s going to leave. Hazel wants to grab her and make her stay, but her attention is already destroyed. Melissa crosses the parking lot back to her mom’s duplex. She jumps on all the leftover snow, erasing it into gray powder.

Kit pulls her jeans up over purpling thighs, scrapes slush from her shoe on the edge of a headstone.

“I guess we better head out too.” Kit kicks a puffy marble grave. “It’s late.”

It feels late, but it’s not, really. Melissa shouldn’t have left. Though it’s dark, it’s only five. The black winter of New England, Hazel’s father calls it. And he’s just inside all day. He doesn’t have to face it. In August, when the air was thick and damp, the president spoke on TV of a girl with wild hair and an angry smile, a girl he’d almost had sex with, but instead they’d done weirder things. People discuss the details with heavy tones: dresses, stains, private meetings. Hazel didn’t understand, and it’s too late now to ask.

“The party’s going to be epic.” Kit rubs her skull. “Really, Hazel, you should go. We keep meeting people and telling them about you and they’re like, ‘Who is this chick? Does she even exist?’”

Hazel pictures herself at the edge of a group of people she never knew lived in Lexington, wedging herself into the fold as they danced and bit and frolicked. “My parents probably won’t let me.”